Poem #2: "Where Will Their Names Go Down?"

James A. Emanuel’s three-stanza poem “Where Will Their Names Go Down?” uses questions to interrogate the importance of ancestor acknowledgment. In Emanuel’s handwritten annotation of the poem at top of the page, he explains that the title was inspired by an unanswered letter he sent to the New York chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In the letter, he proposed that “the names of ordinary African Americans who have suffered violent and severe punishment for demanding their civil rights (especially voting rights then) be recorded [in] The Congressional Record” (Emanuel “Where Will Their Names Go Down?” with annotations). The poem he wrote as a response to his suggestion functions as dirge that mourns and memorializes these ancestors.

The poem poses three explicit questions that reflect Emanuel’s ancestor acknowledgment. These questions coupled with Emanuel’s dispersed use of anaphora fill the poem with irony and anger. The first question, also the title, “Where will their names go down?,” addresses the unacknowledged names (though Emanuel specifically refers to them as “boys”) of those who suffered violence for demanding their civil rights (2). He writes that their bodies are “sunk link by link” (3), and their bones (“socket, bone, and upright knee”) are “muscled down dead” (4-5). In emphasizing that their bodies—bones and all—are down “[i]n the Tallahatchie, the Mississippi, and the Pearl” rivers, he creates irony with question: where will their names go down? Because while bodies have perished, their names have not perished with them. And, just as the location of their bodies is known, their names are known as well. Within this poem, Emanuel creates a synthesis of ancestor acknowledgment that according to Christel Temple includes “elements of honor, praise, dirges, and eulogies, as well as naming” (42).

The poem’s second question evokes anger that the ancestors have not been acknowledged and honored properly. The speaker asks “Will they rise again / Except to velvet eyes / And rainbow fins that pierce the deep?” (7-9). Initially, this passage may seem more concerned with the fate of their bodies rather than their names. Like mythic creatures, these boys seem destined to return as fish who swim the depths of the sea. However, the speaker questions whether there is more to their existence than the reincarnation of their physical forms. Beneath this inquiry lies a deeper concern: Will the ancestors’ names rise to be remembered and memorialized? Or will they remain lost to pierce the depths of history?

The third question builds upon the second and creates an anaphora, which accentuates the anger in the poem. The speaker asks whether the ancestors will rise “except to flush in streams that knife the seas / And rush their secrets through the foundations of the world?” (emphasis added 10-11). The sermonic tone in this passage makes this third question noteworthy for its ancestor acknowledgment. When read with the stanza as a whole, the word “rise,” the repetition of “except to” and the rhythmic cadence gives the stanza a powerful punch. For one does not “rise” from the dead to do a diminishing thing—“except to.” Also, there is irony in the fact that anything involving “the foundations of the world” is considered a limitation. For even the poem’s meter contradicts this, for the stanza’s meter expands when “foundations of the world” is uttered. But for the speaker, this is limiting; ancestor acknowledgment is foundational.

Emanuel notes in his type-written annotation that “[t]he phrase ‘foundations of the world’ comes from the author’s memory [his recollection] of Melville’s treatment of Pip’s terror in Moby-Dick, afloat in the sea.” However, my examination of Moby-Dick suggests a stronger connection to Ahab’s speech to the severed head of the whale, in which he implores it to reveal its secrets:

…tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; (Melville ch. 70).

Like the great-white whale, these ancestors carry untold secrets that travel with them through the seas. They are the “unrecorded names” with “untold hope” that Moby-Dick encounters, and they are among the “bones of millions of the drowned” where this now decapitated whale has dived. The speaker’s final question asks whether their names will rise beyond the fate of being lost in the depths, unspoken, and unrecorded.

These questions are never answered fully, yet there is an urgency and anger in the poem’s pleading for one. The speaker emphasizes this urgency through the passage of time: “Right before our eyes / They sank, and pulled us to our knees. / From swollen prayers we rise to fiercely shake a chain of days” (12-14). This passage shows that grief and prayer have brought witnesses and mourners to their knees, but they may have remained there too long. Weariness and inflammation have set in, anger has erupted, and time “as a chain of days” has passed (14). So many days have gone by that the ancestors’ blood spilled in violence has thinned to a “dying scrawl” as it moves through the rivers (15-17). Through collective ancestral acknowledgment, Emanuel’s poem urges us to confront the question: Where will the names of ordinary African Americans who suffered violent or severe punishment for demanding their civil rights, especially voting rights, be recorded? If not in The Congressional Record, then where?

I can imagine that Emanuel would have respected the intention of the Equal Justice Initiative’s “Freedom Monument Sculpture Park” which memorializes the history of racial violence through visual and immersive experiences, including the recitation of lynching victims’ names and representations of their suffering (Legacy Sites). In its own way, Emanuel’s poem serves as an alternative record of historical injustice. While “Where Will Their Names Go Down?” was never entered into The Congressional Record in the way he initially suggested, its presence in the James A. Emanuel papers (1922-2018) at the Library of Congress ensures that acknowledgement of those “ordinary African Americans” who fought for civil rights are in a congressional building. Through poetry, Emanuel creates a collective ancestor acknowledgment as his own form of historical reckoning.