Guggenheim Poet-in-Residence Ama Codjoe recites this poem inspired by verbal description techniques.

"If They Come in the Morning" is written after Kerry James Marshall’s "Black Painting" – on view in "Going Dark the Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility" – and after Fred Hampton.

Transcript
Ama Codjoe: Hi I’m Ama Codjoe, and I’m reading “If They Come in the Morning,” after Kerry James Marshall’s "Black Painting", and after Fred Hampton.

In the after of the painting’s scene

sun slices, shoots through

the room—but the now-painting

remains dark. In the days after,

hundreds will tour the bloodshot

house, I mean it was like

what Mamie Till said: Leave

the casket open, I need you to see

what they did to my son. I can barely

make out the painting’s two figures—remember

there are three: Akua is nine months pregnant

next to Fred. I mean the police came

so early morning resembled night,

they shot through the mattress and killed

and killed—Fred died and died.

The bed heavy with two bodies—one

body heavy with a third, I’m asking you

to remember. Three asleep at 4:30am.

In the now-painting Fred’s body is hard

to make out and alive. Soon he will be

murdered. My eyes can barely decipher

the two—remember three—draped

in brushes of black paint. I am close now

to the painting, as close as catastrophe,

as close as mourning barreling into night.

About this poem: The first time I saw "Black Painting" was at the Kerry James Marshall retrospective in 2017 at the Met Breuer. The hard-to-discern image required my concentration. As I stared at the painting, I pieced together its clues—the white flag with a black panther in the painting’s right corner; a book with Angela Davis on its cover resting on the nightstand; and the spine of that book which reads, "If They Come In the Morning"—and quickly added them to my knowledge of the Black Power Movement in the United States. Fred Hampton, chairman of the national Black Panther Party and chair of the Illinois chapter, was killed during an early morning police raid in the bed where minutes prior he, his fiancée, and their unborn child slept. The scene assembled itself in my mind, and I felt, looking at the painting, that I was discerning the violence of white supremacy in addition to the serene, chilling image.

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