Tyehimba Jess, Reconstruction 2.0
The Fisk Jubilee Singers began in 1871 as an acapella ensemble of students from Fisk University, established only six months after the end of the American Civil War. The university was in need of funds, so the group of 11 students went on tour, singing traditional Negro spirituals. They did not perform in the traditional minstrel show format made popular after the Reconstruction period; instead, they sang the songs of the black slaves and the newly freed slaves. As they toured the US, they faced racism, but that did not deter them. After a show in Chicago, they turned over their small earnings to the people displaced by the Chicago Fire of that same year. After they had given themselves the name of The Fisk Jubilee Singers, they continued on their tour, eventually earning $40,000 for the University. The Fisk Jubilee Singers still exist today, but the very first members were never recorded, having set out on their tour only five years after the end of the Civil War, during the time of Reconstruction which brought about more struggle for the newly freed slaves than their time during slavery. The first recording of the Fisk Jubilee Singers was in 1909, but until that moment history has not heard their voices. "Olio" opens with a Fisk Jubilee Proclamation, a narrative which looks like a poem but breathes witness to the voices of the students still in the waning shadow of slavery. As they navigate their way through a country where Reconstruction is, at the time, nothing more than a social construct directed by the government, they come across racism. It had yet to enter into the hearts of the people. Tyehimba Jess does this: he creates a narrative in the form of interactive poetic forms to not only give voice to freed African Americans entertainers during that time of Reconstruction up until World War I but to give shape to the sound of their voices.
Tyehimba Jess did not introduce me to poetry, but he did teach me to like poetry. His various shapes of a narrative are poems within the voice he gives to those who did not have a voice refreshed my opinion of poetics. No, I wasn't a fan of poetry, my words need to mean what they say and say what they mean, and punctuation is important. An odd thing to say for someone who majors in English Literature, but Jess comes from the same cloth. Instead of maintaining the hard lines of iambic pentameter and the other 49 versions of poems, he manipulates those forms to shape the black experience he formulates as what could be the voices of the silent. Olio is not Jess's first trip in the world of historical fact, his Lead Belly is the same content, if not as free with the shapes of his narratives within the text, but tells the story of Huddie William Leadbetter, otherwise known as Lead Belly. Unlike the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Lead Belly was on record during his career, but his story is just as hard as those in Olio. His story comes closer to World War I instead of the Civil War, and Jim Crow Laws were in effect. Jess lends his voice to sections of Lead Belly's life where a voice is needed to fill in the facts of the life he leads, and this same premise carries over to Olio. In both works, the prevalent themes are a historical certainty: the reader can not believe these words created by Jess did not come from the people he writes about, nor the various events surrounding the words. Together, Olio is not merely a book, but a historical work of word-art.
Olio is more than poems: there are interviews that leave the reader running for Wikipedia entries to see if the topics discussed are of historical fact. In the section titled Bella Marie Jenkins, RN, the narrator is interviewing a nurse who cared for Scott Joplin in his last days, but the reader is brought face-to-face with history:
"You got a lot of gumption. You get that in the war? You one of the 369, am I right?"
This moment of reality shows randomly within the text, as a sort of separator between the various poems. These interviews read as if steeped in the history of the struggle Blacks had even at wartime. The nurse saying she wasn't allowed to work on white US soldiers has a Toni Morrison taste to it, yet there is disbelief that such a thing could happen, that even a war did not stop the machine of racism and segregation. There is no hostility. Throughout the various works, Jess misses the righteous indignation that is expected to raise its head within the various works, but that is part of his theme: this was a way of life, be it right or wrong. Black identification within a white structure leaves an empty feeling in the mouth which is not hunger, but a missing taste. This narrative needs no poetic structure to get to the point. Yes, eventually the interview is about Scott Joplin, but the prose is not needed to shape the effect of the interview.
Olio contains several tear-out sections, furthering its interactiveness to place the reader into tactile interaction with the text. Again, there's history intermixed with the creative process. In the "Dunbar-Booker Double Shovel" pages, the syncopated verse tears out of the book. On the other side are two lists, one depicting numbers of black victims of lynching and below that, the 78 "Reasons for Black Lynchings." Paul Dunbar was a poet born in Ohio to parents who were slaves in Kentucky before the Civil War, and Booker T. Washington, a former slave, and educator. The appendix gives interactive examples of how to form the page into various shapes to see how the two difference voices come together regardless of the shape the page manipulates. The Black Lynching information, regardless of how the two voices fold, is not affected. This history, set in stone, has no amount of manipulation will make those figures change. This is Jess at his finest, blending fiction and fact into a page of a verse of black words which remain powerful regardless the shape of the white page.
There is a ticker-tape of information located at the tops and bottoms of the Fisk Jubilee Singer's pages. The information is simple: the name of a church, the city, and a year. The "tape" begins with Mother Emmanuel AME Church, Charleston, SC, 1822. The tape ends nearly 200 pages later, with the same entry that began the narrative, but the date has changed. Instead of 1822, the date is 2015. Mother Emmanuel AME Church. Charleston, SC.
2015.
This is not the end of the book. In fact, Jess does not give Olio and official end because there is no end because history and verse are both circulars. Just like the Dunbar-Booker Double Shovel tear-out-and-manipulate page, words are altered but the history on the back, the Lynchings, stay the same. What is first is also last. 193 years later, Mother Emmanuel AME Church closes the list of all of the black churches that suffered some vandalism or crime. This fact, this truth needs to thematic preparation, recorded history does not need a preface because it is seen, heard, felt, tasted. The 2015 incident at Mother Emmanuel was all over the news for days. The 1822 incident, when the church was burned down after several trials where various blacks, including Denmark Vesey, a founder, were thought to be part of a slave revolt and executed.
Olio is a wire-tap of the past to bring forward those who were not recorded, interviewed or even considered due to their color. Reconstruction was an idea that failed based on the soul-deep denial for blacks within society, and the pages of Olio give voice to the other side of that denial.
Works Cited
"Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church." Emanuelamechurch.org. Emanuel AME Church, n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.
Jess, Tyehimba. Leadbelly. Amherst: Verse, 2005. Print.
Jess, Tyehimba. Olio. New York: Wave, 2016. Print.
Thompson, Ben. "Badass of the Week: Lead Belly." Badass of the Week: Lead Belly. Ben Thompson, n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.