Black Madness

Abstract

INTRODUCTION WHAT 'S GOOD?I beg to dicker with my silver-tongued companion, whose lips are ready to read my shining gloss.A versatile partner, conversant and well-versed in the verbal art, the dictionary is not averse to the solitary habits of the curiously wide-awake reader.In the dark night's insomnia, the book is a stimulating sedative, awakening my tired imagination to the hypnagogic trance of language.-Harryette Mullen, "Sleeping with the Dictionary," Sleeping with the Dictionary Let's start with a comparative analysis that does not work.In Leonard Kriegel's autoethnographical essay "Uncle Tom and Tiny Tim: Some Reflections on the Cripple as Negro" (1969), he declares, "Uncle Tom and Tiny Tim are brothers under the skin." 1 Using what he terms a "functional analogy" to Blackness, Kriegel traces his experiences in New York City as a so-called cripple, building a case for equal treatment socioculturally as well as under the law. 2 He links the mandate that disabled people request police escorts to their destinations (suggested by former New York City mayor John Lindsay) to calling a Black man "boy" in a white crowd.Kriegel uses Frantz Fanon as an epigraph and as an interlocutor throughout to critique the injustices he experiences, asserting that Blackness is both "analogy and method" even if the two are, according to him, not something Black America "can yet give itself."3 In addition to these analogies, Kriegel offers explanatory glosses of his life that speak to living within and internalizing ableism: He feels as though his existence causes his mother pain.He calls his condition a public embarrassment.Within rehabilitation facilities,

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