The best way to return is simply to start writing…
I was writing a section of a chapter of my book earlier this morning, and I did something that I have found myself doing a lot while working on this. My book is a synthesis, among other things, although I tend to see it much more as an extended essay where I make a series of arguments about the long relationship between Britain and the Caribbean by bringing together mountains of existing scholarship in ways that I hope haven’t quite been done before, or in this particular way. It’s a different way of writing than I did for my dissertation or for the still-in-progress revision of that dissertation into a book. There I constructed a narrative (and also arguments) from a vast collection of primary sources, which meant that every time I wrote a sentence, it generally came from at least one, often many, sources produced during this time period in question.
But now I’m writing about things I know not because I have found them in the archive but because I have been reading about Britain and the Caribbean for two decades at this point. And what I have found that to mean is that I know that I know a thing, but then I feel compelled to confirm that I know it and compelled to check that my knowledge of it is as precise as I need it to be.
This morning the thing that I knew that I knew was about banjos, but what I wanted to confirm was that enslaved people in the Caribbean had built and played banjos specifically, rather than some other similar but differently named instrument, and during the specific time period of the chapter. I knew this to be true, but I wanted that additional confirmation, plus this was a piece of information that I knew I wanted to be accompanied with a citation, since to many of my readers, the banjo will be associated not with black cultures but with white Southern cultures. So I turned to Laurent Dubois’ The Banjo: America’s African Instrument. (Turning to this specific book is part of how I knew it to be true that enslaved people in the Caribbean had built and played banjos, because first and foremost, Dubois is a Caribbeanist.)
In short order, I confirmed what I already knew and found the chapters that were particularly rich in the information, ready to put in the citation.
I’ll admit, this process, which I do countless times as I write, is slow. I did all of that (about 20 minutes’ work) to confirm six words, not even a full sentence. And 20 minutes was pretty quick, relatively speaking. Had this been a book I was less familiar with, or had read 15 years ago rather than 3-4 years ago, or a topic about which I was less confident about, it could easily have been an hour, or hours, or even days. But I like crystalline precision in my writing, and this is the only way I know how to do it.
But none of that is really why I’m writing about this right now.
As I was skimming through The Banjo, my eyes passing along so many instances of banjo building and playing in North America and the Caribbean, the word kept repeating in my head.
The banjo…the banjo…the banjo…the banjo…
And then it suddenly clicked.
The banjo…the banjo……The Banjo Lesson.
I don’t know how I hadn’t ever made this connection before.
The Banjo Lesson is one of the great words of African-American painting, painted by Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1893. It’s an immense work. It is also a work that I barely know how to consider or write about since it is an image that so dominated my childhood home that it blends into the everyday fabric of life for me.
My mother loved that painting. She must have first seen it where it is currently housed, at Hampton University. She worked there as a secretary when it was Hampton Institute. There were no fewer than three prints of it framed and hung in my childhood home. It was everywhere. It is everywhere. One of those framed prints is in my home now. I’ve always known it.
And yet the act of putting two and two together only happened today. That among the things my mother was teaching me, whether she knew it or now, was that, as Dubois puts it, the banjo is an African instrument. I’d picked up the message that Black artists did oil painting on par with the French impressionist masters. I’d picked up the message that Black people were worthy subjects of great art in a world that still tries to suggest that we are not. But deep in my subconscious, only surfacing today, was the realization that this was not simply an instrument that the grandfather (we think) is teaching to his grandson (we think), it is an instrument that is part of our African heritage.
I’m back! Thank you all for your continued support. More stories to come.