UC San Diego

Understanding Charlie Beal is the result of a digital archive project focusing on Charlie Beal, a Black jazz pianist of the 20th century who has since faded into obscurity. In Understanding Charlie Beal, I attempt to challenge the idea of "the Archive" by utilizing it as a genre to frame a sprawling hybrid text. Utilizing Saidiya Hartman's theory of "critical fabulation" I seek to write from a place of not what happened, but what could have happened. To accomplish this, I work from the primary source material of my family records that my paternal grandmother, Nona, kept, and which my father, in his young adulthood, damaged. Through the use of photo albums, interviews, and the single record he was able to record in his lifetime, I ask myself and my family not just who Charlie Beal was, but who he and his memory are able to be to us now. In short, Understanding Charlie Beal has actually been my attempt to understand my family through the occasion of seeking out this mysterious and larger-than-life figure that left such a large emptiness in his death. In this process, my work has had to contend with the themes of familial legacies and obligations, intergenerational trauma, the continued history of slavery, the burdens and blessings of memory, and the fluid boundaries between life and death.