Warm Broad Glow

Glenn Ligon, 2005

Two words in neon, lowercase. negro sunshine. And the light is doing something wrong. The letters are dark. Ligon had the front of every tube painted with Plasti Dip, an industrial rubber coating. Black, over the glass. The glow can’t come through the words. It leaks out from behind them. A halo around a blackout. Sixteen feet of it. This is Warm Broad Glow, from 2005. Glenn Ligon’s first neon. He left the cords hanging and the transformer boxes on the floor. He doesn’t hide how the light gets made. But the words aren’t his. Gertrude Stein wrote them in 1909, in a book called Three Lives. She’s describing a Black woman named Rose. “Rose laughed when she was happy, but she had not the wide, abandoned laughter that makes the warm broad glow of negro sunshine.” Rose doesn’t have that laughter. That’s what the sentence says. And that’s where the phrase starts to turn. It sounds warm. Almost admiring. But is Stein admiring Black laughter? Or turning it into a type, then measuring Rose against it? Ligon takes his title from the pretty half. The half that stings, he puts on the wall. Then there’s the fight inside the words themselves. “Negro” carries blackness. “Sunshine” is all light. Dark and light, forced into the same phrase. The same problem as the neon. And then it gets harder. Chicago, in the thirties. Richard Wright is still a young Black writer. Native Son is years away. He pulls Three Lives off a public-library shelf and opens to “Melanctha.” The prose starts singing in his ear. He hears his grandmother. Then Wright finds an attack on Stein in a labor journal. Tortured prose. Throttling the revolution. So he runs a test. The way Wright told it, he gathers Black stockyard workers in a basement and reads “Melanctha” out loud. They understand every word. They start slapping their thighs. Laughing. Stomping. Interrupting him to talk about the characters. The wide, abandoned laughter Stein said Rose didn’t have. Here it is, coming from Black workers listening to Stein. So what are they hearing? A stereotype? People they recognize? Something Stein caught without fully understanding? Ligon doesn’t pick one. But, nearly a century later, he puts the words on a wall and plugs them in.

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