WITHOUT TERMINUS

A genre-hopping exploration of language, history, social justice, and family lore.

Early on in his onrushing narrative, blending photography, collage, drawings, charts, and surrealist typography with prose, Webster ponders the history of Black folk hero John Henry, who beats a steam-powered drill in a race to break down a mountainside to lay down train tracks, finally “dying from exhaustion with his hammer in hand.” The train is both metaphor and a very real thing in the poet’s meditation: Many members of Webster’s family worked on the railroad as porters, in the case of a grandfather “robbed of time and dignity and pension,” meeting the terminus of the title as both the final stop of a train and of death. The train, by Webster’s account, is a constant in Black lives and Black deaths: “Some say progress is born with the rail, twenty-five years later a porter cannot serve, cannot retire, and so he dies. black years are born working on some railroad of the great north, the train moves, black years are still. a rail worker cannot retire, so he dies and haunts the railroad. a railroad cannot be born unless a black dies, but such is progress.” Being worked to death is one thing; being shot to death by traffic police quite another, as happened to the brilliant writer Henry Dumas in 1968—“simply black aboard a train and his body a train car left unsecured until collision.” There is no train, Webster wishes us to understand, that was not born of theft and blood, and each page builds on that haunting truth. But in any event, as he writes, “no one makes it out of here alive, and then there are those who did not make it here living, whose deaths occur postmortem.”

A virtuoso work of literary experimentation in the service of a forgotten history.