Free Turn Me Loose by Frank X Walker Page B

to what extent can looking away align with loyalty? In the final section of “On Collective Memory,” Maurice Halbwachs posits that sometimes looking away offers us our only chance at loyalty. 5 He reads Peter’s betrayal of Christ as just such a moment. Halbwachs reasonably asserts that when someone we love is about to experience something brutal or horrific, our impulse is not to stare or to be consumed with longing looks; instead, our impulse leads us to look away. Halbwachs contends that from this perspective, Peter had to turn away from Jesus, who was like a brother to him. Thus, in orderfor Peter to serve as a witness for Christ, he had to deny their brotherhood.
    The poems in the section “Look Away, Look Away …” imagine the making of Evers into the NAACP field secretary who would become the necessary witness to the “strange and bitter crop” produced in his own backyard. Evers’s witness identified his steadfast loyalty to the lives of those who, according to Abel Meeropol, were the by-products of a macabre southern ecology. Under the pen name Lewis Allen, Meeropol wrote a poem, “Bitter Fruit,” that would become the lyric of the song “Strange Fruit” in 1939 as an indictment of lynching as a natural feature of the South. 6 In the song, lynching, an extralegal, vigilante practice of killing mostly black people through burning, mutilation, and hanging, serves as an environmental, regional, and racial indictment of a grisly southern tradition made to look like an ecological norm. Where “Dixie” celebrates, “Strange Fruit” indicts.
    Though Evers was brutally murdered, much like the victims whose stories he recorded, historian Taylor Branch notes that the killing of Evers was not referred to as a lynching but an assassination. Thus, “the murder of Medgar Evers changed the language of race in American mass culture overnight,” according to Branch. 7 Walker acknowledges this difference through the way that he deconstructs the song’s text to rethink Evers’s legacy. The “Gallant South,” taken from the first line of the second stanza of “Strange Fruit” emphasizes various spectacles and spectral scenes that extend the singular startling, grisly one. Through this broadened lens, the scope of violence opens to reveal other, more anesthetized forms of violence usually hidden behind other, more visible forms of brutality. Walker reveals the way that violence looks in dreams; the way it can inform how you imagine love; how it can transform lives and makes for unlikely unions. The voice of Myrlie Evers comes to stand for the living possibility of a “gallant South” as she converts the Willie and Thelma De La Beckwith cabal into a sisterhood in which her life intertwines with theirs.
    The final section of
Turn Me Loose
, “Bitter Fruit,” cites the original title of the poem that would become “Strange Fruit.” Such a return becomes an act of remembrance much like the act necessary to answer the call of Medgar Evers. If we are to finally lay him to rest, to satisfy his request to
turn him loose
, we must remember. This remembrance, however, eschews the wistful recollection of a magnolia-scented South and embraces memories of the flowery scent mixed with the stench of roasting flesh. Compliance requires the recollection of putrescent truths. This remembrance would involve recognizing the on-going presence of the past in the brutal killing of James Craig Anderson. We will have complied with Medgar Evers’s request to
turn him loose
when we bring all of our creative powers to bear on questioning the return of the past. Frank X Walker’s collection of poems offers a worthy model for how we can deploy the imagination in service to the urgent call of history.
    Michelle S. Hite
    SPELMAN COLLEGE
NOTES
    1 . See Manning Marable, “A Servant-Leader of the People: Medgar Wiley Evers