Whose Gaze?

This morning I posted two short paragraphs from my sequel to the book Stones from the Creek on a Facebook page I put up to publicize that collection of short stories.  It describes a character’s first day as a convict worker in an Alabama coal mine.  It is a struggle for me to describe the end-of-shift beatings he witnessed… beatings for failure to make weight, to mine sufficient coal for the company.  I want it to convey horror and brutality, not to avert eyes from the inhuman viciousness of the prison industry in 1907.  But I don’t want to create a kind of violence pornography that fails in connecting the reader with the character in a full way.

One way of bringing historical text to life on the internet is the use of actual photographs.  More and more are being scanned and it is a rich resource.  While posting the selection from my work in progress I looked for a long time at a photo of two imprisoned coal miners — convict laborers, slaves — and considered using the picture to illustrate the excerpt.  And then I couldn’t do it.  The photo shows two young Black men sitting on what appears to be a wooden shelf about four feet high.  I suppose it to be a bunk bed in the mine dormitory.  They sit facing the camera, forearms across knees, bare feet pulled up to them.  Their eyes are closed… against the powder flash of the photographer?  Both of them have shackles around their ankles with three elongated links of chain tying those shackles together.  How could the truth of this picture (and the injustice it represents) possibly outweigh the humiliation of the subjects who sat for it?

In the early 20th century, when photography was still the province of professionals, pictures of lynchings were printed and sold as postcards.  James Allen put together a collection of these photos as an exhibition, a book and a website, all titled Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America.

Like visual evidence of the Nazi extermination, these pictures remind us of what should never be forgotten.  They demonstrate the horror of white supremacist terror in this country and the fact that it was not a secret or an anomaly.  The photos document large, excited crowds of white people — some with children in tow — cheering the annihilation and mutilation of Black people.

But these images do more.  Remember that they were not kept secret; they were sold as souvenirs to be looked at again and again.  So what does it mean for us to look at them?  What does it mean for ME, a white man, to look at a picture of the destruction and desecration of a Black person that was made for white people to savor and enjoy?

I have posted a photo twice on that Facebook page of soldiers of the 7th Cavalry standing over a mass grave of Lakota Indians at Wounded Knee.  It is a lynching photo by any standard and was sold as a postcard by the photographer to those soldiers and to others, as well as to tourists.  I have posted three times a photo of Texas Rangers posed on their horses with their ropes around the bodies of Mexican Americans in Texas in 1915.  It is a lynching photo by any standard and was sold as a postcard by the photographer to whites North Americans along the Rio Grande.

I agonize over those photos, which illustrate two American pogroms that I am trying to write about with sensitivity and care for the sequel to Stones from the Creek.  I have been unable to post photos of the Tulsa race riot of 1921.  Those, too, are lynching photos.  Those, too, were sold as souvenirs to the participants in a pogrom that killed hundreds and destroyed the entire African American district of the city of Tulsa, apparently in an effort to turn that city into another sundown town.  There is something too personal about those photos, something that captures the faces of people and glories in their objectification.

I know that Ms. Mamie Till insisted on an open casket for her son Emmet’s funeral.  I know that the photos in Jet magazine brought the savage beating and murder of Emmet Till to that publication’s readership.  I know that the generation who saw those pictures in Jet was moved to oppose and upturn the system of disfranchisement and Jim Crow.  I also know that those photos were Ms. Till’s and that she chose to share her personal loss and horror and to share them with an audience that would view them through her eyes and not through the eyes of the vicious criminals who took her son.  She had the right.

I don’t know that I have the right.  They are not my photos.  I know that I look at the photo of those two men — imprisoned in order to provide the steel companies with a captive work force — and I identify with them and not with their captors.  But who else knows that?  I am a white Jewish man who struggles to look at photographs of the Shoah.  The Nazis were proud to document their murders.  Even as I understand the absolute need never to forget I derive no satisfaction or pride from that memory.  And so, picture by picture and paragraph by paragraph, I struggle to decide how to capture these dark memories of how the United States became what it is today.