Brother AACOOLDRE : Frank Marshall Davis: Living the Blues

AACOOLDRE

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Frank Marshall Davis Living the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist & Poet

Edited by John Edgar Tidwell (1992)

Book Review By Andre Austin (May 2015)

Frank Marshall Davis was born in 1905 in Arkansas city, Kansas died in 1987 in exile in Hawaii. He loved writing poetry, listening to Jazz music and writing articles for newspapers he founded and or worked for. Right from the gates I must confess I wouldn’t be interested in Davis if the maverick investigative journalist/film director Joel Gilbert didn’t accuse Davis of being the real father of Barack Obama. The mountain of circumstantial evidence makes a paternity link between Ann Dunham & Davis producing the Sex rebel child of Obama in 1961 in Hawaii. At any time Obama can turn Gilbert into an obscure joker or top notch investigator on par with a Woodward or Bernstein helping to bring down Nixon with the “Good News” of his corruption and lies with a DNA test. Davis could not take Racism anymore so he packed up his bags and moved to Hawaii in exile in 1948 and didn’t return until invited by Black students who dug up his poetry like Alice Walker did for Zora Neale Hurston.

Davis claims 4 daughters and one son, Mark by three different white women. One of his daughters Lynn looks like the female version of an Obama. Frank once wrote “Until the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, we could aim our hope no higher than selection for what was termed the president’s “Kitchen Cabinet”. Since then we have been inching our way slowly toward the Oval room” (Living the Blues p.332). Only if this proud father could have lived to January 20, 2009 he would have been the proud father of the first black (Bi-racial) president of the United States.

Being a loner and growing up as a teenager Davis states that adults thought he was a “Queer kid” and that “My inferiority complex mushroomed daily” (p.50). I do not know if this complex spilled over into adulthood. I’m curious to know if this was part of his motivation for being a sex rebel to white women because ‘stolen fruit taste sweeter’ (See Sex Rebel: Black p.93). His first wife Thelma was golden brown and was barren and Davis abhorred the idea of bringing offspring into a racist world (LTB p.203). However, when it came down to his second wife Helen he was happy to produce mixed children. Davis wrote Sex Rebel: Black because he needed the funds and he defined the term Sex Rebel as those breaking the religious and racist objections to not integrate the bedroom (SRB p.93). Keeping this in mind helps explain the use of the pen name Bob Greene. Bob Greene is an abbreviated version of Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899).Davis writes:

Old Granddad (Henry Marshall), who incidentally drove a horse and wagon, was as potent as his hundred proof namesakes. An evangelizing agnostic, he studied the works of bob Ingersoll like a preacher studies his Bible. I came under his influence at precisely the right time for I was psychologically ready to defect from the church…the suspicion formed that maybe the Christian religion was a device to keep black people subservient to white. Very well. Then I was though with it (LTB p.64)


Ingersoll passionately believed that the alleged divine origins of the bible were not sufficient reasons for a suspension of critical judgment from which Davis adopted.

Davis same opinion of the Christianity was transferred to the FBI who monitored him for 19 years. “To many black Americans, the FBI was the J. Edgar Hoover gestapo, a powerful federal police force dedicated to maintain the oppressive white power structure” (LTB p.325). Black people are sweep over their magical spell of hiring black agents but the agenda has not changed. I’m beginning to like Davis and wish I could hang out with him for a beer, read some poetry and ******** or something.

In Davis Sex Rebel: Black he states that the only thing fictional was the names. However, like I pointed out he used a pen name of a real person of Robert Green Ingersoll into Bob Greene. Davis added an E to Green. This Modus operandi was kept up with a teenage girl he named Anne in Sex Rebel who was 13 but looked 15/16 (p.71-76). This is of course Ann Dunham the mother of Barack Obama who arrived in Hawaii in 1959 at the age of 15/16. Davis devotes an entire chapter 7 to her. Davis hated the laws of miscegenation as being primarily a one way street in the south. Down South a white man could bed black women with impunity, but the reverse was a signal for the violence of a lynching with the Learning Tree.

Davis reminds me a little of Frederick Douglass whose first wife was black and his second was white. Douglass once said:

“They all seem to be amazed and dumfounded over me having a white woman for a wife. You all don’t know that my father was my mother’s master and she was black as a crow. Don’t it seem natural that history should repeat itself? (In reverse see Lay my burden down p.26)

Davis views on marriage was that color shouldn’t be the determing factor in such a personal, close association as marriage (LTB p.300)


ADDMITANCE DAVIS WROTE SEX REBEL: BLACK

“A brother who had operated a bookstore in San Francisco told me he had read all three of my volumes of poetry as well as another book of prose I wrote. I looked at him curiously. He said. ‘I mean Sex Rebel: Black. Although it did not list your name as author, I wracked my brain trying to figure out what other black writer might ne in Hawaii. I could think of nobody but you. Then I reread your poetry. I saw the similarities in style and phraseology. I hit it right on the head, didn’t I?’. I could not then truthfully deny that this book, which came out in 1968 as a Greenleaf classic, was mine” (LTB p.346) And the book still has a dynamite kick 46 years later and is free online just type the title.


TOPICS ON RACISM

Miscellaneous incidents on Racism Davis points out:

1. In a Texas county they had the first black buy an automobile. Immediately, the whites enacted a law preventing to drive on public roads so the blackman made a road on his own land and drove his family around on Sundays.

2. Only with to see all white movies because he hated to see and hear whites laugh at blacks in the movies being scared of ghost with elongated eyes popping out and eating watermelon.

3. He was 6 foot 1 and passed over for Athletics because they were black.

4. In the 1960’s hair and clothing were forms of visual protest

5. Hated blacks who talked to whites with hat in hand and disobeyed mother’s instruction to address whites with yes sir or no sir. He talked of 100 year-old black men still being a boy in the eyes of the whiteman. We were in “perpetual childhood”

6. Davis joined a Jewish organization to fight against anti-Semitism but still spoke against Hebrew businessmen who had slum apartments and high rents.

7. Mamie Smith was first black women to cut a record on wax in 1921 “Crazy blues”. Mamie Smith also had a song he recites:

“I’m gonna tell you like the Chinaman tol the Jew

I’m gonna tell you like the Chinaman tol the Jew

If you no like me then me no like you”

“IF THE MAN ON THE MOON WAS A COON” By W.C Handy

Was one of Davis favorite tunes of the day from the 1930’s. I recall shortly after Obama was elected I wrote a poem called “Blackman on the Moon”. Its strange as history runs in cycles and coincidences. Obama noted in his book that Frank Davis was a contemporary with Richard Wright and Langston Hughes (Dreams from my Father p.76). Gramps showed Obama poems of Davis that were Anthologized. Davis admits in his book he corresponded with Lang for 40 years and took a picture of Wright that was featured in Time magazine. Wright appreciated Davis teaching him photography. Davis took pictures of Ann nude in his house on his couch too. This is why Obama could never admit he was his real dad with his Sex Rebel book, nude pictures and former communist affiliations. So the Plumbers team were sent out to say he was born in Kenya to deflect any scooping of links with his Mom to Frank. It was brilliant the subterfuge pulled off at the ballot box.


I’ve been shaking down Obama’s family tree

Guess what, Guess what I discovered and see

Frank Marshall Davis an agnostic and a Red

With Evidence to prove Frank & Ann were in the Bed



CONCLUSION

There’s no agenda behind looking into the true parenthood of Obama but a curiosity to know the truth. This truth can’t derail his presidency because he’s safely in his second term. Exposing the truth will not sabotage his policies because the Senate and house won’t let him do anything anyway. But I do feel deceived on the level of going to bed with a woman only discovering I was lied to by a man. Now that’s nasty but I’m not mad at Obama. He had to do what he had to do to win: By any means necessary. And the good thing is we get to know the truth before he leaves office, but we should have known before he took office. By the way, a poem by W.C. Handy Davis like to recite is similar to the opening lines of Barack Obama’s poem “Pop” he wrote in 1981.

“ Ashes to Ashes

Dust to Dust

Whiskey to drink

And good booty to bust…(LTB see p 37 and 72)

Obama states in his book Dreams From My Father that Gramps used to take him over to Frank Davis house where they drank and recited poetry. Now that allegations that Davis is the true father of Obama I’m interested in everything he wrote especially his poetry. Being a poetry lover myself its nothing but joy to decode and deciphers the poems of others who are either introverts or frankly speak their minds.

When Davis died in the summer of 1987 Obama went to his funeral. Obama marks this year as a dark side of Chicago youth in the spring. I wish his obituary program or epigraph would have summed up his aesthetic vision:

I was a weaver of jagged words

A warbler of garbled tunes

A singer of Savage songs

I was bitter

Yes

Bitter and sorely sad

For when I wrote

I dipped my pen

In the crazy heart

Of mad America

……………………

But

I did not die

Of diabetes
 

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