Audre Lorde's "Afterimages": History, Scripture, Myth, And Nightmare (Critical Essay‪)‬

Audre Lorde's "Afterimages" (The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde [NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000]: 339) is a complex, multi-layered poem that voices the continuing trauma of one of the most brutal events in the Civil Rights struggle--the murder of Emmett Till. This 14-year old black boy was savagely beaten and killed in the Mississippi Delta in 1955 for allegedly wolf whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. After kidnapping and pistol whipping Till, Bryant's husband Roy and his half brother J.W. Milam shot him in the head, tied a 74-pound cotton gin fan around his neck, and dumped the boy's body into the Tallahatchie River. Determined to publicize the atrocity, Till's mother Mamie insisted on an open casket, and pictures of her son's mangled corpse flooded the media to the horror of Americans, white and black (see Anne Sarah Rubin, "Reflections on the Death of Emmett Till," Southern Cultures 2 [1996]: 45-66). Lorde incorporates but emblematizes these historical events through a series of startling allusions attached to Till, to his executioners, to Carolyn Bryant, and to herself. The opening section of "Afterimages," stressing that Lorde's "eyes are always hungry" for the "visions" of Till's death, prepares readers for "the fused images [that lie] beneath my pain." These "fused images" emerge from Lorde's own nightmare, Scripture, and classical myth. On one level, Till's death functions as a rite of passage into the heart of darkness for Lorde herself. "I inherited Jackson, Mississippi./ For my majority it gave me Emmett Till." Symbolically, Till was murdered the same summer that Lorde, born in 1934, turned 21; her coming of age is linked to witnessing the afterimages of crime, then and in the future. The immediacy of Till's death makes Lorde the heir to his pain and the inheritor of the necessity for interrogation. At first, she tried to escape from the tragedy; "my eyes averted/from" Till's photos in "newspapers, protest posters magazines"" But the ghost of "this black child's mutilated body" haunted her. Her "majority" propels her into a nightmare, "like a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep," a psychic landscape reminiscent of Adrienne Kennedy's surrealistic plays. Just as Kennedy's autobiography People Who Led to My Plays undergirds her works, "Afterimages" reveals the "internal consciousness of myself"" a phrase from one of Lorde's interviews (qtd. in Conversations with Audre Lorde, ed. Joan Wylie Hall [Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2004]: 102). As Kennedy was, Lorde is tormented by "nightmare rain," disfigured and bloody black bodies, and the fright of raped women. She confesses, "I learned to be at home with children's blood." Graphic details of Till's murder--e.g., his eyes ripped out of his head--transport Lorde into a phantasmagoric world breaking barriers of time and space. Her "visions" with their "flickering afterimages" speak an allegory of pain. Mississippi, 1955 becomes the portal for Till's, and Lorde's, journey into archetype.