February 2025 - The Trayvon Generation by Elizabeth Alexander

Book blog #6, February 2025

Book: The Trayvon Generation by Elizabeth Alexander

Post by Rachel Shiryayeva

At our February gathering, we met to discuss The Trayvon Generation, by Elizabeth Alexander. This book was originally an essay published in The New Yorker in 2020, and it was written in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. The work showcases the observant prose of Alexander, who likes to dissect language, redefine it, and light up our minds with it. It includes the personal writing of the author, a Black mother who is deeply afraid for her Black sons, and it makes profound statements about the effect of monuments and memorials, the importance of art, and the necessity of truth-telling in history. Additionally, in this work Alexander proves to be a discerning curator, discussing and connecting choice paintings, sculptures, poems, and stories of other outstanding artists and individuals.

The first person in our book club to comment brought up the passage in the early pages, about the power of words, and how there is a danger in our wrong use of words. As Alexander puts it,  “. . . there is too much language in the air right now that is imprecise, false, harmful, operating not to bridge understanding but to create misunderstanding, to divide. . . ” (p.10).  I mentioned that this writing reminded me of another small book I read a few years ago: Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump.

Considering Alexander’s careful attention to language, it is not surprising that she starts her book with an extremely long sentence about the power of words. (After marveling at its length and structure, I eagerly made plans to present it to my composition students.) However, the sentence that stuck out even more in my mind came later in the book: “She is remembered not simply because she was a brilliant writer–that was insufficient, and genius is neglected every day. She is remembered because people did the work of remembering her”  (p.57).    

To give some context, this quotation refers to Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), preeminent African-American writer, anthropologist, and folklorist. According to Alexander,

Hurston “. . . died in a state of penury and was buried in an unmarked grave in a Florida field” (p.57). Over a decade later, seeking to reclaim the legacy of the forgotten Hurston, the acclaimed writer Alice Walker went looking for Hurston’s grave. Alexander even describes Walker as calling Hurston by name as she strode through a field. The story ends with Walker purchasing a new tombstone, thus starting us all on “the work of remembering”. Ironically (or presciently?), in 1945, Hurston herself had written to prominent African-American sociologist and historian W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) requesting he establish a “cemetery for the illustrious negro dead” (p.48). Unfortunately, DuBois did not take up Hurston’s suggestion. The cemetery was not created, and Hurston did not end up in it.

For me, the most memorable phrase of the above quote is “. . . did the work of remembering”, because it presses us to consider the idea that positions we often think of as passive (audience, students, readers, listeners) do not have to be.

 Other remarks people made focused on a handful of impressive individuals featured in the book: Corey Menafee, Lucille Clifton, Deborah Luster, and Jackie Sumell.

Corey Menafee

Corey Menafee, a Black man, worked as a dishwasher at Yale University. (I don’t believe his position was mentioned in the book, so I looked it up.) One day, Menafee picked up a broom and smashed out a stained glass window depicting slaves picking cotton. One of the slaves was apparently smiling.  For his act of destruction, Menafee was fired, although he was later rehired at a different dining hall.

Alexander comments on the images of slavery that were depicted at Yale: “These images are not just assaults to Black people. They say to the white people who are exposed to them over and over, all day every day, This is normal. Slavery was normal” (p.32).

Alexander herself had been disturbed by another artwork on display at Yale. In fact, it

“. . . presided over the conference room. A metal collar was around the neck of a brown-skinned figure at the foot of the university’s namesake [Elihu Yale]” (p.28). As Alexander memorably expressed it: “Now that I saw and could not unsee, how much of my brain space was being taken up that could be used for other things?” (p.30)

When Alexander talks about exposure to racist monuments and memorials, she mentions the writer Adrienne Su, who described “the shock of delayed comprehension”, which Su, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, experienced after living near Stone Mountain, the largest monument to the confederacy. As Alexander puts it “...the largest bas-relief sculpture on Earth has been called “the largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world” (p.21). Su’s coining of the phrase “shock of delayed comprehension” helped Alexander to understand what she herself experienced when working at Yale and being constantly exposed to the racist art, hung in prominent places without critical comment or context.

Beyond suffering from “the shock of delayed comprehension”, I assume Alexander did not complain about the depictions of slavery and their effect on viewers because she felt it would be too much of a risk for her to take, as a professor at the university.

Therefore, someone else had to step up.

If not for Menafee’s decisive action, who knows when the issue would ever have been deemed worthy of consideration by the Yale administration? In fact, in a related struggle, protesters had already been demanding the hall change its name of “Calhoun”, who had been a slave owner. And after Menahee got in trouble, protesters (and the media) brought him to the attention of the public. If not for these protesters, Yale would probably never have dropped the charges against Menafee, and I guess he would never have been rehired.

All I could think of when I read about this man’s action was how wonderful it was; the privileged students at this prestigious university must all have been relentlessly trained in critical thinking . . . and yet it was Corey Menafee, a humble dining hall worker, who took critical action.

A Black dishwasher picked up a broom and smashed out the racist glass!

Lucille Clifton

We talked about Lucille Clifton, a poet whose works are featured in The Trayvon Generation. In her poem “at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989”, she asks for the names of the slaves who worked on the plantation (“tell me your names/tell me your bashful names”) The poem ends with the phrase “here lies” repeated three times (“here lies/here lies/here lies/hear). It is sad and eerie that we do not know the names of the people who lie under the ground, in eternal slumber. Then, our minds are disturbed by the other meaning of the word “lie”.  I did further research on this poem and its poet and learned that Clifton had indeed gone on a tour of this cemetery on a plantation, in 1989, and she had asked why the tour guide had not spoken about slaves. The answer was that as Clifton was the only Black person present, the guide had not wanted to “embarrass” her. Clifton retorted that she was not a slave, and she was not embarrassed. She also asked to see the “inventory”, thinking this may be revealing. Lo and behold, when the inventory was checked, it was found that ten slaves were registered. Clifton was also told by the tour guide that women were not considered worth counting, so nothing is known about their presence.

From this experience, Clifton found the inspiration to compose her poem.

Deborah Luster

Deborah Luster was a white photographer who embarked on a project as a response to the murder of her mother: she decided to take portraits of inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as “Angola”, since it is on land that used to be a plantation called “Angola”; this in turn was named after the “Angola” of southern Africa, where many enslaved people came from.

I was surprised at how meaningful the project turned out to be for all involved. I have looked at art all my life, and I have sometimes thought about how increasingly irrelevant great art has become in our day. This is why I was so astonished and gladenned to learn of Luster’s project: it taught me that the power of art is still alive, and it can indeed change people’s lives!

To be captured in Luster’s photographs, inmates gathered whatever possessions they had, and they situated themselves as they wished to be known to their families. So powerful was the effect on their loved ones that one inmate who had not been spoken to by her nineteen children in the fifteen years since she had been incarcerated, received a visit that rekindled family relations.

Elizabeth Alexander shares some of the affecting portraits in her book: the one that begins the chapter is the one that Alexander herself found most powerful: it features “Daddy-O”, the oldest inmate at the time the picture was taken. He is slender and wrinkled, with a look of profundity. He leans against a tree, his eyes gazing downward, maybe to keep off the sun.

This part of the book (the end) was the part where I could not stop shaking my head in disbelief at the facts presented: “reckless eyeballing” could still be a punishable offence?? There is a membership golf course on the prison grounds for people outside the prison, with a view of “Camp J”, where solitary confinement is held?? And really. . . “Angola” is the name of this place??  Alexander describes it this way: “The Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, sits outside of New Orleans on land the size of Manhattan. It today looks like the plantation it was, with Black men picking cotton, or okra, while white correctional officers ride on horseback to oversee their work” (p.86).

After reading this chapter for the first time, about a year ago, I did much additional research on the Internet.  I came across a memorable website that offers a map of all of the prisons in Louisiana, as well as incarcerated people’s video testimonies: (“The Promise of Justice Initiative”, End Plantation Prisons). I learned that inmates do hard labor for pennies, and sometimes for nothing at all. More important than any facts, however, was just having some proximity (to borrow Bryan Stevenson’s word) with the human beings locked away from the rest of the world. And remember that, according to Alexander, some of these people were arrested as teenagers, for “reckless eyeballing”!

Check the website:

https://labor.promiseofjustice.org/

jackie sumell

We also spoke of jackie sumell, who does not capitalize her name.

When an art student at Stanford University, she was given the assignment to design the most exorbitant dream house one of her professors could describe. Finding the assignment unworthy, sumell thought of how much more profound it would be to ask the question of one of “Angola’s” inmates: Herman Wallace, with whom sumell had been corresponding after she learned of his story in 2001.

Here is a brief version of that story:

Herman Wallace had formed a chapter of the Black Panther Party while serving time for armed robbery in the Angola State Penitentiary. This group (the “Angola Panthers”), had decided to work on improving prison conditions. In 1972, after a prison guard was murdered, Wallace and two other Panthers were convicted, even while there was no physical evidence linking them to the crime. They were held in solitary confinement for forty years, which was the longest time anyone had served such a sentence.

sumell explains in an artist statement why she chose to alter her assignment, which was a study in spatial relations: “I struggled to balance the futility of my assignment–which reinforced the power dynamics of wealth, race, and privilege–with the stark reality of Herman’s condition” (p.96).

So Wallace and sumell corresponded over the months, working on every detail of Wallace’s dream house, from the picture of a black panther on the bottom of the swimming pool to a library full of books on Black liberation. They never dreamed that Wallace’s conviction would be overturned, but one day it was.

Then–three days after he was released from prison, Wallace died.

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As you can see, The Trayvon Generation is full of stories that show the power of art, and it is full of stories about exceptional individuals. However, as our one Black book club member pointed out at the end of the meeting, if the conversation had taken place among a more predominantly Black group of people, it would have gone differently: the talk would have been about people’s fears for the current generation of Black youth. As a response, I noted the title of the book is The Trayvon Generation, (named after African-American Trayvon Martin, a victim of racism who was shot and killed at the age of seventeen), and the author does express her personal fears for her sons. In fact, the middle section of the book is also entitled “the trayvon generation” (no caps). In this section, the heartfelt worries of the author are supported by anecdotes and examples. One standout example is that of Darnella Frazier, the seventeen-year-old who recorded George Floyd’s murder on her phone.

I admit that the words of our sole black member deflated my spirits at first. However, in the end I was glad that he spoke up, because it provoked an awareness in me of how difficult it is for us to walk in each other’s shoes. Is it even possible? My book club friend’s words presented a challenge to me, and, I hope, to others who read this blog. For those of us who are accustomed to living in the comparative security of the privileged (white) majority, it is hard to imagine the lifelong trials of growing up and existing outside of that space, but it is important to try.

One way to do this is to read. I think it was in 2019 that I first read about antiracism when the New York Times wrote a piece on Ibram X. Kendi and his book How to Be an Antiracist. I read this work and it was as if a window on a new world opened to me. I wanted to see more; I wanted to know more. Since then, I have been reading many non-fiction books by Black authors, and, (remember this expression?): now that I have seen I cannot unsee.

Some Recommended Readings (in no particular order):

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi

The Red Record, by Ida Wells

Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America, by Michael Harriot

Twelve Years a Slave, by Solomon Northup

The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row, by Anthony Ray Hinton

We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival, by Jabari Asim

Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, by Michael Eric Dyson

Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, by Jennifer Eberhardt

Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March, by Lynda Blackmon Lowery

Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High, by Melba Patillo Beals

Mom & Me & Mom, by Maya Angelou (memoir)

Black Fatigue: How Racism Erodes the Mind, Body, and Spirit, by Mary-Frances Winters

Tough: My Journey to True Power, by Terry Crews (memoir)

How to Be Black, by Baratunde Thurston

Driving the Green Book, by Alvin Hall

The Classic Slave Narratives, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (includes four autobiographies: The Life of Olaudah Equiano; The History of Mary Prince; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs, writing as Linda Brent).