Portraits: Walker Evans’s Subway Portrait (1938) predates William Carlos Williams’s Asphodel, That Greeny Flower (1955). Williams records seeing a dark-skinned man on the subway (“a brown felt hat / lighter than / his skin”), who reminds him of his father. “From what came to me // in a subway train / I build a picture / of all men”(CP II 328-30). Lisa Smorto reminded me of Williams’s description when she learned that I was using a deeply ironic image of a black man on a trolley in my paper, Notebook: Césaire and Williams (Poetries of the 1940s, National Poetry Foundation, U Maine, Orono, June 23-27, 2004). Césaire writes, “A nigger big as a pongo trying to make himself small on the streetcar bench. He was trying to leave behind, on this grimy bench, his gigantic legs and his trembling famished boxer’s hands. And everything had left him, was leaving him. His nose which looked like a drifting peninsula and even his negritude discolored as a result of untiring tawing” (Cahier 83). Subservience erodes identity for white or black. A “pongo” is an ape. “To taw” is to bleach leather. Mixed forms of purity, “nos multicoleres puretés” are shared tropes for Williams and Césaire.

Walker Evans. Subway Portrait, 1938
Gelatin silver print. 4 ³/₄ x 5 ⁷/₈ in.

The Getty Center, Los Angeles