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Black Movements
Black
Movements
Performance and Cultural Politics

S oy i c a D i g g s C o l b e r t

R u tg e r s U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s
New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London
Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data
Names: Colbert, Soyica Diggs, 1979–­author.
Title: Black movements : performance and cultural politics / Soyica Diggs Colbert.
Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2017] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016033726| ISBN 9780813588520 (hardback) | ISBN
9780813588513 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780813588537 (e-­book (epub))
Subjects: LCSH: African American theater—­History. | Performing arts—­United
States—­History. | African Americans—­Civil rights—­History. | Civil rights
movements—­United States—­History. | African Americans in the performing arts.
| Civil rights movements—­History. | BISAC: PERFORMING ARTS / Theater /
History & Criticism. | ART / Performance. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies
/ African American Studies. | ART / Art & Politics. | ART / American / African
American. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Black Studies (Global).
Classification: LCC PN2270.A35 C65 2017 | DDC 792.089/96073—­dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033726

A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication record for this book is available from the

British Library.

Copyright © 2017 by Soyica Diggs Colbert

All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106
Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is
“fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–­1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For Rodger
Contents

Introduction: Webs of Affiliation 1

1 Flying Africans in Spaceships 23
2 Trapping Entanglements 58
3 Prophesying in Octavia Butler’s Parable Series 104
4 Marching 142
5 “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”:
Locating the Future of Black Studies 168

Acknowledgments 179
Notes 181
Bibliography 205
Index 219

vii
Black Movements
 Introduc tion
Webs of Affiliation

Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to

knock down.
—­Robin D. G. Kelley

What histories and ideologies must be affirmed and what other

ones denied for a slave to become a superhero?1 The filmmaker Quentin Tar-
antino’s slavery revenge fantasy Django Unchained (2012) offers a response
to this question. It features a fearless black outlaw who has earned his free-
dom from slavery by accumulating value working as a bounty hunter.2 Set in
the antebellum period, the film depicts the eponymous protagonist, Django
( Jamie Foxx), as he learns the rules of bounty hunting from his mentor, Dr.
King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). Schultz explains that bounty hunting, like
slavery, is “another flesh economy.”3 The comment predicates Django’s free-
dom on his participation in activities that perpetuate the power dynamic
of slavery. Instead of dismantling a system of domination, Schultz gives
Django the opportunity to shift from being dominated to dominating oth-
ers. His apprenticeship prepares him for his final mission to rescue his wife,
Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from her cruel slaver, Calvin Candie
(Leonardo DiCaprio). But accomplishing his quest to save the damsel in
distress does not distinguish his journey. Rather, all the choices he makes
to position himself as the hero enable the final fantastic scene of triumph, in
which he rides off on a horse with Broomhilda.4

1
2 Black Movements

Tarantino’s superhero figure demonstrates a swagger born out of the

character’s separation from and participation in the dehumanization of the
enslaved.5 Although he plays the role of a black slaver only to enact a stun-
ning ruse on Candie, Django, well armed and trained to defeat an army of
men, looks on as dogs eat black men alive, slaves beat each other to death
in hand-­to-­hand combat, and house slaves enforce brutal punishments on
their fellows. By the film’s end, Django kills Candie, enacts revenge on the
servile head house Negro (Samuel L. Jackson), shoots and kills the mis-
tress, dynamites and burns down the big house, and frees himself and his
wife. Through his transformation, he embodies not only the fantasy of black
revenge but also the liberal ideal of unfettered agency.6
As a prototypical black superhero, Django’s masculine authority delimits
the regulatory force of his status as chattel.7 Throughout the film he shocks
many onlookers as a black man riding a horse and brandishing a gun, but
their surprise often gives way to disdain when he exercises the relative
authority of a free black man over his enslaved counterparts, admonishing
them and directing their actions. His ability to secure his freedom through
his exceptional performance as a bounty hunter and his deadly reconcilia-
tion of his and his wife’s suffering satisfies investments in a particular brand
of American masculinity—­part savior, part hero—­that, I argue, is available
to black men in greater abundance in the post–­civil rights era.8 This era has
emerged alongside theories of poststructuralism, which render race a non-­
material construction in which new architectures of blackness emerge, mak-
ing it multiple and sometimes unlinking it from the past. As Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., said in a Time magazine interview about the film 12 Years a Slave
(2013), “we have the best of times, and we have the worst of times. We have
the largest black upper-­middle-­class in history, but we have the largest black
male prison population. . . . So it’s like we have two nations within the black
community. So how did we get here?”9 Tarantino’s film suggests that we got
here through the cruel embrace of liberal ideals of individualism that predi-
cate black liberation on the replication of racial dominance and heteronor-
mative performances of gender.10 Although set in the antebellum period,
Django Unchained offers unfettered individualism to its male protagonist as
a remedy for the burdensome legacy of slavery—­at once a comforting and
a deceptive remedy.
Tarantino and others have crafted satirical and fantastical postmodern
renderings of black history that, as forms of future-­oriented remembering,
 Introduction 3

contribute to imagining how freedom may coincide with blackness in the

late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries.11 Providing another lens
through which to see how we got here, Spike Lee uses the documentary
form as a mechanism to awaken the past—­to engage with it and breathe
new life into histories that might serve as the fertile ground for black free-
dom dreams to develop. His 4 Little Girls (1997) offers an entry point into
the civil rights movement by way of the Birmingham campaign and, in
particular, the devastating violence enacted in the Sixteenth Street Church
bombing.
Situating Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and
Carol Denise McNair as martyrs in a campaign for social equality, the film
memorializes the movement as much as it mourns the victims of gratuitous
violence. Lee’s documentary remembers four innocent girls with distinc-
tive personalities, hobbies, and family relationships. It also demonstrates
that black suffering pervaded the Birmingham campaign. As a result, 4 Little
Girls suggests a way forward that requires living with the dead while not dis-
tinguishing oneself from them. To live with the dead, however, is not the
same thing as to be bound by death. Living with the dead allows an indi-
vidual to incorporate and move forward with those she has lost. Conversely,
being bound by death inhibits the growth of the subject. Although a subtle
distinction, the notion of living with death versus being bound by it serves
as a tipping point for artists navigating black cultural politics in the post–­
civil rights era.
Lee’s act of memory humanizes individuals who participate in collec-
tive dissent and reminds the viewer that leadership appears in the form of
female children and male adults. Beginning with a tribute to Collins, Wes-
ley, Robertson, and McNair, the film intersperses descriptions of the four
girls with recollections that chronicle the launch and development of the
Birmingham civil rights campaign. The film first depicts male leadership
and then disrupts the familiar rendering of patriarchy, revealing that chil-
dren became the foot soldiers of the local movement. The juxtaposition of
adult male leadership with female children heightens the sense of shock
and terror that the bombing produces. The film mourns their lives and their
potential—­what they are and what they could be.12
Lee’s documentary leverages the innocence of the children to draw atten-
tion to the ethical demands of the civil rights struggle. Near the end of the
film, he makes the bold decision to show the girls’ autopsy photos. Carol
4 Black Movements

Denise McNair’s father tells viewers that he remembers seeing a piece of

concrete lodged in his daughter’s head. Then the film cuts to an image of
the young woman’s mutilated body, proof of the violation. McNair’s mother
says that she remembers going to identify the body and demanding to see
her daughter. After leaving the morgue she went to her mother’s house and
“when I got in there I couldn’t stop hollering; I couldn’t stop screaming.
And I can just see myself sitting in the chair, being so upset in a place that I
wanted to rub but couldn’t rub it.”13 Cutting from reactions to the bombing
and still photographs, the film riffs on what Fred Moten describes as “the
mo(ur)nin(g)”—­part moaning, part mourning, part morning—­that the
photograph of lynching victim Emmett Till produces.14 Heightened by the
soundtrack, the dirge-­like sequence produces sadness, sympathy, and out-
rage. Aliyyah Abdur-­R ahman’s Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and
the Erotics of Race forcefully argues that black girlhood often represents a
cultural impossibility as blackness comes to stand in for an absence of inno-
cence. In the documentary, the innocence of the girls transfers to the inno-
cence of black people who are simply demanding equality. The expansion of
freedom emerges by way of a collective composed of individuals who linger
simultaneously with suffering and the possibility of a new day.
Tarantino’s film is an act of fantasy; Lee’s film is an act of memory. Both,
however, circle around the historical (slavery and the civil rights move-
ment) and theoretical (black performance theory in the context of post-
structuralism) touchstones of this book. In the wake of the purported
failures of race-­ based collective movements of the twentieth century
(such as the civil rights movement and postcolonial movements in Africa
and the Caribbean), I analyze how artists and activists of the late twenti-
eth and early twenty-­first centuries use the freedom movements of earlier
historical periods as ways to imagine a more democratic society now and
in the future. Like Tarantino, some create fantastic reworkings of the past,
while others, like Lee, seek to re-­create the past as a site of instruction for
the present. Black Movements explores how post–­civil rights black perfor-
mance and cultural production becomes legible, possible, and generative as
a result of its relationship to prior moments and modes of cultural produc-
tion. The return to slavery as a historical touchstone has little to do with
recovering the slave’s past, as Toni Morrison describes in “Sites of Mem-
ory.”15 Yet even though Django Unchained tells us little about slavery, it offers
great insight into early twenty-­first-­century cultural production. If Django
 Introduction 5

Unchained qualifies as an act of memory, it does so as a deliberate act of

counter-­memory that situates identifying as a triumphant black subject in
opposition to identifying with the conditions of the enslaved. In the hands
of Tarantino, however, the imagination functions to make available certain
forms of masculinity to black men that have remained limited to them due
to the shadow of slavery.
Django Unchained does share with 4 Little Girls a depiction of disposabil-
ity that relates to the treatment of the enslaved, and I mention both films
here to highlight how artists imagine, use, and call forth performance prac-
tices to constitute racial identity and interrupt the dehumanization of black
people. My book explores representations of blackness that disrupt equat-
ing blackness with objection, while examining the possibilities and dangers
that representations of black suffering provide. Django Unchained demon-
strates the risks of embracing the lure of a black superhero whose presence
perpetuates the myth of individual exceptionalism and reinforces systems
of domination. In contrast, 4 Little Girls offers the possibility of remember-
ing forgotten histories. While the seductive lure of forgetting empowers
individuals to a point, Lee’s film reveals that the choice to think through and
with the past enables a more expansive rendering of freedom predicated on
an active engagement with the regulatory forces that circumscribe agency.
All of the chapters in Black Movements consider how artists devise strate-
gies, some more successful than others, to disrupt the equation of black-
ness with suffering. I use the word movement to mean “a change in position,”
place, or posture.16 Political movement can be defined as “a series of actions
on the part of a group of people working toward a common goal.”17 Black
movements are embodied actions (a change in position, place, posture, or
orientation) that draw from the imagination and the past to advance politi-
cal projects. This last term encompasses the multiple meanings of movement
while retaining the temporal qualities of blackness as performative.
The black movements that I explore occur within a social context in
which the idea that the consolidation of repeated actions (performance)
over time constitutes identity (racial and otherwise) is routinely accepted.18
Judith Butler argues in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” that
history and temporality produce gender as a performative—­the crystal-
lized, hailing, regulatory power of identity categories and social positions.
Performance constitutes the actor because it renders the individual answer-
able to the nature of the role he or she inhabits, which, as Butler explains,
6 Black Movements

becomes sediment as performatives. Performatives, such as gender roles or

other identitarian categories, and “reiterations of stylized norms, and inher-
ited gestural conventions from the way we sit, stand, speak, dress, dance,
play, eat, hold a pencil and more,” exert social force through the percep-
tion of their stability. But performatives accrue value in reiteration of per-
formance.19 Butler’s formulation depends on temporal accumulation. Over
time, the appearance of identity flattens the “internally discontinuous”
aspects of gender in order to produce continuity.20 Joseph Roach offers a
similar rendering of the term performance, explaining “that [it] offers a sub-
stitute for something else that preexists it. Performance, in other words,
stands in for an elusive entity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire
both to embody and to replace.”21 The filling of the vacancies, as he explains,
never amounts to a perfect replica.
Although it is easy to analogize Butler’s rendering of gender perfor-
mance to race, the preface to the 1999 edition of her book Gender Trouble
warns against such easy alignments. Her admonition gives us room to con-
sider how the performances that constitute blackness disrupt the accumula-
tive time associated with gender performance because theories of gender
performativity do not account for the temporal incongruence of blackness.
My book contends that performances, which constitute blackness, operate
within contrapuntal time. Post–­civil rights artists make use of the tempo-
ral specificity of performing blackness by crafting webs of affiliation, which
offer contexts for rethinking blackness in the past, present, and future. If
identity functions as an accumulation that desire ushers forth, then histori-
cal misreadings of blackness have grave implications for contemporary per-
formances. Such a rethinking of the relationship between performance and
blackness is particularly important in a historical context in which individ-
ual striving, particularly on the part of President Barack Obama, have been
exploited to counterbalance histories of antiblack racism. Ruminating over
how performance constitutes the affiliation formerly known as race is not
simply a form of nostalgia; instead, it provides an opportunity for respond-
ing to racism because it acknowledges the sociality of racial identity.
Artists and activists have explicitly and implicitly linked their actions to
prior enactments to create what I call webs of affiliation to combat and, in
certain cases, foster antiblack racism. Black movements function through
webs of affiliation. I use the word web to draw attention to a form of tempo-
rality that is not linear and therefore does not follow a progressive narrative
 Introduction 7

or understand the past as before the present. Webs of affiliation connect

performances in the present to those enacted in the past but not through a
direct line. Black movements occur in time but also shape our relationship
to time, and temporal play distinguishes the cultural production I explore
in this book. Temporal multiplicity—­that is, time working in counterpoint
rather than linearly—­gives artists and activists in the post–­civil rights era
greater flexibility in shaping their relationship to blackness and how it func-
tions and relates to the categories of the human and the citizen. Black Move-
ments explores how artists actively engage with certain pasts and jettison
others to remember, revive, and reimagine political movements that seem
to have stalled. These moments of engagement create webs of affiliation,
and in this book I show that they occur through speech acts, mimicry, oral
expression, and acts of disruption.

Blackness in the Post–­Civil Rights Era

The work of black cultural producers as historical agents in the post–­civil
rights era confronts the troubling dichotomy of the hero and the slave
that the social, cultural, and political shifts of the late twentieth century
have installed. Like the black superhero at the center of Tarantino’s film,
President Obama (standing alongside other black superstars such as
Oprah Winfrey, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Robert Johnson, Tyler
Perry, Jay-­Z, and Beyoncé Knowles) personifies the possibility that an
exceptional individual can move beyond the equation of blackness with
slavery, a burdensome inheritance that limits personal striving. Obama’s
presidency calls attention to how black excellence functions as a twenty-­
first-­century aspiration that is supposed to unlink the individual from
his or her limiting past. Yet as my parenthetical list suggests, a number of
late-­twentieth-­century figures held similar positions of achievement that
distanced them from the burdens of blackness. The pull of liberal individ-
ualism on black people intensified after Jim Crow, and the victories of the
civil rights movement enabled them to occupy social, educational, and
professional spaces that had been less available to them during Jim Crow.
While scientific advancements also contributed to the transformation of
racial categories in the late twentieth century, my focus in this book is on
how social and cultural practices inform, intersect, and reflect political
8 Black Movements

imaginaries and practices. By the end of the twentieth century, as a result

of shifting understandings of blackness and changes in the apparatus that
regulate black people, blackness began to appear to be a chosen affiliation
rather than a biological inheritance.22
As Jacquelyn Dowd Hall expertly argues in “The Long Civil Rights
Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” predominant narratives of
the civil rights movement marked a political decline after the passage of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965.

After a season of moral clarity, the country is beset by the Vietnam War, urban
riots, and reaction against the excesses of the late 1960s and the 1970s, under-
stood variously as student rebellion, black militancy, feminism, busing, affir-
mative action, or an overweening welfare state. A so-­called white backlash sets
the stage for the conservative interregnum that, for good or ill, depending on
one’s ideological persuasion, marks the beginning of another story, the story
that surrounds us now.23

In Black Movements, I take up “the story that surrounds us now,” consider-

ing the multiple ways that artists working after the classical phase of the
civil rights movement (beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Educa-
tion decision and ending with the passing of the Voting Rights Act) have
taken up the unfinished business of advocating for uniform protection of
civil rights, not just singular, individualized cases of redress. Of course, this
analytical move does not mark the end or completion of civil rights move-
ment strivings or suggest that the fifty years under consideration reflects
a singular political, social, or cultural project. The civil rights movement
emerged out of political exigencies that informed the shape of a diverse set
of practices that emerged according to Hall, in the 1930s and continued for
decades. While some of the desired outcomes of the civil rights movement
still remain unaccomplished, the aesthetic and political imaginary (a binary
I trouble throughout) of black movements has produced shifts following
the classical phase.
The artists I explore in this book range from Octavia Butler to Kanye
West and from Toni Morrison to Beyoncé Knowles. Although they have
flawed, limited, and incomplete visions of how to further the political proj-
ects of the mid-­twentieth century, their choice to align with various and dis-
tinct black freedom dreams marks a resistance to blackness as a deathbound
 Introduction 9

position to be overcome through the acquisition of wealth and power or as a

position of ontological impossibility under any circumstance. According to
Abdul R. JanMohamed, “the death-­bound-­subject’s ‘life’ is thus defined by
the need to avoid the possibilities of life as well as the possibility of death.
This is the aporetic zone occupied by bare life, a zone between the status of
‘flesh’ and that of ‘meat,’ neither quite alive nor quite dead.”24 Black move-
ments prove that, although black subjects live under the threat of death,
they do not necessarily “avoid the possibilities of life.”
Although Black Movements situates its claims within the era after the
classical phase of the civil rights movement, I resist arguing for a definitive
break between the political aims of black freedom movements of the early
and mid-­twentieth century and those of the late twentieth century. Post, in
my formulation, indicates coming after, but it does not deny how ongoing
acts of memory inform the historiography—­the process of shaping histori-
cal narrative over time—­and feed into understanding what came before.25
I am more invested in exploring how artists negotiate the shifting social
landscape over the fifty-­year period than in offering a uniform depiction of
how black movements operate in the post–­civil rights era. I use the term
post–­civil rights era to indicate a shift in political, discursive, and quotidian
experiences of blackness that I link to the end of de jure segregation and
the emergence of poststructuralism and multiculturalism. I do, however,
aim to hold on to the ongoing salience and expansiveness and diversity of
civil rights projects and resist reconciling them to a project to end segrega-
tion. The more expansive vision that I explore emphasizes the humanity of
black people and realizes that black freedom movements encompass inter-
national and feminist projects. The practices call attention to visioning as a
creative and critical practice that requires an understanding of the political
as constituted in artistic work; such an understanding troubles the dichoto-
mies of politics and aesthetics and of reason and unreason.26
Conceptualizing black freedom as unfolding through repeated embod-
ied movements also puts pressure on periodization; take, for example, the
relationship of black internationalism to the classical phase of the civil rights
movement. Hall explains the domestic as well as international aims of what
she calls the “long civil rights movement,” spanning from the 1930s to the
1970s. She challenges nationalist historiographies that posit that the juridi-
cal victories of the civil rights movement resulted from international pres-
sure on the United States to appear more democratic. The historiographies
10 Black Movements

contend that the U.S. government conceded to some of the demands of

civil rights activists because the nation saw equal rights as a weapon in its
Cold War campaign against the Soviet Union.27 Rather, she argues, “seen
through the optic of the long civil rights movement, . . . civil rights look less
like a product of the Cold War and more like a casualty. That is so because
antifascism and anticolonialism had already internationalized the race issue
and, by linking the fate of African Americans to that of oppressed people
everywhere, had given their cause a transcendent meaning.”28 Black inter-
nationalism served as the context of the civil rights movement, placing
the global experience of black people at its center. Understanding that the
civil rights movement is constituted, in part, by a set of practices that result
from a web of affiliations rather than from a national causal dynamic but-
tresses Hall’s claim for the mutuality of the civil rights movement and black
internationalism.
The persistence of black internationalism during the classical phase of
the civil rights movement highlights a longstanding antagonism between
the aims of black freedom movements and the positions of the state
expressed through the rhetoric of antiracism that emerged during the
Cold War. Due to the civil rights movement, writes Roderick A. Fergu-
son, “the U.S. nation-­state would achieve new levels of freedom and secu-
larity. Indeed the transformation that took place on campus yards would
help to make the rearticulations of minority difference into the general
presuppositions and elements of U.S. liberal capitalism.”29 As a result,
antiracism became incorporated into the national logics of U.S. democracy
and capitalism, producing “successive official antiracist regimes” particu-
larly “liberal multiculturalism (1980s to 1990s), and neoliberal multicultur-
alism (2000s).”30 The operation of these official antiracist regimes required
incorporating individual people of color into existing institutions organized
in opposition to their thriving.
Official antiracist regimes demanded that forms of blackness be unteth-
ered to the history of capital that distinguishes black life in the Americas.
Jodi Melamed describes the incorporation of antiracist social movements
into the state project of multiculturalism, beginning in the 1970s. “Liberal
multiculturalism would signal the moment in which state and capital would
use antiracism to forestall the redistribution of resources to economically
and racially disenfranchised communities,” while neoliberal multicultural-
ism was “a means of using difference to foster capitalist distribution while
 Introduction 11

curtailing social redistribution for underrepresented folks.”31 In order for

the United States to incorporate the antiracism of the civil rights movement
into a national project, the national rhetoric had to forget the critique of
capitalism and the allegiances cultivated through black internationalism.32
The periods of multiculturalism that followed the classical phase of the
civil rights movement have designated the geographical and ideological
parameters of black freedom struggles, demarcating which issues, concerns,
and ways of being are of the past and which are of the present. Conversely,
through webs of affiliation, black movements cut across these periods to
reorganize subjects’ relationships to pasts and reimagine ways of being in
the present and future.

On Agency: Opting In or Out of Blackness

The social, economic, and political gains of the civil rights movement did
not, on their own, install post–­civil rights negotiations of blackness. Philo-
sophical shifts also played a role in understandings of blackness as death-
bound. Following Frantz Fanon’s assertion in Black Skin, White Masks
(1952) that “the black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the
white man,” blackness has been understood as a category of nonbeing or
being for another.33 In his analysis, black people exist only in service to
white people but never for themselves; they are objects in the social drama
but never subjects of it.34
Fanon’s statement appears again and again in discussions of black ontol-
ogy, as does consideration of his anecdotal description of alienation via his
“corporeal schema.”35 Responding to the utterance of a child calling, “Look,
a Negro!,” he examines how he has come to stand in for a transhistorical
manifestation of blackness. “I was responsible at the same time for my body,
for my race, for my ancestors.”36 As Fanon theorizes it, his blackness emerges
in relationship to the child’s singling him out, noting his difference. The
child transforms him into an object in service of the child’s desire for legibil-
ity. The child’s exclamation also provides an understanding of “the effects of
that gaze” and insight into the gazer.37 Fanon’s recounting of black ontologi-
cal impossibility also establishes a relational aspect that situates ontology as
a dynamic. In his rendering blackness appears to be a result of misreading
that does not account for his present embodied reality but projects a mythic
12 Black Movements

history onto him. The white onlookers’ process of denying present actions
and substituting past mythologies challenges the accumulative principle at
the heart of theories of performativity and calls attention to how blackness
as a performative operates across real and mythical time.
Fanon’s account of the black man in relation to the white man teaches
us as much about ontology as it does about the violence that makes a black
person legible and recognizable to a white onlooker. Although Fanon may
seem to leave little hope for the appearance of the black man in the eyes of
the white man, his work does allow for the emergence of a black person in
the eyes of another black person. It also leaves room to consider how black
people anticipate misreadings of their actions in order to craft liberatory
performances of blackness.
Fanon’s description emerges through disaffiliation, a practice that post–­
civil rights black artists use to redefine blackness. In “The Case of Blackness,”
Moten reads possibility rather than foreclosure in Fanon’s text. “It seems to
me that this special ontic-­ontological fugitivity of/in the slave is what is
revealed as the necessarily unaccounted for in Fanon.”38 Moten’s interpreta-
tion reorients the conversation from the possibility, or lack thereof, of black
ontology to the contexts under which one may ascertain it. His provoca-
tion reaffirms the importance of perspective in deciphering whether black-
ness can appear outside of the context of the white gaze and the necessity
of examining and framing an epistemological problem. The analysis makes
clear that colonial framing does not preclude but may occlude black social
life. The child’s exclamation demonstrates how blackness as a relational per-
formative links Fanon to a history that he cannot escape. Manifestations of
blackness in the years following the classical phase of the civil rights move-
ment have made the pull of history more malleable, but many purchase
such freedom by buying into the promise of the individual.
Through disavowal, artists construct a remedy for the seemingly unus-
able pasts that constrict Fanon.39 But such a remedy, impossible within the
colonial context that shapes his text, emerges as an option only in the post–­
civil rights era and depends on theories of individual will that poststructur-
alism makes available. Such a remedy also situates Fanon as a recipient of
history rather than in relationship to history, a temporal configuration that
post–­civil rights artists also reimagine as they construct blackness.
The late-­twentieth-­century turn toward black achievement as a remedy
for suffering specifies but does not singularize the context of an ongoing
 Introduction 13

dynamic of sly black performance. Throughout Black Movements I consider

black performance in two ways. First, it expresses a theory of social life: that
the ontological status of blackness may be found in the archive and reper-
toire of black expressive culture. I examine both the archive and the rep-
ertoire for evidence of the ontology of blackness and the manifestation of
black social life as the basis for artistic and political action. Second, it cor-
responds to practices that emerge in aesthetic and quotidian expressions
that affirm the ontology of black people as beings who resist, innovate, live,
thrive, suffer, and die. Finding common ground with Afro-­optimists, I con-
tend that black performance provides a mechanism to create, even within
contexts of suffering and illegibility; it never loses sight of those contexts.
Assumptions about the relationship between liberal individualism and
agency inform the way in which blackness operates in the post–­civil rights
era. According to the logics of liberalism, when people do not act to claim
their freedom, they forfeit agency by not taking personal responsibility.40
Liberalism purports to endow individuals with unceasing access to the
unfolding of freedom. As David Eng writes, “economists and legal scholars
tend to view choice as the very definition of (neo)liberal freedom.”41 The call
for black subjects to take personal responsibility for their living conditions
in the late twentieth century is linked to assumptions that individual will
governs agency and that the refusal of agency is akin to an ungrateful child’s
unwillingness to do chores and therefore actively contribute to the mainte-
nance of the house. The child wants to live in the house, make a mess, and
refuses to clean up after him or herself. As such, the child’s living conditions
should rightly be curtailed to align with this unwillingness to participate
in sustaining the household. Never mind that the house has a leaky roof,
cracked windows, and paper-­thin walls that prevent the child from sleep-
ing at night. Responsibility must be evaluated within the social and tempo-
ral contexts in which it is called forth. The cultural production I call black
movements temporalizes blackness, situating black performance, whether
virtuoso or mundane, within the structures and strictures of its production.
Nevertheless, as critics, we must consider how a group of artists have col-
lectively attempted to attenuate the hold of blackness, rendering it a choice
rather than an inheritance, because such a gesture provides insight into the
operation and production of blackness in the post–­civil rights era. Writing
about post–­civil rights black artists, Frank B. Wilderson III suggests, “It is
not that one must gain recognition as an artist, but that one must shake free
14 Black Movements

of niggerization.”42 In the groundbreaking collection of post–­civil rights era

visual art, Freestyle, shaking free becomes shaking loose. Thelma Golden’s
introduction to the volume, “Post . . . ,” serves as a touchstone for many
examinations of black artistic production in the late twentieth and early
twenty-­first centuries. She explains, “A few years ago, my friend, the art-
ist Glenn Ligon, and I began using the term post-­black. . . . [It] was short-
hand for post-­black art, which was shorthand for a discourse that could fill
volumes. For me, to approach a conversation about ‘black art,’ ultimately
meant embracing and rejecting the notion of such a thing at the very same
time.”43 In Golden’s description, black art becomes a moving target, an
ephemeral category that may appear and disappear at any given moment.
The belatedness of blackness signals the availability of the term for rein-
terpretation, use, regulation, and transcendence of the limits of histori-
cal racialization. The post–­civil rights era opens up blackness to temporal
play that secures and disrupts lines of affiliation across generations. Black-
ness as racial inheritance, a traumatic burden, or a state of being property
forecloses such temporal play. Throughout Black Movements, I distinguish
between inheritance as a practice that lays claim to the subject and affiliation,
which the subject actively creates. Post-­black demonstrates flexibility with
the past and an ability to affirm and deny relationships that have come after
the period known as the Black Arts Movement.
Golden’s term draws attention to the instability of blackness, making
her introduction a useful point of reference in discussions of black art
and culture in the late twentieth century, which often seek to consider
the racialized term’s contemporary operation. Equally powerful, although
less often cited, is Hamza Walker’s essay “Renigged,” also in Freestyle,
which tells the story of how the author “became black.”44 “Renigged”
draws attention to his conscious but historically motivated decision to
identify as black despite the racial designation’s pejorative connotations.
The act of becoming black entails claiming a certain history and reject-
ing another. Walker’s choice, however, is a far cry from the racial primal
scene described in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk. Here, Du Bois
recalls that his entrance into double consciousness was prompted by a
white classmate’s refusal, with a glance, to accept his gift. It also differs
from the ideological regulation of the Black Arts Movement as expressed
in Amiri Baraka’s introduction to Black Fire, which argues that blackness
is a political category.45 Walker’s essay communicates the perception that
 Introduction 15

he chooses instead of being chosen and that the choice amounts to a fun-
damental shift in the operation of blackness. Du Bois describes an inter-
racial exchange whereas Walker depicts an intraracial one, emphasizing
the notion that choosing a racial designation did not function with the
same fluidity in 1903 as it did in 2001. The manifestation of black cultural
production in the twenty-­first century is distinctive from earlier instantia-
tions because blackness has become understood as a choice rather than a
demand. The desegregation that resulted from the civil rights movement,
along with late-­twentieth-­century theories of individual animations of
power (Michel Foucault) and identity ( Judith Butler), have coalesced to
produce this phenomenon. Yet even though theories challenge the idea
of unilateral power or fixed identities, they do not account for the limits
of any single individual who is working to transform a regulatory system.
Contemporary artists who identify as black do not all identify as black art-
ists. Nevertheless, across identifications, many share a desire to jettison the
objectification associated with the slave as commodity. Some do so for the
purposes of interpellation into the mainstream, whereas others do so because
they do not buy into the totalizing narrative of objection. Throughout Black
Movements, I consider how artists working after the classical phase of the
civil rights movement intertwine, first, the impossible and visionary nature
of aesthetics and, second, the probable and pragmatic aspects of politics. The
intertwining of politics and aesthetics diminishes the distinction between
what Kenneth Warren describes as direct African American political action
and indirect cultural politics. Following Warren, Gene Andrew Jarrett sum-
marizes, “Direct African American political action acknowledges, in Warren’s
words, that ‘race . . . is at bottom a problem of politics and economics—­of
constitution making and of wielding power legislatively and economically in
order to mobilize broad constituencies to preserve an unequal social order.’ ”46
Conversely, “indirect cultural politics . . . operate ‘outside the political realm
of direct representation—­whether one did so literally, sociologically, philo-
sophically, administratively, or philanthropically.’ ”47 While Black Movements is
primarily concerned with indirect cultural politics, it does insist on a relation-
ship between direct and indirect action.
I also examine embodied practices that are at once political and aesthetic
to consider how performance functions to rework epistemologies and ontolo-
gies. Politics proper are consigned to the rational and reasonable, as J. A.
Mbembé critiques in “Necropolitics,” but aesthetic production maintains
16 Black Movements

the capacity to imagine the unreasonable and impossible in order to open

political possibility to reason and to what western episteme may categorize
as unreason.48 Aesthetics’ ability to engage with the impossible and unreason-
able also allows the artist to illuminate the cross-­purposes of desire and out-
comes that perpetuate, crystallize, and transform racial categories. Therefore,
black movements exist at the cusp of social legibility, gesturing toward the
impossible while referring to the probable. Expressing innovation and prag-
matism, they often appear to be the “threshold of revelation.”49
Uncovering and revealing the history of slavery and colonization in the
Americas has enabled limited means of redress in the twentieth-­first cen-
tury. Nevertheless, many of the twentieth century’s black political move-
ments seem to have run their course, if we are to believe that these freedom
movements exclusively aimed at giving black people in the United States
legal means of redress and black nations in the Caribbean and Africa inde-
pendence. The post–­Jim Crow, post-­apartheid, postcolonial era has ush-
ered in a purportedly colorblind society, and, along with it, an assault on
race-­based forms of knowledge production and coalition formation. In the
twenty-­first century, race is said to no longer function as an explicit marker
of second-­class citizenship, notwithstanding the abundance of evidence
that suggests otherwise. In the late twentieth century, race purportedly went
underground. Yet racialized language and race resurface (albeit subtly) in,
for example, discussions of the Trayvon Martin shooting that focus on his
hoodie (an object of clothing that anyone can choose to wear) rather than
on structural racism. The constructed and historically ambiguous status of
blackness reveals itself again in discussions of the epidemic proportions of
incarcerated black and brown people that highlight the individual’s poor
decision making rather than the criminalization of blackness. Likewise,
evaluations of black independence struggles in Africa and the Caribbean
allege that these movements have accomplished nothing more than to cre-
ate a black ruling class that mirrors the politics of its white predecessor. The
constructed and historically ambiguous nature of race also emerges in the
mechanisms that artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries
use to link to or unlink themselves from black diasporic artistic traditions.
Although blackness remains a category closely tethered to physiognomy in
terms of its ability to regulate individual identity, the category people of color
draws attention to the multiplicity and diversity within blackness. Instead of
being primarily a regulatory force (one that chooses the subject), blackness
 Introduction 17

becomes a category that individuals opt in or out of. Nevertheless, artists

occupy a privileged position because their aesthetic practices actively cul-
tivate the appearance of blackness. Their position enhances the political
implications of their acts and situates the activities that this book examines.

Black Performance Revisited

Black Movements analyzes specific historical conditions of black perfor-
mances enacted or archived during the post–civil rights era to show how
black performance evokes black political practices. As such, it participates
in the project of black performance theory, which “decipher[s] the impera-
tives of blackness [and] translat[es] the meaning of blackness by excavating
the enlivening enactments that sustain blackness, . . . locating them within
the generative force of performance.”50 In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith
Butler explains the constitutive nature of performance to the individual,
his or her role, and the site of the performance, whether on a stage, in a
museum, or on a street corner.51 Performatives and archives remember and
regulate these live and ephemeral phenomena. As Anita Gonzalez explains,
“performance . . . involves enactment, re-­creation, or storytelling. Perform-
ers present humans in relationship to the exceptional circumstances that
surround them. Even as performance centers in living beings and concrete
experiences, it is also a metaphoric, or symbolic, iteration of life.”52 D. Soyini
Madison gives a similarly capacious definition, locating performance, as do
I, in the repertoire and the archive: “Performance constitutes forms of cul-
tural staging—­conscious, heightened, reflexive, framed, contained—­within
a limited time span of action from plays to carnivals, from poetry to prose,
from weddings to funerals, from jokes to storytelling and more.”53 Both defi-
nitions suggest that performance exists in the live event and in the detail-
ing of the live event, within poetry and metaphor. Conversely, Thomas F.
DeFrantz asserts that “performance emerges in its own conscious engage-
ment, and it is created by living people. Of course, some will argue that
‘texts perform,’ or ‘music videos perform,’ which may be true, but for my
sensibility, performance involves subjectivity occasioned by action born
of breath.”54 While I do not suggest that texts perform, I do argue that rep-
resentations of performances function as a part of the archive of a perfor-
mance and expand the social, imaginative, political, cultural, and aesthetic
18 Black Movements

possibilities of the enactment. To represent the oral quality of storytelling

in the novel, as Toni Morrison does in Song of Solomon (1977), is to provide
insight into the particular characteristics of black expressive culture. I exam-
ine the interplay between performance, performatives, and archives to deci-
pher how black movements persist, circulate, and reimagine themselves.
Performatives link the actor to other actors, to the social field, and to the
history and future of the performed act. Nevertheless, the mandate of lib-
eralism to focus on volitional action, on self-­help and self-­determination,
also leaves room for demonstrating how performance studies (a field that
examines the relationship between individual action and the constitu-
tion of the public sphere) helps to decipher the current manifestations of
race-­based bodies of knowledge. In Cities of the Dead: Circum-­Atlantic Per-
formance, Joseph Roach defines the process of surrogation as “how culture
reproduces and re-­creates itself.”

In the life of a community, the process of surrogation does not begin or end
but continues as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of rela-
tions that constitutes the social fabric. Into the cavities created by loss through
death or other forms of departure . . . survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alter-
nates. Because collective memory works selectively, imaginatively, and often
perversely, surrogation rarely if ever succeeds. The process requires many tri-
als and at least as many errors. The fit cannot be exact. The intended substitute
either cannot fulfill expectations, creating deficit, or actually exceeds them,
creating a surplus.55

Roach argues that social organization summons individuals to play roles

that then constitute the social sphere, either reproducing or disrupting it
but never perfectly replicating it. He contends that social memory informs
the choice of surrogate and the effectiveness of the act of surrogation. There-
fore, the process of selection manages the desire to link past and future
social structures. The act of surrogation negotiates not only the difference
in actors but also the shifting relationship among actors and, by extrapola-
tion, social shifts as well. Through the process of surrogation, the individual
not only participates in crafting the social sphere but also demonstrates how
performance perpetuates temporal links and disruptions. Although Roach
focuses on filling gaps that occur in the present, I go further, considering
how artists use contemporary performances to fill historical gaps as well.
 Introduction 19

Acts of surrogation negotiate the matrices of desire that encourage or

discourage modes of performance; the desire to keep things the same or,
conversely, the hope for change; the desire to leverage the regulatory force
of race toward coalition formation or to subvert the limitations of racial
sameness that often manifest as national, gender, and sexual normativity.
The performances, which require creative political vision, emphasize the
constitution of competing desires, such as practices that seek freedom in
the midst of enslavement, peace in a sea of violence, and wealth in the midst
of poverty. Understanding how individual acts contribute to political move-
ments through the constellation of enactments that rub up against, under-
mine, sidestep, or call attention to hegemonic social conditions gives black
movements their force.
Black movements are embodied actions that participate in political
movements by creating links across time and space, thus disrupting the
accumulative force of blackness when it unfolds in linear time. From the
high-­stepping strut of the marching band, to the militarized formation of
parade participants in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement
Association, to the playful yet mournful stride of jazz funeral musicians, to
the civilly disobedient steps of civil rights activists, marching functions as a
political act and an aesthetic form. Marching exemplifies the physical, tem-
poral, geographical, and political unrest at the heart of black movements.
By considering the way in which certain performances call prior ones into
being, black movements point to not only geographical connections and
divisions but also temporal ones.

Webs of Affiliation
Rather than understanding the black nationalism of the Black Arts Move-
ment as a failure of assimilation in the civil rights era (that is, rather than
understanding history as a sequential or an ongoing repetition of cause
and effect), black movements call for an understanding of the simultane-
ity of, for example, assimilationist and nationalist desires. Take the Harlem
Renaissance, when the New Negro ideal existed alongside Garvey’s vision
for the Black Star Line. This juxtaposition suggests that the historiogra-
phy of the period need not be understood as an unfolding but as a web of
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 A Paramount Picture. The Ace of Cads.
“THE ACE OF CADS” TRIES TO FORGET HIS LOST ELEANOR AT
THE GAMING TABLE

She: “Oh, but I can match you one vulgar Restoration gallant against
another!
“ ‘Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts and broken vows;
If I by miracle can be
This live-long minute true to thee,
’Tis all that Heaven allows.’ ”

He sighed: “How I loved you, Leonora! As I had never loved anyone

before, as I will never love anyone again!”
“How I loved you, Maximilian! But now!” And she said: “A legal
separation is a silly quibble. Besides, you might want to marry again. Or I
might.”
“Might, Leonora? But you will, must, can’t help but! With your beauty,
youth, wealth.”
 “Thank you. I have often noticed that one’s friends like one best as one is
leaving them. Then, Maximilian, shall I divorce you?”
“If you please, dear. My lawyers are Messrs. Onward & Christian. They
will arrange the matter with yours in the usual way.”
“Remember, dear, that your King will not receive a divorced Duke at
court.”
“The King can do no wrong,” yawned the Duke. “It must be rather hard
on him sometimes, but the law is the law.”
His eyes were closed against her beauty, else he had seen the sudden
smile that touched her beauty, touched it and was going, going, lurked a
while in the depths of her eyes like a very small bird in the ferns of love-in-
the-mist, and lo! was gone. She said softly: “You are such a baby, Max!”
Seamen passed by, bearing a great leather Innovation trunk to the side. A
black cloud rose up from Africa and hid the sun. A shadow walked across
the pretty town of Cannes and drove the youth from painted faces.
“And because,” said the young Duchess wistfully, “you are such a baby, I
don’t put it beyond you to make love to my sister if you should meet her.
She has always been jealous of me, so she would enjoy nothing so much as
your making love to her. Promise not to, Max, please, oh, please! She has
just come over to Paris, so I read this morning in The New York Herald.
Max, promise not to make a fool of me to my own sister!”
“She’s pretty?”
“Pretty? Are words so scarce, sir, that you must use a copper coin? And
she my twin!”
“Ah me! Oh dear!”
Her voice scarce disturbed the silence of the yacht: “Good-bye, Duke
Maximilian. Our lives go different ways. I do wish you success, happiness,
health. Good-bye.”
As he lay, with closed eyes, his fingers found her hand and raised it to his
lips.
“Good-bye,” said he. Such was his farewell.
She looked back from the side. He lay silent. She said:
“Courtesy, Maximilian?”
A sea-bird mocked the silence. The cloud athwart the sun was now as
large as half the world. The Duchess of Mall said:
 “Chivalry, Maximilian?”
The sea-bird screamed and flew away, and Leonora of Mall cried: “I will
forgive you all things but your farewell, Maximilian. The very birds are
appalled to see chivalry so low in a man that he will take his lady’s adieu
lying down.”
Her maid, hatted and veiled for travelling, whispered to her ear:
“Your Grace, he is asleep.”

III

It is a sorry business to enquire into what men think, when we are every
day only too uncomfortably confronted with what they do. Moreover, the
science of psychology—for that is what we are talking about—is as yet but a
demoiselle among the sciences; and that writer carries the least conviction
who tries to wind his tale about her immature coils. Therefore we will not
enquire into the young Duke’s thoughts, but merely relate his actions: we
will leave his psychology to the fishes of the tideless sea, while we let him
confront us with all his vanity.
The time came when the young Duke awoke. Now the winds of the sea
were playing about him, the sun was certainly not where he had left it, and
the angle of his deck-chair was peculiar. The world was very dark. He
looked upon the sea and found it odd, and he looked upon the land and did
not find it at all.
“Ho!” cried the Duke. “Where is the land, the land of France? Ho there,
Captain Tupper! What have you done with the fair land of France? I do not
see it anywhere. Our French allies will be exceedingly annoyed when they
hear we have mislaid them. And do my eyes deceive me, or is that a wave
making for us over there?”
“It is blowing moderate from the southeast, your Grace.”
“Moderate, upon my word! Captain Tupper, moderation sickens me. Ho, I
see some land over there!”
“We have just left Nice behind, your Grace.”
“I sincerely hope, Captain Tupper, that you are not among those who
affect to despise Nice. Queen Victoria was very fond of Nice. It may not be
Deauville or Coney Island, Captain Tupper, but Nice can still offer
attractions of a homely sort.”
 “But I understood, your Grace, that——”
“These are strange words, Captain Tupper! But proceed.”
“—that our direction was Naples.”
“Naples? Good God, Naples! And look, there’s another wave making
straight for us! Hang on, Tupper. I’ll see you are all right. You sailors aren’t
what you were in the days when you each had a port in every——”
“A wife in every port is the correct form of the libel, your Grace.”
“But hang it, I call this, don’t you, a damned rough sea? However, I feel
very gay this evening. I have just had an idea. Now, Tupper, let me hear no
more of this high-handed talk about turning your back on Nice.”
“But, your Grace, we are making for Naples!”
“Your obsession for Naples seems to me singularly out of place on a
windy evening. I think you might consider me a little, even though I am on
my own yacht. I detest, I deplore, Naples. Put back to Nice, Captain Tupper.
I am for Paris!”
“For Paris, your Grace!”
“For Paris, Captain Tupper, with a laugh and a lance and a tara-tara-
diddle for to break a pretty heart!”

IV

Students of sociology have of recent years made great strides in their

alleviation of the conditions prevailing among the poor; but is it not a fact
that, as a notorious daily paper lately asked, the study of those conditions
appears to attract the interest of only the lighter sort of society people and
the pens of only the most ambitious novelists? And that the benefits of this
study, at least to novelists, are not mean, was proved beyond all doubt only
the other day, when perhaps the wealthiest of contemporary writers
increased his fortune by writing a tale about a miser in a slum. No one, on
the other hand, will deny that the achievements of sociologists among the
poor are as nothing compared with those of students of hospitality who, poor
and unrewarded though they remain, have of late years done yeoman work
in alleviating the conditions prevailing among the rich. It is to the generous
spadework of men such as these that American hostesses in Europe owe the
betterment of their lot; and it is by the support of their merciful hands that
ladies burdened with great wealth are prevented from sinking down in the
rarefied atmosphere to which they have been called.
Mere students of hospitality had not, however, been strong enough to
support the ailing burden of Mrs. Omroy Pont when that lady had first come
over from America at the call of certain voices that had advised her that her
mission lay in European society. It had needed graduates of that
brotherhood, lean with endeavour in ball-rooms and browned with the suns
of the Riviera, to prevent that ample lady from succumbing to the exhaustion
of carrying her wealth through the halls of her houses in London and Paris
among guests who had failed to catch her name on being introduced. But the
Good Samaritans had worked unceasingly on her behalf, and since Mrs.
Omroy Pont had both great wealth and infinite insensibility she was soon in
a position to give a ball at which quite half the guests knew her by sight.
The morning after the Duke’s arrival in Paris there was this notice in the
Continental Daily Mail: “The Duke of Mall has arrived at his residence in
the Avenue du Bois, and will spend the spring in Paris.” And presently the
good Mrs. Omroy Pont was on the telephone, first here, then there and
finally to the Duke himself, saying: “My dear Duke, how do you do, how do
you do? I am so glad you are in Paris just now, Paris is so attractive in the
spring. You mustn’t fail to see the tulips in the Tuileries, they are as beautiful
as débutantes. My dear Duke, I am giving a party to-morrow night, you must
come, you really must come, now don’t say you won’t because I can’t bear
that, and really I must say, my dear Duke, that your unfortunate inability to
accept any of my invitations so far has seemed almost marked, whereas
——”
“I am afraid,” began the Duke, who had not the faintest intention of going
anywhere near one of Mrs. Omroy Pont’s parties, for she bored him and life
is short.
“But you mustn’t be afraid!” cried Mrs. Omroy Pont. “Now, my dear
Duke, I want you particularly to come to this party because there is someone
who wants to meet you, someone very lovely, positively I am not pulling
your leg——”
“Really this is too much!” the Duke muttered, coldly saying out aloud:
“Dear Mrs. Omroy Pont, you do me great honour but I am afraid that an
extremely previous and decidedly prior engagement——”
 “It is Miss Ava Lamb who wants to meet you, my dear Duke. She has just
come over to Paris. Dinner is at nine. Thank you, thank you. It will be such
fun. You will not have to talk unless you want to and you may go to sleep
just when you like as I have engaged Mr. Cherry-Marvel to conduct the
conversation over dinner. At nine then, my dear Duke.”

The Duke, as he fairly acknowledged to himself the morning after Mrs.

Omroy Pont’s party, had been diverted beyond all expectation by his meeting
with Miss Lamb. While she, candour compelled him to admit, hadn’t seemed
any less sensible to the pleasant quality of their companionship. A beautiful
girl, a sensible girl, with a lively interest in the passing moment and a
delicious capacity for deriving pleasure from the twists in conversation
which came so naturally to the Duke but were become, it has to be
confessed, a shade familiar to his friends. She hadn’t, he reflected over his
morning coffee, said anything throughout the evening that didn’t interest and
entertain; and, since she had come to Europe for the first time but the other
day, had amused him vastly with her impressions, which weren’t by any
means all favourable, since Miss Lamb confessed to a taste for simplicity;
which was very agreeable to the Duke, who was also wealthy.
All this made very pleasant thinking for the Duke over his morning
coffee; but had he consulted his memory more carefully, it might have
emerged that Miss Lamb had listened with pretty attention the while he had
talked, the matter of his talk seldom being so abstract in nature that she
couldn’t entirely grasp it by just looking at him.
What, of course, had instantly impressed him, as it impressed all who
knew the Duchess, was the amazing resemblance between the sisters; since
the fact that twins are very frequently as alike as two peas never does seem
to prepare people for the likeness between the twins they actually meet. Now
between Miss Lamb and the Duchess of Mall there wasn’t, you dared swear,
so much as a shadow of difference in grace of line and symmetry of feature.
But why, as Ava Lamb sensibly protested, why on earth should there be or
need there be or could there be, since Leonora and she had been twins as
punctually to the second as was possible?
A nearer view, however, discovered a deal of difference between the
sisters: in those small gestures of voice, habits of expression, capacity for
attention and the like, which, so the Duke had warmly said, contribute far
more than actual looks to mark the difference between one woman and
another. Nor were they less dissimilar in colouring, for whereas both the
Duchess and Miss Lamb had those small white faces and immense blue eyes
generally affected by American ladies for the conquest of Europe, the
Duchess’s hair was of a rich and various auburn shaded here to the deep
lights of Renaissance bronze and there to the glow of Byzantine amber—the
Duchess’s hair was, in fact, fair to fairish, while Miss Lamb’s was as near
black as is proper in anyone with blue eyes who is without Irish blood.
In the course of the ball that inevitably followed Mrs. Omroy Font’s
dinner-party the Duke had had further opportunity of judging the differences
between his wife and her beautiful sister. And presently he had thought it
only fair to tell Miss Lamb that he and her sister had decided, for each their
sakes, to break their marriage; and he had thought it only fair to himself to
point his confession with a sigh, a sigh which he explained, after a silence
quite beautifully bridged by an understanding look from her, as being forced
from him by the fact that there was no pleasing some women.
“You mustn’t for a moment think,” he’d added wretchedly, “that I am
trying to enlist your sympathy against your own sister, but——”
“Please!” Miss Lamb had protested quite unhappily to that. And here was
another and the sweetest difference of all between the sisters, for Miss
Lamb’s was the prettiest American accent imaginable, whereas the Duchess
had long since and all too completely achieved the cold and ironic monotony
of the mother-tongue.
To be with Ava Lamb, the Duke had gratefully reflected at that moment,
was to look on all the beauty of his wife in atmospheric conditions
undisturbed by his wife’s sarcastic habit of mind. Miss Lamb hadn’t a touch
of that irony and sophistication which is so often mistaken by American
ladies for European culture, she was perfectly that rarest of all visitors to a
bored continent, a fresh and simple American lady.
And “Please!” was all she had said about her sister! But to the young
Duke that one word had meant so much, forced as it had been so unhappily
from her lips, as if half to shield her pert sister against the consequences of
her folly, half to prevent him from seeing how deeply she disapproved of
that sister, and wholly and sweetly to stay his tongue from exploring further
into that misguided sister’s character—it had meant so much that he had
been content to wait on her understanding even before she’d quietly added:
“Oh, I understand——”
“But do you, do you?” he had cried emphatically, and she had let silence
present him anew with her deep sense of understanding. She had a delicious
talent for silence.
“My dear”—it had just slipped out of him like that, quite naturally, quite
wonderfully—“if only other women were like you! To understand, I mean,
just to understand!”
“And men?” Miss Lamb had dropped the two words with perceptible
unwillingness yet with just a touch of defiance, as who should say that she
too, on so rare an occasion, must for once say what was in her mind.
“Men?” the Duke had smiled. He couldn’t somehow think of this tall
gentle girl as a woman of the same age as his wife. She verily quite charmed
him. Once or twice, indeed, he couldn’t help but pity Leonora Mall for the
way she had let life so quickly polish her freshness into that worldliness
which he, for one, found so unsympathetic in women.
“Men, Miss Lamb? And what, if you’ll forgive me, do you know of
men?”
“Enough surely, surely!”
“But that sounds quite threatening! Have you, then, hunted men in
jungles and caught them, caged them and watched them?”
“But, Duke, wouldn’t I, surely, have been married by now if I knew
nothing of men?”
“Oh, well caught! But, Miss Lamb, you haven’t married probably just
because, like all rare people, you’re—well, fastidious!”
“Oh, I don’t know! Maybe. Fastidious is a long word, Duke, and I seem
to have been waiting a long time, so maybe you’re right. But I don’t
know....”
“May I say, then, that you’ve been very wise? So much wiser than many
quite sensible men, so much wiser than many beautiful women. I mean, to
wait.”
“But aren’t we all,” she pleaded, “always waiting?”
“Some of us, unfortunately,” the Duke said grimly, “haven’t. I, Miss
Lamb, didn’t wait long enough.”
 “But are you so sure, Duke?” She was pleading with him. They were
alone. The music and the dance passed behind them. He met her eyes
humbly. “Are you so sure you’ve waited long enough—I mean, my friend,
for time to bring the best out of someone you love?”
“But,” he’d cried wretchedly, “I don’t love her! That’s just, don’t you see,
the awful mistake and pity of it all! It’s not that Leonora and I have
quarrelled, but that we’ve each just found the other out.”
Miss Lamb sighed: “Oh! Oh, dear! And why, why? Way back home I’ve
wondered, you know, about many things. All this sadness in life! It hurts to
hear this. It hurts me—for you both. Poor, poor Leonora!”
The Duke said very earnestly: “Look here, don’t for a moment think that
I’m being cruel or anything like that. Believe me, your sister loves me no
more than she has driven me into loving her. Honest to God, Miss Lamb.”
“You say that! But I know her, Duke. My own sister! Go to her now, and
you will see. I am telling you to go to Leonora now and you will find her
crying for her lost love.”
“She left me cruelly, completely. I had done nothing. She left me, as a
matter of fact, while I was asleep. She took herself from my yacht as though
—look here, as though I was a plague! You call that caring, Miss Lamb? I’d
rather be hated in purgatory than cared for on earth after that fashion. But let
us talk of something else. Of you!”
“Oh, me! Just a tourist in Europe....”
“Of your heart, then, in America! You left it there? Now confess!”
“Dear no! I wouldn’t have my heart jumped by man or god, not I!”
“Bravo, bravo!”
“So my heart’s with me here and now, I thank you.”
“What, you feel it beating!”
“Perhaps. A little.”
“Oh!”
“At being in Paris, Duke.”
“I deserved the snub. Go on, please.”
“My friend,” she said softly, “the history of my life is the history of my
dreams. When I was a girl I had—oh, such dreams!”
“Girls, Miss Lamb dear, do! And when they grow up and marry they use
the sharpest pieces of those broken dreams to beat their husbands with. Oh, I
know! Every husband in the world is held responsible for the accidents that
befall the dreams of his wife’s girlhood! Oh, I know! I’ve been, Miss Lamb
dear, most utterly married.”
“I’m growing afraid of you, Duke. You’ve a cruel tongue!”
“Ava, I wouldn’t have you think I’m abusing your sister to you. But she
certainly was born to be a good man’s wife, and she’s certainly never let me
forget why she has failed to live up to the promise of her birth.”
“But my dreams weren’t at all of knights, cavaliers, heroes! You bet no!
My dreams were just of Paris, this lovely merciless Paris!”
The music and the dance lay in the halls behind them. They were alone
on the formal terrace high above the marvellous sweep of the Champs
Élysées. Far down on the left the fountains of the Place de la Concorde hung
in the blue air like slim curved reeds of crystal. In the courtyard below them
a cypress-tree stood dark and still, and in its shadow the concierge’s wife
talked in whispers to her lover. From the wide pavement men looked up at
the lighted windows with pale astonished faces. Far up on the right, served
by long processions of lights from all the corners of the world, the Arc de
Triomphe stood high against the pale spring night. Most massive of
monuments, built high to the god of war upon the blood of a hundred
battlefields, upon the bones of uncountable men and horses, upon the
anguish of ravished countries—the miraculous art of men to worship their
own misery has raised the monument to the Corsican murderer to be as a
dark proud jewel on the brow of the most beautiful of cities. And Ava cried:
“Look, the stars are framed in the arch! Oh, Duke, look! And so the arch is
like a gate into the kingdom of the stars!”
The Duke whispered: “Don’t talk of the stars, Ava Lamb! The stars make
me think of all that is impossible.”
Up and down the broad avenue between the trees prowled the beasts of
the cosmopolitan night, these with two great yellow eyes, those with one
small red eye closely searching the ground. In the middle distance the Seine
shone like a black sword, and the horrible gilt creatures that adorn the Bridge
of Alexander III were uplifted by the mercy of the night to the dignity of
fallen archangels driving chariots to the conquest of the Heavens. And a
three-cornered moon lifted up an eyelash from the beau quartier about the
Place Victor Hugo.
 “There’s beauty, isn’t there,” sighed Miss Lamb, “in the very name of
Paris! even when it’s said in an American accent——”
“But, sister-in-law, I love your accent!”
“My, how you laugh at me! But ... Paris, Paris! Oh, isn’t that a lovely
name for a town built by men to have!”
And as, over his coffee the next morning, the young Duke reflected on
yesternight, he found himself enchanted by a gay memory. Oh, to be
enchanted again, to be thrilled, to be exalted—and all, honest to God, by
companionship! What fun there was in life when women didn’t grow so
confoundedly familiar with one’s habits. To be with Ava Lamb was to renew
all the joy he’d once had of loving his wife, to renew it and to increase it, for
wasn’t he now older and wiser, wasn’t he now wise enough to appreciate
enchantment? Why, oh, why, wasn’t his wife like this girl, why, since they
were both alike in so much, hadn’t Leonora a little of Ava’s warm attention
and quick understanding? And again the Duke, in solace for self-pity, cast
back to yesternight, how he had warmed to the beautiful stranger’s love of
Paris and had told her the tale of how Paris had come to be called Paris, and
the way of that was this:
“In the old days, Ava, if I may call you Ava, when the world was small
and the animals enormous, they tell how a young conqueror came out of the
dark lands, and with fire and sword he came into the smiling land of France.
Of course it was not called France then, but you know what I mean. Now
that was a great and noble prince, and it was his custom to rest himself after
the tumult of battle with the worship of art and beauty, which is not at all the
fashion among princes nowadays, because of course we have progressed so
far since then. And so our prince, when he had killed as many natives of the
conquered country as the honour of war demands, chained the rest with iron
chains and put them to the building of a mighty city by the river Seine. And
when at last the city was builded it was far and away the fairest city in the
world, as all who saw it instantly admitted under torture, for the young
prince hated argument.
“All went well until they came to the christening of the city, when it
transpired that no one had the faintest idea what name to call it. Here was a
to-do! Nameless they could not leave so great a city, yet what name would
embrace all these marvels of architecture, how could they call so fair a city
by any such commonplace kind of label as Rome, Jerusalem or Wapping?
Therefore the young prince fell weeping with mortification for that his city
must remain nameless just because it was the fairest city in the world, when
an ancient man rose up in the assembly and said: ‘This here is not the fairest
city in the world. But the magic city of Is in the land of Brittany has got it so
beat that this looks like a slum beside it. I have spoken.’ Not that he ever had
a chance to again, even though it presently was proved that not the fairest
city in the world could be fairer than Is in Brittany, and so the prince made
the best of a bad job and called his city the Equal to Is, which is Par-Is,
which is Paris. Shall we dance?”
But she said: “No, no! They are playing an old-fashioned fox-trot.
Besides, one can always dance; there are so many men with whom one can
only dance, for what have they to talk about? Duke, I did love your legend of
the christening of Paris! Did you make it up?”
Now these words had chanced to cast a gloom about the young Duke, and
he had said: “But there is another legend, a more private legend. It tells,
sister, of the house of Mall, how the golden cock on the weather-vane of St.
James’s tower shall crow thrice at the birth of the greatest of the Dukes of
Mall. And, although I say it who shouldn’t, this very miracle attended the
birth of him who now stands beside you. And the legend further tells that
when the golden cock on St. James’s tower again crows thrice the greatest of
the Dukes of Mall shall die. Ava, to-night I find myself in fear of my fate.
That which is written shall come to pass, and no man may defy the passage
of his destiny—but to-night, Ava, I am troubled with a foreboding that the
second crowing of that beastly cock is not far distant from this dear
moment.”
Very sweetly she had tried to soothe his foreboding, but it was heavy in
him and he had not listened, saying: “I’ve never but once before been vexed
with this depression, and that was on the night of the day I fell in love with
Leonora Lamb.”
“Let us dance,” she had said shyly, but they had not danced very
enjoyably owing to the number of the students of hospitality who were
generously supporting Mrs. Omroy Pont on so memorable an occasion.
And thus it was on the first night between Miss Ava Lamb and the young
Duke of Mall.

VI
 Now the Duke had turned his yacht from Naples merely to amuse himself
(that is to say, to annoy his wife); but is it not a fact, as The Morning Post
lately asked in reference to our treating with the Soviet Republic, that it is
dangerous to play with fire? So it happened that the Duke had not been gay
of his new enchantment for long before all others palled on him, and he
awoke one morning to recognise that he could not, try as he would, do
without the one enchantment that was called Ava Lamb. Those American
sisters, first the one and then the other, were fated, it appeared, to ravish his
imagination to the exclusion of the whole race of womankind. And he had
all the more leisure in which to contemplate his dilemma insomuch as Miss
Lamb, pleading the importunity of friends, would sometimes not see him for
days at a time.
In the meanwhile the Duchess, in London, was preparing to petition the
Courts to release her from her unfortunate marriage; and after the usual
correspondence had passed between the lawyers of both parties, and the
usual evidence collected, the majesty of the law pronounced the usual decree
and everyone said the usual things.
Impatiently the Duke in Paris awaited the wire which would tell him that
he was no longer the husband of Leonora Mall; and when it came he delayed
only long enough to instruct his valet to telephone his London florists to
send the ex-Duchess a basket of flowers before calling on Miss Ava Lamb at
her hotel.
However, she was not at home. The Duke protested. Even so, she was not
at home. The Duke felt rebuked for not having conformed to the decencies
of divorce so far as to wait twenty-four hours; and in all humility he returned
the next day.
However, she was not at home. The Duke pleaded. Even so, she was not
at home; for, her maid said, she was resting before the ardours of the night
journey to Cherbourg, whence she would embark for New York. The Duke
scarce awaited the end of the astounding news. Miss Lamb was lying down.
Calm and cold, she said:
“What does this mean, Duke? How dare you force yourself on me like
this?”
Fair, tall, intent, the Duke further dared her displeasure by raising her
unwilling hand to his lips. Twilight filled the room. Outside, the motors
raced across the Place Vendôme. The Duke said:
 “I have dared everything on this one throw. Ava, I love you.”
Miss Lamb said to her maid, “Go,” and she went.
The Duke smiled unsteadily, saying: “Well? Ava, what have you to say?”
Where she lay on her couch in the dusk, her face was like a pale white
flower. But he could not see her eyes, because they were closed. The dress
she wore was black. The hand that lay outstretched on her black dress was as
soft as a temptation, and he said: “I have a ring for that hand that has not its
peer in the world. I love you. Ava, will you marry me?”
He could not see her eyes, because they were closed. But still the dusk
lacked the courage to steal the red from her mouth, and the Duke saw that
her mouth was parted in a queer sad smile.
“Why do you smile?” he whispered, and he said unsteadily: “I know why.
You do not believe I love you, you do not believe I know how to love, you
think me the shallow, vain braggart that I have shown to you in the guise of
myself until this moment. But I love you, Ava, more than life. I love you,
Ava, with all the youthful love I had for your sister increased a thousandfold
by the knowledge I now have of myself: for it is by loving that men come to
know themselves, and it is by knowing themselves in all humility that men
can love with the depths of their hearts. Ava, I do love you terribly! Won’t
you speak, won’t you say one word, do you disdain my love so utterly as
that? Yet I can’t blame you, for I have spent my life in proving that my love
is despicable. I have been proud, pitiless, impious. I am soiled. But, Ava,
even a fool may come to know the depths of his folly; and I who know so
much of desire, dearly beloved, know that I have never loved until this
moment. Still you won’t speak? Ava, I did not think you so ungenerous
when in my vanity I first fell under your gentle enchantment. Dear, your
silence is destroying all of me but my love. Won’t you give me even so
much as a queen will give a beggar, that, had he been another man in another
world, he might have kissed her hand?”
Now night had extinguished all but the last tapers of twilight, and in the
dark silence the maid whispered to his ear: “Your Grace, she is asleep.”

VII

The Duke told his chauffeur outside Miss Lamb’s hotel that he would not
need him again that evening, he would walk. But he had not walked above a
dozen yards across the Place Vendôme, regardless of his direction, regardless
of the traffic, when the breathless voice of his valet detained him. Stormily
the Duke swung about.
“This telegram,” the valet panted, “came the minute after you had left this
afternoon. I feared, your Grace, it might be important, and took the liberty to
follow you.”
The Duke’s face paled as he read. The telegram was from the hall-porter
of his club in St. James’s Street. The valet, an old servant, was concerned at
his master’s pale looks: but he was even more concerned at the sudden smile
that twisted them.
“I hope I did right, your Grace.”
“Quite right, Martin.” And suddenly the young Duke smiled a happy
smile. “You have brought me this wire at just the right moment. I can’t,
Martin, thank you enough. Meanwhile, old friend, go back and pack.
Everything. We are for Mall to-night. Paris is no place for an Englishman to
die in. For pity’s sake, Martin, don’t look so gaga—but go!”
Miss Lamb’s maid did not attempt to conceal her surprise at the Duke’s
quick reappearance at the door of the suite. But the young man’s face was so
strangely set that she had not the heart to deny him sight of her mistress.
“I’ll be,” she sighed, “dismissed!”
The Duke smiled, and maybe he never was so handsome nor so gay as at
that moment.
The maid said: “My mistress still sleeps. It is when she is happy that she
sleeps.”
“Happy? Does it make a woman happy, then, to see a man destroyed by
love?”
“It is more comfortable, your Grace, to be loved than to love. But I know
nothing of my mistress’s heart. I came to her service only the other day. Yes,
she is asleep. And the room is dark.”
The Duke said: “Good! This is indeed my lucky day.”
“I leave you, your Grace. And if I am dismissed?”
“I count you as my friend. I do not forget my friends. Leave me now.”
But a few minutes before he had left that room in a storm of rage. Now, a
great peace was on him. He let the minutes pass by, standing there in the soft
darkness, a man condemned to death. His life behind him lay like a soiled
wilderness through which smirked and pirouetted an unclean travesty of
himself. The gates of death looked to him clean and beautiful. He did not
wish his life had been otherwise: he regretted not a minute of waste, not one
inconstancy, not one folly: he regretted not a strand that had gone to the
making of the mad silly tapestry of his life, he was glad that all had been as
it had been so that he could now be as he was, a man who understood
himself and could die with a heart cleansed of folly and sacred to love.
To the windows of the quiet dark room rose the chatter of the lounging
traffic of the Place Vendôme. The Duke listened, and smiled. Brown eyes
and scarlet lips, blue eyes and scarlet lips, black hair and golden hair and
tawny hair, lazy smile and merry smile and greedy smile and bored smile,
little breathless laughs, little meaningless laughs and sharp cries of pleasure,
dresses of Chanel, Patou, Vionnet, Molyneux—round and round the Place
Vendôme they went, like automata on a bejewelled merry-go-round. And the
Duke saw himself sitting in motor-cars first beside one and then beside
another, talking, talking, whispering, sighing, yawning....
As the minutes passed his sight began to distinguish the objects in the
room. On a table some roses were fainting in a bowl. He made obeisance and
kissed a rose, for kissing a rose will clean a man’s lips. Then he knelt beside
the still figure on the couch and he kissed her mouth.
“Oh!” she cried, and she cried: “You thief!”
He said: “Your voice is so cold that ice would seem like fire beside it. But
I don’t care.” And again he kissed her mouth. Then he said: “Your lips are
burning. That is very odd. Your voice is very cold, but your lips are burning.
Now why is that?”
“For shame,” she whispered. “They are burning for shame that you are so
little of a man.”
He laughed, his lips by her ear. “Beloved, do you think I would die
without kissing your lips? Honestly, beloved, could you expect it?”
In the darkness he could just see the pale mask of her face and the
shining, savage pools of her eyes, and he kissed first one and then the other.
She was very still.
“Die?” she whispered.
He would have laughed again, but he fancied that maybe too much
laughter would not become his situation, would appear like bravado. But he
would have liked to show her he was happy, and why he was happy. A vain
man, he had realised that he was contemptible: therefore it was good to die.
Loving as he had never loved before, he was unloved: therefore it was good
to die.
He told her how he had been warned that the cock on St. James’s tower
had crowed thrice that dawn. And then he was amazed, for as he made to
rise he could not. He cried out his wonder.
She said: “Be still!”
He cried out his despair.
She whispered: “Be still!”
Her arm was tight about his shoulder, and that was why his happiness had
left him like a startled bird. He sobbed: “Child, for pity’s sake! It’s too late
now. Let me die in peace. To have died without your love was blessedly
easy. A moment ago I was happy.”
“Die! You!” And, as she mocked him thus, the cold irony of the English
tongue tore aside the veil of the American accent, and when the Duke stared
into her eyes he had leapt up and run away for shame but that her arm was
still tight about his shoulder.
“You, Leonora, you! And so you have revenged yourself!”
She whispered: “Be still!”
And as he made to tear himself away, she said: “Yes, I wanted to be
revenged. I wanted you to fall in love with me. I wanted you to look a fool.”
“Then you must be very content, Leonora! Let me go now.”
“Let you go?” she cried. “Let you go! But are you mad!”
“Oh, God,” he said pitifully, “what is this new mockery!”
“You see,” she sighed, “I’ve gone and fallen in love with you again! That
rather takes the edge off my joke, doesn’t it? Oh, dear! Maximilian, I have
waited to love you as I love you now ever since I married you four years
ago. But you never would let me. Be honest, sweet—would you ever let me
love you? You were always the world’s spoilt darling, the brilliant and
dashing and wealthy Duke of Mall—and I your American wife! Darling,
what a lot of trouble you give those who love you! I have had to go through
all the bother of divorcing you to make you love me, and now I suppose I
must go through all the bother of marrying you again because you’ve made
me love you——”
“Oh, but listen!” he made to protest.
 “I certainly won’t!” she cried. “I must say, though, that you’ve made love
to me divinely these last few months, and the real Ava would have fallen for
you, I’m sure, if she hadn’t been in California all this while. I dyed my hair a
little, but the only real difference between me and your wife was that I
listened to you while you talked about yourself. Darling,” said she, “kiss me,
else how shall I know that we are engaged to be married?”
He said desperately: “Leonora, what are you saying! Do you forget that I
am to die?”
“Not you, not you! You may be divorced for the time being, poor
Maximilian, but you’re not nearly dead yet. I sent that wire myself this
morning from Victoria Station—to mark the fact that the Duke of Mall is
dead! Long live the Duke of Mall!”
“Leonora, I can’t bear this happiness!”
“But you must learn to put up with it, sweet!”
“Leonora, how divine it is to be in love! I love you, Leonora!”
“My, how this British guy mocks a poor American girl!”
“But, Leonora, I adore you!”
“Words, words, words! Whereas, sweet, a little action would not come
amiss. You might for instance, kiss me. Max, how I’ve longed to be kissed
by you these last few months! Max darling, please kiss me at once! I assure
you it is quite usual between engaged couples.”
Note: The legend of the Dukedom of Mall may not find a full measure of
credence owing to the fact (only recently pointed out to the author) that the
weather-vane on the tower of St. James’s Palace is adorned, not by a golden
cock, but by a golden arrow. But have we not been warned in letters of gold,
that shall last so long as mankind lasts, not to put our faith in the word of
Princes? The author does in all humility venture to suggest that the same
must undoubtedly apply also to the word of Dukes.
 VII: THE REVOLTING DOOM OF A GENTLEMAN WHO WOULD
NOT DANCE WITH HIS WIFE

T HERE is a tale that is told in London, and maybe it is told also in the
salons of New York and upon the Boulevards of Paris, how one night a
nightingale sang in Berkeley Square and how that song was of a doubtful
character calculated to provoke disorder in households brought up in the fear
of God. Needless to say, there are not wanting those who will have it that no
nightingale could have done such a thing; nor has the meanness of envy ever
been so clearly shown as by those who have suborned certain bird-fanciers
into declaring that the nightingale is a bird notably averse from singing in
squares and that the legend should therefore be deleted from the folk-tales of
Mayfair. But, however that may be, the song of the nightingale is far from
being the burden of this tale, which has to do in a general way with a plague
of owls, in a particular way with one owl, and in a most particular way with
the revolting doom of a gentleman who would not dance with his wife.
Many will hold, in extenuation of his disagreeable attitude, that he could not
dance. But could he not have taken a lesson or two?
Now of the many and divers people who saw the owls in flight we need
mention only policemen, statesmen, ’bus-drivers, noblemen, Colonials and
hawkers, to be convinced of the truth of what they one and all say, how in
the gloom of a certain summer’s twilight not long ago there flew a plague of
owls across Trafalgar Square towards the polite heights of Hampstead Heath.
Maybe no one would have remarked them, for the strange cries and hootings
with which they adorned their flight were not discordant with the noises of
the town, had not the pigeons that play about Lord Nelson’s monument fled
before them with affrighted coos; and in such an extremity of terror were the
timid creatures that very few were ever seen in those parts again, which is a
sad thing to relate.
Nor can any man speak with any certainty as to the exact number of the
owls, for the twilight was deep and the phenomenon sudden; but one and all
need no encouragement to vouch for their prodigious multitude: while the
fact that they appeared to be flying from the direction of Whitehall at the
impulse of a peculiar indignation has given rise among the lower people to a
superstition of the sort that is perhaps pardonable in those who have not had
the benefits of a public-school education. These simples declare that the
owls, for long peacefully asleep within the gloomy recesses unrecognisable
to the feathered intelligence as the austere House of Lords, had been startled
from their rest by the activities of the new Labour Government as revealed
in that patrician place by the agile incendiarism of my Lords Haldane and
Parmoor, and had in one body fled forth to seek a land wherein a
Conservative Government would afford them the lulling qualities necessary
for their rest.
The serious historian, however, is concerned only with facts. The plague
of owls fled no one knows whither, although superstition points to Italy. But
this much is known, that whilst crossing the brilliant centre of Piccadilly
Circus one among them swooped down from the twilight and perched on the
left wing of the figure of Eros:[A] which, presented to the nation by one of
the Earls of Shaftesbury, adorns the head of the charming fountain where old
women will sell pretty flowers to anyone who will buy, roses in summer and
roses in winter, roses by day and roses by night, or maybe a bunch of violets
for a young lady, a gardenia for a gentleman of the mode.
[A] Almost immediately after the publication of this tale in a magazine, the figure of
Eros was removed from Piccadilly Circus. It has been generally supposed that, to effect
this removal, pressure was brought to bear on the London County Council by
gentlemen-who-will-not-dance-with-their-wives, whose name, alas, is legion.
Now why that one owl separated itself from its fellows for no other
apparent reason than to perch on the left wing of Lord Shaftesbury’s Eros
has hitherto been a mystery to the man in the street, who was at the time
present in considerable numbers reading The Evening News and discussing
the probable circulation the next morning of The Daily Mail. The owl rested
on its perch most silently: nor did it once give the least sign of any
perturbation at the din of the marching hosts of Piccadilly Circus, and this
for the space of one hour and eighteen minutes: when it hooted thrice with
marvellous dolour and fled, to be lost almost on the instant among the lofty
shadows of the Regent’s Palace Hotel.
It has to be told that the cry of the owl on the fountain served three
purposes, which the historian can best arrange in ascending degrees of
abomination with the help of the letters a, b and c: (a) it struck such terror
into the vitals of an inoffensive young gentleman of the name of Dunn that
he has never been the same man since; (b) it was the death-knell of a gentle
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