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Open Books: Event Archive
October 22, 2006 03:00 PM
MARTHA COLLINS
Ms. Collins's most recent book is Blue Front ($14 Graywolf), a book-length
meditation on, and narrative of, one of the many sad events in America's
racial history, one with a family connection for the poet. In 1909, in
Cairo, Illinois, a black man, Will "Froggie" James, was lynched following
the murder of a white woman. Ms. Collins's father was a five-year-old
resident of Cairo at the time and a likely witness to the lynching. Her
investi gation of that event, of her father's flirtation with the Klan, and
of race history in this country is presented in a halting, breathless,
manner. This makes for a great deal of velocity in the telling, the sense
that she is compelled, to the point of interrupting herself, to get all the
details in. Ms. Collins refers to, and takes language from, various historic
records -- "his name / is not in the directory which / would have listed him
as '(col)'." Her work is sharp, as when she writes about the location of
another lynching, "a lamppost, this / was a modern event, the trees were not
involved." Her techniques and perspectives are too numerous to relate here.
Perhaps most haunting is the flat description of fifteen postcards made of
the lynching and related scenes. This book is a stellar blend of the
historic and the personal, evocative and thoughtful.
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