The Allure of Destruction
Looking again into ghostly territory
On a Tuesday in July 1970, Ray King drove a bulldozer into a house. If you’ve followed my work or heard one of my talks, you’ve seen a photo from that day:
There he sits. Liberal. Civil Rights activist. Chair of Charlotte urban renewal commission. Sunday School teacher. Ceremonial heavy equipment operator.
You can attempt to go to the address of the house today–811 Canton Street in Charlotte—but you’ll find that it no longer exists, not just the house but the whole block. Nearby, there does exist an interstate highway. It appears to be a permanent fixture on the map, but it is not.
There are other photos from July 22, 1970. They show some of what was happening outside the frame in the scene above. In one of them, people stand and watch the unfolding spectacle.
Their faces are unreadable, but the facts of the story and the details of the photo make it clear that they are next. The bulldozer is going to turn around and create another spectacle. The men on the porch are in the way of progress. They’ll be cleared out soon.
The devastation remains, now covered over by other projects but never resolved. It may seem to be a permanent fixture on the map, but it is not.
Nearly sixty years have elapsed since King mounted that bulldozer. It’s hard to know the difference between “60 years” and “permanent.” In neighborhoods like mine, for decades the site of the spillover of Urban Renewal, the average age of death is only slightly more than 60 years. The devastation encompasses an entire lifespan and more. Some folks might hear an eschatological hope in the claim that highways crumble, empires fall, regimes change. A far-off redemption has no material use, though, for the men on the porch or the girls with hair in rollers or the family whose house is rubble.
Over the last decade I’ve studied under people who have taught me to see the hauntings of the old Brooklyn neighborhood, another of Charlotte’s Urban Renewal zones. I’ve learned to imagine into that space something other than what is there currently: a jail, a courthouse, acres of parking, another chunk of freeway. I deeply cling to the idea that some sort of restorative justice is possible. But recently I got some feedback from one of the current title holders in that neighborhood. It amounted to, “we don’t take either your work or our history very seriously.”
That’s not about me or my work so much as it is about the way power is constructed–who has it, how they got it, what spaces they inhabit, the need to cling to it, the backlash when even an ounce of it is redistributed. The way power is constructed in this society seems to be immovable, unalterable, fixed, inalienable, permanent. I tell myself that it is not.
There is one more photo of Ray King on that bulldozer. I cannot find it, but I swear it exists somewhere in the vast expanse of my Dropbox. It is the scene of the first photo above, but from a wider perspective. In it are several white men and women looking on as King and his driver engage the throttle. They are flanked by the Black men on the porch to their right and the Black youths to their left. We see only their backs.
They are standing still. The allure of the destruction captures them. The spectacle of compound fractures at 811 Canton Street bids them to move into the frame as silent accomplices. Perhaps I could be more gracious. They may have come to bear witness to immense grief, refusing to turn away even if they were powerless to stop it despite months or years of trying. Whatever the case, they are caught up in the destruction as well, in the avalanche of violence, in the cavalcade of earth movers. Intentions be damned, 811 Canton is no longer on the map.
I wish I could find the photo so that you could look at it and see that you are in it too, looking on into ghostly territory. We could remember being there, in our different places but all longing for instruments of repair rather than death. We could “construct a countermemory” as evidence for a future us that our descent into terror could be otherwise. We might exorcize the wickedness from this story, an exorcism “not in order to chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant them the right to a hospitable memory, out of a concern for justice.”
We might cleave ourselves from predatory real estate developers and their commodification of every space and body.
For now, though, the devastation proceeds. The exorcism is delayed. One hopes not permanently.
Baldwin Speaks: Awake at 4AM, I thought over and over of one particular passage, from the end of the first section of The Fire Next Time. I share it with hesitation, as I’m not exactly the audience for these words. And yet, social movements draw wide circles and pull strength from many sources. Plus, this is an open letter meant for many people to hear. On the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, James Baldwin writes to his nephew, who is his namesake,
“...We, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the face of unassailable odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.
You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free.”
Upcoming Public Talks: I’ll be at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Charlotte on Tuesday. Contact me for details.
One Last Note: From Immanuel Wilkins’ new album, “Blues Blood”: