Black Mobility: Gathering Sites in Hopes of Honoring Self
Written on Tuesday, June 25th, 2024 @ 5:32 p.m.
A passport is an archival document that gathers sites a person has stepped foot on. It collects biometric information that a citizen must comply to give up in exchange for participating in international travel experiences. I’ve been thinking about how to intuitively know when to root & when to sojourn (in your city, your state, domestically, and internationally). What are the things that push us out with the tide to grace another sea? What are the things that pull us closer inward? How do we decide when, where, & how to move?
(n.) Movement:
How the landscape of our bodies respond to sonic landscapes traversing through us
“The movement of their back flexed & angulated with the rhythm.”
A group of like-minded folks gather to throw stones of revolution knowing they will ripple out.
“The Harlem Renaissance movement moved many people.”
(n.) Mobility:
To be capable of moving with finesse (often associated with the privilege able-bodied folks have).
“After Dave Drake lost one of his legs his mobility changed.”
Possessing the capacity to move with ease & when necessary great urgency.
“White residents of New Orleans possessed the means of having increased mobility to flee the city before Katrina broke the levees.”
To improve, climb up, the rung of the social ladder you were born into by utilizing all you have within you.
“W.E.B. Du Bois believed that the talented tenth would improve mobility for African American Men “through developing the best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination & death of the Worst, in their own & other races.” He didn’t know there was no ladder, only a circular clearing of community.
Department of Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst
(v.) Mobility:
Be free
I believe some of these answers can be gathered from the archive which is the passport. For instance, from the writer James Baldwin’s passport, I know these things:
His middle name is Arthur
He was born on August 2nd, 1924 (a leo ❤️🔥)
He was born in New York, U.S.A.
He stood at 5 feet 6 inches tall
He had black hair
He had brown eyes
He had no wife
He had no kids
He was a citizen of the United States
This passport was issued on his 41st birthday in 1965 in New York
Here’s what I already know given the context as a Black Feminist & lover of history:
He honored his sexuality by not marrying a woman
November 8th, 1965 was 8 months (almost 9) after his good friend Malcolm X was assassinated
February 12th, 1968 was 1 month & 23 days before his good friend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated
These are the dates James was admitted by the U.S. Immigration through New York
One of the things that James encountered that pushed him to make a trip was an image in a newspaper. In the 2017 film I Am Not Your Negro directed by Raoul Peck, at minute 6:50-8:00, James writes about witnessing the image that moved him into movement.
“That’s when I saw the photograph. On every newspaper kiosk on that wide, tree-shaped boulevard in Paris, were photographs of 15-year-old Dorothy Counts being revealed and spat upon by the mob as she was making her way to school in Charlotte, North Carolina. There was unutterable pride, tension and anguish in that girl’s face as she approached the halls of learning, with history jeering at her back. It made me furious, it filled me with both hatred and pity. And it made me ashamed. Some one of us should’ve been there with her! But it was on that bright afternoon that I knew I was leaving France. I could simply no longer sit around Paris, discussing the Algerian and the Black American problem. Everyone else was paying their dues, and it was time I went home and paid mine.”
For James, in this specific moment, a photograph he longed to have an active role in is what pulled him back home. His writing makes it sound like the decision to return was instant. He saw the photo & something in his body communicated that it was time to go home. That photograph was taken in 1957 & it’s unsure from this passport image if one of these trips was led by an inner knowing to return after seeing the images. Perhaps on another page of the passport, a more firm connection could be made.
As much as the images moved James to bear witness & give testimony through his words not from afar, he also simply felt called to touch the soil & the folks who contributed to who he was. In Raul’s documentary, minutes 9:51-10:39, James lists the many things he does miss about his home.
“But I missed my brothers, and my sisters, and my mother. They made a difference. I wanted to be able to see them, and to see their children. I hoped that they wouldn’t forgot me. I missed Harlem Sunday mornings and fried chicken, and biscuits, I missed the music, I missed the style…the style possessed by no other people in the world. I missed the way the dark face closes, the way dark eyes watch, and the way, when a dark face opens, a light seems to go everywhere. I missed, in short, my connections, missed the life which had produced me and nourished me and paid for me. Now, though I was a stranger, I was home.”
“missed the life which had produced me and nourished me and paid for me”
For all of the valid reasons James left the United States, he also acknowledges the beautifully complex double-edged sword that the people present there made his existence possible. Without those roots, he would not have blossomed into the James Baldwin we know today. James had every intention of making a trip down South to work on a book entitled Remember This House. However, as his fight with liver cancer came closer to an end, the trip was never made. Moreover, James writes of having faced difficulty writing the text calling it “impossible.”
Writing this book was a vulnerable action for James to do, as it meant writing about his relation to three great men of an ongoing movement perhaps he sometimes felt isolated from while living abroad.
“It means exposing myself as one of the witnesses to the lives and deaths of their famous fathers. And it means much, much more than that — a cloud of witnesses, as old St. Paul once put it.” (I Am Not Your Negro 19:04-1914)
While James spent a great amount of time in France (& other parts of Europe like many other African American artists), his passport also communicates that he returned to the States on & off—blurring the line between fight or flight.
(v. & n.) Fight:
To trudge through something you may not see the finish line of—to endure with intention & purpose.
“Muhammad Ali was active in the fight for civil rights. At the time of the Esquire Magazine shoot, he endured the consequences of refusing to be drafted in the Vietnam War.”
Here, Muhammad Ali is depicted as the martyr St. Sebastian for the April 1968 cover of Esquire Magazine. This concept came from the 15th-century Italian artist Francesco Botticini's work depicted below. 
To struggle to hold the present reality of the circumstance you find yourself in while holding the possibility of a more just outcome you can vividly imagine.
“Stevie Wonder engaged in a fight between what he witnessed in the world & the beautiful visions of what life could be in his song Visions (released the day after James’ 49th birthday in 1973).”
(n.) Flight:
Covering any distance with rapid speed…faster than blinking your eyes.
“When they left the neighborhood they contributed to white flight.”
A trip—around the sun, above the land you frequent—beyond what you were accustomed to knowing to return to an embodiment of what you know.
“Harriet Tubman saw the swift flight of the days of slavery ending when she said my people are free while slavery raged on around her native Maryland.”
There is a glimmer that appears in the faces of those who are preparing to take flight. We can see it in the artist Augusta Savage’s passport photo (above). Her eyes glimmer as she looks slightly to her right & up to something we are not privy to. Augusta’s hair has been straightened with a side part with crimped waves falling just below her ears. She has a slight closed-mouth smile disturbed only by the presence of an official seal. Her passport is stamped August 25th, 1931.
Augusta did not return from taking a trip beyond what she knew until 1932 (according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum). Before her return, she was awarded two Rosenwald Fellowships in Paris & “received a Carnegie Foundation grant for eight months of travel in France, Belgium, and Germany.” Stamped with the seal of the Department of State Augusta was officially approved.
As much as learning about their travels fills me with joy & wanderlust I am seeking something else. These thinkers traveled beyond to further honor themselves in a time, much like today, of great racial unrest & terror. I’m interested in how these folks permitted themselves to journey beyond & freely in their daily lives. In between the travels, wherever they were calling home for the moment, how did they get to be free? What was their seal of approval indicating that their day was filled with movement, mobility, & the blurring of fight or flight?
What if (v) mobility (be free), is the smaller act of letting life move me to encourage movement in whatever space I am supposed to travel? What if it’s about being moved as a result of being present like James was while walking & stopping to pick up the paper?
Sometimes the trip you take is what you do to endure the struggle—be of service to it. Other times, like Muhmaud, the trip you don’t take is what enables you to endure with the intention of sending waves throughout a movement. I have to believe that when the time comes, we can trust our bodies enough to be present to make the obvious choice for us. If not, we can take the time to develop a trusting intuitive relationship with our bodies, environment/land, & the folk around us to honor the blur we so often run from.
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