Trial of the Caryatids

Dedicated to Kilolo Luckett

“Discomfort is always a necessary part of enlightenment.”—Pearl Cleage

Exhibit A: Rodin’s Fallen Caryatid

Her body: slick like    /           is stone, a twisted permanence. She could be unfurling upward, a whipping ribbon ready to cast this square rock off of the blade of her shoulder. But truth. She is winding down, piling into herself, her face diving towards the dirt. As a viewer, I will not give you hope and say that perhaps she has a beautiful mind, a skull about to shatter with thick-lipped predatory flowers ready to defend her body. This is not what Rodin intended for his fallen caryatids—he intended to instruct the viewer in the body refusing.

Suffering does not ennoble humans—it does not make us better—it does not make us less animal—it makes us versed in a biology that says, yes, we may be the only creatures on earth that kill one another for fantasy alone.

Exhibit B: Caryatids of Erechtheum

What do the wind-worn faces think of the salt-capped sea they overlook? The caryatids have been holding up the ceiling of the porch of the Erechtheum with their thin wrists, have been standing contrapposto for 2,500 years and a day. Each given a specific face, a specific curl of hair, each body however, is trained and formed for servitude, brunt bearing. When you see them overlooking the ocean, their pupiless gaze unerring in the sun, do not imagine that this was all they were made for—simply know that at some point in their mythology that they danced. They were meant to dance.

Exhibit C: Photograph of the Lynching of Laura and L.D. Nelson

It is not known what became of Carrie, the two year old, imprisoned with her mother and her elder brother. Somewhere between the mob dragging her mother to the darkness like a Sabine, and them throwing her mother like bait on the end of a line—she disappeared. Photography stills what was the metronomic rhythm of Laura’s weight in the breeze over the North Canadian River. If you are uncaring, or maybe if you are, you will say that she danced.

From a bridge and above a river: for some eyes a celebration and opportunity for art. Hence the postcards. From a bridge and above a river: for others a new knowledge, yes, the women too. A caryatid. Laura swung, her skirts fluttering at her ankles, her hands roughened from Oklahoma farm work—at rest at her sides. Pray that she found a deep cavern in her heart where she was safe. Pray that the last gaze she shared with her son was filled with awesome love. Pray that the stories we made up are real—that goddamnit, we do become ravens and doves and lions. Pray that she flew up and twisted away the stone, the shotput of unbecoming anxiety given her by a people that remain sour. She was not still and solemn overlooking an ocean. Yet, she was meant to dance. On both her shoulders a burden of fire she never called to her but was gifted cruelly.

Exhibit D: Calder Mobile of Josephine Baker

Paris. Montmartre. Folies-Bergere. Josephine Baker: black flapper, capitalizing on the white gaze with the incensed sardonic sway of hips. Alexander Calder molded her body from wire—spirals at Josephine’s joints—man, she could swing, swing better than anyone on any stage. She was to flapper style what Beyoncé is to white women in lace fronts. In life, as in the wire mobile that Calder formed of her body, she did not pinch, she did not break, but remained flexible, adaptable. Freda carried refusal : Black Pearl : Bronze Venus : river flowing backwards towards the nearest freedom smoking. She did not carry anything that wasn’t hers, she did not carry anything that wasn’t human. And when Coretta held out her hand and offered Freda the uncut diamond of leadership when Martin died, Freda clutched the empty air of a different kind of liberty and said, no. For she had two loves: her country and Paris.

Exhibit E: Edmonia Lewis’ Cleopatra

The body in repose; the face: a death masque of ecstasy and release, smoothed by water and polish under the brash fingers of a woman. The snake arises from the reposed queen’s crown, phallic in its eagerness. The high realism of the statue shows the body between life and death; the nipple erect in a sculpted image of a dead woman. See Edmonia’s hand glossing over the final shine of the breast’s apex—the final adjustments to the illusion of gossamer draped cloth with chisel and hammer. These instruments, thought often brutal, tendering discreet subtleties and softness. Unlike her Cleopatra, Edmonia stood up from her demise of poison and then walked away, undoing thread by thread the notion that her skin was “the pleading agent of her fame.” Belonging only to herself she threw down the solemn weight of the uncanny rage and awe cast from white gazes upon her like a flood of red cardinals wings, saying, “Some praise me because I am a colored girl, and I don’t want that kind of praise.”

Exhibit F

Our heads around the necks of Roman women in ivory, our profiles on the broaches of White Southern ladies, our bodies circling the pithoi jars where Greeks kept their wines, our arms and legs appearing carved in mahogany for tables, for chairs, for the comfort and pleasure of others.

Who will be the cartographer of Black women’s lives: unpinnable, irreducible, quickly falling from the untracked mountain, to the generous womb of a lake in a valley, to the tall cities reflecting light from traveled rivers. There is a small joy in those of us who traveled out of history not having a name, and that joy is that we may always see ourselves in ourselves, share the one name that means taking the course threads of fear and spinning them into silver for our hair. That small joy of sharing a name that means we have crossed all oceans with less but have done it gracefully, we have passed over all mountains and know the wolf better than the wolf knows itself, we have overlooked barren dust and decided to dig the rivers ourselves and we did it as indelibly as a glacier once did. We may also share the name of not having to do any of those things anymore, that we may repose, run, and fling ourselves into the comfortable lap of mannishness. What is that word? What is that name we share? Tell me, tell me, all the names that we may call ourselves.

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Jessica Lanay is a poet, librettist, short fiction writer, and art writer. Her work focuses on architectures of interiority, escapism, and psychoanalysis. Her poetry has appeared in Sugar House Review, Fugue, A Bad Penny Review, The COMMON, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, and others. Her short fiction was published in Tahoma Literary Review, Black Candies, and others. Her art writing can be found in BOMB. The opera, Virgula Divina, libretted by herself, and composed by Karen Brown, is due to premiere in 2020. Lanay is a Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Kimbilio Fellow. In 2018, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Normal School for her poem “Milk. Milk. Milk.” and she received a Millay Colony Residency.