Cornelius Fortune: ON SUPERMAN • Cleaver Magazine

Nonfiction by Cornelius Fortune
ON SUPERMAN
Of migratory journeys across a sea of stars

Start with an origin story—everyone loves a good origin story.

Well, this one is mine, more or less.

It begins with a door, a door leading into consciousness: that veritable point of existential entry, from pure spectator to the role of participant, beyond the Lacanian mirror stage. If the world up until then is from the vantage point of being cared for, getting slowly plugged into the gestalt of the culture, absorbing the language, having those things pushed down into the wiring, it’s that moment—that first, earliest memory, which solidifies, and subsequently, codifies one into the world.

My earliest memory was of the planet Krypton.

It served as the door into my awakening consciousness.

I remember holding my mother’s hand, walking into the darkness of a movie theater with the smell of popcorn permeating everything…symphonic music crashing all around me, and that large, beautiful orb, going from red to blue, and finally, to this crystalline landscape. I felt swallowed by the whole thing, as if I were walking on the surface of Krypton itself.

We took our seats, and I must have never looked away. At the age of three, there was something about this world that felt familiar to me. Just like Superman absorbs the power of the yellow sun, my three-year-old brain, was absorbing everything on that silver screen—every word, every gesture. But it is the celestial Krypton that remained seared into my memory, so much so, that today, watching those first minutes of Superman: The Movie (1978), still gives me chills.

That you can divide the 1978 motion picture into three parts is worth considering. The first part is a science fiction movie, then it turns into a Rockwellian Americana experience (complete with 1956’s “Rock Around the Clock”) blaring out the car speakers, and then the comic book part of the movie, starting roughly when the theme for Lex Luther and Otis (the aptly named “The March of the Villains”) plays during Otis’ first screen appearance—those first bars of John Williams’ leitmotif immediately establishes the film’s shift in tone. But none of what came after the Krypton sequence is clear to me—visually, that is. All I could remember was Krypton.

I wanted to be Clark Kent because I never really felt human at that age (we’re talking three to age ten). I was Black, but the wrong kind of Black (light skinned), poor and living in a ghetto, but I gave off airs because I “spoke like white folk,” one elder told me. I was trying to speak like Clark, sans Christopher Reeves’ stutter and stammer—more like Superman, deliberative and assured. My Superman-related comic book collection swelled in the early ‘80s and any time Superman: The Movie would play on TV, I would have to see it. One of my cousins, a mean Black boy who enjoyed teasing me endlessly once the grown-ups were out of earshot would say to anyone who would listen, “That nigga break for some Superman.” Followed by laughter.

My dissertation work on the second Great Migration has turned nearly every story I encounter into a migration story, even Superman.

This was a different sort of world-building, hardly novel, but personal, autoethnographic, evocative as I soaked in the rays of the yellow sun as only someone graced with melanin in their skin could.

Writer JV Chamary makes the case beautifully, in his 2016 Forbes essay, “Science Says Superman Should be Black.” I would venture on the backend, going from the hard sciences, which is where most of the essay makes its connections, to the soft sciences, that the destruction of Krypton was not merely a loss of a planet, but the loss of a civilization, a language, a culture—all destroyed in a single moment.

For African Americans who were taken on a slave ship across the treacherous Atlantic ocean, it is, as with the baby Kal-El, a loss of identity and place. From that moment on, he will never really be a Kryptonian or a human being. Arguably, although he adopts the planet earth and its inhabitants as his home, he could never really be of either world. African Americans are Americans of African ancestry. So too, Clark is a de facto member of the human race, with Kryptonian ancestry.

This connection of loss of culture is what might have subconsciously connected me immediately to Clark. Yes, Superman has a way of connecting to his Kryptonian roots through the Fortress of Solitude, but it’s really a technologically equipped library preloaded with interactive “home movies.” He will never really know what it was like to live there. For African Americans, the history, the literature of the past, helps us to connect to those ancestors through slave narratives and oral histories, but we know it will never be sufficient—because we were cut off from Mother Africa, in language and culture. For us, our story, like Clark’s, starts on foreign soil.

But the shared journey, the one from my three-year-old mind, embedded within me (and other Black Americans), is one of displacement, balanced across the multiplicities of blackness. Or, as W.E.B. Du Bois famously asserted in The Souls of Black Folk: “One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

I would argue that Superman’s story, simplified and boiled down to its elemental components, is one of migration and identity rebuilding. This is also my story—the story of Black folk writ large, our souls, ephemeral and pure.

Reducing it down to secret identities misses the point. Our inherent duality is the greatest gift of all. We are both human and superhuman in our never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way.

The soul of America rests in our hands, hearts, and minds.

In fact, a Black man in America, just by being, just by surviving is… a…Super. Man.

Cornelius Fortune’s work has appeared in Yahoo News, CinemaBlend, The Advocate, The Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, Midwest Living, In the Fray, the quint, and others. He holds an MA in English Literature and has taught composition, technical writing, as well as poetry and drama at the college level. Before going into education, he served as managing editor of the Michigan Chronicle—the state’s oldest weekly black newspaper—and senior editor of BLAC Detroit magazine. Additionally, he holds a PhD in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University.