physically and (which amounts to the same thing) historically. The air inside the Pullmans was fragrant with smoke, everyone knew their place, and the help spoke Help language. The imaginative concept that had brought forth the text and its art was that not just inside but outside black boundaries, the universe is white.
As white as white flesh sprouting from a brown juice.
—
Life magazine, September 6, 1937, page 116. Life digital archive, New York Public Library.
“South Ferry.–The Omnibus,” about 1865.
The stereo pair with contrast and detail restored
An anaglyph of the stereo pair (requires red-and-blue stereo viewer)
At
and
you’ll find a pair of documents from 1857 Charleston. They advertise slaves for sale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Slave_Mart
In each, a woman named Eve is referred to with the term prolap. In 1857, readers of those advertisements must have known what that word meant, but I don’t know now. It isn’t in the Oxford English Dictionary, the Dictionary of American Regional English, or any of the nineteenth-century dictionaries that I’ve consulted, and a Newspapers.com search through the 1850s yields only an unrelated medical term, prolapse. I didn’t find it, either, in any of the several 1850s gynecology texts that I found at Archive.org. So today I submitted prolap to the OED.
I was being sentimental. I intended to make myself believe that I was completing Eve’s forgotten name and nobly getting it admitted to a dictionary’s kind of memory. But both the dictionary’s language and what memory does with it will tell me I’m no nobleman. All that my memory and my words actually did was to dress me up as a headwaiter, station me with a volume of the OED behind a reservation desk, and let me admit the gentlemen and ladies already in the corpus to the privilege of being known there once again. The grammar of my notion about Eve was possessive, as if she were an Eve of my own to decide about in a future of my own. But long before I was born, the orders concerning Eve had already been written into the book I wielded, and the whiteness of the shirt that I wore when I read them out had always been a part of their language.
By the exit from a crossroads one day in 1917 there stood no. 3594, underground in her clean blouse and her necklace. In 1917 she was accessorized with a name as well, but by now that has probably been erased from the record you’re seeing.
You may desire to say something self-assuring like “Nevertheless, I won’t forget no. 3594’s act of cleanness in the dark.” But since you know what has probably happened to no. 3594’s name, you probably shouldn’t. Just try to see without memory. Whatever memory is, it no longer has power over what remains to be seen of no. 3594.