The Visible Man

While researching ideas for this project, I learned about the Works Progress Administration’s Folklore Project, which hired out-of-work writers to collect narratives about the American experience. Here, I discovered a connection to telling stories that was similar to mine—one that presented different perspectives on the “black experience.”

One of the writers who contributed to the Folklore Project was Ralph Ellison, who collected oral histories and folklore from black Americans to create stories about life in Harlem. Like Ellison, I also want to create narratives that have been within the black community for generations. I want to make drawings that escape the narrative of death and destruction that seem to be portrayed as the singular black experience in America.

One of the oral histories collected by Ellison for the Folklore Project is called “Sweet-the-Monkey,” a folk tale recounted to him in June 1939 by Harlem resident Leo Gurley on the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. In this story, the main character has the power to turn himself invisible and is regarded as a trickster. Several of my drawings for Federal Project No. 2 include a character representing me, drawn using a stipple technique to show that his “blackness” is nonexistent in the eyes of other people, that he is “not black enough”—rendering him invisible.

The drawings I made for this project represent both my own experience growing up black in Huntington Beach, California—where I was one of the only black kids in the punk scene and at my Christian high school—as well as the experiences of my friends. I wanted to move away from the usual stories of despair about race that I frequently see, and focus instead on the nuances and humor of the subject that often go unnoticed. So I collected friends’ stories of growing up, about experiences that shaped their identities.

In one, She Guided Her Mother’s Hands, a friend who is part of a biracial family buys a book to teach her own mom how to braid her hair. In Black As Punk, I wanted to tell the story of a friend who hated being the only black girl in the scene. No Nunchi shows my Korean friends and I hanging out together at a restaurant in Los Angeles. There was a time when there was stigma around black people and Koreans mingling, especially during the 1992 L.A. riots, so my friends and I like to talk about how we can come together, maybe even start a restaurant of our own. Other times, I want to hang out with friends and not talk about politics at all. I tell them: let’s just get pizza, and not worry about the news for a second. In I Wish My Pizza Came With No Worries, my character is walking past black intellectuals who are having an argument that’s never going to get resolved.

Several of the images also reference my own experiences. I went to Christian and private schools in Southern California, where there were 80 kids in my class and only three black kids. I don’t know what it feels like to go to a school where I’m in the majority. Class Portrait is an illustration of my and my friends’ experiences going to private schools.

Growing up, I loved reading, but I wasn’t always into reading black authors. I became self-conscious about the books I was supposed to read in high school and college, like W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, or The Autobiography of Malcolm X. These books educated me, but they also made me feel like I had to be black all the time.

As I created these drawings, I found myself wondering if I was running away from my blackness, or getting tired of having it dominate my life. Even in writing this, I’m still holding back my true feelings about the subject, out of fear of having my blackness questioned. It took a lot for me to not edit the drawings when I finished. Even though I’m constantly trying to live for myself, I guess my black experience is based on always questioning who I am.

Edward Cushenberry was born and raised in Orange County, California. Now he lives in the Los Angeles, where he splits his time between photographing his life and drawing everything else that’s going on in his world, in an attempt to merge real life with romanticism.