Jerry Ward's Blogspot

New Orleans, LA                                                       OPEN LETTER TO C. LIEGH MCINNIS February 26, 2020 Dear C. Liegh, Before I comment on your defense of Richard Wright, I quote cogent lines from popular song---- What's love got to do, got to do with it? What's love but a second-hand emotion? Tina Turner Nobody loves you but your mother, And she might be lying too. B. B. King Love is strange.   Much of the music that informs African American literature is saturated with commentary on love, and it helps to shape belief that love is   most genuine when two people are true to one another.   She or he who claims to love several million people (or a whole nation) is broadcasting what common sense refuses to confirm. And it's impossible to find evidence beyond dispute that the later Toni Morrison loved black people without nuanced qualifications   or that Richard Wright hated them. Close readings of

Black Boy at 75/ Native Son at 80 Richard Wright's gifts to world literature, to borrow verbs made famous by another native son of Mississippi, endure and prevai l.   They do so because at each stage of his career, from his   proletarian verse and prose of the 1930's to his enormous outpouring of haiku and his final novel A Father's Law at the time of his death in 1960,   Wright raised essential questions. Such questions defy conclusive answers.   They invite responses.   They engender new questions which beget a new generation of responses.   Wright's legacy is marked by secular immortality and the infinite gestures of the human mind. For me, the publication of the 75th anniversary edition of Black Boy is a reminder of how important   are the closing words of his autobiography ----"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to creat

THEM/THOSE SAVAGES "When one has got to make correct entries, one comes to hate those savages --hate them   to the death." Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness Look, and say can you see what you must see in the darkness of the heart. Does hating them, those savages dispensing venom, divisions, vices, perpetual discord, constitutional pains, ever suffice, ever resolve the tyranny of misery? Can terror be brought or bought to civilize a savage mind? No doubt, in the lurid murdering of democracy, terror has purpose.--- judicious battle of hell balm with the holy water of heaven, the telos of the floral rainbow. Make correct entries in the vortex of eternal violence. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             2/23/2020 9:00:00 PM

EVERY BODY'S OBITUARY Be still. Grow. Fashion the anthropocene. Decline. Die Become the dirt whence you came to renew the Earth. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             2/11/2020 7:33:28 AM .

CONFESSION Your questions are just prompts provoking my hand my mind to commit faults so easily found in others without remorse I so deserve your questions Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             February 8, 2020

OUR SOULS ARE RESIGNED : a Kwansaba (for Wilfred D. Samuels, 7 February 1947-3 February 2020 ) Grace gave you the gift of faith, a grain of salt to lesson pain, perhaps to tutor one wound or another with a vision-seeking prayer at last. Teach us to be so wholly good to   speak   a truth to fatal powers and find God's face in Nature's mirror. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             February 5, 2020