VIDYA VENKATESH

Becky was the white woman who had two Negro sons. She’s dead; they’ve gone away. The pines whisper to Jesus. The Bible flaps its leaves with an aimless rustle o n her mound.1

In Jean Toomer’s Cane, Becky is thrown out in contrast to her sons. Her mound is the tumble of brick and mortar left by the leaning chimney that finally fell and killed her. The aimless Bible is her neighbor’s gesture of grace and cruelty, left to sanctify the rubble that no one dug through. Becky and her sons are dead, gone away. Their story is told in ambivalent signs— the wind that could be a voice, “aimless” flapping that sits between reactive and deliberate motion, the holy book that is also another piece of debris on Becky’s body. Whispers, rustles, a token of gracious cruelty, are what stand now for the scandal of their contrasting skin and the rumors of their lives.

In Martin Puryear’s “Becky,” X-ray sections show above and below ground. The figures are all bones: bone network of roots, bone drooping leaves, bone house, two bone grown plants like the skeletons of Becky’s two flown sons. Bones cut through, hang atop, stand above the embrace of the deep night water that the ink’s shimmering horizontal streaks call to mind. Glen Ligon’s text work, too, resembles a cross section of earth to sky. Opening to the white of the sky clarifies and crystallizes the words as a manifestation of the phenomenon they describe: I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background. That sky, that openness, is freedom and release—for the reader, from the confusion of the jumbled southern end. But it is exactly the freedom and release of the reader that constrains the words, ties them to a specific form, and by making them legible, makes them dismissible. Here, as in “Becky,” it’s the black ink that is beautiful, layering and shimmering in captivating whorls; as the meaning recedes, the beauty of the material comes forth. The work complicates the pleasure of reading by expressing beauty, significance, and freedom in illegibility.

The repetition of Ligon’s text without heed for the spacing of the canvas creates a syncopated, sputtering rhythm, placing the emphasis on different words and syllables each time. The number of beats in the repeated sentences don’t line up with the size of their score, resulting in a hemiolic effect, a dance of phonemes that works through and against the words. It’s as if a three-beat phrase is being repeated in 4/4 time: the phrase is simple and natural, but by virtue of misaligning with its environment, it becomes spontaneous, surprising, and dynamic. The resulting rhythm is not what is expected, but it is undeniably ordered: it produces its own logic. One line seems to read: I DO NOT ALWAYS FEEL COLD.

In a similar motion of misalignment as a stylistic and generative gesture, Becky’s house in the Ligon print is a tumbled confusion of geometries and interiors. It appears as a slanted cube, seen from a skewed perspective and cut into the inside of a mound (a tomb). In this visual play, Becky is lost and found. The character of Becky, we know from Cane, is socially isolated, physically marooned between the road and the railway, abandoned by her sons, buried by the rubble of her own fallen chimney, and left for dead by her neighbors. Puryear’s representation stays aloof from a direct depiction of Becky, but writes her into the white stark square in the center of her teetering house, around which the room slants, the plants bend, and the roads run. “Becky” falls towards its absent subject, inscribing the silent and everywhere manifest connection between Becky and the world that sought to isolate her. It’s a dissonant connection that rejects the eye’s attempts to totalize, forming its own alien logic of gravity and perspective. The world gestures to Becky in a kind of elegy: the gesture is made possible by her absence, a misalignment with the world that ripples outwards from her invisible death. She is there and not there, like the prayer (wind?) in the trees or the blessing (curse?) of the Bible. If Ligon expresses radical potential in misalignment and illegibility, “Becky” reminds us that the illegible, generative subject may be absent and silent in her own tableau.

Becky was the white woman who had two Negro sons. She’s dead; they’ve gone away. The pines whisper to Jesus. The Bible flaps its leaves with an aimless rustle on her mound.

1 Jean Toomer, Cane (New York: Liveright, 1923), 11.