We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (20 page)

MAKING LEMONADE

When she first appears, we are not allowed to see her face.

We see her from the side, her arms draped over the roof of the SUV. She looks down, refusing our gaze. As she pushes back slowly, we anticipate seeing her but the shot quickly cuts to the side of a barn, a chain hanging heavily, a Southern tree. We are on the coast now, looking at the ruins of Fort Macomb, a brick bulwark wedged above the water to protect New Orleans from the British, taken by the Confederate Army in the Civil War, lost to the Union a year later, finally abandoned to storms and thieves. When we finally see her face she is below us, kneeling on a stage, her hair in a black wrap, her hands clasped as if in prayer, her eyes first closed then rising above us, as if pleading to a higher power. She wears a black hoodie.

This is the way Beyoncé’s film for her album
Lemonade
begins—with a refusal. She denies us her gaze the way that her lover has denied his. Nicholas Mirzoeff, the scholar of visual culture, calls the look that two people share the most fundamental to humanity, “the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love.” Through it, he says, “you, or your group, allow another to find you, and, in so doing, you find both the other and yourself.”
¹
Seeing each other fully and mutually is no less than the beginning of community. But
Lemonade
starts with a betrayal, the breakdown of this basic relationship. “Why can’t you see me?” Beyoncé says later to her lover, repeating the line over and over. “Everyone else can.”

Lemonade
is a story of infidelity and promises broken, the journey of one Black woman from grief to redemption. When the album and its accompanying film arrived, they generated speculation about her supposed marital drama with Jay-Z. But in the manner of works like D’Angelo’s
Black Messiah,
Kamasi Washington’s
The Epic
, and Kendrick Lamar’s
To Pimp a Butterfly
,
Lemonade
cannot be heard or seen separately from the exigency of the Movement for Black Lives.

In the way that post-hip-hop Black pop, like Malcolm X’s oratory, has been about having conversations in public without compromise or apology,
Lemonade
is an album addressed to women and to Black people, but most especially to Black women. Her grief is connubial, lineal, racial. Her desire is to be seen not just by her lover but by
her folks
. The world can watch too because it might learn something. And in this way, her redemption rises from the personal to the social—not the
universal
, because we see each other from different vantage points of power, but that space where we come together, allowing us all to think about the ways we are broken and how we might mend the ways we break each other, how we might imagine healing, reimagine history, and dream freedom.

The film, codirected with Kahlil Joseph, sets these stakes immediately. We are placed in the South, a geography that looms large in the American imagination of slavery and segregation, life and death. We see Spanish moss on the trees, a camp of windowless shacks, young Black women dressed in white antebellum dresses. We linger on one woman in a shoulderless dress of gray and scarlet, a small tattoo below her neck reading “Dream Big ♥.” Like the others, she stands silently as if bearing witness to the erased and untold history before them. “What are you hiding?” Beyoncé asks of her unfaithful.

“The past and the future merge to meet us here,” she says. “What luck, what a fucking curse.”

On the first song, “Pray You Catch Me,” she is locked outside her lover’s door, trying to listen in on his secret life, perhaps even seeking some kind of cathartic revelation of his crime. But she will not receive it. This moment is presented as stage one of her grief: intuition.
²
At the song’s conclusion, she whispers desperately, “What are you doing, my love?” She has been alienated from her lover and herself. In the film, she removes her hood and flings herself off a building in a death dive.

Denial is the next stage. She tries to purify herself as if she were a Yoruba iyawo, reaching for a communion with higher spirits—wearing white, fasting, abstaining from sex and mirrors. But the pain is inescapable. She describes it by evoking the memory of slavery and its intimate relationship with religion—its rituals of sacrifice, self-flagellation, supplication, and suffering.

In “Hold Up,” Beyoncé appears as Oshun, whom Joan Morgan writes is “the Yoruba Orisa/Goddess/Witch whose province includes affairs of the heart, (self) love, (re) birth, creativity, community, childbirth.”
³
She rises from the river in gleeful catharsis, taking her “Hot Sauce” bat to muscle cars, store windows, and surveillance cameras. All around her explosions go off and the corner boys gape. “Tonight I’m fucking up all your shit, boy!” she taunts on “Don’t Hurt Yourself.” And yet Beyoncé is still reminding her lover that their fates are intertwined. She sings, “When you lie to me, you lie to yourself.”

But after the release of anger, she descends into apathy and emptiness. She is broken and sleepless, even as she immerses herself in the daily grind and meaningless sex. She wanders through Southern mansions that do not feel like her own, that remind her only of what she has not gotten and who she is not. In “6 Inch,” constant labor provides her with an escape and a mission—adding commas and decimals, stacking cash. But it is red-lit, exhausting, unsustainable. At the climax, the house goes up in flames.

Riots, we were reminded after Ferguson and Baltimore, are what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the language of the unheard.” Here she stares back at us coldly, her face lit by the fire’s flicker, obscured by the smoke. But as a sample of Isaac Hayes’s version of “Walk On By” swells to its climax, she can be heard in a broken voice, crying out against her abandonment: “Come back.”
⁴

Yet there are also images of support and healing: women whose faces are drawn in Laolu Senbanjo’s Yoruba-influenced body paint joyfully swaying together; Serena Williams twerking—respectability be damned—sharing the throne and a look of power with Bey; women whose long white dresses are tied together at their hands, moving like a pulsing heartbeat; Bey and her defiant sisters gathered around the SUV against which she had earlier hidden her face—its tires are gone and it’s up on blocks, not going anywhere soon. Then the music suddenly drops out into a Malcolm X speech:

The most disrespected woman in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected woman in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.

As he speaks, we see everyday Southern Black women of all ages—at the gas station, in their neighborhood, along a busy street. Their relaxed, smiling faces break up a narrative of pain. They seem to say,
We are here, we are surviving
. And the rest of us are reminded too of how unseen and unheard Black women can be.

Indeed, Beyoncé’s method points to the way she wants her story to be read: as a larger, collective story of Black womanhood. The texts that glue the songs together in the film come from a collaboration with the Somali-British Muslim poet Warsan Shire. Much of the text comes from Shire’s album
warsan versus melancholy (the seven stages of being lonely)
, which also traces the fall of a love affair.

She quotes Shire’s poem “the unbearable weight of staying (the end of the relationship)” to reveal another layer of her own history: “i don’t know when love became elusive / what i know is that no one i know has it.” A New Orleans brass band gives way to Texas country blues on “Daddy Lessons,” a musical nod to her roots. The lyrics of the song focus on her semi-estranged father, who left her family after he was discovered to have fathered two children outside of his marriage.

Beyoncé has to detach from herself, and slips into the second person as she thinks about her lover’s refusal to reveal himself, and his refusal to see her. “Do his eyes close like doors? Are you a slave to the back of his head?” she asks. “Am I talking about your husband or your father?”

Through home video, father and daughter are shown in happier days—talking about seeing her grandparents, riding horses together. These are intercut with scenes of lightning storms, young girls playing, a teen donning her mother’s pearls and examining herself in the mirror, a young woman being harassed on the street by a leering man, an ecstatic funeral march. Where is this search into her past heading? The care and protection of family is one possibility. The cycle of pain and revenge is another.

Her self-interrogation continues. “Why do you deny yourself heaven? Why are you afraid of love?” Love seems to be the most impossible option. We see her crying as she lies on the floor of the New Orleans Superdome. After the fires, this is the bottom. She has returned to the same place where she once short-circuited her Super Bowl halftime show, where eight years before, tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Katrina, denigrated by the media, and treated as animals by federal and local authorities, sought refuge and comfort. On this Southern ground, she has seen the power and tragedy of humanity.

When the breakthrough comes, it happens in a kind of a baptism. We see her wading into the bayou waters at the head of a line of nine other women dressed in gauzy white Sunday dresses. Her moment of release comes when they look into the sun and raise their joined hands. She now has the power to break the curse, to return to her lover not as victim, but as redeemer.

At the March on Washington, King called on the nation to redeem its broken promises to African Americans. “Sandcastles” speaks of broken promises too. Her lover has broken his promise to be faithful to her. She has walked out on him and broken his heart. Yet she has also broken her promise to leave him. “Show me your scars and I won’t walk away,” she sings. He cannot walk away now. He must learn how to see her anew.

The climax of the film begins quietly—a gathering of beautiful young women for pictures and a feast. “So how we s’posed to lead our children into the future?” an elder asks. “Love.” Then a procession of powerful images begins: young women holding pictures of men who may be their fathers or grandfathers; the mothers of the fallen—Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin; Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner; Lezley McSpadden, mother of Michael Brown—holding pictures of their sons.

As Camry Wilborn said of the scene, “For black women, even grief is political.”
⁵
A young girl in a Mardi Gras Indian suit rattles her tambourine as she circles slowly round two empty dinner tables, a ritual to honor the ancestors. Finally, Beyoncé turns to Jay-Z’s grandmother Ms. Hattie White, who is speaking at her ninetieth-birthday party, to reveal the importance of working to transform the sour into the sweet: “I was served lemons and I made lemonade.” No set of images from Beyoncé—not even her standing in front of a screen that reads “Feminist”—better conjures a notion of Black women as bearers of legacy, protectors of justice, caretakers of boys, men, each other, than these.

Here is where we must make a leap—of faith, maturity, imagination—in the same way the post-Ferguson Movement for Black Lives has called on all of us to rethink everything from the bottom up—our shared language, images, and stories; the spaces where we learn, live, and work; who we think we are, individually and collectively. I use the term “we” here advisedly. If we are to undo resegregation and racialized exclusion, the fact is that some of us will have to work much harder than others. All of the forms of refusal, denial, and justification that preserve the structures of privilege will have to be undone to make room for those who are the most marginalized.

We often think of revolution as something to be won in bloodshed through war and the violent seizure of power. But as Grace Lee Boggs has put it, the next revolution might be better thought of as “advancing humankind to a new stage of consciousness, creativity, and social and political responsibility.”
⁶
Her revolution would require us to move away from finding new ways to divide and rule, and instead move toward honoring and transforming ourselves and our relations to each other.

To be sure, Beyoncé’s freedom dream is not about turning the other check. She riots through borders, breaks chains, “runs in truth.” Her tears become flames. “I need freedom too,” Beyoncé cries. But her freedom is not won in bitterness and revenge. Instead it is won through deep love. In the chorus of “Freedom,” it almost sounds as if she were singing, “
Women
don’t quit on themselves.” In the end, they celebrate around the table with the gifts of the garden, the antidotes discovered in the kitchens of nurturance, the recipes passed down generation by generation.

The chorus of the album’s penultimate song, “All Night,” suggests that the prize of reconciliation is hot makeup sex. But the verses take the song in another direction. She becomes the light to her lover’s darkness, a minister baptizing his tears. “Trade your broken wings for mine,” she sings. “I’ve seen your scars and kissed your crime.” In a line that has caused some consternation, Beyoncé sings,

True love breathed salvation back into me

With every tear came redemption

And my torturer became a remedy

For some, this moment of transfiguration rings false. The discovery of infidelity, the baseball bat, the explosions—all of that feels more real. But it is also worth asking: What does it mean that we are better able to see pain than love? That rage and conflict in art are perceived as deeply felt, while reconciliation and joy are dismissed as mere sentiment? Does it reveal more about how broken we are than about the art itself?

She sings, “They say true love’s the greatest weapon to win the war caused by pain.” In granting redemption, she frees her oppressor. But forgiveness frees her too, allows her to heal from her trauma: the self-hatred, destructiveness, and suicidal depression. Her torturer is not
the
remedy, he’s
a
remedy. As the song concludes in a bloom of strings, she whispers, “Oh I missed you my love.” Of course she has missed her lover. But she has also found herself. The “my love” she names is also self-love. The writer Ijeoma Oluo has written, “
Lemonade
is about the love that black women have—the love that threatens to kill us, makes us crazy and makes us stronger than we should ever have to be.”