Patrick Phillips (4) (1970–)

Song of the Closing Doors begins with the cancer diagnosis of the author’s friend and memories of their their youth when they were in love with the world, oblivious that it might end. Phillips recalls when they were seventeen, “in that year when all/we ever did is play.”

A few poems later, his sister discovers a dog’s leash in a coat pocket and cries. “Death is a god/damned thief.”

I think of my peers who have passed, friends lost early to disease or accident. Parents who died of cancer. We have the ashes of four dogs buried in the front garden. I live in my parent’s house and am haunted by Mom’s reflection in the mirror where I often watched her apply red lipstick. I remember the dogs waiting at the door, sleeping next to the bed.

Loss is inevitable. I am thankful for poets who put life’s grief into words.

Phillips writes about marriage and the momentary pleasures of life, the joy of pizza, and the man on the train who warns “y’all don’t understand yet,/ but you will.”

I understand. Doors are closing, time is short.

May the Living

who read this
still speak of the dead
with wild imprecision:

sins all forgotten,
rage overwritten,
as even our bitterest

enemies shed
great crocodile tears
and pretend.

I hereby forgive
all the bullshit
that follows a death.

If you’re reading this,
we were once friends.:

May the Living from Son of the Closing Doors by Patrick Phillips

Thanks to A. A. Knopf for a free book.… (more)

The author of this book moved to Forsyth County, Georgia in 1977 when he was in elementary school. His parents were seeking a slower, more rural way of life than Atlanta could offer, but they may not have realized that they were moving into one of the most racist, segregationist counties in the country. In fact, in 1990 there were only 14 African Americans in the county, all the way on the southern edge. Curious about how this came to be, he asked his fellow classmates but only received vague answers about a rape a long, long time ago. Years later, he decided to put the pieces together and figure out what really happened in Forsyth.

In 1912, most of the African Americans in Forsyth County were ex-slaves and sharecroppers, though there were a few who had acquired land and wealth post-reconstruction. A familiar trope in which a white woman accused a black man of breaking into her home and assaulting or attempting to assault her was the beginning of the troubles. There are various stories, one of which was that her husband came home and that is what prompted the woman to sound the alarm of rape on her lover. The man the sheriffs later arrested was visiting from another county and a relative of well-respected local black family. Others also arrested lived near the house where the alleged attack occurred. The white people of the town were enraged, not just at the alleged crime, but also at the uppity black people around them in Forsyth.

When another attack occurred later that year, this time on a girl walking home along a country road, the county was in a fervor. It did not take long to accuse another group of black residents of assaulting, raping, and leaving the girl for dead in the woods. The state troops even had to be called in to protect the accused after the beating of black preacher and a lynching of another black man was conducted. Of course, two men were later convicted and hanged, regardless of whether there was any proof. The larger crime, though, was the terrorism of African American residents and visitors of the county for the next 75 years.

One by one, black families were intimidated, their homes burned down, and their land taken over. In just a few months, not one black resident was left in the county. Even those who initially had protection from white employers were driven away when the white families were also unable to keep the violence at bay. Continued, consented violence for years to come would ensure that Forsyth County would remain white. When an African American crossed the border into the county not knowing with what brutality and intimidation they would be greeted with, they soon learned their grave mistake and never returned.

In 1987, civil rights organizers began took notice of Forsyth County; even Oprah dedicated an episode of her show to the issue. Once national attention shown light on the history and degree of racism of the place, the county drew ire from the country. Marches to protest the segregation of the county were met with violence. Even the most weathered in the civil rights movement were surprised by the level of hatred of the residents. Some local leaders were embarrassed while others were in denial.

After the marches, a biracial committee was formed by the governor. The dysfunction of the place was reiterated when even this committee could not agree on a single official report and two were filed. The most contentious issue was on the topic of reparations for the land stolen through intimidation and violence.

Twenty years later, the African American population of the county was only 2.6 percent, greatly under-representative of the area. As time and the economy continued to change the texture of the county, the old guard bigotry has gradually been replaced by suburban prosperity and anonymity. Most of the residents are likely unaware of the long history of racism of Forsyth County.

I had no idea of the history of Forsyth County. Intellectually I knew that places with such deep racism and hatred exist, but to read the story in black and white drove home just how devastating the expulsion was. This is a dark, distressing, and unnerving piece of American history that shows just one example of how difficult it can be to swim against the tides of institutional racism. Local government sanctioned theft and murder allowed this county to remain hateful well into the twentieth century, and America’s aptitude for denial of wrong-doing and idealized but not realized exceptionalism means that stories like this rarely receive the attention they deserve.… (more)

A History of Rampaging Racists

Patrick Phillips hoes heavily plowed territory (broadly, black-white relations, or lack of them, in America, from slavery to present day) and manages, often in powerful style, to produce a story that reveals much about white racial hatred. He accomplishes this by digging deep into the purposely buried history of among the most, if not the most, violent, hate-filled patches of land in the U.S.: Forsyth County, Georgia. Today it is a giant, wealthy (among the wealthiest in the country) beneficiary of Atlanta’s prosperity. However, it still bears, though out of sight by choice, the wounds of its violent racial rampage against its African American families, so that today African Americans comprise only 2.6 percent of the population (2010 U.S. census; even Alaska has a larger African American population, 4.3 percent), in a state with 31 percent of its citizens African American.

In September 1912, three young black workers are accused of raping and murdering a white girl. From that moment and for the next nearly one-hundred years, whites, often rampaging like packs of wild dogs, lynch and otherwise intimidate the black population of Forsyth County until it is nearly one-hundred percent white, and maintain the county as whites-only straight through the 1960s and 70s. Phillips draws on primary research that includes interviews with people who were children at the time to trace Forsyth’s lineage of hate.

And it literally is a lineage of hate. What Phillips demonstrates so effectively is how virulent race hate is. Those with the notion that time will resolve racial hate, that not everybody on the scene of hateful, barbaric acts condone them, will see how wishful such a thought is. In one of the more chilling passages, Phillips quotes from Royal Freeman Nash’s article that appeared in the November 1915 issue of W.E.B. Du Bois Crisis magazine. This has to do with whites taking advantage of blacks forced to sell whatever they could not carry as they fled Forsyth:

“‘Failure to vacate on the date set meant a stealthy visit in the night and either dynamite or the torch. The result was a state of terror which caused one Negro family to accept a twenty-four hour notice [delivered by] two children aged five and six respectively, who had learned the game from their elders.’”

A worthy addition to the sorrowful history of prejudice and hatred in America, made even more compelling when readers learn that the author’s parents and he himself participated in the January 1987 Brotherhood Marches to demand change.
… (more)