In Hamburg with The Negro Avenged On Menzel’s Atelierwand In Madrid with Picasso’s Guernica

“like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host . . .” —W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

the actor, when he sees Füssli’s painting in his mind for the second time, thinks— yo body so black, ya mama can’t see ya

face. the woman clutching this semicentered and blackened male figure first stands out for the actor

due to her yellow-brown skin.

the moment before—a preternatural echo voicing the vibrato and distortion of two nearing white men—jars him slightly

from the Avenged Negro. the mulâtresse in her white dress and her unfurled, black hair long in the wind. almost blacker, the actor

notes, than the Negro’s blue-black skin. the disarmed torso of the Avenged disappears into the whipping

storm, as her one, reddish arm reaches and slaps a cackle of lightning. the left corner paints the suggestion of a body

of water—just as the actor finally notices the third figure, a darker brown onlooker. hooded, she appears with red, vaginal lips—

right of their feet—relocating time and the plateau, where these three figures find themselves

thrust upon. Füssli’s storm is a headache in the actor’s mind, a boulder rendering— a Black disappearing—nearly headless

and out of sight.