Clopping down hardwood hallways with ridiculous clown steps symptomizes white people’s wispy attention to the matter of their bodies in space. Their bones develop disbelieving in police boredom, belts, backhands, in-school suspensions, eyes of the ilk of assistant principals haven’t felt them up enough.
Surveillance surprises Cecilia as, the film insists, it should me. I, who this horror is not for, untoward, should not have been born on guard for the extremities of regard, born strangling at the edge of my mother, who named me for a tip-toe in the door, a birth-certified hire with a nice ring to it, rolls right off of clean teeth: “Justin Phillip Reed” expects a frame to fill itself
as the camera does. A camera Venn-diagrams vicarity & vanity. My friends are binging Big Brother in their living room. The drapes are drawn. My drunk friend tells me we call capitalism the wrong name—all of Marx’s epochs, even, citing Orwell’s Homage. People ode on Orwell for dramatizing mass gaslighting like Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk & he weren’t the same age. Lowercase slaves play bagpipes in the margins of this page. You like to act brand new to being unmade in my image, or
this novel paranoia of occupation is the juvenilia of native imperial citizens. Cecilia is distraught to find herself unsafe everywhere, but everyone knows what happens in the Black girl’s bedroom; the camera bets on it. In Wells’s fiction, the explicit dream of white invisibility is impunity: to dwell in the shadow of a doubt in the light of day. From Yule lads being lads to Kevin Bacon rape, only the bullets that miss are suspicious. In the book, Griffin says he went to work “like a nigger.”1
My lover’s still a country convincing me I can never leave. He makes me feel like I’m the crazy one. He controls, & I quote, how I look, what I wear, what I eat, what time I leave the house, what I say & think. My lover is the mall in Johnson City, Tennessee. I have no country but a commercial district. Hurt & submission & clearance for dessert. In the movie where I cut his throat to save my life, they make me
Elizabeth Moss, secretary & receptacle of sub-totalitarian emotion, a symbol of inequitable diminishment to hysterics, historically; in this form I’m forgiven getting free by any means & I get to walk away. Little black dress dropped into little black night & a big Black cop for an alibi. The salt-stung wind whinges, the waves parade. I have turned the proverbial table. Spidery piano score escorts my denouement. Elements collect in applause & collude to conceal me in mystery ideally no longer required. I sure did let him fuck around & find out on the floor of his Teslacrat mansion
that no person appears to scrub, mop, dust, or polish. Honestly, suspense is the misnomer. I already told you: I know where I am. I’m not allowed to forget the state we’re in
where my baby sister resembles Storm Reid, particularly around the nose that no one we can see has tried to knock off her face. In my panning anxiety a filament whistles at high frequency incessantly. It is summoning Assata with bravado. It is hunting Sally Hemmings & holding Billie Holiday for observation. It is easy to say “the camera” as though it still drags me along.
1 Like is like nigger, a greasy finger-fondled reflection, a signifier sent out to obliterate singularity & solve for service the problem of semantic resistance. Niggerlike an optical technology, a thousand-camera suit, a humid shimmer of image bent n-word. Cecilia’s baby daddy a glassmaker, his “guilty snigger heard running round the room.” (Rae Armantrout)