Jackson, Angela 1951-
JACKSON, Angela 1951-
PERSONAL: Born July 25, 1951, in Greenville, MS; daughter of George and Angeline (Robinson) Jackson. Ethnicity: "African American." Education: Northwestern University, B.A., 1977; University of Chicago, M.A., 1995.
ADDRESSES: Home—5527 South Wentworth Ave., Chicago, IL 60621.
CAREER: Poet. Organization of Black American Culture Workshop, Chicago, IL, member, 1970-90, chairperson, 1976-90. Active in Illinois poets-in-the-schools program, 1974-76, 1979-83. Stephens College, Columbia, MO, writer-in-residence, 1983-86; Columbia College, Chicago, writer-in-residence, 1988-92, instructor, 1986-88; Framingham State College, Framingham, MA, Christa MacCauliffe Visiting Professor of Diversity, 1994; Howard University, Washington, DC, visiting professor, 1994, professor of writing, 1995-97; School of the Arts Institute, faculty member, 1998. Member, Illinois Arts Council literature panel, 1979-81, 1992; Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, secretary, 1983, president, 1984, treasurer, 1985; member ETA Playwright Discovery Initiative 1991-98.
AWARDS, HONORS: Conrad Kent Rivers Memorial Award from Black World, 1973; Edwin Schulman Fiction Prize, and Academy of American Poets Prize, both from Northwestern University, 1974; Illinois Arts Council awards, 1979, for "Witchdoctor," and 1980, 1986, 1988, and 1997, fellowship, 1979 and 2000, and Daniel Curley Award, 1997; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1980; Hoyt W. Fuller Award for Literary Excellence, 1984; American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, 1985, for Solo in the Box Car, Third Floor E; DuSable Museum Writers Seminar Poetry Prize, 1985; Pushcart Prize for Poetry, 1989; Chicago Sun Times/Friends of Literature Book of the Year Award for Poetry, Carl Sandburg Award from Chicago Public Library, and ETA Gala Award, all 1994; Illinois Authors Literary Heritage Award, 1996; Shelley Memorial Award, Poetry Society of America, 2002.
WRITINGS:
POETRY
Voo Doo/Love Magic, Third World Press (Chicago, IL), 1974.
The Greenville Club (chapbook), published in Four Black Poets, BkMk Press (Kansas City, MO), 1977.
Solo in the Boxcar Third Floor E, OBAhouse (Chicago, IL), 1985.
The Man with the White Liver, Contact II (New York, NY), 1987.
Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners, TriQuarterly Books (Evanston, IL), 1993.
And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New, TriQuarterly Books (Evanston, IL), 1998.
Contributor of poetry to periodicals, including Callaloo, Obsidian, Black Collegian, and Open Places.
OTHER
(Author of introduction) Carolyn Rodgers, How I Got Ovah: New and Selected Poems, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1975.
Witness! (play), produced at ETA Theatre, Chicago, IL, 1978.
Shango Diaspora: An African-American Myth of Womanhood and Love (play), produced at Parkway Community House Theatre, Chicago, IL, 1980, published in The Woman That I Am, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1993.
When the Wind Blows (play), produced in Chicago, IL, 1984.
Comfort Stew (play), produced at ETA Theater, Chicago, IL, 1997.
Contributor to anthology 15 Chicago Poets, Yellow Press (Chicago, IL), 1976. Contributor of short stories to periodicals, including Chicago Review, First World, Black World, Story Quarterly, and TriQuarterly; contributor of poetry to periodicals, including Mississippi Valley Review, Black Review, Black Collegian, Hoodoo 7, OBAsongs, Essence, Eyeball, Prairie Voices, and TriQuarterly. Author of novel Tremont Stone.
SIDELIGHTS: Though she has shown great versatility throughout her writing career, author Angela Jackson is most recognized for her poetry. An African American who grew up in urban Chicago after having been born in rural Mississippi, Jackson expresses a concern for racial equality in her poems as well as in her other works, which include short stories and dramas. A graduate of Chicago's prestigious Northwestern University, where she won several literary awards in 1974, Jackson went on to become an instrumental member of the city's Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) Writers Workshop. The influence of this organization, which also produced such writers as Carolyn Rodgers and Johari Amini (Jewel Latimore), informed the themes that dominate Jackson's work. According to D. L. Smith in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Jackson is among "the most versatile and richly talented of the writers to emerge from Chicago's … OBAC. … She is … especially admired for her technically deft, densely metaphorical, and constantly inventive language. She is also celebrated as a brilliant reader of her own poetry and fiction."
In the early 1970s Hoyt Fuller, editor of the periodical Black World, directed OBAC, helping to shape its strong political and social consciousness. The community-based group was formed with the goal of advancing "the conscious development and articulation of a Black Aesthetic." The member writers were encouraged to find ways to express in words the "Black Experience," as well as focusing their attention on the works of other African-American authors.
In the midst of this experience, Jackson published her first volume of poetry, Voo Doo/Love Magic, in 1974. In the book, which she dedicated to her family, Fuller, and OBAC, she expressed her debt to the group, declaring in the book's dedication: "i am more than grateful for the grooming and growth allowed me in the workshop; for the dedications i have gained as a Blackperson and the commitment to Black / craftsmanship and Black / communication."
Marked by its experimental use of rhythmic patterns and inflection, the collection of fifteen poems in Voo Doo/Love Magic incorporates the themes of love, family, and the black experience. Smith observed: "These poems are ebullient in spirit, and deeply rooted in Afro-American vernacular speech. The main technical challenge which they pose is the dilemma of how to capture the authentic rhythms and inflections of vernacular speech, yet at the same time produce a language which is creative, not merely imitative."
Because of her mastery with pause and rhythm, Jackson became one of the most sought-after readers and performers in the Chicago area. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s she was a participant in the poets-in-the-schools program that traveled throughout the state of Illinois.
After some of her poems were included in the 1976 anthology Fifteen Chicago Poets, Jackson published her next collection, The Greenville Club (she was born in Greenville, Mississippi), in 1977. The work was included and published in a volume called Four Black Poets, which is made up of several chapbooks. Although the title suggests a rural setting, it is in fact an allusion to a Chicago club made up of former residents of Greenville. Most of the poems, therefore, revolve around Jackson's urban upbringing in Chicago. Smith felt that the work included in The Greenville Clue "reveals a sensitive, clear-headed, and fiery poet at the height of her powers." Some of these same concerns are echoed in Jackson's American Book Award-winning 1985 volume of poetry, Solo in the Boxcar Third Floor E.
In her 1997 volume And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New Jackson offers a collection of poems—some published between 1969 and 1993 and some new—that treat a broad spectrum of topics, including the advent of language, sexuality, and the experience of the homeless. Booklist contributor Donna Seaman offered high praise for the volume, calling the poems "sinuous and inexhaustible exhalations, complex riffs rich in sensuous detail and resonant with psychological insight." Seaman concluded that "Jackson reanimates myth and history, scrutinizes life from unexpected perspectives, and shares her keen irony, seasoned humor, and hard-won wisdom in poems that conjure diverse times and places, and tell many stories."
In addition to her works of poetry, Jackson has found success with her fiction, in the form of short stories, and with drama, in the form of plays. In fact, she spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s working on her fiction. Some of her most recognized short stories are "Dreamer," a work published in the 1977 inaugural issue of First World, and "Witchdoctor," which appeared in 1977 in the Chicago Review, and for which Jackson received a 1978 Illinois State Arts Council award. Smith observed: "The power of these stories derives not from the movement of plot, but from the vividly present consciousness of her characters and their sense of themselves, of each other, and of the world."
Jackson lives in Chicago but travels frequently for visiting professorships or teaching jobs as a university writer-in-residence.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY:
Angela Jackson contributed the following autobiographical essay to CA:
[Editor's note: àse is a Yoruba word denoting a sacred energy carried in sap, blood, and the spoken word.]
ÀSE: AN AFRICAN-AMERICAN READER
I grew up on a street of churches—-a block of chants, and songs, and shouts. At Mass at the church on the corner the priest intoned from a big book edged in gold. Next door I was drunk with spirituals. There I learned the words to that sweet song "Yes, Jesus Loves Me," at First Timothy Baptist Church. And two doors away at Reed Temple, the "Saintified" church, the preacher announced "I'm going to do the Grizzly Bear" and began his holy dance in black and white spats. All ritual began with the Word.
In the primary grades at St. Anne School we sat at the front of the room in baby bear chairs and we learned to read aloud. Each of us, one at a time, standing before his or her chair reading. "Read with expression," sister would exhort. And so I would and found the words came alive, walked off the page and cast a spell. Read with expression. Write with expression, my subconscious said.
Once I went to a Church of Christ tent revival with Janet Sankey, one of my college roommates. The preacher, dynamic and long limbed, pointed to a lecturer at the side of the stage. To underscore, underline his message he pointed at the lecturer and hollered, commanded: "Read!" And so the reader read from the Bible with authority and clarity. So I read from my book of days.
In the time before I was they were Africans. Africans making a way in a land populated by terror and indignity and the roots of many songs. My grandmother Mary Mariah Jefferson Jackson told me her mother crossed Atlantic River in 1821. Atlantic River. That is one branch of the river that flows through me. My mother, Angeline Robinson Jackson, whispers of her East Indian maternal great-grandfather. Her maternal grandmother was straight from Africa. Her father's grandmother was Choctaw and African.
My father's father, John Jackson, was a short man. About five feet, two inches. But he was tall in meanness, grit, and tenderness toward his grandchildren. There is a story about John. I only half know it. It seems my grandfather, the strict, dignified farmer, was accused of some crime. A posse set out after him as he rode out of town. They chased him for miles and miles. Suddenly, Grandpapa tired. He wasn't taking any more. He turned his horse around and chased the posse. Chase the posse, children.
I was scheduled to arrive in August. Instead I came to 237 Hyman Street in Brown's Addition, Greenville, Mississippi, July 25, 1951. The midwife placed me on a pillow. She said I was so tiny I looked like a little doll. They called me Dolly. My father was Up North building a nest. He who was the giver of names might have called me something else.
My name is a passed down name. My mother was named after her great-great-grandmother Angeline, a slave. Angeline, mother of great-grandmother Patsy Robinson Thomas, born in 1867, women on my mother's father's side. Angeline Robinson Sherod, my mother's father's sister, carried the name, but my mother was named for Angeline the African, Angeline the slave. My mother named me after herself because when I was born she was twenty-nine and wanted something all her own. She took off the -ine and modernized it with an -a. From Angeline to Angela. So I was Angela and Angela Ruth because she wanted my middle initial to be the same as hers, Angeline Robinson Jackson.
I did not know my name was Angela until my mother registered me for first grade. The nun sat at the desk in the front of the classroom. Her habit was deepest black with a white, white bib-like collar and forehead piece. A rosary dangled from her waist to the floor. "What is her name?" the nun asked my mother, who stood at the side of the desk with me on her other side.
"Angela," my mother murmured. "Her name is Angela. Angela Ruth." What was going on? They were talking about me. My mother was telling them wrong. I was six and knew my own name.
"Uh uhn, Mama," I protested, yanking on her arm. "My name Dolly." For Dolly was what I was called at home. Who was Angela?
"Hush," my mother said, shaking my arm to still me. "Your name is Angela." I was silent, stunned, and betrayed. In an alien environment in the presence of an alien with a new name thrust upon me. But Dolly did not die that day my mother registered me for first grade. She continued to live on Fifty-fifth and Wentworth. She thrived after school. At three o'clock I took off the perfect white blouse, and blue jumper, or later plaid skirt, white blouse, and blazer; eschewed my studious air, my obedient demeanor, my Goody Two Shoes perfection; and hit the street like any semi-tomboy, free Negro spirit. My hair sticking out as if I would fly. I fought boys, because boys were bullies. I fought girls because girls were unfair or bullies. Arms like windmills I did battle until one day my brother, Prentiss, decided to instruct me in his new invention, The Power Punch. One of the first pieces of fiction I wrote was the story of The Power Punch. One of the benefits of having so many brothers and sisters besides having so many people to love and be loved by is life gives you through them a multitude of stories. The human heart displays its many sides through them.
Their names are in order of birth: George Jr., Delores Lillian, Rosemary, Prentiss James (named after my mother's brother Jim, called James), Sharon Marie, Betty Jean, Debra Anne, and Margaret Frances. I am the fifth child of nine. There is a missing tenth, an oldest daughter, first born, a beauty who died at eleven months of dehydration in 1940's Mississippi. Emma, my mother's sister, told me how my mother wept, sundered by the deepest grief, barely more than a girl herself weeping the loss of her baby. I wonder about life, what things would be different if Emma Lee had lived. I wonder who she would have been. I reinvent her in fiction as the oldest of the Grace clan in the novel Treemont Stone. I store my grief for her and the mystery of Death in the poem
The Red Bootee
(for Mama)In the back of the drawer
(the important drawer—
where Mama and Madaddy kept
important things/like
birth certificates
life insurance
and
all our old report cards.
In the back of the important
drawer where all the
important things (to be saved)
were kept—
we found a little biddy
red bootee
Tiny/leather/and trimmed
in fur/older than us.
A little red bootee.
And Mama said
it was Emma Lee's
a baby sister
Older than us
who we'd never
even
seen
(From And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New)
*My sister Betty Jean called me. She said, "You're reading at Northwestern!" I said, "Yes." She said, "I want to direct you!" I said, "What?" She said, "I want to be for you what David Stein was for Whoopi Goldberg." I said, "No, I don't need a director. This is a poetry reading." Then she said weirdly, "I want to be a part of greatness." Now if she thought flattery was going to cause me to allow her to direct a poetry reading of mine, she was "wrong, dead wrong" like that singer Toni Braxton says. I did, however, like that part about greatness. I still like that part about greatness.
Sometimes my sister is right. She does have an eye for drama, the potential for performance. In 1978 she sat at my kitchen table at 5340 South Kimbark and read the long narrative sequence "The God of Fire" begun in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1977, and she gripped the one hundred or so pages and shouted, "This has to be on stage!" And so on March 25, 1979, I began to piece together poem by poem, scene by scene, in longhand, Shango Diaspora: An African-American Myth of Womanhood and Love. It was first on stage October 11, 1980, as the showcase presentation of the Midwest Black Theatre Alliance's Fifth Annual Conference. Presented at Parkway Community Theatre, directed by Carl Morrison, the lead was performed remarkably by Soyini Madison. As fate would have it, Dr. Madison published Shango in her anthology, Woman That I Am, thirteen years after the play's initial appearance.
My sister has beautifully directed poetry, using six or seven gifted actors, among these the incomparable Cheryl Bruce. She directed poems from the volume Dark Legs and Silk Kisses at the Victory Gardens Theatre in 1994. It was fifteen to twenty minutes of magic. The poems came alive in quite a different way from my readings. I appreciated the difference of added movement and characterization as I always appreciate my work embodied under skilled direction in the art of gifted actors. But I like to read and have been told by a few that I must record. Even the critically rigorous Dr. David L. Smith describes me as a "brilliant reader" of my own work. I am a reader then. As I have been all my life. And according to writer-scholar-performer Eileen Cherry I am a reader of life, an interpreter. I have travelled through dreams, discerning, consulted stars and signs, and been a meticulous observer of human behavior. I have read my own heart and attempted to read the hearts of others.
I grew up on a street of churches. The Catholic church on the corner, the Baptist church next door, and the Saintified church two doors from our house. My life was filled with rituals. Catholic rituals of incense and palm leaves, wafers and bells, candles and chants. At the church next door we were welcomed into another side of our world. We attended St. Anne Catholic Church teas of women in pastels and matching frappe on the ornate, prettified, food-filled tables. We attended First Timothy Missionary Baptist Church teas that looked and smelled the same. A delicate bounty of chiffon and finger sandwiches. With my friends at home, Bunny, Diane, and Kathy, who called me Dolly, I went to Tom Thumb Weddings celebrating matrimony. At the church on the corner our eyes went moist with "Ave Maria," celebrating a fertile virginity.
Years later at the funeral of Mrs. Valentine Hoye, mother of my friend Bunny, Janice Jefferson, I heard a sermon that would remind me of the many sermons I heard at First Timothy without knowing I was hearing. The Reverend May told the story of a young man having car trouble whose father exhorts him at the end to "junk the body and bring the engine on home." The engine, of course, was Valentine Hoye's soul. The metaphor made tears shoot to my eyes. I think the metaphors and symbols and music of the Catholic church, Baptist, and Saintified ripened in me. My imagination was a plum—tender and dark, thin-skinned. We stood outside the doors of the Saintified church dancing as they danced. We weren't making fun of the preacher and the congregation. We liked the service, the lush spontaneity expressive miles away from the structured restraint of the Catholic church on the corner. Another time my mother was at the stove cooking. I don't know if it had any connection with the Saintified church or the Baptist church, but she taught me a word. "Tolerance," she said. "Tolerance," I repeated. This was a beautiful word. I was about ten. The word would serve me well, giving me access as a writer to other points of view. As a person this word would lead me to another word: empathy. One of the most beautiful words a writer can give in giving to the reader skins to try on, hearts to hold and listen to, minds to learn. Empathy.
Television was still rather new, not everyone had one. Summer days they were useless anyway. We wanted to be outside. We were outside. The world was at our running feet. Inside we watched the news and saw the signs Down South that read Colored and White. (The signs Up North were invisible a few blocks away.) We saw the people who looked like us standing up, facing dogs and water hoses. Saw the mighty jets of water pushing down the nicely dressed civil rights protesters. Knocking them to the ground. Inside on TV we watched the news that watched us. Outside we ran.
There was a family that came from Alabama. Two girls and one boy. The girls, Cleopera, the dark, striking, older girl, and Joyce, my age-mate, small and light skinned with wavy hair, pretty and sweet (who would die at seventeen, murdered at the hands of her husband). And Jewel whom we dubbed Leave-ma-be because that is what he shouted when someone caught him as we all ran. Leave-ma-be. That name that came out of our play would appear in my fiction. That name if not that boy.
It was Cleopera who charmed our summers and my imagination for the rest of my life. I hear from a grown-up Jewel, our reappeared friend, that Cleopera is an actress now and quite good. She was an actress then, for she acted what she wrote and performed for us. We'd be lined up on the back steps of the Saintified church, which they lived above and attended. Cleopera's audience lined up, and she'd read to us from a handwritten text or read to us from her fertile mind. She read to us stories of high school, that enchanted place where crowds roared and couples kissed in the hallway. We were swept away on the summer air, on dreams of growing up. All the way to high school.
She was the first writer I knew. Cleopera. I was in trouble. I'd borrowed one or two of her stories. I lost them. She came to the house demanding payment. My mother gave her a dollar or two. She was an indignant writer. This was not like me and my brother Prentiss at war over comic books sent to me in the hospital. That was about property. This was Art. And the griot must be paid. So Mama paid for me. To keep me from getting beat up.
*What can I tell you and would you believe? It was an African-American girlhood in an African-American territory. A cultivated grace with a bloody rag in the middle of the street. There was a mailbox on the corner next to a drugstore owned by a Black pharmacist, Mr. Jackson, where my brother George (called Sonny or Sunni) worked. Once when Prentiss and I were mailing a letter to California for our mother, George tapped on the window and called us in. He gave us huge scoops of ice cream on cones. We adored him and his big brother generosity.
There was a Kroger on that side of the street and a cleaners. And a large gray mansion where the last white people lived.
My father had bought our house from a white widow fleeing Black invasion from a safe spot in Florida. Then he sent for us, and we came by car, a boxcar in the Great Train of the Great Migration. We would live for a time on the second floor of the two flats with his sister, others, tenants who rented a room and used the common kitchen. Crammed like flowers into a tight vase we perfumed the City. Each traveller intimidated by the City, determined to conquer it. My mother, still no more than a country girl, was afraid of the tall buildings, the tight spaces. She was here only because her husband who had seen the world in the occupation forces hated the segregated South that hated us.
My sister Rose (from Rosemary) lay at the bottom of the steps in the hall looking out. She swore she would cross the wide, treacherous street one day. So many cars. Going so many places in the City. She would go.
We set out in a threesome. Rose, the oldest, was the leader. Then Prentiss, round-headed and jacketed like any boy. Then me. We were soldiers out to conquer the World of Books. We were worshippers at the altar of Words. It was the dead of winter, and we walked south to Fifty-seventh Street, and across to the side street Shields to Fifty-eighth where we met Treemont, the cul-de-sac. So enamoured of the street I was that years later I would pluck Treemont from memory and call the mysterious man of my novel by that name, Treemont Stone. The sound of it was surrounded by magic come from a journeying, a quest. At Fifty-ninth we trekked over to Normal and walked down (past the waving man who sat on his porch and waved at anyone in summer especially) to Sixtieth to Hiram Kelly Branch Library. It was a massive graystone, imperial and sublime. The Library. The Library. The House of Books. We ran inside, sometimes waving our forms that turned into cards, sometimes offering books we had read.
We returned books at the front desk, then headed for the stacks in the Children's and Young Adults Room. On those shelves I found the delights of National Velvet, The Yearling, A Wrinkle in Time, Pray, Love, Remember, and more. I remember reading the word "bitch" in National Velvet; it was a word I had heard the male roomer call his wife during one of their midnight fights, or maybe I had heard it somewhere else. It was one of the words on our list of forbidden words like n-i-g-g-e-r and l-i-e, a sin to say. I looked up b-i-t-c-h in the dictionary. It was a female dog. I looked up words I loved like m-e-t-i-c-u-l-o-u-s. (Years later I would think I would be a meticulous craftsperson.) Most of all I remember the work of Florence Crannell Means, a white writer who wrote about people of color, a young Black woman college student at a Black college, or the heroine of The Moved-Outers who was Japanese American and teen aged when her family was moved out to an internment camp during World War II. These stories shaped my consciousness, fed a love for imaginal adventures, and called me to empathy and an awareness of my own emotional wellspring.
We always left the magical house of Hiram Kelly Branch each with an armful of books. Loaded down with these essentials, these nourishments, we began the long walk home. One fall day, on Fifty-ninth Street, we came upon an old dead dog. Maggots ran in and out of its mouth. The body was stiff with death. We gasped at the sight of mundane, maggoty death. Started running. We did not run all the way home. It was too far. We slowed down, slowed by our books. Reaching home, we looked up the head of the stairs. "Last one up the stairs is an old dead dog," Prentiss (we called Prenny) said. Books alive in our arms, coats wide open, we raced upward. I do not remember who was Last.
"Susan Rupp" much of my underwear said. A small white tab at the back of panties and undershirts. My mother worked on Saturdays for the Rupps. They weren't well-to-do; they had just enough money for the wife to have "help." Susan, however, had an aunt with money that she spent liberally on Susan in the form of clothes, books, and toys. She passed many of these gifts to me. The underwear with her name sewn in for identification at camp I hated. But books! Nancy Drew (enough for a set), Trixie Belden, an obscure girl detective, Lennon Sisters mysteries, Cherry Ames, and Bobbsey Twins.
My mother would come home from work on Saturday and bribe me to do the dishes by withholding my book-gift sent by Susan. Sometimes I would find the book and begin it before I did the dishes. My mother would take it from me until my chores were through. Other days Mama would be so happy and pleased to be bearer of the book that she gave it to me straightaway and watched me dance. I did the Book Dance.
The greatest gift Mama brought me from Susan was the work of Louisa May Alcott. I discovered in Jo of Little Women a soul sister and role model. Louisa May Alcott herself was validation of the woman as writer. It is because of Alcott's Jo that I at an early age, before ten, began to dream myself as writer.
Oddly, a few years later, it was Lorraine Hansberry's Beneatha who wanted to be a doctor who inspired me to want the same. Independent-minded, daring women spoke to my idea of who I would be. A good girl by training and disposition, I was at heart a rebel. For years I thought this was my well-kept secret until I walked into my teacher's, legendary poet Mari Evan's, office at Northwestern University one day. She quoted her poem "The Rebel." "That's you," she said, nodding her beautiful head toward me. My feelings were hurt. I thought everyone knew I was a good girl. But to be a poet is to see things anew. The challenge presiding over sight and tongue. Independent. Autonomous, a word I learned to love at twenty around the time that Ms. Evans, Mari, saw into my heart. But I am ahead of myself.
*Father O'Shea was sharp-tongued and stern. My sister Rose was in his good favor because she and Helen Drew cleaned the sacristy every Saturday. They made sure the sacramental robes were clean and fine. Rose was pious and perfect (so I thought). I yearned to be just like my big sister.
But Father O'Shea turned a kind eye on me when I went to the rectory asking for books. He gave me the works of "good Catholic writers" like A. J. Cronin, who was also a doctor, and Thomas B. Costain. Cronin I loved for his love of science and Christ. The Keys to the Kingdom and The Citadel were books I barely breathed through I wolfed them down so. I don't remember if Tom Dooley was among these, but I read him and sought to emulate his missionary-physician work. I wanted to be a doctor, but it was not only Tom Dooley who brought that interest out, but Beneatha in A Raisin in the Sun who prompted the healing instincts in me. It was Lorraine Hansberry, a Black woman writer, who urged the desire to be a doctor in me. In truth, I wanted to be a healer. I did not know then that words could be instruments of mercy and excision. I was a bright girl, and medicine was more sanctioned than writing. How many writers did we know? On State Street Dr. MacDonald, dark, round, and brilliant, a graduate of Northwestern University, mixed his own cough syrups. At Cook County Hospital a light-skinned Black woman doctor, serene and pristine, treated me. To be a doctor was to be intelligent and humane, if not compassionate.
I was in fourth grade for one month. One night Sister Norma, the new nun, called my mother and told her I finished my work too easily and folded my hands and looked around. I was about to be bored. Thus, I was promoted to fifth grade. I excelled. I loved school. I established a routine; my also-double-promoted friend Vickie Mays and I would finish our schoolwork, then crack open our library books. Soon lost in the worlds of our imaginations. One day Sister Norma, in a fit of pique, took our library books from us. She said we could not read them in school. Stung and sullen, enraged, I walked Vickie home to their apartment above the liquor store. Vickie said, "She shouldn't have taken our library books." I agreed, still bruised. Why would Sister Norma deprive us of our pleasure after our work had been so carefully done?
One day Joseph Brown, who was farther along in SRA (the reading series) than I was, complained to Sister Norma that he did not want to sit next to me because I didn't talk in school. But Emmet Garner didn't mind; he made me laugh in school. In eighth grade we had a spelling bee. Joseph Brown and I were the last two standing. The entire class wished me failure—they said so! Under the weight of their collective death wish I flubbed the word. Joseph spelled it. He won the spelling bee. The class went wild. At graduation I was surprised to be called to the altar of St. Anne Church twice. The second time I was called to receive an award for Outstanding Academic Achievement. I was given a little black prayer book that I still cherish today. Outstanding Academic Achievement.
I still remember that moment in grammar school when I stood up and recited, and Sister Norma asked me if my brother (Prentiss) helped me with my homework.
"No, sister," I said. "He don't, he doesn't help me." At that moment, correcting my at-home speech to suit the world, I was saying to the world that "he don't" was bad when it had always been good enough, succinct, musical, resonant. But it was not so bad correcting myself. I was well on my way to achieving that double-tongue of traditional African-American culture—words for the world and words for home.
*"What should we name the baby, Dolly?" They'd called me to the phone because my mother was on the line. She was calling from the hospital. The baby was a girl. Add her name to all the other girl names in our family. The latest Debra Anne, after our church, St. Anne.
"Margaret." I said. "Margaret Jo." Names I'd gotten from Little Women.
"You have a cousin named Damita Jo," Mama said.
"Margaret Frances," I said.
Margie. So black-eyed Margie arrived looking like a button. I'd helped name her because I had to help take care of her. Delores and Rose were in high school and had work and clubs after school. At ten I got a baby sister and a baby. For a time my father had to fetch me from school-around-the-corner at two, so that he could make the three-until-eleven shift at the post office downtown. I protested. Why couldn't Prentiss who hated school leave school to baby-sit Margie? I loved school. "He has to stay in school because he hates school," my mother said with parent-logic. I burned.
Later, Margie went to Aunt BeeBee's, my father's sister, one of twins. (BaySuh was the other.) Aunt BeeBee lived down the boulevard from me. After school I walked through the park to bring the baby home. Often I read on those long walks. One day I had my face so deep in a book I could not see outside it, around me. I walked into a tree. Later I called that tree Bigger Thomas or Reality. The boulevard at Fifty-fifth was beautiful with many well-tended trees. The grass was tender beneath my feet. Sunlight loved every leaf it lay upon. And sunlight loved me. A French roll of straightened hair bent into a book.
When she was one, black-eyed Margie posed for baby pictures. As a pretty prop they used one of my library books: One Fine Day. I didn't want that baby beautiful though she was posing with my book. It was an imposition. How casually they used the prize from my private world of books to show off the beautiful, wavy-haired baby girl. And the pictures were gorgeous. Evidence of a time when a life I love was just starting. When sunlight and books loved me. When trees were men mighty or soon to be fallen by the natural element of lightning. And I walked down a street of churches while blues fell out of windows over our heads.
Choosing the Blues
(for S. Brandi Barnes)
When Willie Mae went down to the barbershop
to visit her boyfriend who cut hair there
I went with her. Walking beside her on the street
the men said hey and stopped to watch her just walk.
Boyfriend Barber cut hair and cut his glance at her
O, he could see the tree for the forest. He pressed
down the wild crest on a man's head and shaved it off
just so he could watch her standing there by the juke
box choosing the blues she would wear for the afternoon.
Right there Little Milton would shout through the store-
front with the peppermint stick sentry twirling outside
"If I didn't love you, baby, grits ain't groceries, eggs
ain't poultry and Mona Lisa was a man."
And every razor and mouth would stop its dissembling
business. And Time sit down in the barber's chair
and tell Memory poised with its scissors in hand
not to cut it too short, just take a little off the ends
(From And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New)
Willie Mae, my cousin ten years or so older than I, Aunt Mary's daughter, my father's niece, took me as her daughter sometimes.
I walked with her down the street. She was the Feminine Adorned, in her big earrings, occasional wigs, jewelry, and bright, short dresses, short before the fashion. The men went on red alert up and down the street. Willie Mae was walking. Kind of like God talking. They waved to her. They saluted her differently than the way they saluted my mother. Trading a tip of the hat, a "How ya doin, Miz Jackson," for a "Hey, Willie." "Is that your little girl?" one would ask, pointing toward me.
"Naw, this is my cousin. My daughter is in Mississippi. Billie Rae, my daughter, is younger than Dolly." Willie smiled.
But Willie could do more than smile and had been known to kick many a man's behind and woman's behind. Willie Mae could fight.
An Aretha Franklin look-alike, Willie could make the language sing. Willie was the female equivalent of my father in her inventiveness with language, her fresh turns of phrases, only she was saltier, bluer. Elsewhere I have written about Willie Mae's gift for language; an accomplished raconteur, she peppered her stories with phrases like "popping out like poison ivy," "even her hair was smiling." Willie cursed with style, a cool and furious grace. She lifted the profane to art, not the humorless, gratuitous, ubiquitous cursing of post-Black-exploitation movies. Her style suggested a long line of exquisite, precise, humorous, and dead-serious cursing. Her cursing was accurate, personal, adorned with adjectives.
My father did not curse until his later years. And this was shocking to us. He had a way with words grounded in metaphor. His language was a memory vessel. One time he came home in an absolute rage, fuming. He said someone had laid under the porch with his mammy nine days before his eyes opened. My mother said to our puzzled faces, "he just called someone a dog." My father did not like cursing. He lived by the dignity of metaphor. So language was ever alive and rocking in that house. Interjections of "Gol almighty" and "Oh, the devil" splicing the air. Embracing the atmosphere with ethos, value.
*Our class was sitting in church waiting to say our private confessions when I turned around in the pew to look at something behind me. The side of my neck was seized by a deep pain. I started to cry. The pain stayed; it would not leave. The other students laughed. School was almost over. I went home. Holding my neck and crying. The pain stayed with me til Mama came home from work at seven. Still it stayed. She took me by bus to County Hospital on the Westside. I sat with my head in her lap, holding my neck like a dying swan with hands. We watched the stretchers roll by us. The wounded and aching in the extreme went ahead of us. I had a temperature. We didn't see a doctor until three o'clock in the morning. I was sicker than an aching neck. They admitted me.
Cook County Hospital, 1962Mysteriously swollen glands at ten.
I was on complete bed
rest, the nurses wrote in my
chart which I read
"seems content with bed
rest"
I read books (school, comic, anything).
all day long, uncomplaining.
At ten thirty at night
to the tin heartbeat of a radio
in the imperfect hotel quiet
of the hospital
I got out of bed
to dance
the Mashed Potatoes, furiously.
Down the hall death was murmuring
through the heavy mucus of a
child's throat
(From And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New)
I was in the hospital for three weeks. So long I had school in the hospital, with a teacher at my bedside. On Easter I looked out the window and thought of my street and the finery everyone would have on. They gave my symptoms different diagnoses. One of these was Hodgkin's disease. My mother wept in the hallway to hear this form of cancer. They took me in a baby-bed, a crib, to an amphitheatre of doctors to decide on a diagnosis. They did a biopsy of glandular tissue. Finally, the doctors decided I had mononucleosis, the kissing disease. I was sent home.
After the hospital I was sent that summer to Mississippi to enjoy the country, which was the city of Greenville where I was born. So at eleven my Aunt Tumpy, Mrs. Jennie B. Wesby, paid my way along with her charges Yvonne and Joe-Joe. Yvonne and Joe-Joe were the children of my Uncle Joe and his wife Helen who had died. Aunt Tumpy was their aunt and their mother. I spent six weeks in Greenville with Yvonne and Joe-Joe. We stayed at Grandmama's house at 1514 Spruce Street, although every day we went to Aunt Mary's for okra, corn, and tomato and hot water cornbread. My grandmother served fried chicken for breakfast with grits and eggs and biscuits. Once I saw her kill a chicken. The chicken ran around the yard with no head. A red, open wound that was once a neck.
In Greenville I saw pecans still in their coats, bottle-brush trees, crepe myrtle, pear, and in the garden beside Aunt Mary's house, okra, tomato, corn, green beans. My cousin Willie Mae who had lived Up North for a time was then back home. She chased us with a big fat fuzzy worm. We ran, me, Yvonne, Joe-Joe, Cousin Cooter, Willie Mae's brother. We lit up the streets with our screaming.
At night the spray truck came by with insecticide for mosquitoes. It left a fog. I did not know the history of that town then, only I would step into the living room of a shotgun house and run into the television image of someone running for governor extolling the importance of eternal segregation. They were right there on TV just as big and bad, talking as they normally would. I was starved. Mississippi was so nice without the segregationist on TV. The Chinese people who ran the store on the corner were Mississippi. My cousin Cooter who said he was a country boy and was inherently better than me, his city cousin, was Mississippi. My grandmother, my gentle Aunt Mary, mother of Willie Mae, Cooter (Ralph), BayBay (LaVerne), Mildred, Dean, Leon, Charles, all of them Mississippi.
I watched my grandmother who was then in her seventies, witty, stern, wiry, and able, who lived around the corner from my grandfather. My grandfather who allowed us to swing on his swing, taste his hard pears, and observe his young girlfriend delivering his plate of dinner. At eleven I observed the mystery of marriage and separation, the loss of childhood in a glorious spray of freedom and memory, the deep connection of blood and longing.
One day I walked along the side of the road with my cousin Cooter I think. (In Chicago, we called it a street. In Mississippi a road.) A pickup truck with a white man behind the driver's wheel came by; he ran us off the road. We jumped into the ditch. Laughing he drove away. I wrote my friend Bunny a letter from Mississippi. I would write a novel about this place. I had begun it already. I would include this act of Southern hospitality. In those days I was a writer, and I knew that writing was a response to the world, a weapon and a balm. That summer I gained a lot of weight and entered puberty slightly plump. Another battle I would fight for many days. But I remember the feeling of being deliciously alive when I sucked in the insecticide as it billowed behind the truck. I have the sense of other possible lives: if my father hadn't seen Paris and felt the freedom of authority in Germany I would have grown up in Mississippi.
*My father digested the newspaper daily. He debated politics with my mother and Reverend Shelby next door. He was a brilliant man who'd finished sixth grade and Mississippi trade school. He was a skilled carpenter and a student of human nature, which he invariably described as low-down and dirty. He married Angeline, a high school valedictorian and winner of a scholarship to a teacher's college in Alabama, a bookish girl. A lover of books, a reader. But he did not read books. Until one day. … He closeted himself in their bedroom. In a seat by the window. He read and read a book under natural light. We children crept by the door, trying to ascertain this book that held his attention. "What is it?" we wondered to each other. Finally, after a day or two he exited the cave of inquiry. "This ain't nothing but what you hear on the corner every day." The book was Another Country by James Baldwin. I hope one day I will write books powerful enough to lure my father's ghost to inquire in a reading. That I will include something of what he could hear on the corner to hold his attention.
When I was a teenager my mother would take me shopping at Sears. I was the biggest girl, a size thirteen, while my older sisters, Rosemary and Delores, were dainty sevens. I liked clothes, fashionable and pretty, but not like I worshipped books. I would sneak away from Mama and hide happily in the small book section. My mother would barter with me—a dress and a book.
In high school, Loretto Academy, 1447 East Sixty-fifth Street, I was in the Science Club, Yearbook Club, My-Self (student literary magazine) staff; as a senior I was a hall monitor. And from freshman year at lunchtime I wiped trays clean outside the cafeteria to offset my tuition. Later I worked in the office where I could not resist looking up the IQs of myself and my classmates. Oh, yes, I was bright. Yes, I already knew Roella Christine Henderson (valedictorian, who would be my roommate at Northwestern) was brighter. But I also learned that IQs change, and a gift may be stretched, compounded, through will, discipline, work, the right circumstances. I don't think IQs especially in those days measured creativity, imagination.
My best friend in those days was Shirley Eloby, who had gone to grammar school at St. Anne with me. Shirley lived on Fifty-first and Princeton. She graduated second in our class at Loretto Academy. All through high school she had a boyfriend in the navy. In college they married and have been married for many years. She is a nurse with a Ph.D.; a while ago I saw her in a yellow suit advertising a health fair on TV.
1966. I would stand on the side of the stage—almost into backstage—in a stiff pink fluffy dress with a wide skirt. Valeria Allen, the dancer who embodied the Virgin Mary, the Immaculate Conception, and all the rest of the litany I read, performed at center stage. We were a duo. I the Word. She the Dance. I read in a rich whisper, my voice hushed and reverential for I spoke of the Mother of God, and the nuns at our tiny, all girl, all Black—save for two Latinas in our class of 1968—Loretto Academy were of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Early I learned in whom the Word was made flesh. I loved words. Not having the exceptional, astonishing singing voice to sing them I read them, and they lived before others. In these first performances I recognized the sacred function of language—even in a high school gym. A function sacred and public. The reality of the awe that may follow spoken evocation.
I was waltzing with my father as we prepared for the cotillion. Such intimacy was torture. He would not observe the instructions of the instructor. He thought he knew it all. He knew the waltz, he thought. I wanted to die on this Sunday afternoon in Loretto's gym with all the other girls with all the other fathers. The impending cotillion in Hales gym a sublime cruelty. My father was in Father Heaven.
Home again. My mother told my father he'd been doing the two-step. She showed him the waltz. They waltzed. She red and five foot, three inches. He dark and six-feet. A Sunday afternoon in the living room. They waltzed to what music?
CaesuraA highschool girl high over the city
riding the el-train (a whip in midair
flung in tempered steel on long black legs)
on the afterschool second wind of adolescence.
The newspaper on a platform
lines through a window:
Nat King Cole
dead of cancer.
Whatever remark to throw back
at whomever hangs
on the windowed-air
like a scribble on sweating glass.
Who, girl, are you to know the sudden fall
of voice to whispers in the vestibule
of the funeral home, the steady fan of dreams
in the old women's hands,
the broken promise of seductive solace
in the sail of song across the dark waters
of the heart's imagination?
O, Imagination, quick slow schoolgirl
riding the flung out steel
in your promissory sleep,
who are you now to study windows?
The day is punctuated with caesuras,
pauses in the voice, not usually
written down
(From And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New)
*At Northwestern later, 1968-69, I took up the word again in my readings as a New Black Poet (Margaret Walker Alexander said I was), a part of what Gwendolyn Brooks would call "The Whirlwind." Still, even though I read into the Whirlwind, I spoke in a rich whisper that was sometimes fierce. My knees shook, but my words were bold.
We had seen cities burning, and on campuses across America (places of higher learning into which we entered in larger numbers because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) we were burning. To be on stage was to be a flame, the voice urgent, urging the collective flame higher. And so I was in the second half of that first year a surprise to my schoolmates, for I was not an everyday star of light or darkest skin and huge Afro. In reading my poetry I was myself revealed. I was them revealed. For (this is important) we shared a spoken value system this campus audience and I. We shared an identity.
I was not a poet alone—the lone voice for the common identity. In my second year another poet arrived. She was far more expressive than I—multitalented as a singer, a dancer, a performer, a writer. Her name was Eileen Cherry. She did many things. I did one thing. I wrote and read what I wrote. What characterized those earliest readings, too, was my reading with a drummer, Clovis Semmes (later Jabulani Makalani), and flutist, Janet Sankey. We did this naturally, organically understanding ritual. Music seemed right with the words. Words and Music. This was well for music was our heartbeat, and poetry came from the heart of things.
I was becoming myself and searched for my style of being; writing (which for me at that time included reading) was everywhere, in all things. I used to sit on my bed in my dorm room not far from the building the Black students took over before I came. I used to sit and compose myself. In Jeff Donaldson's History of Afro-American Art I treasured an article by visual artist Robert Thompson in which was rendered the characteristics of Yoruba art. I recall some of these:
Mimesis at midpoint—between the real and
superreall; a heightened measure of reality,
awe-inspiring.Frontality—the subject leaps out at you,
directly, in the foreground.
Repetition of changes—the lines of Yoruba
art, the structure is based upon changes that
are repeated but still change. The way a blues
song repeats and changes.
There were other characteristics, but these I recall embracing as I sat on my bed, eighteen, and devoted to the invention of myself in language. The words from my mouth and pen would create a mimesis at midpoint. They would catch up life, elongate moments here, shorten there, brighten, mute to arrive at Real Life, True to Life. The Spirit of Life as opposed to simple realism. The words from my mouth and pen must be frontal, enhanced by subtleties, but direct, launched right out of the heart of experience. "The Man with the White Liver" written in 1984 after I attended a Midwest Black Theatre Alliance Conference in St. Louis is such a frontal piece; it pushes right into the audience. Direct as the blues. When I read it I feel my self surging up, urging out. Here it is:
The Man with The White Liver(for Mrs. Josephine Sankey)
He got the thang make a woman cry out in the night.
The man with the white liver
he the killin-love giver.
His first wife die smilin,
say hand me my comb so I can comb
this hair befo that man get home.
His first wife die smilin,
sit up in the sheets
say hand me my comb
before my husband get home
so I can live in his arms
forever. She smilin
reachin and dyin
for the man
with the white liver.
He the killin-love giver.
He second wife die dancin
cross the street dreamin he
standin on the other side
heard him whisperin her name
in the broken car horn
carried her own way from here.
She dancin like Dunham in the middle
of the street dreamin her name on his
sweet, thick mouth, lift her
dress above one knee, raise the
other hand high-swearin she hear her name
in his juicy-dreamy mouth. She
wave to it
and git
hit.
Car with the broken horn
carry her own way from here.
She dreamin about a man
with a white liver. You know him.
He the killin-love giver.
His third wife die like a coffee cup
first thing in the mornin
she dark and laughin when he stirrin her up,
die with a silver spoon in black brew so strong
the spoon stand up
in the cup
first thing in the mornin she die
like maxwell house good to the last drop
people say they read the grinds in her eyes
grinds say lord have mercy I love me my man
with his white liver he the goodest love giver.
He got the thang make a woman cry out in the night.
He got the thang make a woman rise up light as light
and slide through blinds like sunshine.
My girlfriend's mama say tell Angela stay away
from a man with a white liver
when she find one
run
say girl stay away from a man with a white liver
he the killin-love giver.
His love take the life
from every smilin wife
he have one behind the other
linin up for lovin
like lambs to the slaughter.
I'm tellin you like I tell my own daughter.
Stay away from a man with a white liver
who make yo liver quiver yo nose open wide
yo heart stop dead in the middle of his rockin ride.
He the killin-love giver.
He got the thang make a woman cry out in the night.
His shoulder the last thing she see.
His coffee cup the last thing she ever be
(From And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New)
Repetition of changes was in part a self ever-changing, moving from the bawdiness of "The Man with the White Liver" to the tenderness of "Strolling" to the religious spirituality of "In Dark Bounty." A whole-personed art, kaleidoscopic; each poem different and inside each poem a repetition of surprise, sometimes the varied use of the repeated line.
Another day I sat on my bed reading the liner notes for my three-record set Billie Holliday: The Golden Years. It was then at probably nineteen in the Northwestern University Apartments I discovered the secret source that would be the central guide to the way in which I worked with the word both written and spoken. Billie Holliday described the development of her style as an emulation of the way Lester Young (Pres) played his horn—each note was interpreted, each note nuanced. That is how she used her voice in emulation of the horn. And that is how I decided to use my voice—each word nuanced, interpreted, alternating with significant silences or pauses. (Silences I would later read about in an essay by Denise Levertov.) Each word a note. And then I swore I would have the emotional range and colors of Aretha Franklin, who is capable of mixing fire with the watery petals of white, red, green, blue, orange, gold flowers. I promised myself to keep grace. I am sure, too, my subconscious said if I cannot sing like the angels then I would sure as heaven write like them and I would read.
*For twenty years I was a member of the Organization of Black American Culture Writers Workshop. Each week we, an ever changing community of writers, would share new work or work in development. In that constant environment, writing and reading were one. They remain so.
I discovered sometime in the mid-1980s that I put on a ritual mask of the writer as I begin to write. I am myself and grander than myself. And I wear that same mask as I read. It is a mask that preserves the integrity of the interior while it allows it to spread out, sacred, luminous, idiosyncratic, dizzily human, flawed, and completely perfect. Alive. I put it on when I transposed the God of Fire poems to Shango Diaspora. It is Eileen Cherry who pointed out to me that the women were pieces of my consciousness. A consciousness made whole, restored by the creative process of impersonating others, creating other faces, characters. I hide myself and enlarge myself in poem. I costume and go naked at once.
Now my job is harder because so much of this world is chaos, fragments, and I have to work the fragments into a whole and read to audiences who may or may not share my value system. But it is the invisible ritual mask that gives me the authority to seek and say inside a mimesis at midpoint, frontally, in words ever changing, musical, and restorative.
Freshman year I acquired the title of "poet." Suddenly I bloomed in the spring. A Poet. All year long I'd answered the call inside myself, the urgency that was a microcosm of the sixties world outside, by writing in a blue-grey notebook. Poems. Poems of assertive Blackness, young cynicism, unrequited love. I sat in my twin-size dorm room bed in Allison Hall, the modern beige building off Sheridan Road, and let who I was crawl, walk, and dance out of me. I began to learn to curse like my cousin Willie Mae.
There was cussing but none so stylish as my cousin Willie Mae's.
I attempted my studies, a full course load of chemistry, German, calculus, introductory studies, pre-med courses. But poems called me to create myself in the hot and glorious moment.
That year culminated in a cultural program and dinner at which I read a poem that would be published in the Northwestern yearbook, Syllabus. I read it that night at the gathering, on stage there for the first time. The poem had some lines like this:
I am a woman—Black.
You are a man—Black.
My love boundless.
…
Lead me.This last ironic command far from who I was in real life. My own personality, independent and proud, tried to be squeezed into a size-two model of compliance and mythical Black woman obedience.
What characterizes these poems is their eagerness to address the breadth of a Black experience, interior and exterior. I wrote poems about starving Biafran children, a death at the hands of a gang, police brutality, revolutionary zeal and death, and philosophical pieces about Life. The shortest one of these last kinds is
Life is a gas.
It is.
It is.
Inhale."Is it because I am who I am?" Margaret "For My People" Walker asked me as I wept broken-heartedly in her office because she would not let me in her poetry writing class. I was a freshman. She'd only accepted upperclassmen. I was devastated.
She offered, kindly, to work with me on forms after classes. I said, "No." I was pre-med and didn't have time for a class after my other classes. I was too busy. (And too proud.) I think sometimes of what kind of poet I would have turned out to be if I had taken Professor Margaret Walker Alexander up on her offer. She said I was one of the new Black revolutionary poets. And so I was.
*In bed I have made many decisions in which I dreamed of myself. One day in bed I decided I did not wish to be a literary comet with a bright moment and a short life. I knew in a clarity that I wanted a life of honor. I thought of Gwendolyn Brooks. My life would be as hers—rooted in my work, not in a persona created for celebrity, or created by celebrity. I would have things to say, and say them in a daring, rich way. I would write great moments and small moments as a life is written—as many lives are written.
I have never been one to dare. My sister Rose tells me of a fight we fought when we were very young. She three-and-a-half years older than I. She wore her one of two good dresses. I ripped it at the waist. "You tore my dress," she says she wailed. I took this as a challenge to my right to fight, and tore the rest of the waist. Don't ever dare me.
One day on the bed I dared myself to make a life for myself as a writer, a life of dignity, passion, joy, and enduring achievement. I dared me.
It was from Gwendolyn Brooks that I learned to unlock language and make it sing from deep inside itself. She brought the stunning and cool techniques of the Moderns home. Ms. Brooks fused an African-American sensibility with the sharpened, unsentimental skills of Eliot and Pound. Her acute observation became my own. Her startling grace I sought. In poetry and in fiction she found the grandeur sprung from the minute, the tiny detail. Gwendolyn Brooks could turn weeping backwards and leave the eyes dry and clear. Hers a lavish restraint. What gifts of hers I could earn I would. And I would search for my own particular, peculiar way among words.
The girls came back to the dorm all in ecstasy over a man. He was Hoyt W. Fuller, editor of Negro Digest, suave, debonair, worldly, brilliant, mature. It was fall 1969, and he was a visiting professor at Northwestern University. I was not in his class, having had Afro-American literature the year before with a Southern white teacher, Alston Fitts. Talk of Mr. Fuller floated back to the dorm, out of the mouth of enraptured classmates. He was elegant in sports jackets and turtlenecks. He carried an umbrella, long and black, at the ready in case it rained. At the urging of Christine, my roommate, I approached him one day after his class and handed over my blue-grey notebook, asking him to read my poems. He consented and kept the notebook for three weeks. When he finally returned it, he told me I showed "all of my hang-ups in my poetry" and I had "a way with words."
Walking with him home from class one evening he said that his office was inundated with manuscripts. I did not know what the word meant: inundated. I loved his knowledge of words. He was a man who brought new words, new languages.
He spoke French with a flair and conversed at OBAC with visitors from Europe. His English was sophisticated and crisp without the edge-softening slur of the Southern accent I was used to. He spoke Spanish, too, having lived in Majorca years before. He was a well-travelled man, and he spoke the language of liberation; a justice-seeker, he understood the language of self-affirmation. He understood the languages of freedom fighters around the world. Explaining the struggle of Arab "terrorists" because he understood that outrageous acts foster outrageous acts. He was a man of the world who loved learning. Near the time of his death, May 11, 1981, he said he planned to study Chinese.
He educated my ear. Taught me to love Sarah Vaughan. We were sitting on different couches in his living room in Atlanta. He put on Lena Horne and I liked it. "You like that, huh?" he said. Then he put on Sarah Vaughan. And I knew what altar I worshipped at. If over the years he had taught me to love Sarah Vaughan, then I knew why. In his apartment, number 1902 overlooking the lake at 3001 South Michigan, I lay my head back on the same couch and listened to Sassy. Ice fell into shiny glasses and straight drinks were passed. I sipped Coke, tried a rum and Coke and dreamed myself a woman of age while Sarah Vaughan sang. Just as I learned from Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin I learned from Sarah Vaughan the cool, the restraint, the poise, the presence of mind and attitude required of Art-making.
I can see golden Corvoisier in a glass. He's sipping from it. Sitting, listening to Sassy.
In my first conversation with him (after my roommate Christine urged me to seek him out), Mr. Fuller invited me to the OBAC Writers Workshop on the south side where I might be "judged by my peers." I remember thinking "Don L. Lee and Carolyn Rodgers are not my peers. I'm eighteen, they're old." But I went anyway to the address he gave me, 77 East Thirty-fifth Street. I put on my royal blue, high-necked Church dress, and my black pumps with the design on the heel and I rode the el from Evanston to Thirty-fifth Street and walked from State to almost Michigan Avenue across from DeLaSalle High School where my brothers went to school and a few doors down from the junk-curio shop, and I entered a storefront where writing above the door read "Temple of the Yorubas." I was home. Two "street"-looking brothers greeted me. I would learn their names were Walter Bradford and E. Van Higgs, two poets. They were kind and beckoned me to join in, take a seat in one of the chairs that lined the wall or sit on one of the couches. I sat in a chair. There were posters around the room, like the ones we students decorated the Black House with on NU's campus. Book shelves with books on them took up a third of one wall that led into the back room where more chairs and other things were stored. Once sitting in his office reading some letter he had shown me, Jeff Donaldson watched me reading and said, "Angela eats words." I ate that OBAC room with my eyes, reading everything. Did I know then that this would be my home, or rather my delivery room?
It is hard to recall OBAC. The years of devotion to that collective ideal. My love for the collective so much a part of my love for Mr. Fuller, one of the forces who shaped me. Each meeting was an experience, a Black call to the future, an evocation. "Make it a Black world," the OBAC Young People's Workshop wrote. And so it was in that space. Dreaming. Debating. Rigorously exploring the Black Experience, our Black experiences.
Every Tuesday evening my mother sat in church with a group of women to say novenas to Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Every Wednesday I went to OBAC, starting with the third Wednesday of October 1969. The fourth Wednesday the workshop held its business meeting. They had scheduled a rent party for that fourth Wednesday in October. I arrived at the workshop to find it dark. They'd cancelled the rent party with no notice. The next week they were chagrined and so apologetic to learn that I had come all the way from Evanston for nothing. But that first week. …
I describe that first meeting I attended in an essay on Hoyt Fuller. I describe much of our relationship in that essay which I began shortly after his death on May 11, 1981. That night in October 1969 the circle of chairs soon filled up and the couches were filled with people. The reading and responses began. Invariably the reader expressed some nervousness, and the group was congenial, soliciting the work, soothing the nerves of the poet. (Most of the readers were poets, for poetry was the genre of the day. Immediate. Concise. Intimate and collective.) I remember Barbara Reynolds was one of the readers that night. After a while the door opened and in walked a woman in a trench coat, with her hands in her pocket; behind her in walked Don L. Lee, Poet Supreme of campuses across America, trench coat over his arm; then Mr. Hoyt Fuller, trench coat over his arm, strode in. They headed for the front of the room. It seems to me Mr. Fuller sat at a desk that was later in the back room. He settled into his seat not far from the woman, who was Ann Smith, and Don L. Lee. He made himself comfortable, raised his head and looked at me. He smiled.
OBAC was founded in 1967 by a group that included Abdul Alkalimat (political scientist), Jeff Donaldson (visual artist and arts historian), Conrad Kent Rivers (poet), Hoyt Fuller (editor Negro Digest/Black World, writer), E. Duke McNeil (attorney), and Ann Smith (then McNeil, actress). It was composed of four or five workshops, the Writers Workshop, which was led by Mr. Fuller; the Visual Artists Workshop which was led by my teacher and friend Christine's cousin, Jeff Donaldson (The Visual Arts Workshop would paint the famed Wall of Respect on Forty-third and Langley which sparked the contemporary mural movement in the United States. Its key members would later make up AfriCobra), the Drama Workshop, which was led by Ann Smith (who later became the first Black woman elected to an Illinois State position as a trustee of the University of Illinois); and the Community Development Workshop. There was no Music Workshop, for Chicago already was home of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). As well as being dedicated to the development of the arts and what we would now call Afrocentric criticism for these arts, OBAC had a political aim: through affirmative, honest, courageous, and accurate art, authentic art, Black people would feel whole and empowered and exert their muscle in the political and economic realms.
*Nommo was the name of OBAC's journal, a Bantu word for the power of the word to make material change. The spirit transforming physical reality. There was nothing the word could not evoke, inspire, heal, illuminate. This is what I inbreathed. This is what I believed. For twenty years I was a member of the OBAC Writers Workshop. I came regularly from October 1969 but was not invited to become a member until summer 1970.
I remember those OBAC rent parties, an integral part of summer. The door was wide open at 77 East Thirty-fifth Street and people lingered in the doorway, searching for seats inside. In the back room I sliced the ripe watermelon into red triangles, arranged fruit on platters. Mr. Fuller organized the items for sale in the Chinese auction. A Chinese auction is one in which the bidder pays whenever he or she bids. It can earn a lot of money for a group sponsoring a Chinese auction. Invariably they were books or statuettes or bracelets or what-nots Mr. Fuller had brought back from Africa or someplace. Sam "The Spook Who Sat by the Door" Greenlee ran the auction, eliciting fresh bids from competitors while I or somebody else like Sandra Jackson-Opoku ran around the room with a cup collecting cash. Sometimes we had a guest poet like Mari Evans, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, or others. In 1967, before I came, OBAC had Alex Haley as a guest talking about his book Roots that he was working on. All of OBAC's members would be present at rent parties: Haki (then Don), Walter Bradford (poet and youth organizer), Maga Jackson (a University of Chicago student then, a psychiatrist in California now), Daniel Clardy (a high school student brought in by Sterling Plumpp when he first started coming to OBAC), Sandra Jackson-Opoku (a college student at University of Chicago, then University of Massachusetts, now the author of The River Where Blood Is Born), Sterling Plumpp (who had come up from Mississippi years before, later a professor at the University of Illinois), Collette Armsstead (a college student who first came to OBAC around 1980), Warren Fowlkes (a high school student brought in by Sterling Plumpp; Fowlkes, who died in 1980, and my sister Sharon are the parents of my niece Serene Magenta Fowlkes), Yakie Yakubu (poet, now serving a life prison sentence for murder), E. Van Higgs (poet, and public school teacher), Eileen Cherry (Northwestern University student with me, now a professor at De Paul University), Nora Brooks Blakely (daughter of Gwendolyn Brooks and Henry Blakely, founder and director of Chocolate Chips Theatre Company), Mwalimu, Philip Royster (professor, now director of the University of Illinois Cultural Center), David L. Smith (a University of Chicago graduate student, later one of the editors of the Encyclopedia of African-AmericanCulture and History, now dean of faculty of Williams College), Rhonda Davis (original OBAC member, specialized in Afronese name readings), Carolyn Rodgers (original OBAC member, nominee for National Book Award), Johari Amini (original OBAC member now a naprapath near Atlanta), Andrew Wasiah (moved west after marrying and continuing his education), Patricia Washington (a psychology graduate student, later moved east), Johnnie Lott (a high school student originally whose spine was injured by a policeman's bullet, who married and stopped coming to the Workshop), Dfaye Anderson (a high school student when she first came to OBAC, now a writer in New York City), Randson Boykin (original member of OBAC who was sixteen when the workshop first started, multimedia ritual artist, died in 1996), S. Brandi Barnes (came to OBAC in 1980 when the workshop had started meeting at the Southside Community Arts Center, poet and teacher), Johnathan Smith (a Princeton graduate who later returned to Princeton for graduate school), Ginger Mance (who came to OBAC in 1980, although she and I went to high school together, an attorney now), and others. The names changing over the years. I and a few others stayed the same. And the rent parties stay the same in Memory where life is glad and young, and dying was the last thing on any one's mind, though it was the time of Black Consciousness and we were being killed methodically and haphazardly.
In my earliest days at OBAC the workshop was in need of seats. My mother wanted to donate a worn couch to the workshop. On a Saturday morning Mr. Fuller and Haki came to pick it up. My father was home guarding that old couch on the back porch. He said that he would fix it up. My mother was overruled. Mr. Fuller didn't seem to mind. He greeted my father with a sincere respect. He acted happy to know I had a crazy, cantankerous daddy in residence. My life was normal. And the couch stayed where it was, never to be fixed up by my father.
Also in my earliest days OBAC had instituted a story hour at Hall Branch Library. I would go and assist while Ann Smith or Donna Parks (sister of Carole A. Parks, Mr. Fuller's assistant at Negro Digest) would read to the few children who showed up. Later, on those mornings when it was Ann and me, Ann would take me to H and H, a soul food restaurant on Fifty-first, for breakfast. There she would instruct me in the mysteries of men, flirtation, romance, and sex.
Some Saturdays if Donna or Ann did not come, I lingered at the Hall Branch Library and explored the Vivian Harsh Collection of Afro-American History and Literature before it was moved to the new Carter G. Woodson Library on Ninety-fifth and Halsted. For years it was housed at the Hall Branch on Forty-eighth and Michigan. Crammed into two small rooms. I was a detective in those days and fell into the past. I read Crisis and Opportunity, early issues of Negro Digest. I discovered Nancy Cunard's Negro, a classic from 1932, edited by the wealthy offspring of the owner of the steamship line. A thousand treasures fell into my hands, and I fell in love with the history of them and their presence in the present. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, W. E. B. Du Bois, Georgia Douglas Johnson—their voices spoke to me. I read about lynchings in old vibrant issues of Chicago Defender. In those days we stared the devil down. Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell. Garvey's ghost haunted me. "Look for me in the whirlwind, in the voices of a thousand Negro slaves." All of this and more would be echoed in Sterling Stuckey's African-American History Class, and I would sit enraptured.
I knew then I was what is called "a race woman," a sharer in a legacy of strivers, ablaze with a moral calling: Make it right. Make it better. Lifting as we climb.
I had set out on a voyage when I entered college at Northwestern, and OBAC was the first important port of call where I picked up the essentials, what I had to have to continue, to make it to my destination years from now.
I was looking recently at Nommo: The Journal of the OBAC Writers Workshop, winter, 1975, which I did mostly alone with a little help from assistant editor Debra Anderson, who was in school at Washington University in St. Louis, and the assistance of Chaga at Hieroglyphics Ink at Third World Press, with whom I went over and over the galleys which ultimately contained errors that drove Mr. Fuller mad. Errors that I assiduously corrected only for new ones to appear. What most galled Mr. Fuller was the absence of the copyright sign which we later hand stamped into the inside cover. By the time of the stamping he had calmed down, for his managing editor, Carole A. Parks, had roundly gone off on him reminding him that I had asked both him and her to help me do NOMMO '75. Guilty and chastened by the assistance that had never come, he silently sat in the big armchair in his living room in number 1902. The lake lay blue below through the bay window. Our fight was over. The one in which he had bellowed and harangued while I hummed. "Stop that humming. Stop that humming," he said, for the more he yelled, the more I hummed.
*I called him Mr. Fuller until the day he died, and when I was twenty-five or so he, out of respect for my maturity and achievement, began to call me Miss Jackson. My sister Rose said I called him Mr. Fuller so relentlessly in order to establish boundaries so that I would not fall in love with him. The astrologer Katherine De Jersey says ours was a pure love, and it prepared me and helped me envision the man I would love. We talked regularly, routinely, intimately about everything. I was listened to.
Once we sat on the couch in his living room at number 1902, and he tried to explain to me the division of the world by gender, from an historical perspective. "The man goes out and hunts and explores," he said. "The woman tends the hearth." A surprising point of view from the editor who exalted the works of men and women. I remember thinking, as we sat there, that there was something vaguely not right about the assignment of jobs. I wanted to explore, if not hunt. I had no interest in doing dishes, although I did like to cook. I think Mr. Fuller was speaking to the rebel in me, the "Ain't I a Woman?" Sojourner Truth.
My brother was learning Latin, seated next to my mother on the radiator in the kitchen. He stumbled through his responses to the priest. I broke in, "I know. I know, Mama." My mother shot me down. It didn't matter what I knew. How the Latin phrases stuck in my brain as no language has since. I was a girl and could never be an altar server.
In the seventh grade I asked a young seminarian why women could not be priests. His answer didn't make sense to me. "If you go to the highest mountaintop, you find men are the leaders." This didn't smell right when I was in seventh grade, and it still doesn't smell right. Sitting in my seat in seventh grade, listening to the bluster of the red-faced seminarian, I sensed some crucial logic missing. It's still missing. And Mr. Fuller, wonderful as he was, could be guilty of this fault in logic, too. But it did not matter because a conversation with him was an experiment of the mind. And I grew through him in logic, wisdom, and integrity.
After he moved back to Atlanta in 1976 we talked two to three times a week about everything. Ed Spriggs, helping sort through Mr. Fuller's material after his death, found my name over and over again on Mr. Fuller's phone log. "Why is your name on here so many times?" he asked me, looking deep into my face. So soon after the funeral, I couldn't answer.
For days I didn't really talk.
Abena called to tell me. "Angela, I just might as well go on and tell you. Hoyt Fuller is dead. He dropped dead of a heart attack." Before she had finished I had started to scream, ran and hid in the bathroom. This was a violent grief born out of shock. My sister Betty was there. She picked up the phone to find out what had happened. But what had happened could not be found in words. The earth had opened up, and the world was split in two. My grief cry, was also a birth cry, for at twenty-nine I entered a world of letters without the guide, without my mentor, my wise and dear and true friend. I had always been independent and purposeful, achieving a number of small victories on my own. To strive for excellence was a part of my upbringing; Mr. Fuller had strengthened that. He strengthened my strengths.
The night before he died he called me to see how my play, Shango Diaspora, was doing. I was despondent, in bed, unhappy with the production. He began to try to make everything all right. "Send it to me," he said. "There's a director here in Atlanta who is good." He was consoling, ever an advocate, a way-maker, a wayshower. I remember thinking, "Mr. Fuller, you can't always be fixing things for me." I was right. After his death in May, that summer I threw myself into my novel as some way to salute him, to honor his presence and his passing. I would do him proud, and reverence his memory in my work, through Treemont Stone. But I am ahead of myself, as I often am.
Hoyt Fuller was extraordinary in that long before the voices of black women writers came to the fore Hoyt Fuller lifted up our voices. He gave women as artists the viability and visibility that others would not. At a time close to his death he was deeply upset to learn that a reigning black woman star still rankled because she had never been in the pages of Black World. He was truly disturbed to have passed over her talent. To have missed one.
Because he admired black women in general, artists, and integral people of accomplishment, he laid a path of possibility for me and countless others. When I achieved, he acknowledged it as if I had walked on water because paddling my own canoe was extraordinary enough. Once he let me know that he would not publish me in Black World any time I wanted. I told him he did not have to publish me in Black World. I did not expect that from him. I never felt that I had a special entry into the pages of Black World. I had to work in order to be worthy of publication in the journal of African-American letters.
Journey to Africa
Hoyt W. Fuller, 1923-1981The streets turn to dust where you grew up
wind over quiet hills to a red brick
church
white steeple a
star.
The world you knew ends here:
a swath of ash swaddling a dispir-
ited flesh
swollen, misshapen with
embalmer's mishandling.
Not like you, not like you at all.
The holy man said you were Africa. All your
meanings flew up on his great voice. (When
you
walked so briskly, you caught
wind
around the bend of your elbows,
gusts
gathered around swift-body and
fell
away.)
You were fire-quick. Furious.
No one saw the ash.
This is how I remember.
The streets turn to dust where once white
hoods marched while you watched the devil-
ment down
slanting roads like destiny.
The slow slopes would not give you up
before dusk.
You were a sudden sunset: col-
ors
that crashed into earth. Our
squinting eyes
seek the grave, definite horizon
on the quiet
hills.
in a wild nostalgia for flesh,
and sweet sense.
It was the Darkland that stirred you out of the
sleepy
dust of dreams and denial. The clamorous
skin, undying cloth that dared buried bones
to walk. Oh, you swore by sunrise.
Even when weariness robbed you of fire
and took it to caves to warm the
ravenous soil. Squinting still, we sift for
meanings.
If there were more
to say, you would say
even the dust shall
rise
and all these roads be
luminous
(From And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New)
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:
BOOKS
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 41: Afro-American Poets since 1955, edited by Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.
Jackson, Angela, Voo Doo/Love Magic, Third World Press (Chicago, IL), 1974.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 15, 1998, p. 970.
Publishers Weekly, September 20, 1993, review of Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners, p. 68.