Weaver, Lila Quintero, Darkroom

Dale Rappaneau Darkroom: A Memoir in Black & White

In the grand scheme of prolonged issues plaguing America, racial inequality—despite the nation’s claim of all men being created equal—remains one of the most prevalent. According to the NAACP, African Americans “are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites.” In 2017, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, white Americans had an average unemployment rate of 3.85, whereas “black or African” Americans had an unemployment rate of 7.46. High school graduation rates, yearly corporate earnings, CEO positions held by black vs. white Americans—across the board, it is proven time and time again that racial inequality is still very much alive in our nation. More than that, the white individuals threatened by the shrinking of this inequality will stop at no lengths to ensure they remain in power, as we saw with the neo-Nazi / white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and again in Charlottesville eight weeks later. White individuals, to protect their power and dominance, will literally fight, intimidate, and even kill those opposing their rule.

America's graduation rates, National Center for Education Statistics, updated Apr., 2017.

This tendency toward violence, as history demonstrates, is no new behavior, but it has become more publicized, thanks to the widespread reach of the Internet. These days, if someone acts out in a racist or violent manner (e.g., police brutalization against young black men), it’s easy to catch the act on camera and upload it online for thousands or millions to see. However, prior to the Internet age, publicizing such racist activities required more logistical hoops through which to leap in order to get the word out. You had to have camera equipment, had to catch the act on camera, had to develop the film, then send it to a newspaper or magazine willing to print the material, which often meant being at the mercy of white publication owners, etc. etc. This complicated process has resulted in some crucial (and violent) events going unpublicized, resulting in modern recreations of those events for historical purposes, as seen in the graphic novel Darkroom: A Memoir in Black & White.

Darkroom (left) and author Lila Quintero Weaver (right).

In this novel, author Lila Quintero Weaver, an Argentinian woman who as a young girl immigrated to America with her family, recounts her life growing up in (and at times around) Marion, Alabama, in the early 1960s. At that time, as no doubt many of us are aware, racial tensions were high. The Civil Rights Act of 1960 had recently passed, which was designed to fight back against segregation in the South, and the country was on its way to passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination and prohibited segregation in schools. The nation was divided between black and white, and being neither, Weaver throughout the novel finds herself and her family caught somewhere in the middle.

The novel’s subtitle is an obvious nod to this binary understanding of race in the South, but it’s also a nod to how Weaver’s father loved to take black-and-white photos. In fact, much of the novel’s imagery is designed to emulate black-and-white photographs, as if Weaver were trying to recreate actual images of the past. For much of the novel this just feels like a stylistic choice, but late into the novel it becomes obvious that Weaver’s intent is to use black-and-white photograph imagery to support her deliberate recreation of events, for the entire novel builds to the critical moment when Weaver and her family live through a violent, Charlottesville-like riot, of which there exists no photographic documentation.

Throughout the novel, Weaver reminds the reader of her father’s love of photography and videography. We see him developing film in his darkroom. We see him taking photos of his children. The novel opens with Weaver discussing how much fun she had watching her father rewind home video tapes on a television, how everything felt odd yet hilarious in reverse. This focus on her father’s hobby is crucial because he was one of the few individuals with recording equipment in attendance at the Marion, Alabama riot of 1965.

This riot broke out in response to a planned peaceful march by African Americans from a church in Marion to a local prison. Whites from around the area heard about the march and decided to perform their own counter-protest against the black protestors. The police sided with the whites, and when the march had begun, the police coordinated a shut-off of the town’s electricity so the whites could attack under the cover of darkness. Reporters and photographers (including Weaver’s father) heard about the mayhem and came to capture it all on film, but they were attacked by the police and white rioters. Cameras were broken. Reporters were run off the scene. Lenses were vandalized with black paint. The intent was clear: no visual evidence. The rioters wanted their actions to go undocumented.

The riot resulted in the death of a single black American, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who is described in the novel as fleeing the scene with his grandparents. Jackson takes his grandparents into a local cafe for safety, but a trooper follows them into the cafe and we are left only with the sound of a gunshot in the darkness. Weaver is careful not to recreate this event beyond the bare details—name of victim, seen going to cafe with grandparents, followed by trooper, gunshot—because her integrity as a historian is dependant on her depiction of the events. If she overstepped from recreation to fabrication, the entire novel would come crumbling down, thus we are given merely the reality of a single gunshot and a single black man killed during the riots.

As horrifying as the riots may be, Weaver seems to argue that the true horror, for her at least, came the next morning when she walked to school. Despite a few shards of broken glass here and there, the entire town seemed to be functioning as normal. People went about their business as if a huge riot had not just occurred. At school, the event was given little attention, and people were already phrasing Jackson being shot as something he deserved. (”That colored boy that got shot threw a bottle at that state trooper, you know.” “In that case, he got exactly what he deserved.”) The blatant and belligerent violence against the peaceful black protesters was seen as something they earned through their behavior, as if wanting equality were an assault against the whites in charge. This moment, when we see Weaver as a girl wandering through the town, hearing the white people talk about the incident as if it were nothing, that’s the true horror of racism. It’s the acceptance of the unacceptable in the face of losing power.

Charlottesville white supremacy protest.

Darkroom: A Memoir in Black & White is a daring novel, one that attempts to provide the past with what it never received: visual evidence and representation. From our Internet age perspective of today, it can seem odd to take such care in capturing a single event via an entire novel, but Weaver is giving the Marion riot its due attention. She wants the reader to understand the nuances that led up to the outbreak of violence, and that her family, in part because they were neither categorized as white nor black, were granted privilege as outsiders to the entire ordeal. The white Americans accepted them for being not black, and the black Americans accepted them for being not white, thus Weaver and her family became impartial observers, which is exactly what one wants from a historian. Weaver has no claim to either side of the binary divide; she is just telling us the realities of what happened, like watching a movie play out on page.