Where Is the Master’s House

Title. Where Is the Master’s House?

Object. Top Hat

12 associations

1.     Berlin

2.     School

3.     Manchester

4.     Corn Exchange

5.     Manchester Museum

6.     The Whitworth

7.     A crime scene

8.     Topography of Terror

9.     Checkpoint Charlie

10. Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

11. Artefacts

12. Isabel Wilkerson: Caste

Where is the master’s house? I’ll state the obvious, shall I? It is in our minds, our hearts, our DNA. It is shipped wholesale as cargo with the cotton, the sugar, the artefacts from around the world that are housed in the Manchester Museum as curios about the less-than-humans who live in faraway lands.

Let’s go right back to the beginning. Allowing the Science and Industry Museum, or the Guardian, or any English Institution to devise reparation exhibitions, in other words, use the master’s tools to dismantle the master's house, even for a few months so we can look at what he did and what he needs to ask forgiveness for, or make reparations for, is like asking Jeffrey Dahmer to solve the crimes committed by Jeffrey Dahmer. To watch him put up a crime board, you know, the thing with the string leading from one potential assailant to the other. To join up the dots. But the bastard who is joining up the dots is the actual fucking serial killer. 

Let’s unpack that shall we. In my mind-maps the master wears a top hat. Look at the mind-map. Then follow the top hat. A bit like following the money. It leaves the shore. He is ensconced on the shore of Virginia, Jamaica, Cuba, Brazil. Having a fucking wonderful life. 1000s of staff, wrong word, enslaved people, lighting his candles, cooking his soup. his cornbread, filling the tureens, minding his kids, providing more enslaved people, sometimes their own kids fathered by him.

The goods get put on a ship which is driven by a person wearing a slightly battered top hat. He may have bought it second hand, or he’s had it for years, or he only wears it for best, or when he is looking for whores in New Orleans where the fair skinned girls, oh, the fair skinned girls, when he wants to appear better than he is. Don’t we all?

There’s another set of top hats waiting to barter the price, in a similar building to the Corn Exchange, where the Royal Exchange tells stories written by other top hats for years, for centuries. For fucking centuries. Stories that don’t make any sense anymore. Who gives a fuck about Hedda​, no, she's called Nora. Who actually gives a fuck, the spoilt bitch. 

On them ships, more than likely, on them ships, that trail up the River Irwell, where Factory International stands, leading to the Manchester Ship Canal and the Rochdale Canal, most likely, are artefacts. And even if there aren’t, the stuff shipped up the canals fund the expeditions to gather artefacts so they can wonder and revel in the exotic narratives — about these less-than-humans — in their top hats, and their bustles and their parasols and their arms linked, and their demeanour, and their nosegays, and their laudanum, and their manners, and their house parties where they do pay them at this end cos they can afford to now.

Like they can afford to buy paint to express their feelings, or document a top hat of great importance and the things in his room that says this about him, his living artefacts, the ones that pass down into our DNA that says he is, will always be​, a better man than you. And even if the artist does not wear a top hat, only a top hat can pay for his paint and his labour, and we know how that goes. That picture is his delusion. The artist is missing. The artist is simply a mouthpiece. Even if no one is specifically commissioning him, a top hat has set the pace, a top hat has decided who is important, what themes are important, what is this season about. The Whitworth is full of them. The school of. The era of. Abstract art. Expressionists art. Top hat art.

The art we are fed in school. Wearing a top hat and looking important is an art. Disraeli. Can’t remember a thing about him and why I should care. He did some bad underhand shit though no doubt. I can’t believe they tell these stories with a straight face. And poor old Frederick Douglass with his hair parted and his frock coat and his marvellous oratory. And his deft pen and lines, that the top hats and the bustles clap. What an unusual less-than-human. He almost sounds like us. He almost has us fooled. Apart from the colour of his skin you could imagine him in a nice life. He has a nice life. He has a nice house. He has a job. His job is to demand reparations as long as he uses the master’s tools. Imagine him on stage screaming, ‘You cunts.’

The closest I have ever been to seeing how it should be done is in Berlin. The Topography of Terror. No one tells the truth about Hitler as well as the Germans. They leave no stone unturned. Well, they might do. But they turn more stones than most. Him and his lack​eys and the things they do. How the ordinary choose not to look. And the bottom line, it is just fleecing everyone. Just the same as everyone else he is just fleecing everyone. But then there’s this picture in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, it is the most insane photo I have ever seen and shows the depravity that was going on in our lifetime. It’s not even a century ago yet. There are 2 German soldi​ers holding rifles. Walking amongst the bodies, the naked bodies of, definitely tens, maybe even a hundred, Jewish women. And sat there too is an unhurt, fully clothed little boy. They find it on the desk of an officer. A trophy. Wow, they display their officer’s trophy, their dysfunction, cos everyone who has gone in his office has seen this photo. It is more than likely a talking point. A laughing point even. A game. Count the naked Jewish females, when they’re drunk on whiskey not power. Drunk on power. But they don’t learn their lesson, a few decades later they watch a boy bleed to death in CheckPoint Charlie’s no man’s land. Both sides. Both sides don’t take responsibility. Both sides watch him bleed out.

The whole of Berlin is a crime scene. It’s in the bullet holes in the walls of their National Museum Berlin. In all the reconstructed master's houses. Berlin is an illusion. Obliterated. A pastiche. A homage to regret. That taints their people. 

There has never been a stack of suitcases, or glasses behind glass, or hair, what about hair. Not in Manchester. Manchester is also a crime scene. Manchester is the beneficiary of criminal activities. Manchester buries their guilt beneath the crazy paving patios of their institutions. And they want the Reno to be a piece. To throw the Reno on the floor and use the broken pieces to fit in between the slabs. I don’t think so. I don’t fucking think so.

• The Reno was full of teenage kids. Mostly.
• ​Flooded with great tracks. Always.
• Having a weed. Mostly.
• Cutting our teeth. Cubs in a lair. Always.
• Shagging each other. Sometimes.
• Half-caste guys shagging white girls from town. Mostly.
• Half-caste girls taking the fucking piss out of half-caste guys who they see as their brother. Always.
• And here my friends is a wonderful story that no one tells when they tell the story of the oppressed. Cos it gives no top hat, no bustle, the opportunity to sprout wings.

NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF J. D. GREEN,
A RUNAWAY SLAVE, FROM KENTUCKY
CONTAINING AN ACCOUNT OF HIS THREE ESCAPES,
In 1839, 1846, and 1848.

When I was sixteen I was very fond of dancing, and was invited privately to a negro shindy or dance, about twelve miles from home, and for this purpose I got Aunt Dinah to starch the collars for my two linen shirts, which were the first standing collars I had ever worn in my life; I had a good pair of trousers, and a jacket, but no necktie, nor no pocket handkerchief, so I stole aunt Dinah's checked apron, and tore it in two — one part for a necktie, the other for a pocket handkerchief. I had twenty-four cents, or pennies which I divided equally with fifty large brass buttons in my right and left pockets. Now, thought I to myself, when I get on the floor and begin to dance — oh! how the niggers will stare to hear the money jingle. I was combing my hair to get the knots out of it: I then went and looked in an old piece of broken looking-glass, and I thought, without joking, that I was the best-looking negro that I had ever seen in my life. About ten o'clock I stole out to the stable when all was still; and while I was getting on one of my master's horses I said to myself — Master was in here at six o'clock and saw all these horses clean, so I must look out and be back time enough to have you clean when he gets up in the morning. I thought what a dash I should cut among the pretty yellow and Sambo gals, and I felt quite confident, of course, that I should have my pick among the best-looking ones, for my good clothes, and my abundance of money, and my own good looks — in fact, I thought no mean things of myself.

When I arrived at the place where the dance was, it was at an old house in the woods, which had many years before been a negro meetinghouse; there was a large crowd there, and about one hundred horses tied round the fence – for some of them were far from home, and, like myself, they were all runaways, and their horses, like mine, had to be home and cleaned before their masters were up in the morning. In getting my horse close up to the fence a nail caught my trousers at the thigh, and split them clean, up to the seat; of course, my shirt tail fell out behind, like a woman's apron before. This dreadful misfortune almost unmanned me and curtailed both my pride and pleasure for the night. I cried until I could cry no more. However, I was determined I would not be done out of my sport after being at the expense of coming, so I went round and borrowed some pins, and pinned up my shirt tail as well as I could. I then went into the dance and told the fiddler to play me a jig. Che, che, che, went the fiddle, when the banjo responded with a thrum, thrum, thrum, with the loud cracking of the bone player. I seized a little Sambo gal, and round and round the room we went, my money and my buttons going jingle, jingle, jingle, seemed to take a lively part with the music, and to my great satisfaction every eye seemed to be upon me, and I could not help thinking about what an in impression I should leave behind upon those pretty yellow and Sambo gals, who were gazing at me, thinking I was the richest and handsomest nigger they had ever seen: but unfortunately the pins in my breeches gave way, and to my great confusion my shirt tail fed out; and what made my situation still more disgraceful was the mischievous conduct of my partner, the gal that I was dancing with, who instead of trying to conceal my shame caught my shirt tail behind and held it up. The roar of laughter that came from both men and gals almost deafened me, and I would at this moment have sunk through the floor, so I endeavoured to creep out as slyly as I could; but even this I was not permitted to do until I had undergone a hauling around the room by my unfortunate shirt tail: and this part of the programme was performed by the gals, set on by the boys — every nigger who could not stand up and laugh, because laughing made them weak, fell down on the floor and rolled round and round.

When the gals saw their own time they let me go, and I hurried outside and stood behind the house, beneath a beautiful bright moon, which saw me that night the most wretched of all negroes in the land of Dixie: and what may me feel, in my own opinion, that my humiliation was just as complete as the triumph of the negroes inside was glorious, was that the gals had turned my pockets out, and found that the hundreds of dollars they had thought my pockets contained, consisted of 24 cents or pennies; and 50 brass buttons. Everything was alive and happy inside the room, but no one knew or cared how miserable I was — the joy and life of the dance that night seemed entirely at my expense, all through my unfortunate shirt tail.

Excavating the Reno, Jeff Bassey​, a super-excavator, whispers in my ear, ​'Don’t think I have forgot you and the Prouses taking the piss out of me.​' His Mr T type chains. Silver not gold. It is almost exactly the same fucking story.

Listen, we’ve got our life, and you’ve got yours. Like the Jewish people — man, woman and child — on their way to almost certain death, and their final notes, illuminated on the floor inside the ​Topography of Terror, and the ordinary things they say. I can only remember a shopping list. There is no drama. There is no contextual drama. They are allowed to be what they are, what is happening, who they are. You wanna do an exhibition that attempts reparations​, go and find some of those peoples' ​real words. Like Mary’s newspaper article after the US Civil War 1865. 

I wish to inquire for my relatives, whom I left in Virginia about 25 years ago. My mother’s name was Matilda; she lived near Wilton, Va., and belonged to a Mr. Percifield. I was sold with a younger sister — Bettie. My name was Mary, and I was nine years old when sold to a trader named Walker, who carried us to North Carolina. Bettie was sold to a man named Reed, and I was sold and carried to New Orleans and from there to Texas. I had a brother, Sam, and a sister, Annie, who were left with mother. If they are alive, I will be glad to hear from them. Address me at Morales, Jackson Co., Texas.—Mary Haynes.”

So, Mary last sees her mum around 1840 when the Science and Industry ​is the Liverpool and Manchester Railway and its the 1830 warehouse.​ Both being fed by her labour and her loss. Honour the fucking human being​s that gives their life, their existence, whether they like it or not, to buoy the human condition. Without their sacrifice there would be no Manchester. No Manchester Science and Industry Museum. No science the way we know it today. No art. We’d all be slogging away to make ends meet. 

But, fuck off, anyway. How can you make reparations, like how can you piecemeal the digestion system when you eat a piece of bread? How can you with the naked eye, or even instruments of science, or even the largest computer in the world, know how to replicate what the internal digestive mechanism does with the components of the bread to remedy or harm the entity to which it has been fed? Everything has evolved together. The wheat, the gut, the enzymes, the bacteria. The dance is symbiotic now. Like the 3000-year-old Hindi, Brahmin — Dalit, caste system​ the master's house is built upon. Studied by the Third Reich. Who are in turn studied by the perpetrators of Jim Crow.

Isabel Wilkerson. (p276. Paperback. Caste. The Origins of Our Discontent.’  ‘I was standing during a lunch break at a conference in Delhi. A Dalit scholar and I were communing about our kindred perspectives when an upper-class (Brahmin) woman walked up and broke into the conversation to tell the Dalit woman what she should have included in her presentation, a point that missed and which she would do well to include the next time. … I asked the Dalit women if she knew the woman who had interrupted us, because she had spoken with such familiarity and comfort. ‘No,’ the Dalit scholar said. ‘You see, that is what happens. She just let me know that she was upper caste and above me.’

The master's house is our entire world. ​Its gaslights are always on.