Summary of The Undertow By Jeff Sharlet: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of The Undertow By Jeff Sharlet: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

 

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Jeff Sharlet's The Undertow explores the powerful currents beneath the roiled waters of a nation coming apart, exploring how reaction has morphed into delusion, social division into distrust, distrust into paranoia, and hatred into fantasies of violence. He remembers and celebrates the courage of those who sing a different song of community, and explores a geography of grief and uncertainty in the midst of plague and rising fascism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Mar 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215954195

Willie M. Joseph

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Our Condition

This book is written from the middle of something, a season of coming apart. It is not natural, but it is in the broadest sense of our own American making. A friend suggests that when we are in the trough, it is hard to see the crest of the next wave, but that what we see as we rise with the water is that the next wave will be bigger, and the one after that bigger still. This is exemplified by the news that a winter fair that the town next door has long celebrated on the ice of a pond will not take place this year, or next. This is a small loss, but a real one.

This book of stories of difficult people doing terrible things is a register of grief and its distortions, how loss sometimes curdles into fury and hate, or denial, or delusion. The first time I found myself at gunpoint was twenty years ago, when a sheriff pulled a fake weapon without identifying it as such. The sheriff's stunt was a performance, and so, too, are the subjects of the stories that follow. These stories are about performances of Whiteness, the delusions with which it disguises and reveals itself. The hope of this book is to pull a thread of imagination through these pages, to notice moments of generosity, small solidarities, genuine wit, actual funny, real sorrow and love, anchored against the undertow of these times at its beginning.

Harry Belafonte's Day-O and Irene's Goodnight, Irene are two of the most important songs in the book, as they symbolize the care for one another and the need for new songs to make it through what is to come. The hope is that this book may reveal fault lines within our fears and inspire others to find better words for our children.

Day-O : On Hope

Voice and Hammer

Harry Belafonte was once the handsomest man in the world, with a high, buttery baritone and a smile that seemed to roll off him in soft waves. He was also known for his hard core of hostility, which was compared to Marlon Brando's. One day, he walks up Broadway in Manhattan with his wife, Pam, and admires a Porsche. He walks over to the car's owner, a rumpled White man, and takes out his money roll. He asks the White man how much he has, and the White man says one hundred thousand dollars.

Harry Belafonte pats the White man's shoulder and moves on. Harry Belafonte is a golden oldie who used to sing folk songs with a Jamaican accent and is now seen as a national treasure. One day, he takes Pam and the families of the movie's stars to a theater for a special screening of a documentary, Zero Percent, about a prison college program called Hudson Link at Sing Sing. The program's director, Sean Pica, is a graduate himself and learned about Harry Belafonte from him. At Sing Sing, five times a day, every man's in his cell for a head count and if one man is missing, the whole prison shuts down.

Pica couldn't remember anything like it. Belafonte was the first Black man to win a Tony, star in an all-Black Hollywood hit, and turn down starring roles. In 1959, he won the first Emmy awarded to a Black man for production, and starred in the most radical hour of network television ever broadcast. When he found it in a film archive, he gasped and laughed. He felt like he was watching a different past, one in which the revolution had been televised.

The most important details in this text are that Harry Belafonte was a sex symbol, but that his beauty was not what made him a star. Instead, it was his offer to seduce White women, which he mocked by mimicking the White women who presumed he could be theirs for the taking. He was a man or a boy? Lover or servant? Miss Barbara Britton fades to black and Tonight with Belafonte begins with a harsh charcoal drawing of a man so twisted, so fixed in nothing but pain that he's barely recognizable.

Seven bare-armed Black men, biceps like cannonballs, shoulders heaving, let their hammers fall. Eleven times the hammer falls, and then the light comes up, a spot on Belafonte. Harry Belafonte's song Bald-headed Woman is a chain-gang song that he found ten years earlier in the Library of Congress. He changed the lyric to jet-black woman and sings it on Jackie Gleason's Cavalcade of Stars. Belafonte believes that African American music, Caribbean music, is encrypted with meanings and that all songs are filled with metaphor and subtext.

Harry Belafonte's performance of Sylvie by Leadbelly is a tribute to Huddy Ledbetter, the ex-con LIFE magazine once called Bad N——-, the genius from whose twelve-string guitar not just Belafonte but Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and dozens of others learned the truths of the old songs. Belafonte took from Leadbelly the idea that you could take any song and make it your own, and his version of the song is slower, sadder, and sharper than Leadbelly's. Odetta's national debut is a version of Waterboy that could drive nails into the cross, and Belafonte roams the house singing ballads and kids' songs and comedy songs and work songs, Jump in the Line and Mo Yet and John Henry. He also introduces Odetta, who doesn't look like anything you've seen on television because she's fat. Harry Belafonte negotiated one of the first pay-or-play contracts in the business, giving Revlon an hour of primetime television with Odetta, the first Black dancer with Balanchine's New York City Ballet, and two then-unknown bluesmen, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee,