Phrase used by Whites to express their surprise and disapproval of social or political conditions which, to the Negro, are devastatingly usual. Often accompanied by an unsolicited touch on the forearm or shoulder, this expression is a favorite among the most politically liberal but socially comfortable of Whites. Its origins and implications are necessarily vague and undefined. In other words, the source moment of separation between “now” and “ever” must never be specified. In some cases, it is also accompanied by a solicitation for unpaid labor from the Negro, often in the form of time, art, or an intimate and lengthy explanation of the Negro’s life experiences, likely not dissimilar to a narrative the Negro has relayed before to dead ears. Otherwise, in response to the circumstances occurring “now,” as ever, but suddenly and inexplicably “more” than ever, this is an utterance to be met with a solemn nod of the head and, eventually and most importantly, absolution, which all Good Whites are convinced they deserve. When a time or era achieves “more than ever” status, many Negroes will assume duties kindred to those of priesthood, e.g., receiving confessions, distributing mercy, et cetera. Though, as noted above, the precise connotation of this phrase is quite obscured in its usage, it seems to be uttered in moments of “Aha!” or, more bluntly, “I straight up did not believe you before,” wherein “before” = “ever.” (See also: Negro Lexicon entries #42 & #43: “same shit, different day” and “samo samo.”) Subtexts, then, underscoring this phrase are quite sinister in nature, varying from “Your usefulness, Negro, is married to your misfortune” and “Time is linear,” the implications of which are that (1) value is time sensitive, (2) conditions of despair are temporary, and (3) anything at all can be new, belonging exclusively to “now” and untethered to “ever” (i.e., past, future). These understandings of time versus import are likely due to the fact that spurs to action and empathy for the Whites are often directly correlated to any present dangers facing their individual freedoms, or even simply when one “feels like it.” (See also: Case Study #5: “Empathy.”) This reveals in Whites a compulsion to reformation based upon desire, excitement, guilt, or otherwise self-indulgent emotions, whereas it would appear that the Negro must live the life of the Negro ever, now, and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever [. . .] and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever (cont.)
Suggested Reading
The Green and the Gold
By Helen Longstreth“Gabe said he’d told his dad that he’d marry me if he had a dollar. ‘I dunno about marriage,’ I told him.”
The Daily
First Person
The Art of Poetry No. 114
By Sharon Olds
From left, Galway Kinnell, Robert Hass, Olds, and Brenda Hillman in the Oakley house at the Community of Writers, Olympic Valley, California, 1989. Courtesy of Sharon Olds and the Community of Writers.
Sharon Olds published her first book, Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of thirty-seven. The book is organized into four sections, “Daughter,” “Woman,” “Mother,” and “Journey,” and it begins with its title poem, whose speaker is locked in a box she can open only by repeating after Satan: “Say shit, say death, say fuck the father.” At the time, Olds—who was born in San Francisco, graduated from Stanford, and received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia—was married to a psychiatrist, and she spent her days on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, caring for their two young children. Not long after the book’s publication, she told me last year, someone who had invited her to give a reading picked her up at the airport and said, “I thought you would look angrier.”
From the Archive, Issue 244
Interview
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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