PART ONE. In the Introduction to The Sun Whispers, Wait (Brown Turtle Press, 2009), I situate my
beginnings as a writer of poetry on an October night in 1957. After I finished
my own imitation of a bit of light verse that I had just read in “The Saturday
Evening Post”, I showed it to my father, who said, “This is good. You should
keep doing it.” The Introduction ends
this way:
“It is
a blessing that he gave me that advice and that the original poet in the family
-- my mother -- kept a
dictionary by her chair for the sixty- two years I knew her. Oh, I inherited
words enough for the telling, even if the
stories are most often whispered by and for the child within.”
As I live through yet
another commemoration of yet another birthday, I have focused on both my father,
Floyd, and mother, Arralean, as I have reflected on how they planted and
nurtured my deep commitment to studying African American culture and how it has
been the defining challenge of “American” and modern world culture. My father’s formal, intentional lessons in
Black history and culture, are part of my formation – long before his approval
of my first effort at writing poetry.
For all of the best “right reasons” my father had me in the car on every
length and purpose of trips. “Come on.” And I went. I do not ever remember
talking to him, asking questions, seeking clarifications. He would begin
talking.
And I would continue listening.
That one special evening when he drove me to the site of KKK
cross-burning in East St. Louis is, without any argument, the beginning of my
journey from innocence to experience. John Kirkpatrick, the publisher-editor of
the “East St. Louis Crusader,” had obviously angered the shadowy anonymous
vigilantes who protected the denial of America’s truth. They burned their
threat in front of his home. My father explained that to me. I was no more than
seven years old. Nearly three decades
later as I was studying British and American literature (again), I was able to
see that the Privilege of Whiteness was apparent in how novels were analyzed.
The hero, we were told, began HIS journey into adulthood when he left his home
and began his path from innocence to experience. (The girls and boys who
skipped into the foreboding woods of the fairy tales we had all absorbed as
tiny children did not factor into the theory of “innocence to experience”; how
could they? Such tales were of little significance to the serious literary
critics of those days.)
But when I read the Slave Narratives and other forms of
Black literature in graduate school, it became apparent that Black children
were tossed into the fiery furnace of abuse, oppression, danger and death, at
the earliest age imaginable. From Frederick Douglass remembering his Aunt
Hester, to Hurston’s Janie Crawford searching for her face in a group
photograph and not realizing that she was the black girl in the crowd; to Du
Bois experiencing the rejection by his white female classmate of his calling
card, in an early grade – the shock of Blackness being defined by childhood
trauma became all too clear to me.
But by then Hurston and Du Bois and Douglass and Harriet
Jacobs were confirmation of my father’s voice. The multiple forms of print
media in our house were the most basic form of “home schooling” for me. Ebony,
Jet, the Chicago Defender, the Crusader; the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the St.
Louis Globe Democrat; the Saturday Evening Post – these magazines and
newspapers were the motives for methodical, focused instruction into history,
culture, art and politics. He made sure I watched political conventions. His
“running commentary” on baseball games and boxing matches was matched by the
way he provided context and perspective on every Black artist who ever appeared
on a television show. In Ebony magazine, I looked at Du Bois and heard my
father tell me of his meeting him at Wilberforce in 1915. Earl “Fatha” Hines
wearing out a piano on the Ed Sullivan show sparked an anecdote about some
less-than-reputable encounter my father had with him in a club in Chicago in
the 1930’s. On and on flowed the river of
stories and commentaries and footnotes to historical and contemporary issues.
When we moved from the culturally comfortable environment of
East St. Louis, in 1956, to the bewildering and unsettling atmosphere of
Beloit, Wisconsin, the education continued; perhaps with even more urgency. For
me, at least (more so than for my younger-by-four-years sister), a twelve-year
old black boy in an overwhelmingly white world, my father did much more than
give me “the talk.” In that regard, he never had to warn me of the consequences
of unfiltered social behaviors. I already knew. The KKK cross, the pictures of
Emmett Till, and the by then ingrained habit of questioning everything I saw
had made me sufficiently prepared to navigate the maze of our new home.
Once my father had said goodbye to me at the Beloit train
station at 8:20 am, the morning of August 14, 1962, as I began my journey to
the Jesuits, he had armored me as well as he could against the ever-deepening
strangeness of a culture about which I had been a most attentive student. But
as I have also mentioned in a previous entry, he brought other voices into my
world, long-distance. Books by Claude Brown and James Baldwin and Martin Luther
King, Jr. Music by Billie Holiday and Mahalia Jackson. The packages arrived and I did my best to
make the connections – to the multiple worlds wherein I resided, and to the
cultural assimilation to which I was subjected.
How could I be anything but supremely well-schooled and
truly educated by the time the 60’s overwhelmed the known world? Transported back to St. Louis for studies in philosophy, I haunted the bookstores and libraries,
picking up every newly published or reprinted power-text of the Black cultural
awakening. And once again, similarly re-situated, my father gave me books. And reestablished his still pertinent and
prophetic commentaries.
In so many ways, he taught me to be a teacher. I was trained in the formal and extended
manner by a true Black Studies scholar. When, at his funeral in 1978, I heard
his voice, over and over, saying to me, “I told you to get all the education
you could,” I renewed my covenant with him. A year later I was in New Haven,
having brought my eight boxes of books with me. My past and my future were shaped
into the sacred circle at my father’s funeral. Nothing I would learn at Yale
would be foreign to me – except the excesses of theory that buzzed in places
where I was forced to sojourn from time to time. Just as I had promised, at my ordination,
that I would never preach a sermon that my two grandmothers could not
understand, so I added a pedagogical vow: I would never teach or lecture in a
way that my father, my mother and my brother would find off-putting or
confusing. Those vows, it can be safely
said, have been kept without fail.
PART TWO. “My mother,
the original poet in the family.” And
nothing that I would ever learn in any course dealing with literature, be it
classical Greek or Latin; early, modern or contemporary British; or from the
entire spectrum of American literature – nothing would ever be daunting to me
because my mother taught me how to maneuver among the knots and tangles of
language, and never “break a sweat.” My
mother mastered multivalent discourse at a very early age. She, too,
participated in my home-lessons. But the verbal agility with which she controlled
all conversations, serious or playful – and for her, conversations could be
both, simultaneously – that verbal virtuosity is still a source of amazement
and delight among her family, friends, neighbors, nearly a decade after her
death.
Also mentioned in the quotation that begins this is the fact
that I never knew my mother to be without a dictionary next to her chair.
Never. Many occasions produced the
briefest of comments, always perfectly timed and inflected. Her jokes, familiar
to three generations of her “children”, focused mainly on choosing one level of
meaning over another, with the simplest of words. In the style of the master dancers of west
Africa, my mother could listen to four or five people talking, a room away, and
make the best possible intervention – one that could stop all talk and then
induce great laughter – when folks “got the joke.”
And then laughter would be aimed at those who did not hear
the sly, hidden, doubled meaning of the pivotal word. Playing the dozens?
Signifying? Not hardly; my mother was far to “genteel” for such crude
performances – except that is what she did morning noon and night. And not
always in a harmless way.
What else informs the best Black literature, except the
high, giddy dazzling displays of linguistic acrobatics known from tales about
rabbits; to boasting and toasting chants in bars and barbecues; to verbal jazz
improvisations practiced in barbershops, beauty parlors -- and some of the
sturdiest pulpits in the country?
How could I do
otherwise but establish my credentials as a Black Studies practitioner with,
“Who defines the terms by which we live?’ when I was raised by a woman who
named herself several times before she was seventeen years old. I had always thought her mother’s relatives
were less-than-well-tutored because they persisted in calling her “Arralee”
instead of “Arralean,” It was only after her death in 2007, that I discovered that she had never liked “Arralee”,
so she changed the name. I had known for years that she had always wanted a
“pretty” middle name, so she gave herself one: “Lolita”. And as to her last name (the so-called
“maiden” name), no one will ever know for sure how “Luster” was added to her
signature. Except that it certainly does describe her presence in our world.
Sometimes I think I teach the books that I am sure that my
mother would like to read – and about which she could give a laser-like
critique. The summer after my father
died, she finally had an obscenely large tumor removed from her left shoulder.
Doctors had resisted operating, for fear that she could lose all mobility in
that arm. Because of the thirty years she lived with that deformity, I learned
much about cooking, since I was there to help her in the kitchen; stirring and
lifting and managing the tasks she could not do easily. The afternoon she went to the hospital, I
brought her a copy of Morrison’s Song of
Solomon. I had fallen in love with the book, the characters, but especially
the symphony of language that Morrison displayed.
The next morning, as she was recovering, she told me that
she had finished the entire novel the night before. “What? How could you have done that?” I asked.
“Well,” she said, “I didn’t know if I would survive the operation and I wanted
to know how things turned out.” And then
she started asking questions about the novel.
About five years later, when I was organizing my sly and subversive
themes (the description of someone on my committee; not my own description. Oh,
no…), I knew that I was bound to Song of Solomon, if for no other reason to
finally answer my mother’s sophisticated questions.
He taught me how to read. She taught me to delight in the
words I read.
Everyone who engages in the struggle to continue the work of
Black Studies must have similar authorities in their development. And if any
would say that they do not, then they do not see that my mother and father did
the same work, in my beginnings, that Du Bois, Hughes, Hurston, Gwendolyn
Brooks and Sterling Brown and Ann Petry and Richard Wright and Paule Marshall
and James Baldwin did for me and for all of us, later on.
Paraphrasing my dear friend, Thea Bowman, “we come to our
[discipline] fully formed.” Even if we have never had the experience of a ring
shout or felt the driver’s lash; even if we have never had a vision like Elijah
or Moses or John or Mary, we know that there are wheels within wheels, moving
in counter-clockwise tension. And we know how to find the secret, needful,
meanings.
We knew before we ever began this journey that we could not
afford not to be wise and allow others to float in a sea of denial. The Old Ones sang us here. And we carry the
songs always.
I hope that from time to time, somebody will say, “he was
raised right.” Yes, indeed. I tried to
get all the education I could.
