Critique
Article reserved for subscribers
Julien Delmaire revives a spark of hope in an America of the 1930s where racial segregation rules the roost.
Mississippi, 1932. “Admire the painting for me: these superb losers clumped together like flageolets in sauce, these counterfeit faces that no longer even dare to be reflected in a mirror. Give me a look at those hands, black and worn – the hands of cotton pickers, peons, lumberjacks, high rollers. Nowhere will you find such a concentration of damned per hectare. […] Singer of blues in this kind of harbour, it’s a sacred responsibility. You watch over dozens of souls, you help them cross reefs of emotion and you have to embellish them, scour them from the inside. You are the guarantor of the beauty of the breed, old man!
Because life outside these walls, once past the heat of the dancefloor tired and dizzy from bootleg liquor, laughs at the beauty. “Kids grow up too quickly, little girls see their bellies grow before they have solved the riddles of a tender age. Hunger obliges and misery corners. The blood cuts itself to the blood. All are victims of “the ancient curse”they have “committed the crime of being born naked, of being born black and of believing in the infallible clock of the seasons”. So many noble or lost souls, but all of blood blues.
Weaving talismans and summoning spirits
There’s Steve and Betty who love each other on the fringes of purity, which is to say as close as you can get. When Steve comes home from the bakery where he’s been toiling since he was about ten, he knows that “with a simple word, she [vengera] to…