This article examines some of the revolutionary uses of the slave ship icon during the period of the Black Arts Movement (1965-1976) in order to study the broader implications of the aesthetics of African-American memory. Focusing in on a series of events that took place in 1969, the author probes how visual and cultural innovators, such as R. Feelings and A. Baraka, have articulated key events in African-American history through their reinterpretations of the slave ship icon, a schematic abolitionist-era emblem. Among the generation of black visual artists that came of age after the Brown v.

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Dutchman b y Amiri Baraka Directed by Woodie King Jr. Castillo Theatre, New York City 1 March 2015. This April, I watched history repeat itself. Forty-seven years after Dr. King’s assassination, Baltimore burned once again.

Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954, the author shows how they have been engaged in a sustained and responsible visual practice that places historical, social and economic issues at the core of its aesthetic agenda. Assuming the roles of artists/activists, they employ mnemonic strategies and aesthetics tools to define a contemporary art practice that documents the lives and events that highlight the black struggle to exist in America. 1 On March 25, 1807, the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act went into effect in Great Britain and her c 5 One of the key images that black artists resurrected during this period of soul searching was an eighteenth-century abolitionist icon: a black and white schematic print showing, in the words of its original maker, the Plymouth Committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST) in England, a Plan of an African Ship’s lower deck with Negroes in the Proportion of only one to a Ton (Fig. That shocking image was first published in 1789 as an oblong engraving accompanying a four-page pamphlet calling for the end of the slave trade.

It was later incorporated into broadsides, tracts and material objects of varying designs and effectiveness and distributed by the thousands by the London Committee of the SEAST and other abolitionist committees in England, France and the United States over the next 20 years. Even after the slave trade was legally abolished by the United Kingdom and the United States in 1807 and 1808 respectively, the poignancy of the plan of the slave ship continued to resonate among crusaders against the burgeoning illegal slave trade and the daily brutalities of slavery on New World sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations. The plan of the slave ship remained an icon, a revolutionary print in the abolitionists’ arsenal, until chattel slavery as a system of human bondage was brought to an end. I have named that image the slave ship icon for its continued presence in the minds and creative work of twentieth century black artists and their allies (Finley, 1999). Plan of an African Ship’s lower deck with Negroes in the Proportion of only one to a Ton, 1789 6 For black artists, playwrights and poets of the 1960s, the slave ship icon was pregnant with multiple, useful interpretations, adaptable for black nationalist and integrationist agendas alike. One of the most influential publications responsible for developing mid-twentieth century black consciousness of the slave ship icon, and forging a purposeful remembering of that influential image, was A Pictorial History of the Negro in America: 1,000 Illustrations from Prints, Engravings, Photographs, Paintings written by Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer in 1956.

Published just two years after the historic Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that declared segregation illegal, that book was a rallying cry for black people to wake up and reclaim the images that had shaped their past. A Pictorial History of the Negro in America provided visual fodder for the Black Arts Movement in the form of historical images meticulously selected from the collections of Hughes and Meltzer as well as archives from around the country.

As the book’s promotional material claimed, This book is far more than a collection of pictures – fascinating as they are. Beginning with the origins of the Negro in Africa, the authors trace in text and picture the story of the Negro as a slave and as a freeman, who he is, where he came from, what he has contributed, how he has affected and, in turn, has been affected by American life and, finally, where he is headed. Included in this absorbing account are reproductions of news editorials, letters, posters, handbills and pamphlets, ranging from the early days of the slave trade to the recent desegregation decision of the Supreme Court. (Hughes & Meltzer, 1956, book jacket flap). 2 On April 21, 1968, 100 black students took over Willard Straight Hall at Cornell University, demand 7 Accompanying the profusely illustrated pages was a moving text written by Hughes, which led the reader/viewer to the significance of each image in black history. The Hughes-Meltzer collaboration was reminiscent of earlier fruitful partnerships that produced notable photographically illustrated books with integrated and inspiring narratives. Distinguished among these are Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam’s Twelve Million Black Voices (1941) and Hughes’s own joint venture with photographer Roy De Carava, The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955).

A Pictorial History of the Negro in America also owed a debt of gratitude to other historical precursors, including the journals Opportunity, Crisis and the Journal of Negro History. Together, the momentum started by these pioneering black history and culture journals, the Hughes-Meltzer collaboration, and the appearance of popular black-oriented magazines like Jet and Ebony set the stage for all manner of educational advances in African-American Studies in the 1960s and 1970s, including the reissuing of important black-authored texts from the 1920s and 1930s; the establishment of black studies departments in mainstream American colleges and universities; and the integration of black history as part of secondary and elementary school curricula. The first book of its kind to be published after the Brown vs.

Board of Education decision, A Pictorial History of the Negro in America made a direct link between the value of knowing one’s history and the success of freedom struggles: Here, for the first time, is an authoritative, panoramic picture story of the Negro in America, from the arrival of the first African slave ship to present times, covering every aspect of Negro life – social, political, artistic and economic. This unique book, lavishly illustrated with more than 1,000 reproductions of pictures, paintings, broadsides, drawings, woodcuts and cartoons, contains concise pictorial accounts of all the important events in the Negro’s dramatic struggle for freedom. (Hughes & Meltzer, 1956, book jacket flap) 8 A Pictorial History of the Negro in America moreover inspired an entire cadre of black artists and writers in the 1960s and 1970s, including Alex Haley ( Roots, 1976); black artists’ collectives, such as the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), that spearheaded the public mural movement of the late 1960s with the Wall of Respect (1967) in Chicago; the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones); and the artist Malcolm Bailey. By “remembering” and presenting visual images and documents from the past, this volume “clarified the distinctiveness of African American history” (Schmidt Campbell, 1985, 65). A Pictorial History of the Negro in America was thus one of the key progenitors of the black visual practice of remembering known as symbolic possession of the past. And the slave ship icon was one of its essential images.

9 In the pages that follow, I discuss two seminal works produced in 1969 in which artists reintroduced the slave ship icon: Amiri Baraka’s masterpiece of revolutionary theatre, Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant and Malcolm Bailey’s Separate but Equal series. These celebrated works of theatre and installation art are representative of a novel artistic practice that hinges on the relationship between history, memory and identity. Using memory and history as aesthetic tools these works and the artists who made them pioneered a new artistic practice that validates the defining moments of the black experience. 3 According to the poet Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Amiri Baraka is “the acknowledged father” of 10 The poet, playwright, music critic and essayist Amiri Baraka was the galvanizing voice of the Black Arts Movement, indeed its leading theorist and literary artist.

At the forefront of this black artistic and literary revolution, Baraka produced critically acclaimed poems, plays, jazz operas and music criticism in every year of the decade of the 1960s. As the chief artist-intellectual of the Movement, he encouraged black artists to abandon the integrationist themes of a raceless, classless society, which had become popular in the previous decade, to embrace instead an art and practice that was grounded in black experience, history and memory. In Baraka’s own words, the Black Arts Movement “declared a need for:. An art that is recognizably Afro American. An art that is mass oriented that will come out of the libraries and stomp. An art that is revolutionary, that will be with Malcolm X and Rob Williams, that will conk klansmen and erase racists” (Baraka in Harris, 1991.

5 Baraka described Revolutionary Theatre as “the force of twenty million spooks storming America wit 12 Seeking an alternative and effective activist mode of expression for black art, Baraka pioneered a new form of black aesthetics, which he called “Revolutionary Theatre.” According to him, “The Revolutionary Theatre should force change; it should be change” (Baraka, 1966, 210). For Baraka, Revolutionary Theatre was inextricably linked to the political dynamic of the Black Power Movement. Theatre, as one of the most social of the performing arts, could be an integral part of the socializing process, urging young black audience members and actors to demand civil rights, or even organize for revolutionary change. The activist dimension of Revolutionary Theatre demanded the involvement and action of audience members and thus was designed to instill amongst them a certain level of responsibility and awareness through process and participation. The political implications of Baraka’s Revolutionary Theatre, like environmental theater of avant-garde New York in the 1960s and 1970s or the burgeoning performance art scene of the same period, “involved a profound restructuring of the social and psychological relationships that exist between performer and audience” (Isaac, 1971, 242).

This new form of black aesthetics also encompassed a ritual component tied to its participatory nature, which reinforced the processes of remembering for actors and audience members alike. Revolutionary Theatre was intended to encourage collective remembering and collective action. It called for “new kinds of heroes ready to die for what’s on their minds” and the portrayal of hidden histories as a way to gain control of the dissemination and interpretation of black images (Baraka, 1966, 214).

Bringing political and historical urgency to pressing social issues, such as police brutality and public school bussing, Revolutionary Theatre performed a radical, artistic intervention aimed at dislocating the white mainstream manipulation of the black image. In essence, it sought to rock the boat. 6 The first production of Slave Ship was directed by Baraka at Spirit House in Newark, New Jersey and 13 Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theatre in New York from November 21, 1969 to January 13, 1970. Directed by Gilbert Moses, the play was produced by the Chelsea Theatre Centre in association with Woodie King Jr., with music by tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp. Eugene Lee designed the unforgettable set, a wooden slave ship on rockers with an exposed human cargo hold, after drawings he had seen of the slave ship icon.

According to the white critic Clive Barnes of the New York Times, Slave Ship was, “a strong, strange play that once seen will never be forgotten” (Barnes, 1969, 46). That play challenged not only the status quo, but also conventional modes of theatrical production. In a radical feat of set design and choreography, the entire play took place in the hold of a slave ship, while the storyline followed a group of enslaved Africans through the torturous Middle Passage, to the monotony and degradation of the plantation, and to an ultimate uprising over oppression and exploitation. Slave Ship thus dramatized some of the defining moments of black American experience, and in Baraka’s words was called “a historical pageant”. On one level, the play dealt specifically with the issue of black racial identity, told through a series of historical vignettes that highlighted confrontations with white society. On another level, it portrayed black self-determination through resistance to oppression and obliteration.

Overall, Slave Ship urged change through revolution, enacted in the final scenes of the play, which were meant to carry over to contemporary life through the collective actions of the Black Arts Movement. 7 To date, my attempts to get photographic documentation of design drawings of the set have failed. I 14 The artistic implications of Baraka’s clever staging of the entire play within the hold of a slave ship are our immediate concern.

That radical choice recognized the centrality of the slave ship as a space of mnemonic proportions in the black psyche and relied upon novel set design, clever staging techniques and innovative props to produce and sustain the feeling of being trapped in the hold. Such a decision in staging necessarily dictated that the other spaces of black experience depicted in the play—the plantation, insurrection, and culminating celebration of black power even—were to be read through the defining experience of the Middle Passage and imagined from within the decks of the slave ship. Moreover, through the explicit strategies of revolutionary theater, Baraka’s play not only seemed to embody the chaotic situation described by the slave ship icon, but also succeeded in bringing it to life in a very tangible way that tapped into the sensorial dimension of memory of actors and members of the audience alike. Such a deliberate symbolic possession of the past sought to reclaim the political possibilities of the abolitionist-era the slave ship icon, adding a new and meaningful level of understanding for a late 1960s race-conscious black revolutionary audience.

15 As a theatrical performance that took place in the hold of a slave ship, Baraka’s play in many ways referenced the slave ship icon, both visually and textually. On a visual level, the set shared certain architectural similarities with the space described in the slave ship icon.

Designed to reproduce the feeling of claustrophobia and horror in the hold, indeed the sense of claustrophobia between decks, the creaky wooden set included hatches and other architectural details drawn in the plan of the slave ship. 16 The lighting emphasized the contrast between complete and total darkness in the hold and blinding sunlight above, indeed the tension between black and white. And the actors and audience members crammed together recreated the sense of crowding represented by the tiny black figures populating the plan of the slave ship (see Fig. 17 It could be said that Baraka’s play activated the slave ship icon and charged it anew with revolutionary potential.

The play not only created the environment that the diagrammatic abolitionist drawing suggests, it also produced the bodies that it depicted. The cast and the audience gave real live physical form to darkened figures of the plan. But instead of remaining silent or without words of their own, as the darkened figures drawn in the two-dimensional slave ship icon, Baraka’s slave bodies were allowed to speak. Through them, he inserted the voices, desires, movements and music of resistance that were absent from the slave ship icon. In a bold gesture then, Baraka re-inscribed the slave ship icon with an updated purpose fitting the revolutionary times. 18 Baraka’s Slave Ship was closer to a reenactment of the experiences of the Middle Passage, plantation slavery and revolution, rather than a dramatic production of those events.

As Revolutionary Theatre, audience members were an intimate and integral part of the play. They were seated in a set that placed them in the deepest bowels of the slave ship set, which moreover co-opted them as members of the cast, or re-enactors, if you will.

8 More than 30 years later, Robert Farris Thompson, is still haunted by the experience of Baraka’s Sl 20 Audience members were called upon to join the actors in making the sounds that created the aural setting for the play—the cries and screams. By thus soliciting the participation of the audience, the play vividly produced the sense of claustrophobia and terror in the hold of a slave ship. This enabled the members of the audience to share in the creation of the performance and consequently, moved them towards a sense of collective responsibility. As Francis Ngaboh-Smart points out, Baraka “assumes that the ritual of the stage consists in situating the events in the hearts of the black audience who, after reliving the memory of the sources of their cultural dislocation, can then work towards remedying their condition. The collective enactment is supposed to help the community move toward regeneration” (Ngaboh-Smart, 1999, 181-82). As a participatory event then, Slave Ship operated for many as a cathartic experience, one of confinement, passage, struggle and release. 21 The play was set in a virtual theatre of the senses, a performance space invaded by the sights, sounds and smells used by abolitionists to describe “the poo poo tubs, whips, chains and cries.” This dramatic effect was realized through the use of ingenious props geared to stimulate the aural and olfactory perception, including: Smell effectsincense dirt/filth Smells/bodies Heavy Chains Drums (African bata drums, and bass and snare) Rattles and tambourines Banjo music for plantation atmos.

sic Ship noises Ship bells Rocking and Splashing of Sea Guns and cartridges Whips/whip sounds. (Baraka, 1969a, 1) 22 The effects of the sounds and smells emanating from the set of the slave ship were intensified by carefully controlling of the sense of sight. In particular, darkness—deep, total, consuming darkness was utilized in a sustained manner to emphasize the atmosphere of containment experienced during the Middle Passage and throughout slavery in order to enforce the feeling of domination. The initial stage directions called for: Whole theater in darkness. For a long time. Occasional sound, like ship groaning, squeaking, rocking. Keep the people in the dark, and gradually the odors of the sea, the sounds of the sea, and sounds of the ship, creep up.

Burn incense, but make a significant, almost stifling, smell come up. These smells and cries, the slash and tear of the lash, in a total atmos-feeling sic gotten some way. (Baraka, 1969a, 1) 23 A large part of the play was in fact performed in the darkness, producing and reproducing “the drone of terror” (Baraka, 1969a, 1).

Baraka’s use of lighting was specific. In some cases dim lights were used to point to voices or dialogue being spoken.

“There is just dim light at top of the set, to indicate where voices are” (Baraka, 1969a, 2). In other instances, bright lights starkly illuminated the characters of the slave traders and sailors, and reproduced the effect of blinding sunlight coming from open hatches above deck. For example, the stage directions specify, “Lights flash on white men in sailor suits grinning their vices voices down hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Lights to light white people are sudden, very bright and blinding” (Baraka, 1969a, 5) and slightly different wording. 24 As I have tried to suggest, Baraka’s play recovered and reinscribed the slave ship icon, effectively reshaping the descriptive text of the eighteenth century broadside to include the voices of the enslaved and their stories of survival, pain and suffering as well as their tactics of resistance and survival and the torturous conditions they endured. For example, their accounts of suicide and infanticide are enacted here: Man 1 – God, she’s killed herself and the chi sic child.

Woman 1 – She strangled herself with the chain. Choked the child. Help us, Lord.

(Baraka, 1969a, 5) 25 The well-documented history of rape and sexual abuse pictured and discussed in the schematic drawing and explanatory text of the slave ship icon is also enacted in the play: Woman 2 - Oh, please, please don’t touch me Please Man 1 - What you doing? Get away from that woman. That’s not your woman. You turn into a beast, too.

(Baraka, 1969, 6) 26 So is insanity: Man 3 – Devils, Devils. Cold walking shit. (All mad sounds together). (Baraka, 1969a, 6) 27 Through a dialogue that imagined the conversations between captives in the hold, Baraka created characters and stage directions that reflected a deep spiritual belief in African, particularly Yoruba, religion. Some of the initial stage directions called for, “ African Drums like the worship of some Orisha. Obatala, Mbwanga rattles of the priests. BamBamBamBamBoom BoomBoom BamBam.” (Baraka, 1969a, 1).

During the Middle Passage sequence, Shango, the thunder god, and Obatala, the Yoruba creator and father of the orishas or deities, are called upon as sources of strength by the ritual beating of the drums. Man 1 - Shango, Obatala, make your lightning, beat the inside bright with paths for your people. Beat (Drums come up, but they are walls and floors being beaten. Chains rattled. Chains rattled. Drag the chains.) (Baraka, 1969a, 3) 28 Towards the end of the play, the plantation revolt is brought on by summoning Ogun, the warrior god of iron. Give me weapons.

Give me iron. My bone and muscle make them tight with tension of combat. Ogun, give me fire and death to give to these beasts. (Baraka, 1969a, 11) 29 Baraka’s new narrative for the slave ship icon especially relied upon improviosnal music as a catalyst for action in the play. The concentrated repetition of sounds and music acted as strips of behavior, ritual beats that called upon the actor/audience participants to remember.

Thus African music and religion performed a life sustaining function, delivering the enslaved Africans from the slave ship to the plantation and, ultimately, to the brink of a black nationalist revolution. The following lines are first chanted and then put to music: Rise, Rise, Rise Cut these ties, Black man rise We gon’ be the thing we are (Now all sing, “When we gonna Rise”) When we gonna rise/up When we gonna rise/up When we gonna rise/up When we gonna rise/up, brother When we gonna rise/up above the sun When we gonna take our own place, brother Like the world had just begun? Drum – new sax – voice arrangement. (Baraka, 1969a, 13-14).

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9 In the opening of the play we hear the sound of African drums and the plantation scene is marked by 30 Throughout the play, drumming, dancing and music stand as symbols of resistance and deep African memory. These musical symbols of an African past are never silenced, but only transformed, reshaped into popular forms of black American music. The culminating celebration of Black Power is punctuated by a fusion of jazz, soul music and popular black dances of the late 1960s: Lights come up abruptly, and people on stage begin to dance, same hip Boogaloruba, fingerpop, skate, monkey, dog Enter audience; get members of audience to dance. To same music Rise Up. Turns into an actual party. (Baraka, 1969a, 16) 31 In Slave Ship, Baraka crafted a unique blend of “double voicing” that was richly nuanced, where the different layers of the senses and the spatial levels of the set collided and conversed with the actual voices of the cast and the audience, their co-opted re-enactors. This process of shaping and reshaping the experience of black Americans prompted Lloyd W.

Brown to call Slave Ship “one of Baraka’s more successful experiments in ritual drama,” where “history itself becomes a succession of rituals” (Brown, 1980, 161). 32 It was in these newly imagined possibilities for the slave ship icon that Baraka’s play gained revolutionary potential. Baraka refused to simply recreate the sense of suffering in the Middle Passage that the slave ship icon represents—to reproduce a static memory of the slave ship icon.

Rather by reading other key moments in black Atlantic experience through the space of the Middle Passage—the hold and decks of the slave ship icon—he took that memory to a different level—one of responsibility. To be sure, Baraka produced a memory with revolutionary possibilities. After all, this was part of the aesthetic strategy of Revolutionary Theatre.

It was a form of resistance. He thus made the slave ship icon part of a continuum.

10 Cinque Gallery was operated as a not-for-profit center established with funds from the Urban Center 33 In the same year that Baraka produced Slave Ship, the young artist, Malcolm Bailey, gained widespread critical acclaim for his Separate but Equal series, an installation of monumental paintings and drawings inspired by the slave ship icon and the ensuing Civil Rights struggle. The series was featured in the inaugural exhibition of Cinque Gallery in Manhattan’s East Village in December 1969 (Fine, 1973; Glueck, 1969; Jacobs, 1970).

Named for the leader of the famed Amistad mutiny of 1839, Cinque Gallery was the brainchild of three established black artists, Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow and Norman Lewis, whose vision it was to provide an exhibition space for young (under 30) minority artists who otherwise had few opportunities to show in mainstream galleries. Fax reiterated the need for places like Cinque Gallery when he remarked that the “gifted twenty-four-year-old Malcolm Bailey, with all his merit, would not easily have found a place to show” (Fax, 1973, 144-45). 11 In the aftermath of the March on Washington in 1963, Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff,.

12 Murals, such as the Wall of Respect by Eugene Wade, Bill Walker, Jeff Donaldson and other members o 34 The founding of Cinque Gallery was just one indication of how visual artists shaped the Black Arts Movement. They formed artist collectives, opened art museums and galleries and lobbied mainstream arts institutions for greater representation of black artists, curators and programming. This period produced a black art geared to reach the masses through community-based mural projects and the establishment of neighborhood art centers in urban areas. Using art for political and educational purposes, black artists endeavored to portray black history and black life, often through the depiction of key events and individuals.

To be sure, the Black Arts Movement promoted an art and ideology of “Black Unity, Black Dignity and Black Respect.”. 14 The form of this cross-section resembles those pictured in the nineteenth century engravings of the 36 Hold: Separate but Equal is a large, seven by four foot aqua blue panel with three schematic diagrams after the slave ship icon (see front cover). The white and black figures painted in the diagrams are divided by “race,” not gender: on one side, white figures mirror an equal number of black figures on the other.

The diagram on the left shows one side of a plan view. It is empty except for the capital letters that label the vacant spaces.

“G, A and E” in black and “N, B, F” in white. The diagram on the right pictures the plan view of the half deck with two rows of uniform black figures systematically arranged on one side and the same number of white figures on the other. This section is labeled with the letter “H” in black at the top, and the letter “E” in white at the bottom. The diagram in the center shows a cross section view of the hold, with an equal number of black and white figures separated by a bold vertical line that represents the mast. The figures on the upper deck, bend into a contorted, seated position in order to fit into the shallow space. Each of the figures is labeled with a letter (A, Β and so on) that corresponds to a location specified in the plan views above. The artist drew black and white lines of definition, which show the musculature of these figures in distress.

Such a clever use of shading rendered the figures as anatomical drawings. The black or white figures in lower deck have even less space and are reduced to a reclining position, with legs bent. Instead of being labeled with single letters, this diagram is marked “HOLD” in bold black letters in the white section of the boat. Malcolm Bailey with his Separate but Equal Series at the inaugural opening of Cinque Gallery, New York City, December 1969. Copyright Don Hogan Charles/the New York Times/Redux 37 Bailey’s choice of materials influenced the look and design of this painting. He applied synthetic polymer paint to composition board in order to achieve a slick aqua background.

Presstype was used to demarcate the hard lines of the diagrams and the fine, white directional lines that divide spaces within the sections. Presstype also labeled the sections with bold, uniform letters. Together, these materials lent a crisp, mechanical look to the painting that reduced it to its barest essentials and enhanced its minimalist appearance. The use of a minimalist aesthetic accentuated the starkness of the plan view on the left and gave the sense that the other sections were not quite filled to capacity. This aesthetic strategy revealed a clear contrast between many of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth century versions of the slave ship icon, which were filled to capacity with tiny figures to emphasize the crowding.

Furthermore, the apparent sense of openness in sections of Bailey’s blue print-like painting begs us to think about space, and contemporary allocations of different groups of people within real and imagined social spaces. We might be inclined to ask, who, or what other group (divided by race, sex or class, for instance) might fill the empty spaces?. 15 Some of his later works incorporate the same iconic figure, for example, Untitled No. 7, a brightly 38 Bailey was attracted to the slave ship icon for the historical narrative that it portrays as well as for its reference to graphic design. In particular, he was interested in the form and meaning of the iconic figures.

If we return to the photograph of Bailey in front of one of his wall-sized paintings at the Cinque Gallery, the connection between the black and white figures that he paints and the human condition becomes indelibly clear. Seated on the polished gallery floor in profile, his posture mirrors the crouching position assumed by the black and white figures in the painting behind him. What is more, the photograph is taken from such an angle that Bailey actually “sits in” for and replaces one of the life-sized black figures. Works cited Baraka, Amiri. LeRoi Jones 1961. Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note.

New York: Totem Press. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: William Morrow and Co. Dutchman and the Slave.

New York: William Morrow and Company. The System of Dante’s Hell. New York: Grove Press. Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow and Company). Home: Social Essays.

Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press. New York: William Morrow and Company. Slave Ship: A One Act Play. Newark: Jihad Productions. Four Black Revolutionary Plays. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. ——— Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961-1967.

Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. In Our Terribleness. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. It’s Nation Time. Chicago: Third World Press.

Barnes, Clive. “The Theater: New LeRoi Jones Play.” The New York Times, Saturday, November 22, 46. Brown, Lloyd W. Amiri Baraka. Boston: Twayne Publishers.

1973 1896, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870. Milwood, New York: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited.

Fax, Elton C. Seventeen Black Artists.

New York: Dodd, Mead and Company. Feelings, Tom. The Middle Passage: White Ships, Black Cargo. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers. Fine honig, Elsa. The Afro-American Artist: A Search For Identity. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.

Finley, Cheryl. “Committed to Memory: The Slave Ship Icon in the Black Atlantic Imagination.” Chicago Art Journal 9, Spring, 2-21. “The Door of No Return.” Common Place Vol. 4: http:/www.common-place.org/vol-01/no-4/finley. Fountain, John. “Church’s Window on the Past, and the Future.” The New York Times, February 9.

Glueck, Grace. “Minority Artists find a welcome New Showcase.” The New York Times, December 23, 21. Harris, William J.

Amiri Baraka, The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. “Maafa Remembrance 2000 Dedication Speech,” www.newmountpilgrim.org Hughues, Langston & Milton meltzer. A Pictorial History of the Negro in America. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.

“The Death of the Proscenium Stage.” The Antioch Review, Summer. “A Bridge to the Future.” Art Gallery, XIII, April, 50-51. Ngaboh-Smart, Francis.

“The Politics of Black Identity: Slave Ship and Woza Albert!” Journal of African Cultural Studies, Vol. 2., December, 181-182. Phillips, Louis.

“LeRoi Jones and Contemporary Black Drama.” In The Black American Writer. Volume II: Poetry and Drama. Deland, Florida: Everett/Edwards, Inc., 206. Rose, Barbara. “Black Art in America.” Art in America LVIII, September-October, 62. Schmidt Campbell, Mary. Tradition and Conflict: Images of a Turbulent Decade, 1963-1973.

New York: Studio Museum in Harlem. Walters, Sabrina. “Glass Recalls Slavery’s Horror.” Chicago Sun Times, December, 17: 24.

The Flying Dutchman by c. 1887 (Smithsonian American Art Museum) Hendrick van der Decken The Flying Dutchman (: De Vliegende ) is a legendary that can never make port and is doomed to sail the oceans forever. The myth is likely to have originated from the 17th-century golden age of the (VOC). The oldest extant version has been dated to the late 18th century. Sightings in the 19th and 20th centuries reported the ship to be glowing with ghostly light.

If hailed by another ship, the crew of the Flying Dutchman will try to send messages to land, or to people long dead. In ocean lore, the sight of this phantom ship is a of doom. View of (overlooked by, ) with ships of the, c. In the 1600s the size of the Dutch probably exceeded the combined fleets of England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Germany. The first print reference to the ship appears in Travels in various part of Europe, Asia and Africa during a series of thirty years and upward (1790) by John MacDonald: The weather was so stormy that the sailors said they saw the Flying Dutchman. The common story is that this Dutchman came to the Cape in distress of weather and wanted to get into harbour but could not get a pilot to conduct her and was lost and that ever since in very bad weather her vision appears. The next literary reference appears in Chapter VI of A Voyage to Botany Bay (1795) (also known as A Voyage to New South Wales), attributed to (1755–1804): I had often heard of the superstition of sailors respecting apparitions and doom, but had never given much credit to the report; it seems that some years since a was lost off the, and every soul on board perished; her consort weathered the gale, and arrived soon after at the Cape.

Having refitted, and returning to Europe, they were assailed by a violent tempest nearly in the same latitude. In the night watch some of the people saw, or imagined they saw, a vessel standing for them under a press of sail, as though she would run them down: one in particular affirmed it was the ship that had foundered in the former gale, and that it must certainly be her, or the of her; but on its clearing up, the object, a dark thick cloud, disappeared. Nothing could do away the idea of this phenomenon on the minds of the sailors; and, on their relating the circumstances when they arrived in port, the story spread like wild-fire, and the supposed phantom was called the Flying Dutchman.

From the Dutch the English seamen got the infatuation, and there are very few Indiamen, but what has some one on board, who pretends to have seen the apparition. The next literary reference introduces the motif of punishment for a crime, in Scenes of Infancy (Edinburgh, 1803) by (1775–1811): It is a common superstition of mariners, that, in the high southern latitudes on the coast of Africa, hurricanes are frequently ushered in by the appearance of a spectre-ship, denominated the Flying Dutchman. The crew of this vessel are supposed to have been guilty of some dreadful crime, in the infancy of navigation; and to have been stricken with pestilence. And are ordained still to traverse the ocean on which they perished, till the period of their penance expire.

(1779–1852) places the vessel in the north Atlantic in his poem Written on passing Dead-man's Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Late in the evening, September, 1804: 'Fast gliding along, a gloomy bark / Her sails are full, though the wind is still, / And there blows not a breath her sails to fill.' A footnote adds: 'The above lines were suggested by a superstition very common among sailors, who call this ghost-ship, I think, 'the flying Dutch-man'.' (1771–1832), a friend of John Leyden's, was the first to refer to the vessel as a pirate ship, writing in the notes to (first published December 1812) that the ship was 'originally a vessel loaded with great wealth, on board of which some horrid act of murder and piracy had been committed' and that the apparition of the ship 'is considered by the mariners as the worst of all possible omens.' According to some sources, 17th century Dutch is the model for the captain of the ghost ship.

Fokke was renowned for the speed of his trips from the to and was suspected of being. The first version of the legend as a story was printed in for May 1821, which puts the scene as the Cape of Good Hope. This story introduces the name Captain Hendrick Van der Decken for the captain and the motifs (elaborated by later writers) of letters addressed to people long dead being offered to other ships for delivery, but if accepted will bring misfortune; and the captain having sworn to round the Cape of Good Hope though it should take until the day of judgment. She was an Amsterdam vessel and sailed from port seventy years ago. Her master's name was Van der Decken. He was a staunch seaman, and would have his own way in spite of the devil. For all that, never a sailor under him had reason to complain; though how it is on board with them nobody knows.

The story is this: that in doubling the Cape they were a long day trying to weather the. However, the wind headed them, and went against them more and more, and Van der Decken walked the deck, swearing at the wind. Just after sunset a vessel spoke him, asking him if he did not mean to go into the bay that night.

Van der Decken replied: 'May I be eternally damned if I do, though I should beat about here till the day of judgment.' And to be sure, he never did go into that bay, for it is believed that he continues to beat about in these seas still, and will do so long enough. This vessel is never seen but with foul weather along with her. Reported sightings There have been many reported or alleged sightings in the 19th and 20th centuries., the famous novelist who wrote, was said to have seen the phenomenon on the Pacific Ocean when serving in the minesweeper HMS Jubilee as a Royal Navy officer during the Second World War. Unfortunately he made no mention of this in his two volume autobiography or other works and HMS Jubilee did not, in fact, exist. Monsarrat's connection probably stems from his book 'Master Mariner' which was partly inspired by this tale (he lived and worked in South Africa after the war) and the story of the.

Another sighting was by Prince George of Wales, the future. He was on a three-year voyage during his late adolescence in 1880 with his elder brother and their tutor John Neill Dalton. They temporarily shipped into after the damaged rudder was repaired in their original ship, the 4,000-tonne corvette.

The princes' log (indeterminate as to which prince, due to later editing before publication) records the following for the pre-dawn hours of 11 July 1881, off the coast of in the between and: July 11th. The Flying Dutchman crossed our bows. A strange red light as of a phantom ship all aglow, in the midst of which light the masts, spars and sails of a brig 200 yards distant stood out in strong relief as she came up on the port bow, where also the officer of the watch from the bridge clearly saw her, as did the quarterdeck midshipman, who was sent forward at once to the forecastle; but on arriving there was no vestige nor any sign whatever of any material ship was to be seen either near or right away to the horizon, the night being clear and the sea calm.

Thirteen persons altogether saw her. At 10.45 a.m. The ordinary seaman who had this morning reported the Flying Dutchman fell from the foretopmast crosstrees on to the topgallant forecastle and was smashed to atoms. Explanations as an optical illusion. George Barrington (originally Waldron) was tried at the in in September 1790 for picking pockets and sentenced to for seven years.

He embarked on the convict transport Active which sailed from on 27 March 1791 and arrived at (Sydney), just to the north of, on 26 September, having anchored briefly at in very late June. The various accounts of his voyage and activities in appear to be literary forgeries by publishers capitalizing both on his notoriety and in public interest for the new colony, combining turns of phrase from his trial speeches with plagiarized genuine accounts of other writers concerning Botany Bay. See George Barrington's Voyage to Botany Bay edited by Suzanne Rickard (Leicester University Press, 2001).

A Voyage to Botany Bay and A Voyage to New South Wales, both issued in 1795, were revamped versions of An Impartial and Circumstantial Narrative of the Present State of Botany Bay, which had appeared in 1793–94, but which did not include the Flying Dutchman reference. Leyden says that Chaucer, echoing Second Circle of Hell, alludes to a punishment of a similar kind in his poem The Parlement of Foules: 'And breakers of the laws, sooth to sain, / And lecherous folk, after that they been dead, / Shall whirl about the world alway in pain, / Till many a world be passed out of dread. The 48-page text published c. 1829 acknowledges Blackwood's 1821 story as the source, although the two have little in common. Originally published in instalments in the (London) March–October 1837, January–February 1838 & February–August 1839 before appearing in book form in 1839. Marryat's gripping story added no new elements to the legend. The play was not published until its revival in 1829.

On all these points see Musical Times (London), March 1986, p. References. MacDonald, John (1790).

Forbes, London, ed., p. 30. Published in Epistles, Odes, and other poems (London, 1806). Eyers, Jonathan (2011).

Don't Shoot the Albatross!: Nautical Myths and Superstitions. A&C Black, London, UK. The author has been identified as John Howison (fl. 1821–59) of the East India Company.

See Alan Lang Strout: A Bibliography of Articles in Blackwood's Magazine 1817–1825 (1959, p. Music with Ease (2008). Music with Ease. Retrieved 2008-02-23. Monsarrat, Nicholas (1970).

Life Is a Four-Letter Word (volume 2): Breaking Out. London: Cassell. (1988) King George V.

by., p. 431. 2012-02-16 at the. (March 1959). Retrieved 2014-12-23.

Fulmer, O. Bryan (October 1969). 'The Ancient Mariner and the Wandering Jew'. Studies in Philology. 66 (5): 797–815. John Clute and John Grant, eds.

The encyclopedia of fantasy. CS1 maint: Uses editors parameter. Barger, Andrew (2011). The Best Ghost Stories 1800-1849.

USA: Bottletree Books LLC. London: Smith, Elder & Co. O'Reilly, John Boyle (1867).

David Seed (31 October 2013). Cooper & Millington 1992. Cooper & Millington 2001., radiolistings.co.uk. Retrieved 2015-09-19.

Fokker, Anthony and Bruce Gould. Flying Dutchman: The Life of Anthony Fokker. Sam smith youtube. London: George Routledge, 1931. Bibliography.