A True Story of Institutional American Racism: Len Lawson’s “Negro Asylum for the Lunatic Insane” https://ift.tt/hIOrSXo
Time never feels stable in Len Lawson’s stunning collection of interconnected poems, Negro Asylum for the Lunatic Insane. While the events of the book may be rooted in 1973, thematically we’re thinking about 2020 in one poem and 1865 in another. Lawson tells the story of the fictional Calhoun Asylum, drawing inspiration from the very real South Carolina State Hospital. Nothing about these poems feels untrue. Lawson flawlessly conveys the dark history of American racism by depicting a mental health facility in South Carolina, the patients and staff that reside there, and the destruction such a place causes.
Lawson wows readers with his style and skill within the first five pages of the collection. The first glimpse of this creative scope is “Chamberlain Taylor Gambles Away His Estate, 1853,” the origin story of Calhoun. The repetition of “He never met a bet he didn’t like ” and “He bet on black” creates music like Taylor would have heard on his gambling riverboats. Having lost his house to gambling debts, the big house is transformed into Calhoun in the following poem, “John C. Calhoun Asylum for the Lunatic Insane.” Lawson toggles between the original house and what becomes of it, concluding with the electric lines, “Master buried there with a headstone braces for chaos/ Night excite might bite tight despite white flight from Calhoun.” Following a fictional dedication speech by Strom Thurman, Lawson offers a blackout poem of the same text, which vibrates to the cruel beat of history, ending with the words, “this nation of chaos will fear you Negro forever.”
Another standout poem, “Seizure,” features words that are printed backward, in smaller and larger font, and in italics. The last line queries:
“Seizure” by Len Lawson from “Negro Asylum for the Lunatic Insane.” Main Street Rag Publishing Co., January 27, 2023
The reader is left to puzzle if the seizure is the rapture or the escape from capture, and in that puzzle lies Lawson’s brilliance.
These poems sing with life, humanizing those among us who have transgressed, and this vitality is no clearer than in the section, “Patients.” The first three poems in this section call our attention to Brock Bridges, a sylph-like patient at Calhoun who loves butterflies, has been hospitalized for public urination, and is responsible for the death of an orderly. There is also Birdie, who “saw real fruit hanging” and killed her children. There is “Miss Berenice, Goddess of Sweet” with her swollen leg and Alzheimer’s disease, and Aggie, who left her baby floating in the commode. Lawson’s skillful verse allows a reader to see the patients’ complexities, even in the face of terrible deeds.
The unnamed narrator, a night watchman at Calhoun, is the bard of this collection, observing what’s in the moment and connecting these events to his childhood, experience in WWII, and even projecting into the future with observations that resonate with the concerns of the Black Lives Matter movement. Observing Brock Bridges experience shock therapy in the poem of the same name, the narrator remarks, “Once I heard my daddy say / Fish ain’t got no memory / no past to go back to / only the now / I hoped the same for Brock / his eyes wide roaming for answers / body flapping / not to be caught.” The narrator observes Brock trying to catch butterflies in the courtyard with skepticism, saying “Matter of fact I hate butterflies / They give people false hope / Everything can’t have wings / Everybody wasn’t made to fly / Ask all them Africans that didn’t / grow wings still on the plantation.”
The most intimate and painful moment lies not in the narrator’s memories of the battlefield or the mistreatment of the patients at Calhoun, but when the narrator finds Betsy the cat and her litter, in “New Birth.” While there are five living cats, one has died and its head is full of maggots. He buries the kitten with such tenderness:
I pivoted from the dumpster out to Taylor’s grave and dug a two-foot hole in the ground. I looked back over at Betsy lying flat now in the grass while the youngins gnawed for milk, and I dropped the body in, raking stray maggots into the hole.
He goes on to salute the dead kitten, but it’s the raking of the stray maggots that shows the soul of this narrator and his care with the lives he observes, those others would disregard.
Calhoun may have been constructed in Len Lawson’s imagination, but the Negro Asulym for the Lunatic Insane is a true story of American racism and humanity that cannot be destroyed by hatred or intolerance. This collection should be savored and re-read, for the luminescence of these poems lights our past and our futures.
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