You’ve seen me.  You’ve seen me many times and would like to forget.  But you can’t.  I won’t let you.  More importantly, the people who did this wanted everyone to remember I belonged to them and when I escaped they and their bloodhounds chased me several days through mosquito-filled swamps and forests and dragged me back to be whipped so bad I spent weeks in bed.

I eventually escaped again, taking onions to rub on my body to confuse the dogs, and days later staggered into a Union army camp where they treated me well and two men took photographs of my back, as I sat and turned left to reveal a profile they said looked like an actor’s, and a doctor who examined the frightening network of scars on my back said my story would go into the big Harper’s Weekly magazine so everyone would know it’s a lie that slaves are treated well.

I don’t think anyone knew my last name.  I don’t remember anyone asking.  I wish my full name had been in the magazine article with the powerful photographs.  Please just remember my name is Gordon.  We’ll never know the names of countless others who also suffered the whip.  But now I suppose I’m famous in a big art museum in Los Angeles because a man named Arthur Jafa made Ex-Slave Gordon, a sculpture of me in vacuum-formed plastic, that raises my scars into eyes and makes you ask, “What happened to you, Gordon?”

“I joined the Union army and attacked the enemy but was captured and whipped again, this time by a crazed rebel, and almost died before another escape, and that’s all anyone knows if they even know that.”

Ex-Slave Gordon at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Arthur Jafa in the New York Times Style Magazine

Sources

Jafa, Arthur – Ex-Slave Gordon, vacuum-formed plastic, in the Los Angeles Museum of Art in April 2023.  “Arthur Jafa in Bloom” by Megan O’Grady in the New York Times Style Magazine on August 14, 2019.  “A Typical Negro” in Harper’s Weekly in 1863.

George Thomas Clark authored the collection Paint it Blue