Cornelius Eady's Brutal Imagination

Cornelius Eady's Brutal Imagination

While most fictional characters are given a voice with which to express themselves, that voice usually does not stray beyond their realm of fiction and therefore is restricted from the power of the real world. The imaginary black man that Susan Smith falsely claimed had abducted her children in 1994, however, existed in reality in the minds of the American public for nine days until the truth surfaced about her infanticide. Cornelius Eady’s poetry cycle, Brutal Imagination, serves to give that imaginary black man (hereafter referred to as Zero), a voice that draws power from his simultaneous existence in both the real and fictional realms.

Zero’s voice serves to explain a variety of aspects of his existence, including assertions of his own innocence, criticisms of Susan Smith, explorations of his paradoxical nature, and social commentary regarding the notions of free will versus powerful exterior forces.

Zero is the product of Susan Smith’s and Cornelius Eady’s imaginations, and therefore lacks his own capacity for free will. Eady, however, allows Zero the seeming capacity for free thought and opinion, and therefore the opinions expressed by the character will hereafter be declared to be those of Zero, rather than Eady.

Lucid of his lack of free will, Zero admits, “I float in forces / I can’t always control” (17). In the effort to discover what these external forces are, he feels compelled to explore his origins that caused his inception in the mind of Susan Smith. The attempt is made to explain various hypothetical examples of potential interactions that led to his ultimate creation. He assumes that at a young age, Susan was told that that “All [blacks] do...

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...t actually be dead. “And here is the one good thing: / If [Zero is] alive, then so, briefly, are [the children]” (7). This abandonment of reality did not necessarily happen or may have been transient, but Zero simply maintains its existence as a possibility.

Though described as “dull in his invented hide” (28) by “Uncle Tom in Heaven,” Zero is actually quite complex in his desire to articulate his ideas about his brief life with Susan and his life eternal. His complexity is compounded further by his paradoxical nature, especially his simultaneous existence as a “real” man and as a fictional product of Susan Smith’s brutal imagination. As an eternal symbol of the oppressed and abused, he could be said to maintain a symbolic reality regarding the existence of external forces acting against the oppressed, stripping them of the extent of their free will.