Last spring I was on sabbatical, but I still wanted the students in the African American literary studies program I coordinate to read some selections I selected. I felt that they needed to read a couple of poems from Cornelius Eady’s Brutal Imagination (2001) and learn about the circumstances of Susan Smith.
Smith is the white woman who fabricated a story about a Black man kidnapping her children. She had, in fact, killed them. Eady composed an arresting volume of poems that characterizes the tendency toward brutal imaginings that project and create Black men as criminals. I discovered Eady’s book when I was in graduate school, and the work has stayed with me throughout my career.
I wondered if my junior colleagues received my messages and instructions to discuss some of Brutal Imagination with the young’uns. Apparently they did. When I showed up on campus this time last year, I would encounter students and jokingly say that I heard they weren’t taking their studies seriously. More than a few responded, “Nooo, Professor Rambsy, don’t Susan Smith me.” That is, don’t lie on me.
It was hilarious. They had transformed Susan Smith into a verb. When I joked with one student about not working hard enough, she responded that I was “Susan Smithing” her. I told another student that folks told me he’d been skipping class, and he said, “Nope, they trying to Susan Smith me. They lying.”
So, yes, I learned that, even though I was away, students in African American literary studies at SIUE were made aware of Cornelius Eady’s Brutal Imagination.
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