I will always love you.

"I am burdened daily with showing whites that blacks are people. I am, in the old vernacular, a credit to my race…though many of them have abandoned me because they think that I have abandoned them. … Some of my ‘liberal’ white acquaintances pat me on the head, hinting that I am a freak, that my success is less a matter of talent than of luck and affirmative action." — Leanita McClain (Holloway, 92)

    Holloway (2003) discusses the history of black death in the twentieth century and makes clear from the beginning that there is something clearly wrong with American culture when such a thing as a color-coded death exists. Specifically, she says, "[b]lack death is a cultural haunting, a 're-memory' along the lines of that found in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, which insists that 'not a house in the country ain't packed to the rafters with some dead Negro's grief'" (Holloway, 3). Her frequent references to William Edward Burghardt Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk and his point that his son's death did not signify death but freedom, is critical as it points to an inseparability of that of the life of the African American and of their death. It goes so far as to say the only way to escape black death is by dying, and invariably, that death will be a black death. While things like lynchings are explicitly black deaths, Holloway concludes that, indeed, all Black deaths are black deaths. "Even in death, the color line was a persistent—albeit sometimes ambiguous—line of demarcation," further points to the situation African America faces in regard to social perceptions of a people and determinations regarding their humanity: Racism goes beyond the grave (Holloway, 16). Often, the racism present in life leads to a death wrought by the lens of racism. For example, Dorothy Dandridge wrote, "there was only one decision I could make: I must either kill myself if I was that unworthy [to by an image of a Black woman], or die of attrition then and there—simply will myself to death, which I felt like doing—or tell my story" (Holloway, 92). The expectations held for her to represent her race, to remind whites of the personhood of African Americans, was so great that her only escape was in death. Holloway references other Black women who died after having seemingly failed to live up to the expectations of both the Black and white communities.

    While Holloway limited her discussion to the twentieth century, black death has carried into the twenty-first century. Whitney Houston, as an example, was a chart topper. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, she was the most awarded female artist of all time. She won five VMAs in just one year and eleven different Billboard Music Awards; she topped multiple charts multiple times; she landed a spot on the Rolling Stone Magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time with her debut album; she was inducted into multiple halls of fame; and she inspired other African American women to follow in her footsteps. To use a phrase McClain discusses, Houston was “a credit to [her] race,” if being such a thing is truly even possible considering being a spokesperson for an entire is race is rather illogical and impossible. Regardless, Houston was a successful career woman, and she was liked. She was talented and beautiful. She was an upstanding image of a Black woman whom both people of the Black and white communities looked to as proof of a “good” African American. And then things started to change, and she was no longer seen as an entirely desirable model of everything she was meant to represent.

    Houston had been a constant display of Black success, and as such, the societal pressures she bore were immense. While the magnifying aspects of fame would (and typically do) affect anyone, for Houston, the demands were heightened as she was forced to stand in as a semi-spokesperson and image for her race. When she stopped showing up to concerts and award shows and other various events, her aloofness was pegged on drugs, and when she and her then-husband Bobby Brown were caught with marijuana in an airport, the rumors of harder drug usage only got worse. People attributed the weight she had lost, the scratchy throat, the distracted behavior, all to the drugs.

    Then, in 2012, Houston died at the age of 48. Her public life had crippled her under the weight of prejudice and stereotype and ultimately ended in a very public version of black death. She was found in a hotel bathtub. Immediately, claims of suicide and drowning emerged, and so did the idea of a drug overdose. Though the death was ultimately deemed accidental, it was found that a mix of drugs—including cocaine and cannabis—were in her bloodstream. The cocaine and a heart condition had mixed together and killed her, and they left her in the bathtub, fully submerged.

    She serves as an example of the idea of black death particularly because of the pressures that preceded her death. It seems arguable that Houston could have lived much longer if the emotional aging process of societal expectations had not weighed so heavily upon her. The burdens of being who she was were inescapable in life, and freedom, as Holloway frequently discusses, would only be found in death. In the video of Houston’s funeral (start at 00:37), additional points of Holloway’s discussion are visible: The show, for example, is of high importance. Men approach and handle her casket as though they are not pallbearers but army sergeants. The casket itself gleams and reflects all who watch as she is carried down the aisle. Furthermore, the whole thing, regardless of the guest-only entrance, was filmed for mass audiences.While people like Alicia Keys and Stevie Wonder greatly cared about Houston, for those watching the service on their televisions, it gave more of movie-like aspect to her funeral. Nonetheless, Houston also embodies black death for the pure aspect of her blackness. By being a Black woman, she would invariably die a black death, something Holloway points out as inescapable.

Bibliography:

Holloway, Karla FC. Passed on: African American mourning stories, a memorial. Duke University Press, 2003.
NaiiWH. "End of Whitney Houston's Funeral on I will always love you." Online video clip. YouTube, 18 February 2012. Web.