Voicing Counterpoint

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on April 27, 2016.

Tyehimba Jess’s new book, Olio, is big in size and grand in scale. In an intricate assemblage of history, fiction, and poetic form, Jess brings to life Scott Joplin, Blind Tom, the McKoy twins, Sissieretta Jones, and others, black musicians of the 19th century who were legends of their time yet never recorded. Jess also writes in the voices of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Booker T. Washington, Henry “Box” Brown, and Edmonia Lewis, and many others speak to this transitional moment in American history, post-slavery, when blacks were legally free yet still bound in innumerable ways.

In our conversation, Jess and I talked about the inherent conflicts among these characters—in politics, power, and otherwise. Jess is known for his use of contrapuntal poems—sonnets formatted to be read down columns, across the lines, even backward (he uses the terms interstitially and antigravitationally). In a book about musicians and individuals whose opinions greatly differed during their lifetimes (such as Joplin and Ernest Hogan), it makes sense that counterpoint, a musical device, is the one Jess employs to put these characters into conversation. Or, as he writes through the voices of conjoined twins and singers Millie and Christine McKoy, “We’ve mended two songs into one dark skin / bleeding soprano into contralto / —we’re fused in blood and body—from one thrummed stem / budding twin blooms of song.” This interview has been edited and condensed.

What inspired you to make this book?

I felt like I knew a decent amount about black music, especially from the 20th century, but it occurred to me that I didn’t really know much about the lives of the actual people who were making the music back then. So I started researching. I think the first person I ran across was Blind Tom. And it’s a fascinating story. He was born in slavery, blind. He was autistic. The more I researched him, the more I stumbled across other performers and musicians from that era—the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the McCoy twins. That’s how it became revealed to me what the book was going to be about.

You’re writing about people who were known for what they sounded like without knowing what they sounded like. How did you access, or relate to, their lives without that key component?

I did as much research as I could, and I tried to understand the context of the times and of the places they were living. I listened to people who recorded after them or around the same time. There’s a musician here, named John Davis, who did a recording of all of Blind Tom’s recordings. And there’s another brother who did recordings of Blind Boone’s compositions. Scott Joplin’s music is pretty easy to access. But with the rest of them, I speculated what was going through their minds.

What drew you to these characters—Sissieretta Jones or the McKoy twins, for example?

What drew me to them was their stories. The McKoy twins were joined at the waist. How do you deal with that, as a 19th-century, African American woman? Blind Tom was owned by the same family, more or less, for his whole life. Blind Boone was blinded at six months old. I think in every poem I’m asking, “What is it like, what are the challenges they have to answer to, who are they creating their art for, and how are they negotiating all of these barriers?” Most people have never heard of Sissieretta or most of them. For me, that’s almost like undiscovered territory.

Scott Joplin had more or less fallen out of the public eye for roughly 50 years before he was revitalized. People don’t remember him.

How was he revitalized?

There was a movie called The Sting with Paul Newman that was a big hit. It featured a soundtrack that had a lot of Scott Joplin, and that caused a renewed interest in his music. Of all the people in the book, he’s by far the most popular. But you pretty much don’t hear ragtime anymore, unless it’s on an ice-cream truck. When I say that we forgot Joplin, we forgot the importance of ragtime. It was before jazz. You can’t just forget the great-great-granddad. And Scott Joplin was right there.

I once heard you play harmonica at a reading. Do you still play?

I play a little bit of guitar and a little bit of harmonica. It’s a healing thing, playing an instrument and trying to get the sound right. There are so many similarities between playing music and writing poetry. Playing harmonica, in particular. Poems are easy to write but hard to master. Just as with any instrument—you can pick it up and play a little something, but trying to make it really speak the story and paint the picture that you want to tell—that’s a different thing.

There are a lot of different forms in Olio, including your trademark contrapuntal sonnets. Some are perforated so readers can tear them out and fold them into Mobius and Torus shapes to read. Why did you decide to use contrapuntal sonnets and these other forms to tell these stories?

I felt like it’s always interesting to get as many sides of a story as you can. A contrapuntal poem has the capability of bringing two people together and having them talk in a way that is very hard to duplicate. It provides a direct back-and-forth; each line informs the other line. That lends itself to a lot of the relationships that I was observing. And it’s fun. I think it’s fun for readers to unwrap the meaning as they’re going through the lines and sometimes unwrap the contradictions within each line, depending on which way they’re approaching it. I really try to let readers have fun and then, in other cases, to allow readers to determine their own course through the poem. They can say to themselves, “Maybe I want to go diagonally, maybe I want to go up, maybe I want to go down.” And I think that increases their interest in the subject matter, which serves my original purpose: to get people interested in these individuals. I wanted the book to be a bit of an experiment in how far I can push the contrapuntal. 

Another thing I wanted to do is have the poems perform in a way that a person would, in a show. And hence, you have the olio. And the olio being that part where there’s a variety show, I wanted the poems to have the ability to have multiple kinds of performance. Not a performance that’s one of minstrelsy but one that’s of self-actualization. To have the subjects find a way to bend the forms that they were given, such as the minstrel shows, with Bert Williams and George Walker, and change them to suit their needs. To take a ghazal and bend that form, the way they were taking the minstrel show and bending that.

In the contrapuntals, often the characters who are talking to each other are actually enemies: Blind Tom and his master, Henry “Box” Brown and the black caricature from John Berryman’s Dreamsongs. And Ernest Hogan, who seemed to have a lifelong debate within himself as a black man having written the song “All Coons Look Alike to Me” There are many people you don’t want to listen to, or aren’t supposed to listen to, but on the page, they’re given equal footing.

That’s part of the idea that I try to carry into contrapuntals: on one side, you may have a slave, and on another side, you may have a master, but they have an equal number of syllables. And in that way, we really see both sides of the story. For example, with Ernest Hogan—I think he was conflicted. On one hand, he indicates that he’s responsible for a kind of music that employed a lot of black people. On the other hand, it’s a coon song. I don’t think he intended for it to go the way it did. There’s a list of coon songs in the book.

And those are real titles of the songs?

Those are actual titles. And throughout the book, you see kind of a debate between Ernest Hogan and Scott Joplin. Hogan is talking about the practicalities of entertaining people, and Joplin is talking about the challenge of keeping ragtime unsullied by racial demagoguery. In “Coon Songs Must Go!/Coon Songs Go On,” one side extols the virtues of being a coon song singer, and on the other side is the condemnation. I think that’s what we see today, isn’t it?

What was your intention behind including the sonnets in the voices of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and, along with them, the chronological list of burned black churches?

In a way, the Fisk Jubilee Singers were missionaries. They were trying to prove the humanity of black people, they were trying to prove our artistic prowess, our Christianity. They were the very height of black respectability. I wanted to tell the story of the very first teenagers going out into a world they had never seen, traveling around overseas, trying to take this talent and do something with it. I wanted to capture, to some degree, the way they must have felt. But also, one reason I use the list of burned churches is that there needed to be a counterpoint; the voices needed to be framed by the brutal reality of the discrimination and terrorism they were experiencing in the country. So at the same time that they really are singing about hope, they’re surrounded by the other legacy of the black church in America, which is arson.

The very first church mentioned in that list is Emanuel A.M.E. The murders at Mother Emanuel in Charleston happened in June of last year as I was finishing the book. And as the days unwrapped, I learned more about the history of the church and that it had been burned to the ground in 1822. So there you had it at the very beginning of the list and at the very end. Just like in a crown of sonnets. You have the very beginning line becoming the very end.