The Body Artist - Alejandrocasales.com

artistic subject and streetscape, lyric and conversation. The spirituals, those ‘sorrow
songs,’ also of course, captured black melancholy. 6
Building on Holloway’s astute analysis in, this article’s formulation, the sounds of lynching,
refers to the affective and psychic dynamics produced in response to and as a result
of black death in both historical and artistic representations. Historically, the sound of
lynching, to borrow from Fred Moten, could be best categorized as mo’nin’, a sound that
registers and communicates mourning and pain. Cries of “have mercy,” the dead silence
of shock and the gesticulations and heaving thrust of sounds that often accompany weeping,
all qualify. In art, Billie Holiday’s weathered and sophisticated voice, a voice that
sounds like it has “been through something,” heard in her rendition of Lewis Allen’s lyrics
“Strange Fruit,” is the sound most readily associated with lynching. 7 In this article, I
explain how Blues for Mister Charlie extends the literary history of representations of
mo’nin’ by creating a voice that explains those losses in order to move from ghostly memory
to the introjection of history, from the incorporation of loss to the “work of mourning.” 8
The play represents some of the social, psychic, and historical legacies that could produce
such ghastly sights and did produce such ghostly sounds and comments on the relationship
between those sounds and the process of historical narration.
One of the final scenes of the play establishes the haunting quality of Richard’s voice
and presents the social and cultural paradigms that his bold performance of black masculinity
challenges. The play explains not only why Richard must die, but also why his
death “marks panic.” Not the emergence of panic, especially since “panic had already
led to the death of so many,” but a genuine sense of frantic urgency nonetheless. 9 Lyle
describes this confrontation after his acquittal. Even after Lyle has killed Richard, even
in death, he must continually remember Richard questioning him:
RICHARD. Why have you spent so much time trying to kill me? Why are you always trying
to cut off my cock? You worried about it? Why? (Lyle shoots again.) Okay. Okay. Okay.
Keep your old lady home, you hear? Don’t let her near no nigger. She might get to like it.
You might get to like it, too. Wow! (Richard falls). (120)
Richard’s final spoken lines, in the play and in the chronology of his life, illuminate the
investments Lyle has made to secure his ego. While Richard can physically die only
once, he asks the question, “Why have you spent so much time trying to kill me?” The
ongoing process he identifies signals the perpetual threat he represents as black masculinity
embodied. He continues: “Why are you always trying to cut off my cock?” His
second question points to the threat of castration and highlights the way psychic and
physical forms of castration collapse at the intersection of a particular black, male body
to guard against the bold performance of black masculinity that Richard enacts and the
subversive histories he echoes. Even though a distinction exists between the bodily
penis and the symbolic phallus, “access to the phallus is still predicated upon possession
of the penis.” 10 Moreover, the emphasis marked by italicizing “my” personalizes
this memory and points to a specific voice that Lyle calls forth as he remembers
196 | Soyica Diggs