Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Pickens, Therí A.

Titel

Blue Blackness, Black Blueness: Making Sense of Blackness and Disability

Ist Teil von

• African American review, 2017-07, Vol.50 (2), p.93-103

Ort / Verlag

Saint Louis: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In Leadbelly, Tyehimba Jess invokes Blind Lemon Jefferson in two poems: "1912: blind lemon jefferson explaining to leadbelly" and "blind lemon taught me." The former is written in Jefferson's voice; the latter in Leadbelly's. In what follows, I plan to provide an analysis of the first. A brief description: The speaker (Blind Lemon Jefferson) provides Leadbelly with advice and an anecdote. Each illustrates Jefferson's relationship to his instrument, the guitar (metonymic for music), and the world at large. I unpack portions of the text to demonstrate how to read through the overlapping lenses of blackness and disability. Interpreting this poem while attending to blackness and disability requires more than finding the mention of each within the poem itself. But let's start there. Jefferson first mentions his blindness at the end of the first stanza, as part of his explanation that "everything gotta be 'live on you son." He advises Leadbelly to "read the crowd like a fortune teller's tealeaf, from the plunk of a nickel to the bang of a quarter to the smell of thieves schemin' on a blind man's cash." The mention of blindness here emphasizes the figurative function of the olfactory change and, in contrast, the material nature of the "plunk" and "bang" of coins. Jefferson listens for those differences not necessarily because his blindness causes extraordinary hearing or smell. While Jefferson does not outright dispute the presumption of increased sensory perception, his statement reframes it such that his impairment (blindness) does not cause the problem, but his disability (the social reality that others attempt to take advantage of him) does.6 He listens and knows the difference because he must. He has trained himself as a mode of survival.