A Bigger By Any Other Name

Posted on February 22, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Bigger Thomas, although a fictional character, haunts the imagination of white folk. 

Richard Wright’s Native Son, where we meet Bigger Thomas, was published in 1940.  Benjamin Mays, in eulogizing the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 28 years later after he was assassinated by a white man, said that “no man is ahead of his time.”  At the time, people thought that the book was ahead of its time, but it was of the time.  Richard Wright dared to write and publish a “protest novel” that no other writer of his time wrote, though perhaps thought about.  In fact, James Baldwin wrote, “who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in his skull.”  Frantz Fanon, in his 1952 essay, “The Fact of Blackness,” wrote, “In the end, Bigger Thomas acts.  To put an end to his tension, he acts, he responds to the world’s anticipation.”

The world that Bigger finds himself in is rife with poverty, hopelessness, and despair, with measures upon measures of racial tension.  The legacy of slavery, sharecropping and segregation, hasn’t significantly improved the lot of Black folk in America, that is, what should be realized 75 years after the Civil War.  The ideal, the Black Wall Street, was pillaged and plundered and burnt to the ground by white folk in 1923.  Dreams are not necessarily deferred. . .

The novel, nightmarish, is dream-like.  After the murder of a white woman (Mary), and the rape and murder of a Black woman (Bessie), Bigger moves through the city like a malevolent spirit, that Black boogey man that haunts the imagination of white folk.  Despite Baldwin’s words quoted above, he thought that Bigger was a stereotype that would feed into the white imagination.  (Why would Black folk even care what white folk thought about a fictional Black character?)  Despite being the creation of a Black male author, Bigger is much more than a stereotype.  He is all the dreams destroyed, not deferred.  He is that Black man that white writers have been writing about for hundreds of years.  A case in point, and one of my favorite Shakespearean characters, is Aaron the Moor, in Titus Andronicus.  Aaron really doesn’t care what white folk think of him, and only wishes that he could wreak even more havoc.  Of all Shakespeare’s villains, only two, Iago, and Richard III, rival Aaron. (Note how the two Moors, Othello, and Aaron, are portrayed in Shakespeare’s works, in his imagination, three hundred years before Bigger!)

            Bigger, Bigger, Bigger!

Note:  Richard Wright died at the very beginning of the Decisive Decade (1960).  It is worth noting that he was born on a plantation near Natchez Mississippi, on September 4, 1908.  Wright is one of three great Black autodidacts, two of whom I’ve mentioned during this Black History Month: J.A. Rogers and Malcolm X.

Posted in Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, crime, ezwwaters, James Baldwin, Justice Chronicles, Lest We Forget, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Murder, race, raising black boys, Streets of Rage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Me and Malcolm X’s Murderer

Posted on February 21, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

On this day in American history, Malcolm X was murdered.  I was four years of age.  Fourteen years later, I would meet Malcolm X’s killer.  The first thought that crossed my mind: He, Thomas Hagan, is unremarkable.  And then: What had led this unremarkable man to murder such a remarkable man?  Many questions crossed my mind, but I didn’t ask one.  I just stared at him as if I could get answers.  I had already read The Autobiography of Malcom X: As Told to Alex Haley.  At 18, Malcolm X was the only man I thought worthy of emulating.  In that, even though I never converted to Islam, I studied the teachings of the Nation of Islam, the teachings of the Five Percent Nation, and orthodox Islam.  I have childhood friends who were either one or the other, or all but at different stages of their lives.

How my life as a Black man-child would be impacted by Malcolm’s murder I had no idea.  I didn’t have a memory of Malcolm’s death.  The first “political” death that I remember is the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s.  When King was assassinated, I was seven years of age.  Then, I didn’t understand the implications of his killing, but I knew that the world had changed, that the world had shifted, that King’s assassination reverberated across the globe.  A refrain during the first 10 years of my life, during the Decisive Decade, was, “They killed another good Black man!”  The adults said that over and over, and not until the assassination of Dr. King did it register in my mind.  There was something about being a Black man in America that inspired so many things, but above all else, it inspired fear in the white imagination.

I can’t begin to imagine the life of my father, a native Southern Son, born in the segregated South, in North Carolina, in 1926.  I knew he knew something that he was keeping from me.  Maybe it was this mystery, that he knew that white people would look at me and be afraid, for no other reason than that I was born Black in America.  (Well, my birth certificate says “Negro.”)  For years I resented my father because he never took me on his yearly trip down South, almost all around the Fourth of July.  Later, I wondered if he knew Frederick Douglass’ famous speech about the Fourth of July.  When I gave that a little thought, I realized it was irrelevant.  He was born and spent the first twentysomething years of his life in the South.  As a teenager he served in the segregated U.S. Army during World War II.  When I came to understand American history, I came to understand my father.  He didn’t take me South because he couldn’t protect me from that malevolent thing in the Southern air that sends white men into murderous rage and white women into flights of fancy (fantasy), that without hesitation Black men, and boys, would pounce on them and sully their purity.

Despite this backdrop, I can’t recall my parents ever saying anything bad about white folks.  Later I wondered if this was a character flaw.  Why were Black but mostly white people allowed to kill Black leaders with impunity?  When I looked at Malcolm X’s murderer, that was one of my questions: Why are you still alive?  As I got older, I, too, heard that question, from the older people in my ‘hood, the Watchers, I called them, Septuagenarian Seers who had already predicted my fate as a Black man in America, that I wouldn’t live long enough to mate, or I would end up in prison.

During the Decisive Decade, Black men were murdered.  In the 1970s and up till the New Millennium, Black men were imprisoned.

I outlived my father.  He died at 56.  Deep in my soul though, call it what you will, but I hear his voice in my head.  He is proud of me, that I’ve lived this long, in spite of it all.  And that I have a triumph or two under my belt.  From a cousin, I learned that my father was an aspiring writer.  Maybe I got the “writing gene” from him.

Finally, once again I encountered Malcolm X’s killer, Thomas Hagan, in the New Millennium.  I was working for a nonprofit that helped formerly incarcerated people find employment.  He had been released or was on “work release.”  I saw him in the Long Island City Office of the organization I worked.  I never forget a face, and I stared at him in the same way I stared at him when I was 18.  And he was as unremarkable as ever.  I know he remembered me, if for nothing else the look I gave him as a teenager.

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Masquerading as White

Posted on February 20, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Given my book recommendation yesterday, that is, Black Robes, White Justice, by Judge Bruce Wright, it seems natural to recommend this book by Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.  In many respects, this book explains Black jurists’ administering “white justice,” and not being a counterweight to “white injustice.”

Black Skin, White Masks, is Fanon’s first book, published in 1952.  It was supposed to be his dissertation, under another title.  Fanon, trained in psychoanalysis, looks at the psychological impacts of colonialism, long before people started to talk about post-Slavery syndrome.  Not only were countries colonized, but also minds, bodies, and souls.  The first chapter alone, on language, is worth the price of the book.  Elsewhere I’ve touched on Africans and their descendants throughout the Diaspora “learning” European languages, how these languages were simply not suited to the African tongue, especially English.  For Fanon, the language is French.  Fanon, born in Martinique, first spoke Creole French, which is not really a bastardized version of French, but French with the rhythms and accents of the Caribbean giving new life to the language, as if “standard” French is as dead as Latin, from which French evolved.

Fanon’s writings explains an American phenomenon, “passing.”  What is often missing from the American narrative about Europeans coming to “America” is the wholesale rape of indigenous and African women.  This happened throughout the “New World,” to such an extent that there was an attempt to classify the products of this rape.  In the French Antilles, racial classification went  to 1/64th Black!  Ironically, it was the “black blood” that was controlling (hypodescent), that defined this European obsession with race: Sacatra (7/8); Griffe (3/4); Marabou (5/8); Mulatre (1/2); Quarteron (1/4) Metis (1/8); Mamelouk (1/16); Quarteronne (1/32); Sang-mele (1/64)! J.A. Rogers argues that this “miscegenation” created 55 shades of color.


Fanon is a most interesting subject, and I would recommend reading everything by him, from his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, to his last, The Wretched of the Earth.  And even though The Wretched of the Earth is on my recommended book list, it might not make it on the list of 28 books I will have recommended this Black History Month, because there is simply so much to read to address not only The Miseducation of the Negro, by Carter G. Woodson, which will be the last book I recommend this month, for the obvious reasons, but also the miseducation of Americans writ large.  What I was aiming to say, by beginning with Fanon’s first book and ending with his last, one will see the evolution of his thinking.  Sadly, Fanon died young, in 1961, at 35, at the beginning of the Decisive Decade.  But he left us so much to ponder.

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White Sheets Under Black Robes

Posted on February 19, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Black Robes, White Justice, by Judge Bruce Wright, is one of my favorite titles touching on the criminal legal system!  The title itself speaks volumes.  Bruce Wright was a distinguished New York City Judge and, in light of the current debates about crime and bail reform, specifically in NYC, the late Judge Wright should be uplifted.

Long before the current bail reform movement, Judge Wright was dealing with the issue of imposing fair bail on people charged with crimes.  During the 1970s until the present, many judges in NYC would by default impose excessive bail on poor defendants, bail so high the people presumed to be innocent until proven guilty were held in places like Rikers Island for up to three years before their day in court.  In far too many cases, their trials did not last three days.  A couple were one day trials!  Thus, why the delay in bringing them to trial?  (That’s rhetorical.)  Their cases were not complicated, not if they could be disposed of in less than three days.

Judge Wright, in imposing fair bail, looked to the 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, to wit: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”  For following the Constitution, and in imposing fair bails, not the king’s ransoms many NYC judges imposed on poor people charged with crimes, in the NYC tabloids, Judge Wright was dubbed, “Cut ‘em Loose Bruce!”

Judge Wright calls out a judge or two in his book, even Black judges.  Ironically, many Black judges administer “white justice.”  This has been a fundamental problem of the criminal legal system and law enforcement.  Oftentimes, Blacks in the legal field, from judges to prosecutors to the beat cop, try to prove to their white colleagues that they can administer “justice” in the same way.  If the scales of justice are tilted against Black and Brown people, and the poor, then something is fundamentally wrong with Black jurists imposing “white justice.”  My argument to Black jurists, for quite some time, has been: Black and Brown folk are not asking for any special preferences in the criminal legal system from Black jurists.  They are only asking them to balance the scales of justice.

Judge Wright famously calls out William Thompson, an Administrative Judge in Kings County Supreme Court.  Then, before the Individual Assignment System, the Administrative Judge assigned cases.  “Willie,” as Judge Wright calls Judge Thompson, dubbed himself the “king maker.”  I would add “queen maker.”  Thompson romantically allied himself with a white woman judge in Kings County Supreme Court, Sybil Hart Kooper, who dubbed herself the “Dragon Lady.”  Thompson made sure he assigned “high profile” cases to Judge Kooper, making her the Queen of the Court to his Kingship.  Court watchers have reported that Willie would often visit Sybil in her courtroom when Black and Brown “defendants” were on trial for their lives, and even the teenagers standing trial before the Dragon Lady knew that something was going on, even if they could not articulate it.  So much “white justice” happened under Kooper’s Court I could write a book.

This book, Black Robes, White Justice, is a must read for advocates and any person of color looking to serve on the bench or have anything to do with the administration of “justice.”  If “justice” was truly colorblind, then Judge Wright would not be calling out “white justice!”

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Derrick Albert Bell Jr. — The Godfather of Critical Race Theory

Posted on February 18, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Derrick Albert Bell Jr. should be as well-known as Thurgood Marshall.  He was a lawyer, civil rights activist, and professor.  In 1971, he became the first tenured Black professor of Law at Harvard Law School.  From his reputation alone, Professor Bell would be an instructor I would have stood in line to sign up for any class he taught.

As it was, I was introduced to Bell’s work by one of my professors, Bill Webber, during graduate school.  Webber, President Emeritus of New York Theological Seminary would, once he thought he had taken the measure of you, recommend two books, one for the fall and the other for the spring semester.  Both of my book recommendations were written by Bell, and Webber is the only white male who truly saw some of my “measure.”

Bell was the only Black graduate of his 1957 law class at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.  Shortly after law school, Bell was working for the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department.  He was asked to resign his membership in the NAACP under the rationale that his objectivity, and the objectivity of the division, might be compromised.  Bell left the Justice Department rather than give up his NAACP membership.  Compare this with Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who was a member of the Robert E. Lee Klan No. 1 in Birmingham, AL.  Black “resigned” from the Klan in 1925. In 1937, after Black was confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court, it was reported that he had been given a “grand passport” in 1926, granting him life membership in the Ku Klux Klan.

So, today, I recommend the two books by Bell I read in 1993 and 1994, respectively: And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice, and, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.  Note that Bell, considered the Godfather of Critical Race Theory, is quoted as having said: “Racism is so deeply rooted in the makeup of American society that it has been able to reassert itself after each successive wave of reform aimed at eliminating it.”  Think President Barack Obama’s successor, No 45, and his white nationalist platform.

Now, I am interested in what Bell might have said or wrote about Clarence Thomas when he was appointed to the High Court. Thomas probably doesn’t realize it, but his face is truly at the bottom of the well.

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If Only Death Blossomed

Posted on February 17, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

We are more than halfway through the shortest month of the year, dedicated to Black History Month.  I am feeling a sense of urgency, in that there are thousands of books I would like to recommend.  I stay awake at night, by overly active mind and imagination keeping me up.  Instead of counting sheep, books have been playing across the screen in my mind, my mind scanning the memory banks of books I’ve read in order to make book recommendations.  This sense of urgency made me think of the last letter someone wrote from death row, giving it to his lawyer before his state-sanctioned execution.

For a number of years I volunteered with PEN America, the writers’ organization, the affiliate of PEN International, with the Prison Writing Program (PWP).  PWP held an annual writing contest for people in prisons and jails across the United States.  I served on the poetry committee, which was the most-submitted to category.  Poetry is hard, as Steinbeck attests, yet many aspiring writers begin with poetry, perhaps thinking poetry is easy.  PWP received a lot of awful poetry, but there were, inevitably, gems among the piles of manuscripts.  Many of these poets had no formal education – some wrote themselves out of the darkness of illiteracy, like Jimmy Santiago Baca – and no specialized training in writing; many didn’t know how to present their work.  Others wrote from solitary confinement, handwriting their poems on the back of the disciplinary reports that landed them in solitary.  Oftentimes, the back story, which they felt compelled to tell, was more interesting than the work submitted.  The Chair of PWP during my volunteer time corresponded with people on death row.  At one meeting she read the last words written by someone who was executed.  He only wished that he had more time, to write, to read, but especially to write. His handwritten letter, his handwriting, seemed rush, as if he was racing against time, and he was.  When I stare at a blank sheet of paper, I imagine that letter, that last piece of paper that carried his words from death row to a meeting room in Manhattan where many of us could not begin to imagine that sense of urgency, that all was lost, and that we had to get these words out before walking that last mile at the appointed time of death.

I was going to make a different book recommendation, but the above story compels me to this one, Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience, by Mumia Abu-Jamal.  For decades, Mumia wrote with urgency under the threat of death.  Read Death Blossoms and just begin to imagine. . .

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“Dying But Fighting Back”

Posted on February 16, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

In my last blog I wrote about Langston Hughes, our Harlem Renaissance poet, and his collection of poetry, The Weary Blues, which was published in 1926, the same year my father was born.

I want to uplift the works of another Harlem Renaissance writer, Claude McKay.  McKay was, first and foremost, a poet, and one of his best known works, “If We Must Die,” uses the sonnet as his poetic form of expression, written in 1919, responds to white-on-Black race riots and lynchings across the United States in 1919.  Fifty-two years later, during the Attica Prison Rebellion, in one of the prison yards, one of the people in the prison yard wrote one of the poem’s stanzas across a white sheet.  Tom Wicker, a New York Times reporter covering the Rebellion, wrote a book about it, A Time to Die, perhaps inspired by the words on the sheet.  From his comment on the stanza, it was obvious that Wicker did not know this famous sonnet.  (Perhaps reporters don’t know poetry!)

Although McKay was, as stated above, first and foremost a poet, he wrote five novels and a novella, Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, as well as short stories and other works.  After reading “If We Must Die,” one of the most powerful poems I had ever read, even before I knew what a sonnet was, I set out to read this Bard.  The first novel I read by McKay was Banana Bottom, published in 1933, the same year my mother was born.

McKay, born in Jamaica, first traveled to the United States to attend college.  In the States he read W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk, and one can see how DuBois’ writing on the “duality,” the dual consciousness of Black folk in America, influenced Banana Bottom, whose main character is a Jamaican girl who was adopted and sent to be educated in England by white missionary benefactors.  When the girl, Bita Plant, returns to her native village of Banana Bottom, she “finds her black heritage at war with her newly acquired culture.”  (Talk about “cancel culture!”)

Claude McKay was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and anyone interested in that period should read him.  Additionally, McKay was interested in politics, and as many Black intellectuals of the day, flirted with the politics of the Left.  Almost any political philosophy, they probably intellectualized, had to be better than America’s since her Democracy spiraled out of control and turned violent against Black people simply affirming their humanity, or simply being (in the way James Baldwin’s character, Sonny, the title character of that great short story, “Sonny’s Blues” wants to be), and “dying” (read murdered by white folk), for this alone.

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The Weary Blues Redux

Posted on February 15, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

In 1926 Langston Hughes published his collection of poetry, The Weary Blues.  That same year my father was born in the segregated South.  Carl Van Vechten’s book, Nigger Heaven, was also published that year.

My father was born on this day in 1926, nearly seven years after World War I ended in 1919, a war that his uncle served in.  That very same year, 1919, saw race riots across the United States.  Black World War I veterans were targeted, for the obvious reasons, in what some historians call Red Summer.  Four years later the Black Wall Street was destroyed, burned down by angry hordes of white Americans whose response to Black prosperity, that American Dream that perhaps was elusive to them, was violence.  In fact, whenever Black Americans asserted their rights, they were met by violence by white folk.  Almost all of white violence against Black people went unpunished.  Often, law enforcement turned a blind eye, in a different iteration of blindfolded Lady Justice.

It was this historical backdrop by father was brought into the world.  At the same time, far from the South, in seemingly another country, another world, the Harlem Renaissance was in full bloom.  Langston Hughes, one of the prominent Black writers of this era, published his collection of poetry, The Weary Blues, our book recommendation for today.  The title speaks volumes.  Blues, as experienced by Black Americans, is a uniquely American “thing” – it encompasses so much, so much more than music; these “gifts” W.E.B. DuBois wrote about are all wrapped up in the blues.  A short story by the great James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues,” captures what the blues is.  In the final analysis, the blues just wants to be.  It wants to be left alone to be.  “Why can’t a man just be?” Sonny, the title character, asks.

White Americans have made being for Black Americans difficult in the extreme.  This is the blues, and in 1926 Black folk were weary of how they had to be in America, often simply to survive.

I will write a part II to this because my father’s story only begins in 1926.  (Note: my father absolutely loved the music of Ray Charles.)

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Maya Angelou, A Muse for All Ages

Posted on February 14, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

On this Day of Love, also known as Valentine’s Day, I want to uplift an author and one of her books, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.  I love Maya and this book!

Maya Angelou was challenged by none other than James Baldwin, her friend, to write this autobiography, so poetic, so lyrical, that reviewers categorized it as “autobiographical fiction.”

Maya first published this book in 1969, the last year of the Decisive Decade.  It would be the first in a seven-volume series.  Black male authors have penned many coming-of-age stories.  This book features a coming-of-age story by a Black female author.  It begins when Maya is three years of age.

This book is a book for the ages!

Many know Maya through her poetry, single poems as famous as the author.  My favorite, “Still I Rise.”  Maya could do almost anything with poetry, and she tapped into so many forms, even “the toast!”  My second favorite poem by Maya is, “Where We Belong, A Duet.”  I would argue that in this poem she uses some of the features of the toast.

If you don’t know why the caged bird sings, then you must read this book.  If you have, then there are six more in the series, the titles as evocative as the content, and the main character, Maya, a Muse for all ages.

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The Work of Reconstruction Continues. . .

Posted on February 13, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, by W.E.B. DuBois, is a must read.  One Amazon reviewer wrote, “This book is a great clue to the puzzle of how we got where we are today.”  Indeed, this period would inform the next 100 years in American history, and even today its’s part of the subtext in political machinations.

As I have written elsewhere, the Hayes-Tilden Compromise (1876-77), effectively ended the Reconstruction years in America.  This period of Reconstruction was America’s first attempt to live up to her lofty ideals, especially for the descendants of Africans forcibly brought to this land even before the Constitution was ratified.  This Compromise is one of many in American history adversely affecting Black people in America, most notably beginning with the founding of the nation and the Three-Fifths Compromise, written right into the U.S. Constitution.

Today, we see politicians on both sides of the aisle looking for advantages in the electorate; we see Democrats attempting to preserve the voting rights of Black people, and Republicans attempting to restrict these rights.  (Here it is worth noting that the party of Abraham Lincoln, called “Radical Republicans” at this point and time in American history, pushed and enacted and to a certain extent promoted the rights of the newly freed “Americans” of African ancestry.)  Ever since Black men were given the franchise with the 15th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in 1870, there have been efforts to restrict or deny altogether the rights of Black voters.  Southern politicians and their constituents found a way around the 13th Amendment (one of the three post-Civil War Amendments) by creating, passing, and enforcing laws in order to perpetuate slavery under another name, the penal system.  With the 15th Amendment, these very same individuals resorted to intimidation and terror to keep Black men and years later Black women (with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 giving all women the right to vote), from exercising their constitutional right to vote.

One could argue that DuBois, in Black Reconstruction, is putting a “Black spin” on this period, but in actuality he’s correcting the false narrative of white historians, mostly Southerners, who would argue that Reconstruction was a failed experiment.  But what do you expect from treasonous Rebels and their supporters who call the American Civil War “The War of Northern Aggression?”  Just look at all the Confederal iconography standing more than 100 years after the South’s defeat we are only recently removing from public spaces.  These Confederate monuments and memorials exist in large part because the South did not lose the Civil War.

Today, the white lies in the historical narrative, when corrected, is called “cancel culture.”  The genocide of the indigenous people, slavery, and Jim Crow, are true examples of “cancel culture,” not asking white men to behave and to be held accountable in this brave new world.

DuBois eventually left these here United States and emigrated to Africa, to Ghana, because the way he understood the historical record, White America would not change, at least not in his lifetime.

And so, the work of Reconstruction continues. . .

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