Roger Reeves’s Dark Days: Fugitive Essays teaches us how it needs to be read. By that, I don’t mean it leads us gently. Rather, these 13 “fugitive essays” seek to challenge, to make us reimagine what we thought we knew. “Nothing easy. Nothing without work,” Reeves writes, and the most vivid impression I have is of his rigor. “Disturb, disturb the bones, terror, and trauma of history,” he avows. What he’s saying is this: Avoid the false consolations of sentimentality.
Reeves highlights this in the collection’s second essay, “Through the Smoke, Through the Veil, Through the Wind,” which recalls a 2019 trip to give a reading at the McLeod Plantation in Charleston, South Carolina. Such a setting is fraught no matter how you look at it, and especially for Reeves, a Black poet and critic who was raised in New Jersey (he now teaches at the University of Texas at Austin) but has familial roots in the region. At the ginhouse, he notices a “small detail among the brick and chicken wire and darkness. A child’s fingerprint. A child’s fingerprint in the brick.” He begins to tell himself a story. Then, he stops.
During slavery, Reeves understands, young children “were put to work turning over hot bricks to dry after they had come out of the kiln.” Whatever else it may be, then, the fingerprint is evidence. And yet, what to do in the face of that? How should he respond? A part of him wants to trace the print with his own finger, but he resists. Instead, he considers “the limits of empathy, catharsis, historical reckoning, and the ease by which we think we salve the open wounds of history and the ongoing catastrophe of racism and discrimination in America with personal epiphany and gesture, with tears and the gnashing of teeth.”
This is an essential concept, and it resonates throughout Dark Days. How do we begin to live outside narrative? “Everyone,” Reeves elaborates, “wants a narrative—beginning, middle, and triumphant end. Some happy future that derives from this ignominious present. But what if history is a lyric? What if the freedom you seek can’t be narrated…?” The questions recall the work of Claudia Rankine, who in Citizen also aspires to address race and heritage through the lens of the lyric. “Beyond the narrative, beyond the storytelling, beyond the anecdotes,” she told me during a 2016 interview, “is another world of feeling so buried and dark and crippling that it needs its own genre.”
Reeves is after something similar: to make a book that toggles between memory and forgetting, that recognizes the utility of thinking about how the past informs the future (and vice versa) but also its futility. “There is no definitive narrative to escaping, to freedom,” he insists. “It is—only is.” The statement couldn’t be more apt. What have we learned, after all, from living in this moment? COVID, the George Floyd protests, Black Lives Matter, the coup attempt of January 6—if there is any lesson, it has to do with how the narrative can be turned. Think of that plantation again, where descendants of enslaved people continued to live and work until the 1990s, sharecropping as its own form of indentured servitude.
“When did we, our nation, slip into a post-fact epoch?” Reeves wonders in “Poetry Isn’t Revolution but a Way of Knowing Why It Must Come.” (The title is drawn from Adrienne Rich’s poem “Dreamwood.”) At first, he dates this to the second Iraq war, but that’s a post-fact in its own right, a bit of cultural amnesia reframed as rhetorical strategy. There is no post-fact epoch, since such an ethos is embedded in our history. “Maybe the United States,” Reeves concludes, “has always been post-fact: beginning with the constitutional fraudulence of slavery.”
Here we glimpse the author’s method: not to ask questions so much as to subvert them, and in so doing to turn to silence, which is where the real work begins. He remembers his grandmother, who worked as a domestic; among her clients “were some of the first Black women to earn PhDs.” It was in these homes that Reeves was exposed to Black intellectual life, but the anecdote is not the point. Instead, as with that fingerprint in the brick, he wants to discover where it leads, not to look back on how it was. His essays are personal but never merely (or even mostly) autobiographical.
“To survive,” he reflects, “requires a lyric, ironic, improvisational sensibility.”
The most subversive material in Dark Days involves intimacy, which has long been what oppressors fear the most. Intimacy, after all, is where we find the space to create resistance, learn to protect ourselves. In “Peace Be Still,” the book’s long central essay, Reeves writes about “the hush harbor,” a zone of “quiet in the maelstrom of plantation life.” Redoubts like this were what might now be called (in a very different context) temporary autonomous zones, “clandestine and invisible meetings” entered into at great risk. “I have been searching for where I might go, how I might bring myself some measure of peace, some quiet in the middle of what feels like catastrophe,” Reeves acknowledges.
And later: “I began to think of the hush harbor as a space of revelation, a space of study.”
I want to say that Dark Days seems to me a hush harbor also, a place for Reeves (and us with him) not to find solutions so much as to articulate the questions, to see the situation plain. No false narratives, no empty declarations. No easy answers, or answers at all. Hence, his use of the word fugitive, since he’s operating along the edges of the discourse. Hence, his use of trembling, which represents, by turns, anticipation and fear. Trembling is a word I associate with James Baldwin; it is the last one in “Sonny’s Blues”—“the very cup of trembling”—which Reeves recalls his mother reading aloud to him on the day Baldwin died.
Or does he? Once more, Reeves leaves us to confront the insufficiency of narrative. “This might be less history and more the fiction of memory,” he confides. Still, I can’t stop thinking about the hush harbor. Reeves is open about his debt to Baldwin, even when he dissents. Late in Dark Days, he takes him to task for writing, in The Fire Next Time, that “great men have done great things here…and we can make America what America must become.” Baldwin’s declaration is, for Reeves, the epitome of the sentimental. I don’t necessarily disagree. I want, however, to imagine trembling echoing in the silence, in the space offered by Dark Days.
“This,” Reeves asserts, “is why reading is dangerous—because it points.… Or at least the reading I’m interested in doing, the reading that begins on the edges of plantations, in small groups of study, away from the eyes, appetites, laws and codes of the masters and their policing paterollers;…reading that disobeys, critiques the present through pointing, pointing away to the swamps and marshes where we might convene something like freedom.”•
