by THE EDITORS
Heather Polk, Meditation is Realization, 2020
W.E.B. Du Bois often told a story about riding the Jim Crow car. The long struggle to desegregate the trains is an important chapter in the Black American story. In Vincent Harding’s telling, this chapter becomes a metaphor for Black existence in this country. Where we fight so hard for equal access to the train, but sometimes neglect to ask: “Where, by the way, is the train going?”[1]
Trains lead to destinations. Endpoints. We have always known where the American train was going: war, violence, racism. It is seemingly a permanent condition. It is not just an American problem, either. In places as diverse as France, Brazil, and the Pacific Islands, it often feels as if we are being led down a path to destruction.
What work could our writing do in these moments?
One thing we might do is write of different kinds of pathways. Not merely suggestions for different destinations, for no one can truly see what the end will be, but invitations to savor the trek. Moments to trace the steps, the well-worn paths we take back to ourselves. The paths created for ourselves, by ourselves. Journeys we take alone and together, not for some chauvinistic desire for isolation, but to be free of having to speak to their terms, in a language that can only contextualize destruction.
Enslaved Africans across the diaspora walked down paths. After long days and struggles with the regimes of modern world, our ancestors made their ways to secret roads. The further they got away from the plantation, the safer they felt. The hush harbors, secret classrooms, invisible institutions in the woods, were the destination of these petit maroons. But imagine with us what it must have been to feel the anticipation? Ambling along these pathways must have provided an intense feeling of radical expectation.
We invite you to read these works as pathways, not as maps. Anticipate the future they might portend and cherish the journey they might inspire.