extracted text

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DARK PHRASES
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COPYRIGHT 1993 SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE
FUNDED BY STUDENT SENATE
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PRINTED BY LIBRA BUSINESS SERVICES
NORWALK, CONNETICUT
COVER ART BY REGINA GARCIA

DARK PHRASES
-EDITOR
Holly Bass

CREATIVE DIRECTOR/CO-EDITOR
Brianna Hynell}ail

ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Cecilia Cortez

EDITORIAL CONS.ULTANT
Diana G..Sandigo
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TYPESETTING
Wednesday Guyot
Diana G. Sandigo

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The editors of J)ark Phrases 1993 would ijke to offer our sincerest thanks to all the contributors for their outstanding poetry, prose
and art. It is with great pleasure that we extend an additional thanks
to the members of Asian·and Asian-American Students Union,
Harambe, and Unidad for continuing the fight for the inclusion of
. people of color in all aspects of life here at Sarah Lawrence.College.

VOLUME 3, 1993

Table of Contents
. ..

Poetry
So Beautiful, Malkia Cyril 1
Dropping Me Off, Chris Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Bloodlines, leslie Peace jubilee. . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I Shall Sell My Poverty, Okot Benge . . . . . ' . ... . . . . . . . . ,. .• . . . .
Mama 'Zenzile, Daphne 6sayade Dumas . . . . : . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
For My First Teacher, Kimiko Hahn . . . . . . . . . . .
Thin Nothings, Rose-Anne Clennont . . . . . '· .. . . . . . . . . .
flowers: So_metimes, wednesday guyot, . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 • •
Esta Noche Duemw Sola, Chiara Merino. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Burning Brides, Ava Ming Hu •. . r . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . •. .
Delia-Goddess- of a Separate Species, leslie Peace jubilee . •. . .. -. . . .
Sex with R., Andre Young .. . . -. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . •
Piaf, Joju Cleaver . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . • . . . . . . . . . : . . . .
untitled, Elizabeth Soto . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
the pussy poem: on pussy reticence, Wednesday Guyot . . . . . . . . . . .
A Humble Prayer, Okot Benge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Freedom Fire, Susan N.Kiguli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Eve,. Krishena Peters . . . . . . . . . . . .• . : . . . . . . . . .' . . . . . . .
·The Wedding Night, Ava Ming Hu .. . . . .. . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . .
At:/4mson Blessed, Ernesto Okello Ogwang . . . . . . . . •. . . . .
. .
i dream of walking past, letting it go, Elizabeth Soto . . . . . . . .
. .
Country Wench,-Tusingwire Jotham . . . . . . . . .. .. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Kimono, Michel Ng . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Cry Freedom, Okot Benge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . : . . . . . . . . .
For One Black Child In an All White School, 1967, leslie Peace jubl.lee . . . .
Brother and His Sax, Daphne ·6sayade Dumas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
american dreamer, wednesday guyot . . . . . . .
. . . . . ., . . . .

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11
13
14
21
23
25
27
35
36
38
41
44
45 •
47
48
53

55
57
60
61
62
68
71
73
75
76

Fiction
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For Louis When the Day is Long, Bernardo Ruiz . .
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. . . . . . . . 15
Sallie, Jacqu~line Price; . . . . . . . . , . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
a scene of the city, Ed Shei. . . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . ~ . . . . . . . . . . 42
8:30a.m. Stream Of Consciousness 1993, Kimberly Bliss : . . . . . . . . . . 50
Ghosts and Smoke, Jamesmith m . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ., . ~ . . . . . 64 ,

Non-Fiction

Raising Women: A Man's Journey into Womanhood, Wm. M. Kelley . . . . . . 5
When, Where And Why 1 Entered, or, What Harlem Means to Me,
Randall Kenan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . .

. . . 78

'. . Art and Photos •
Bernardo Ruiz· . . . . . . .
Elizabeth Miranda . . . . .
Kaneem L. Smith. . . . . .
Vicky Lavergne. . . . . . .
William Kelley. . . . •. . .

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. . . . . . . . . . . . _. . ... . . . . . . . . . '24, 52
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · . 40, 77
. . . . : . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . . . . 14, 70
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34, 72, 59
. . ~ . . . . . . . . . . . . . ,. . . . . . . . . 4, 43

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So Beautiful
Malkia Cyril

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There are silences which info~ my pain.
It is in sliced and chopped quiet that I have always known
my body
,
I have not been forever this fat, this uncharacteristically.unhappy •
with the slow path of water down my abdomen,
slick between my thighs
the baby pictures slide memories sweet
down the back of my throat
of mommies cuddling and crowding around
screaming Black children
become Black women in the dark hallways of project buildings
the back rooms of substandard housing
in the streets of Brooklyn ,
we were shot into female comers
and were th~re when·Presidents decided which to keep and cut
I have never beeri worth .saving
so we were Black women
with our heads disconnected from our spirits
we were Black'and women
on tlie bl0od soaked hands of
Korean grocers whose minds saw white projected images
of ho's and crackhed' s
befor~ rainbow of death made in our collective eye
bursting red our veins poppin blue blood •
our bones crushed and crashing onto the
linoleum floors of hard working womeh
for a dollar we became dead niggas
or the dead girlfriends of black women
,,
angry and afraid ,. . .
believing in some shit that is meant to destroy.us
and out of 1960's Black we became women
oilin' our scalps,
scratchin out the dandruff of our ancestors
our lives dirty as fingernails with no hope
and true womanhood slicin' and dicin' like -a blender gadget
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2 I DARK PIIIWIIS

. meant to whip ,us into somethin' c~te and tasty
my name drips off the tongue of this nation like murder
and they wonder
.
these white girls in white colleges sitting in white classrooms _
with white teachers
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enlightened hair whlppin careless and
undaunted by the skidmarks on our faces
bundles of pain learning about the ways their mothers avoided their
fathers luxuries inside someone's black mother
and they
white neverminds in a culture of nevermind its none of your
business anyway give away and give away and think that they've
found liberation in schools remiriiscent of the Mickey Mouse Club by
pointing to that other white girl who mistakenly uttered what they
were all thinking anyway
• "stupid niggers this is my school"
calling her a shame
while they choke buried in coffins of patriarchy
and everytime I turn around some mother is being killed
by her sons and some twisted ~eality of being too dark and too big
and just not right is passed in a needle to some sista
and rests deep in her arms
Oh ... the tracks of my tears, the full of my breasts
the 'thick of my hair couldn't fit into Vogue and I will always be
too much and un-Madamoiselle like
but I wanted so bad when I lived on the fringes of illusion
to be there
not in the pages of Vogue, but in somebody's 'pages
_on somebody's mind I was a Black and lonely woman
who could've killed for a waist introverted into
negative numbers
sometimes I die to be minus
minus 10, or even funny and interesting like prime time
hold people's attention like L.A. Law or Roseanne
be a series to come back to like those girls
whQ give a little pussy to boys in the big house to move
from the kitchen to the prarie
from the back room to the frontier
or think I wouldn't mind security ,

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l)ABI PIIJLlSBS / 3
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being safe in the hyphenated or nameless existence of marriage
. wouldn't care if my pussy was on a payment plan
if someone would just talk to me and tell me I was
somethin more than an after-school special
and there are so many times
• ,
when I just wanna follow the rules
be in the game
but there is a dry spot in my crying heart
that won't let me play with police who
• shbot the women first
and brothers who quietly caress the night
soft brown horizons gleam honey-colored on their necks
all silk in their voices and cream in their smiles
awkward at ten and interegated then , ,
into a "Bitches ain'. t shjt·but hoes and chicks" mentality
do not hold my interest when instead of a baby
•
they cradle a gun
we will never be the canon _that ~pits a
capitalist deconstruction of the human agenda
but we lick the salty tears from the hole it leaves
in all of our lives when we are forced to
look truth.in its face and believe.
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I don't understand why I still try to fit the wide of my soul

the scent of the sista I follow
I lead and walk beside
the world of my word
the ocean in my name
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into bottles of lighter fluid
or cut out sugar coated cookies that some asshole
will smash to pieces anyway
but even on this edge .
the innuendoes and implications
are not lynched they do,not condense into nothingness
I feel them in this space and know them on my terms
and create myself in the silences I have left behind. •
I am ugly when I'm ugly and when I am

beautiful...?
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There is no summer longer than mine

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William M. Kelley

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• Raising Women:
A Man's Journey into Womanhood
William M.- Kelley
I wanted children even before I quite realized that women actually played
a part in making them. At first I think I just wanted a brother or sister. But as I
grew older, and having finally caught on that no little companioh would materialize out·of my mother's body, I began to look forward ·to the day when I could
have some children of my own. By now I knew.how people made l;>abies, and
that seemed O.K. too.
• . I suppose that I first rea~zed that babies came out of women because·of
my mother. A modest woman, I hardly ever glimpsed her totally naked, by
accident several times, but til I reached the age of se~ert I saw her often in her
undei:wear. Both my mother and my grandmother, once they got on their bras and
drawers, they let me watch the rest.
I came out of this experience with two realizations, even as young as
seven. First, compared to men, women wore some of the least.functional and
most uncomfortable clothes any mind could devise. From time to time, they let
me stumble around.in their high heels, ankles wobbling. In the winter, my mother
wore woolies but continµed to wear skirts, complaining of the cold Bronx wind on
her legs. In the summer, at least till she reached the age of seventy, my beloved
Nana daily laced herself into a corset, covered -it with a slip, then a dress. Some
sinister tyranny clearly orchestrated this.
Secondly, but more importantly, seeing my mother in bra and halfslip
revealed to met the top of the world's ugliest Caesarian scar, a brown zigzaggy
tear that looked like she'd given birth to me in an open boat off a shipwrecked
oceanliner, my inbringing performed by my father, an amateur upholsterer.
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Actually she'd had me in New York City, her incision stitched by an incoJllpetent
intern using contaminated medical twine.
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I woµld ponder that scar and know that my mother had exhibited bravery
and fortitude and love at least as monumental as any man at that time who fought
Nipponese or Nazis in foreign lands. My mother had clearly visited Hell and
returned with me in her arms, though she always called me God's perfect child, I
daresay more as incentive than description. Later on, reading Macbeth, when
McDuff says that he came "from my mother's wo{Ilb untimely ripp' d", I could
relate visually.
I held women in high.esteem from early in my life. My Nana sewed,
crocheted and knit. I would sit w~th her, threading needles for h~r. learning how,
to sew and listening as she recounted the story of my forebears: .the Haitian
slavegirl aged fourte~n. the Confederate colonel ~ho knocked her up, gave the

6 / DA.BK PlllUSBS

baby to bis spinster sisters to raise as a servant, then sold the Haitian mother in the •
market at New Orleans; the lightskinned baby growing up to watch at fifteen
Sherman's troops marching through Georgia bringing Eman,cipation, becoming
the mistress of Savannah's foremost gunsmith, a German from the Alsace, how
she bore him ten children, how he left his wife and came to live with her, how one
pf the children grew up to become my beloved Nana, who came North and mar-·
ried a Puerto Rican from Ponce;-and more. Nana couldn't cook, so Mama
handled that. (Pop taught me to keep house.) They said they taught me t0 do
most everything a woman did for a man so I wouldn't later on come to depend ort
the wrong kind of woman. They never defined that kind of woman, too Catholic
fo do it, but at least I wouldn't get hooked by one because I cooldn't make a bed
or keep my clothes clean and mended or fry an omelette.
•
Now I tell you all this so you'll know what kind of women nurtured me
,and their great importance in my life, and so that you'll not disbelieve me when I
state that in looking for a wife I looked not so much for someone who would love
and car~ for me, but for a woman who would love and care for my projected
children. Except it didn't work out quite that way. The mother of my children
picked me before I had a chance to pick her. When I took her to meet my Nana
(then aged eighty-six, clearminded, her eyes failing, but still sewing), they ignored me and chatted amiably and intimately for three heurs. At comparable , •
ages, they even resembled each other. In six months, I found myself married.
The doctor who administered us our blood tests gave us some good advice: Wait for a year to have children to see if the marriage will work out. We
wajted for three years. When we had our first child, we really wanted her. It
makes a big difference. We Africamericans bring too many unwanted children
into the world. And it slio~s in the way too many of us keep or don't keep them . .
We all naturally work harder for something we really want rhan for something "
that comes to us by accident. One could say the same thing about acquiring
freedom.
The Sunday after the Thursday my first daughter came into the world,
twenty-one slugs took.Brother Malcolm out'of it in front of his wife and daughters. A year later, I daily attended the tpal of his three accused killers, finally
coming to the firm conviction that the State hadn't proved its case against two of
the three. After the guilty ~erdict came in, I resolved to leave the Plantation,
perhaps forever. I couldn't do any better for my baby daughter than to remove
her from a mediocre, racist and violent environment. We could protest and battle
our lives thro1:1gh, but before we would ever eradicate mediocrity, racism and
violence, their poison would already have infected our daughter.
Deciding to escape the Plantation constituted the first major decision I
made with my new daughter"s welfare in mjnd. I had other reasons too. One time
· somebody came to visit us, a lightskinned Africamerican woman, and during.the
course of her introduction to my first born, innocently exclaimed, "And she's got
such nice soft good p~etty hair!"

D!BI PBIUSBS I 7

Sometimes words sting, and these stung. I never said anything about it to
the woman herself; I smiled and took the compliment But inside I remembered
almost the first thing I'd ever personally heard Brother Malcolm say: "Who taught
you to hate your hair, and your lips and your noses, and _your brown beautiful
.
skin.r
,
As someone who spent long teenage hours in the bathroom trying, with
beeswax and steam; to get my hair to do things contrary to its nature, Brother;
Malcolm had opened me up with_that single question.- Now, here all that ,
bulltwinkie came se~ping into my house. Would my daughter spend her childhood quantified ,and cl~ified· by tlfe quality of her hair? What good to battle
racism in the street if it came into your home on -the lips of friends?
So we went to Paris on the way to Africa'. In Paris we'd meet people from
- Senegal, the place which most interested me, and find out what we'd need to
know, While we learned French and met Africans, my wife had another baby,
planned and much wante_d. The first baby needed company, someone who looked
more' like her in a sea of flaxenhaired blue-eyed Frenchettes.
My second daughter I saw born. My wife opened her legs and out came a
bl~ckhairea·purple bawling creation, a girl. Seeing my daughter-birthed doubled
my respect and !!dmiration for my wife, for all women. I thought about my Nana
Jessie going through all this mainest of events four times ano my other grandmother doing it ten times. Now I ·had two such glorious and lifefilleq beings to
raise, my two precious Pearls, a profound responsibility.
•
In the meantime, the more we learned about Africa and Africans, the more
we realized that we had much work to do to get ready for Africa. Senegal would
take physical strength and we had lived in cities too -long. At thirty:;two years of
•age, and smoking a pack of Camels a day, I would get out of breath climbing five
flights of stairs. And Africa didn't realis,tically seem like a good place to take two
small children. Nor did we have the spiritual strength ~equired fofthe i<?m:ney.
One had really to believe, and we didn't. It just seell)ed so far .away.
But one thing had become clear; we had to leave Paris. First of all, it
rained two hundred days a year. We couldn't get the Pearls outto play. Cooped
up in an apartment for days at a time, the older Pearl (now three) couldn't sleep at
night, had developed respiratory problems. And judgmg from her first few
months, the new baby would have more energy than her older sister~more need •
for regular outdoor exercis~. '
Still I didn't want to return them to the Plantation. By this time, they'd
Dlled Rev. King too. Things would not get better for a long while, if ever. At the .·
same time, I hear more and more good th~gs about Jamaica, in the West Indies;
Xaymaca, the native Arawakans called it, Land of Wood and Water.
As a place to.raise two girls, Jamaica had a lot to recommend it. Besides
sun and sea and sand, the people spoke ·several interesting varieties of English,
ranging from Received Pronunciation to African4 aced patois. The cooking
traditions of Africa, which in the United States lrad begun to wither before ¢e ,
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_fiery onslaught of Colonel Mickey Donald Feed, still boiled and bubbled among
Jamaican women: To this day, my daughters (now sophisticated New York
women) can feed ten with a handful of red beans, a pound of rice, some onions,
•and one half chicken. Add Dragon Stout and party. In Jamaica in 1968, people
still cooked and ate real food.
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•
We knew little of this when we got there. We just knew about the sun and
sea. We kne\\' that the ·money we paid for an apartment in Paris now bought us a
,house with a yard.
I entered what I called my shepherding period. I'd spend hours sitting on
the verandah,(nothing fancy, just a covered porch) and watch the Pearls at play.
From afar, I explored every exotic nannybug or poinsettia le;if that they explored.
I watched them because I wanted to find out about them. I began to realize that I
had finally begun to understand women.
'
- Drawing on my early insight about the 'tyranny of women's clothes, as
much as possible we dressed the two Pearls like boys. Their understuff usually
• had frills, but outside they wore T-shirts, shorts or jeans, which made easier
climbing,the hogplum tree in the front yard. Here we bucked the prevailing
Jamaican wind, which turned out little girls in· thighhigh dresses with their
pantyseats showing, stirring the passions of undisciplined men. Jamaicans pegged
the age of consent at fourteen.
When we went to the beach, we put them in bottoms. Why make them
hide something they didn't have yet? And everybody has nipples. Occasionally
someone would notice and look real hard. But mostly nobody cared. When
the.
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•Pearls began to want to wear tops, years before they had to, we let them. But at
least they'd had a few years of sun on their bare chests.
At the urging of my very middleclass landlady, we started the older Pearl
in nursery school. But it didn't work out; not enough exercise, too much pretension. After a year and a half, we took her out. She and her sister played around in
the yard for another year. Then we noticed them starting to play school, the older
Pearl as teacher and the younger one as pupil. · Obviously they wanted some
learning, but we couldn't bring ~urselves to send them back. Day by day we'd
watched their sisterly bond growing stronger. Even if we sent them to the same
school, they'd hardly see each other. They'. d develop friendships in their age
,·
groups which woµld slowly wear away their link.
,
We decided to set up our own school, a little oneroom schoolhouse for
two. The Pearls named it the Country Garden School.
In Jamaica, children wore uniforms to school, a gobd idea. It cut down on
'clothes competition among students and saved money for the parents. In strange
way, uniforms legitimized childhood, gave school a visual place in society. ,The
Pearls didn't mind very much not going to school, but they insisted on uniforms.
Every school child must have school uniform, Papa, you no see that. So uniforms
they·got.
Each morning at seven, they'd wake up, wash and put on their uniforms,
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DABK PBIUSBS I S

feed the cats and eat a light breakfast of fruit, bun and cheese, cocoa, brush their
teeth, then leave the house,for Country Garden SchooL From the window, we'd
watch, as _hand in hand and carrying bookladr n bags, the Pearls strolled to our
gate, and later on a safer street to the comer, still in sight of our window, and
there linger, chatting, if waiting for a bus. After a few m<?ments, they'd start
back toward home, enter the gate, walk round the house and knock on,my office
•
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door, which ,I set up like a schoolroom.
•
Somehow this ritual of departure and arrival had survived from their
earliest playing-school game. But more than just a ri,tual, it helped us to make a
shift in our relationship. I took teaching to them very seriously, marshalling
everything I'd'Ieamed about teaching and learning since 1950 ,and my first camp
counselor job. And to them, in the interval, I became Mr. Windfieldr the name
they'd given their teacher, not a man to !!ifle with like softhearted Papa who
eventually gave you _whatever you needed and most of what you wanted.
Mr. Windfield (he had no first name) taught Grammar & Phonetics,
Caribbea:n History, Spanish, Music (recorders), European & American History &
Lit (affectionately nicknam'ed "Pinkfolks"). We saw no truth in white&black,
preferred pink&brown. Mr. Windfield also tried to handle Math, and conducted
Sports and Nature Walk, which-might include sa~ntering up to the beacli collecting shells, to Biscayne Avenue for a snocone. Mama, who always remaine9
•Mama, taught French, Arts & Crafts, Needlecraft, and Social Investigation, which
meant making a shopping list, estimating the cost of each item, and adding the '
total. ~eri in the open market, as Mama dealt with the niarketlad1es, the Pearls
would check their estimates against reality. We had school twenty hours a week,
in the morning before the day got too hot. .
They did well. Later, after having returned to the Plantation, when they ,
each entered public school i'n seventh grade, they tested high and did well, both
graduating high school, thoqgh the younger Pearl never did much like school until
she found one that would.teach her. how to set a fingerwave and wield a
blowdryer. The older Pearl has broad experience in computers.
Perhaps I got more out of teaching the Pearls than they did, thqugh I hope
their schooling did not suffer because of mine. I had a chance to see them in a
new' way, d~aling with their mi~ds instead of their hearts. .Some will not understand why this matters, might even consider it detrimental to the child to have a
parent as teacher, something like husband teaching a wife to drive a car. I can
only answer that those we hire to teach our Africamerican children have not done
such a good job of it that we should refrain from giving them all the help we can.
And how to explain that each September'we take bright little minds-to kindergarten only to have them come back to us several years later poorly educated, hostile
and diagnosed as demented or defective? As the Native American poet, Spotted
Pony, once Said, "If the schools were .any good, society would improve!"
But I did not inten,d for this to tum into an indictment of the public
schools, but rather wanted to encourage Africamericans to start dealing with our

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ch~ldren's minds, and to illustrate some of the rewards for doing so. I wanted to
encourage especially the Africamerican man to take an active interest in \he
development of hi§ children, especially his daughters: I've never had a son, so
maybe I don't know, but fcan't imagine a son giving me more than have my
daughters.
.
They reintroduced me to the fine art of walking slow. I got so good at it .
that I could do an entire city block in a full thirty minutes. _And believe me, I
didn't miss a thing, not one dog or flower. They taught me curiosity. I've peeped
through many a fence hole and round many a comer that I'd have missed ifnot
for them. I saw several circuses and a carnival that would've.passed me without
. notice. They impelled me to sto'p smoking cigarettes. The great miracle of them •
turned me-toward the Creator.
But I'd better stop. In a moment, I'll dig out two or three more photograph albums, and really start bragging. I do 'have to say however that most of all,
• my daughters have given II,le the gift of the.good women they have become. Any
time I get to spend with them now brings me great pleasure. They haven't had an
easy life with a creative artist as a papa, so. they've grown up-tough, but they
haven't turned hard or cynical. They haye generous spirits. I figure myself as
40% responsible for what they've become, and I'd like tQ think that \\'.herever my
ancestors dwell, my~Mama and Nana, greatgreatgrandma Josephine, and before
her, the Haitian teenage Ouidette Badu; and grandma Sina, and gre,atgrandma
Alberta and all the female ancestors I didn't name or whose names I don'~know,
that all those glorious and life-filled beings can see the women I played a part in
raising, can rock their rockers, nod their ~eads, and affirm:
Now them '.s two nice young ladies.
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• Dropp'ing Me Off
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Chris Lee
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Pulled over for stopping and no one has moved.
There is a lurking percussion
from the radio and we're at the curb
before my house in the lowered white c~.
White, I'm not, but I get out hand~ up to say:
"We're all neighbors, Officers
and I live around here," 1
when I see a K-9 out the door of the black and white run at me
in the red and blue flash of rollers.
I'm a young quic~ guy and hop back in.
At the window are roaring fangs,
extended claws before the,glas's at my face.
No wrong had been done
but once I've been frisked and license chec'ked
a cop warns me, of my gun carrying potential.
Years now,J've been a model minority
but beast be damned:
The night is full of dark pigment.

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I.

'

I

,

'

12 / DAHi PBIUSBS

I

•

Kaneem L. Smith

DABI P1WSBS I 13 /

I

Bloodlines
leslie Peace jubilee

'

Trusting shadows and echoes
screaming thinly into the throat of dreams
My mother's voice had begun
to flutter as her mother's voice
Starling caught woman stories
'

Arepetition of wings sharpen
themselves like tongues .
Every time I walk inside myself. she says
her head bowed as if in prayer
Every time I 'Yalk inside myself
I crash into a ~ray wall
impenetrab1e·and I destroy
myself aiainst it
Arepetition of wings sharpen themselves

• Where are your son~s of ~Iory? she asks me

I

What is tacii in touch, tears, echoes
unrequited wishes for salvation
Mother and daughter back to naked back
Hands stretched toward the Father
Oh, heavenly Father, cfeanse
these veins y'ou' ve lain
and lined with rape and blood
and no good grace of god
Where ate my songs of glory?

As though I could answer
when goddesses close their eyes
and girls grope for 'their voices
Arepetition of wings stun
themselves like llumb tongues

'

-

14 / D!BI PIIIUSBS .

' I Shall Sell My Poverty
Okot Benge

I

One day
I shall sell this suffocating poverty
That now hang over me
Like a stinking dirty rag
Like mother hen
Gathering its chicks under her wings
I shall gather together
My sorrows and heartaches
My hunger and social nothingness
My·loneliness and hopelessness
Into a tearful volume of writings ,
I shall write
Of a poverty-caged life
Drowning in a lake of destitution
With no social or economic boats to row ashore
Ever choked with muddy water
of poverty-strangled love affair.
With my pen I shall decorate my poverty
And weave it into a neat book
That shall fetch me cash on the market
Then, my poverty shall be no more
For I shall be a rich po<;>r man .

...

Dm PBB!SBS / 15
.

.

For ~ouis When The Day Is Long ·
Bernardo Ruiz

Help me Louis. If I d<;m't get all the facts straight, forgive me. I don't
, remember everything as clearly as it happened, but I remember the important
parts.
It was a late night at the Korean Fruit and Vegetab\e. You and I had eaten
fried fish sandwiches for dinner but we were hungry again and restless. Out in
front a brown man was chopping chives. Th~ sweet raw vegetable smell made
my mouth water. I stood for a_moment looking at his deft heavy hands. I asked
him where he Wei$ from. Puebla, he said. There were many Mexicans from
Puebla in the1city that summer, cutting carrots and selling fruit in front of Korean
grocers. ije told me !sounded like a Mexican, where was I from ? Guanajuato, I
told him. He ~miled, he looked as out of place as the flowers he had cut and
wrapped in wax paper.
,
Inside, the man behind the counter was giving you looks, Louis. I
watched you pick out a soda on the television monitor. Your skin was flat black.
Themonitor was cheap and one couldn't make out your features, only black.
Pretty soon the Korean man started yelling in Korean to another m~ in the back.
In seconds a young Korean kid, about our age, wearing a Raiders cap, came from
theback and leaned against a shelf with his arms folded. The owner was trying to
get the man out front tQ watch me but he couldn't speak enough English to tell
himwhat he wanted. If he had been able to, I doubt the man from Puebla would
haveunderstood. They were looking at each other in a strained, tower-~f-babel
way. I finally told the man from Puebla in Spanish to watch me. The owner's
facecrimsoned and he didn't look at me again.· Y~u bought a soda, not without
some words, and we left, ~ursing.
,
We were loose in Alphabet city. The sky ~ad a glow behind its darkness.
The streets were loud and chaotic with people. We were silent for awhile, moving
through the swarms. I was dizzy with faces. Conversation was indistinguishable
and the collective hum was unreal. There was a raunchy body smell underneath
the electric lamps. Drunken boyfriends stumbled with heavy arms around their
girls. The homeless had lined the streets with broken shoes and magazines.
There was the warm food smell hitting the street from outdoor restaurants. I
stared at the crowded tables. Candles·flickered and hands gesticulated over halffinished meals. I was hungry and witqout realizing it I had stopped and was,
staring at this one table. The couple looked up from their dinner. My mouth was
open, I felt like afool. You had gone up the block a little but came back and took

myann.

JG / D.!RK PIIIUSBS

-What the fuck do you think you are lookin' at?, you yelled at them.
· . They turned back to their-dinners, shaking their heads and we ran up pie block.
You were itching for trouble. Come to think of it , so was I. Anything to
break the slow monotonous night. We walked over,_past 1st Ave. where the
streets were less crowded. Where the houses looked like they had been bombed. .
We walked' almost to the edge of the highw~y. When we got to a dark comer you
scrambled onto a rubble pile. I followed, scraping my lrnee and cursing. You
were looking around for something. I asked you what you thought you were
doing. You said nothing but picked up a bottle and filled it with gravel.
• -Get something, you said.
•
I grabbed a brick. As we were sliding down the rubble pile you asked if I
remembered your aunt Aida.
-Yeah, I said, the one who used to live right up the block.
,
That's the one. You 'told me that one night a couple of months ago, the landlord of
the building had gone to her in the night and said the kids were making too much
noise. Aida said she'd.keep it down. That wasn't enough, she had been late with
her last three rent payments, he wanted her out·within the week. He said that then
walked downstairs. Before Aida had her and her kids stuff-out, the Landlord's
brother was putting boxes in the living room. He and his wife and his faJ kids
were all settled in_,by the next night.
'
We went up the block a little. I held the brick behind ~y back. We
crossedthe street and crouched near some bushes. A delivery boy was bringing
some pizza inside. A heavy, round man opened the outside door and paid the
delivery boy.
•
We waited as he went upstairs. He walked into Aida's old apartment, and his kids
sat down for dinner. Without a word, as the delivery boy biked up the street and a
car approached, we ran up as close as we could and let the bottle and brick se.t
sail. There was a tremendous crash. We stood sµll, looking at each other, then
w,e made for 1st Ave. like our lives depended on it. For whatever reason we heard
gunshots behind us. We ran straight for three blocks.
yve ducked into an alley and put our hands on our knees, panting. We
were laughing, trying to catch our brea~. At the other end of the all~y I heard
something rustle.
•
•Motherfucker! A tall skinny man with a straw fishing hat and a tom jacket came out of the
darkness and into a yellow shaft of light.
-Say, you cats got a screwdriver on you?, My flutes all busted up. How about a
rubber band? Nah? How about some change? Some motherfucker stepped on .
my flute case and cracked this part here. I was gonna play out in the street, but
it's all fucked up. We fumbled for some change. He was thankful but more
interested in his flute. His face was chocolate brown and his cheeks were sucked
in. He was missing some teeth. He tried to screw his flute toge~~r and pipe out a
time. Wind escaped through a crack on the side.
-Man, it's all fucked up! Say y'all are some good lookin' cats. You make m~ feel

D.µ11. PBBA8BS I 17

old. Damn,Jookit you. When I was twenty-seven I looked like you. I had all my
teeth. But that was before. I used to go aroun4 slapping bartenders, jumping off
buildings, fighting with 'anybody and everybody. Damn, we used to fuck shit up.
He was looking up at the sky.'
-Shit, I was one ~f the first revofotionaries.
We were laughing. You asked him where he was froJTI.
-Where'm I from?, Where the fuck are you from?, ,where you think I'm from.
Right _here. Planet Earth, man, where you from ? Nab I'm just playin', I'm from
right over there. I'm a sculptor, the fuck I want a job that pays four dollars an
hour for, inan. Fuck that. Where y'all from ?
'
,
I said my family was from Mexico, that I was born there, but that I lived in .
Brooklyn.
•
•
'
-Mexican ? Damn you tall for a Mexican, you got all µiese dudes from,Puebla,
Pueblitos, runnin around in the train stations, they're like this tall. •
He put his hand down to his waist.
·I
-I was down in Mexico, I was in Jalisco. I used to live in California. I was
shooting bags of dope .into my arm at 15. I used to stumble around the streets,
doped outta my mind \Yith my1 boy George. Back then, Whitey was like Pow!
I I had already been in and out of men's correctional. One day I was like, "Yo
George, fuck this shit, they ain't nothin here for me." I hitchhiked down to San
Diego, to Tijuana, to Guadalajara, on my way to Brazil to get myself a wife.
He started cracking up.
-When ii get down there, George, man I'm a git me a wife !
-I couldn't believe it when I got to Mexico. I was loose in these villages and I
was broke, drunk - you name it. They had never seen a black man before. They.
thought I was a saint. They came running out oftheir houses, into the street.
They came out and hugged me. That was the first time I had been hugged.
•People put money in my hands and l~t me spend the night in their houses. They
washed me and fed me. When I came back to America fr was like prison, Whitey
was steppin' on my bac~.
-They got these jungles in the south. Man we used to fuck these 500 lb. jungle
women. We got drunk on pulque, sometimes we'd hallucinate. We just kept
going, into the trees, into the iguanas, into everything.
•
-The indians lived in the jungle but the_Federales pushed them out. ~ere were
these young indians, my age, they went to the city to earn money. Their villages
had everything, but they had to go ·out to earn money when the Federales came.
I told them, "Don't go into the city !, It'll kill you ! Don't you understand?". But
they would go in. When I saw them later they were working in factories or on the
roads. Their eyes wtre empty - they were getting pale. This city, he pointed. to a
building, All cites are bullshit, man !
-What's your name ?, I asked after awhile.
-They call me Tonny, that's what they used to call me back then. You cats are
tooyoung. You look so good, damn. You get fucked up quick in this world.
They won't let you stay in the jungle forever.

18 / D!BK PIIIUSBS

Louis, do you remember that night ? We sto9d in that alley half the night. When
the humidity broke it started to rain, but we didn't care. Tanny was talking and
we·were listening.
'
-How long were you down there ?
-Almost ten years. And some time in a p(ison in Mazatlan.
He wouldn't tell us what he'd gone to prison for, but he remembered the place
realwell. He said there were about twenty-five men in this pit. The rain carny in
through big holes in·the ceiling. There were rats everywhere. No one stayed
longer than a month in this place. One time they had to 'eat dog bones.
-It's not like prisons here. The guards hated it. They would sneak us food it was
so bad. Everybody ,shared. If someone had ~ Coke, you could bet it went around
twenty-four tim~s and the last man got a sip. One time this guy froqi Belize came
into the joint with eighty-five pesos.- Me and this dude, the tallest Mexican, were
tight y'know. We knew each other from outside. One night we drank a whole
bottle of pulque without stopping. We just passed it back and forth. As a matter
of fact, it was us that got busted together in the frr$t place, he started laughing
again.·
-Anyway, me and the tallest Mexican, Jorge were waiting up one night. We knew
the Bylizean had his pesos stashed in his underwear. And we were starviQg - so
was everybody. And when you had anything you shared it: So that night me and Jorge stay,ed up till everybody was asleep. I got his back and Jorge was one
stealthy motherfucker. He stepped over all th-ese sleeping bo<;lies. I don't know
how, but he ·pulled the bills from the Belizean's underwear. The next momfng,
we bribed some guards and everyone in the joint had a feast. The Belizean was
•
furious, but the guards kept him quiet
I was numb. The rain was soft, but a cold wind had set in and I fou~d that
I was trembling. I had forgotten who I was or what I was doing. Tonny' s words
kept me going. The stories were so vivid, I didn't want them to end.
•
-The tallest Mexican, Tonny ·started coughing, He got sick from a rat bite: He was
like a brother, that dude. I gave him my.food. I held his head at night, but he had
a fever. He died while I was there. I went numb. f didn't eat. The rats ,ate my
food and I didn't have the energy anymore to push them away. My lips were
cracked. My eyes were swollen. There were motherfuckin' flies in my hair.
There was shi,t all around me and I didn't care. Then this dude came in. This guy
who had crashed a plane full of drugs and money into the jungle. You see, I
hadn't.eaten anything and I started seeing things the others didn't. That night I
had a dream. Me and this dude were ri~ing motorcycles, side by side, down this
long, hot, road. His engine died out and we had to stop. Then I saw this plane,
clearer than I had ever seen anything. I swear I could ·see all the pieces of the
plane like they were real,- but better and clearer. I understood it. It was a t\Vin
engine. I watched from above as the engine on the left failed. The propeller
stuttered then.stalled. The plane dropped a little, then the other engine went out but this engine was shut off. I watched tile ptane crash land in the jungle. It was
in
. this spot where I had been'fishing with these lndians. I didn't remember all- the
I

•

' D.wl PBIUSB8 I 19

different parts of the dream,'but I remembered where the plane crashed. In the
morning I woke up and I drew this dude a picture in the dirt of the pl~e. I told
•him the first engine died but that the second was shut off. I told him where it 'Yas
and he just looked at me.
'
-Later he told me he had to ,tµrn off the other engine so he wouldn't be d~tected
by the Federales. He was hoping to coast, but he crashed the rqotherfucker into
this place, then fled. He got busted that afternoon. Then this dude, he fed me his
soup. He promised to share half the mpney in· the plane if we ever got out. I
could only eat enough at night, and I was still weak. Then a telegram came to the
prison office. My mother arranged for my release, with s~ine money in my hand,
even though most of it was stolen. I had just enough to get this other guy out.
Wewent to his house. He put me in the shower. He·washed my feet and put
rubber sandals on my them. We slept in this bed for almost three days straight.
When I woke up, I had my appetite again. Then we drove down the Yucatan, to ,
the fishing village.· The Federales had been trailing us, but we lost them. We
found the plane. Some of the drugs were gone, but there was a suitc¥e full of
American dollars. He gave me half. We made our way up north, where some ·
prison officials caught up with us and separated us. They escorted me to t,he
border. They told me I couldn't come back. -I been in this shithole ever since. I
lived in Harlem, east side, you name it. Damn !, you cats make me sad.
He shifted the weight from his left foot to his right foot. , He anxiously
wrapped his jacket around his neck and looked up at the sky. In the cold ·he was
shivering. His body was jittery. I watched him try to control the shaking in his
left hand.
-1, I'm gonna go shoot a bag of dope into my arm, you cats want to watch?,
We shook.our heads. Tonny slapped our hands, then took off across the street to a
shitty building that was nin down. There was one light in a window
with red
I
,
cloth over it. Tonny stepped out of the light from the street Tonny, an angel.
Louis, were you as cold as I was? We didn't say anything. We were
empty. We walked through the deserted streets back to your apartment. We took
some bread from the refrigerator and ate it greedily. 11 felt heavy and tired. There
was only the one bed. We undressed and got under the covers. When we turned
out the,light, I couldn't sleep. I w.as ex'hausted but my eyes were' wide open.
-Louis, what do you think ?
•
-We don't belong here. ,Tonny was right. Cities are bullshit, we're not supposed
to be like this, degraded, in prison, working for other people's gain. We're dying
like this. We're crowded like rats, we're all go~g to kill eacp other.
•We were pretty much silent for the rest of the night. I held the covers tightly
around my neck. I thought I was getting a sore throat and my eyes stung. Near
dawn, when the sky was bright I finally fell asleep. I got up later and took the
train home. I knew there was no food
. in the house. I was walking to the super- '
market when I saw a Muslim kneeling to pray. He-had set up his mat, he was
facing east and ,PraY.ing, right ~ere in front of Key Food. The light was fading
across theHudson and people were passing him by O\J there way home with .
\

20 / D!BI. PBIUSBS

shopping bags and briefcases. It was ridiculous. He was somewhere else, he
prayed while drunks spat, horns honked, and lights changed. Louis, I never told
you that. I stood there for awhile watching him. It's been a long time since I've
seen you, since we've spoken the same language or shared a soda. It feels like
years since we broke the lan,dlords window or smoked joints in your stairwell. I
don't know when we'll see each other again, but !just wanted to say that I
haven't forgotten.
•
•

I

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DAIi PIIB!SM I 21

Mama Zenzile
for Miriam Makeba
Daphne Osayade Dumas

She does not know if the church stands, or
if the theatre is still ~gregated-Blacks
in the balcony and Whites
gathered in front down below. Mama Zenzile
recreates the landmarks 'in her memory as she
bends and touches the ground. . . .
She has not attended a funeral, nor witnessed
a birth, a_wedding in Soweto. Click!
Escape took her to England, then to America where
she washed the hot iron curls from her hair
making her over to New World "Negr9" woman.
21 years.
It took a qero's freedom tq ~~t her to walk
from Exile to her birthplace. Click!
Zenzile promised t6 return when her people were free
and could celebrate together.
Zenzile stands, greets Baba Mandela. She
places her hands to her heart and •
tou~hes the land, sifting red earth
through her fingers. Her hair draped ,
South African. She wears tlie robes
of a Homecoming Queen.
The sad children's faces that Apartheid made
smile now. They only want
bread, a boo~. and milk from
their mothers' breasts. A field of faces
collapses the distance as
Zenzile slices the applause
with her high pitched
CUck! Xhosa style.
She talces the wind from the trees and
ripples through the crowd with her song.
Zenzile sings. Click!
•

22 I nm PIIIUSBS

The old ones call her Zenzile,
-Bird voice. Zenzile, The Click song woman. '
Zenzile looks out over the crowd to those who
measured to her waist before she left Soweto.
They stand tall in her view now. A picture flashes ·
from an album .. Click! Xhosa woman
sings the Click song. Her eyes moist,
Zenzile raises a litany to her elders, ,
to the land for receiving her.
Mama Zenzile
home now in Soweto.
27 years of exil~,

-1

I

nm PIWSBS 123
'

For My First Teacher
Kimiko Hahn

the starling over head '
would collide with branches of birch
were it not for your call

I

•

•

21 / D!BK PerusBS

\

Poultry Slaughterhouse in Red Hook, Bernardo Ruiz

D!BI PlllliSBS I 25

Thin Nothings
Rose-Anne Clermont
I

-''This rock is ~hat real is, 'not clouds or mist, which make mysterious
promises and when you go through them they are nothing."
Maxine Hong Kingston
When the other dance teachers told us you were sick
we thought you had a ba_d cold,
or a kidney stone, or something.
But then; they would have told us
about a cold or a kidney stone.
While you were away,
at the hospital, we wererf t , .
allowed to visit until your memorial service,
you had left somewhere, just away.
like clouds that have moved or
. spread out through the sky iqto thin nothings,
changing,
playing an unfair game of hide and seek.
,

The priest at your service
said you are still around, maybe
laughing your silly laugh,
because I can't see you?
But thinking that is not enough.
I wish I could have known you then
your skin, picked at
' '
by Kaposi's Sarcoma
your cheeks, swollen
fromthe Candida Albicans
I know those terms, I know what happens
\
to people who have A.I.p.s ...
I understand manifestations.

.

2G / Billi PlllUSJIS

dying of cancer, bald,
a cholostemy bag around her waist,
why is it alright to see her?
To see her delirious apd weak?
\

You pretended a lot,
but this A.I.D.S thing was real, William
real as our black skin
real as the dirt I used to chew on
when I was a child, so that I could crunch
the tiny_granules hidden in the earth.
Any place I dug I eould find a soft clump,
but as soon as the paste touched my tongue
I would taste hardness.
I can't taste you
I can not taste A.I.D.S,
although I knew you and you died
~from it, it is still-abstract to me. Ten million people is also abstract,
I know it means a lot of people,
but what is that?
Is that intermission at BAM?
No, that's not even one million people.
I can only imagine a landscape,
with people all around,
but even landscapes, to me,
have always been through frames
or windows.
I can not accept
that you have left and your
soul has remained, I don't
buy that yet.
How can I believe that you are gone
when I haven't even seen you leave?

\

/

DAIii ~ / 'J:/

flowers: Sometines
I

Wednesday guyot

Flowers Sometimes have bad habits
of picking grandfathers
who wanna be.boyfriends
and boyfriends who act like fathers
not wanting to be daddies
who won't even be cordial
when the babies leave

/

flowers Sometimes lay dormant ,
on beds with whitemen hungry
, for the scent of desperation and panic
in Castles and grapefields
as sisters scream through clenched teeth
at the madness
at the madness
of spunk and domination
flowers Sometimes wilt
from the pressure of brothers
w~o grow weeds in their hair
and who seek out the convenience
of prone women distracted .
and sisters hungry for a
brother's love
flowers Sometimes dance

in aworld of winds ungodly

because they forget that they love themselves
stuck sometimes
strapped to chairs left listening to heartbeats .
begging for a laying on of hands
111d everyone needs a healing _

28 / D!BK.PBIUSBS

'Sallie'
Jacqueline Pri9e

. Policemen, lawyers, yuppies, students and consquction workers were the
main customers at the place I bartended at in downtown )Vhite Plains. This
mostly white, male, middle-class crowd was at its best uninteresting, and at its
worst obnoxious and rude. I usually occupied my time gossiping with the waiters
in between pouring .beers and martinis.
,
.The long line of,the bar dissected the front of the restaurant and I had a
modest view of the front door. It was a bitter cold Saturday night and the restaurant was dead. Bored, I was leaning against the end.of the service bar when a ,
little Black woman with woolly-white hair walked in bundled in layers of scarves
and sweaters. When she planted herself at the bar and ordered a double Smirnoff
on the rocks; I knew I would be entertained for the night.
There was a retirement home around the corner and although quite a few
old 'pe9ple ate in the restaurant, very few of them sat at the bar. There was one
man who used to come in and watch the Yankee games on MSG, but he only
.drank diet coke and tried to give me stock tips.
From the opening of the restaurant last January, until the day I quit in
December, I was the only front of the hou~e Black employee. ,Pf course, back of
the,·house, everyone was Black or Latino. There would be days when quite a few '
Black people came in, but that happei;ied about as often as the average American
votes. Usually, I made a show of announcing the presence of any Black person in
the restaurant, it was a dramatic moment When this r~ty occurred. It was very •
lonely at times.
•
I've always had a special respect for older Black pec;>ple. I immediately
felt kinship with this woman whose stories were written in ihe lines on her face.
She represented my grandmother and my aunts, a symbol of Black womanhood
that demanded my reverence and attention. There was an unspoken sense of
' community between us; a shared experience of being Black in this country, which
could b{! manifested in saying hi to someone in passing on the street to sharing
confidences with a complete stranger. Sallie was~ survivor, an example of
determination and strength.
' As Sallie sat sipping her drink, after we had introduced ourselves, she
parted her lips, and the stories started spilling from her mouth and into my ears,
making an indelible impression. Her second, and current husband, Taddy, did not
like her drinking, she confided. So she drank vodka: which wouldn't show on her
breath as much as whiskey. He thought that she was at the store right now, she
told me. She tallced for hours. I encouraged her with refills. As the night wore

D.&BK PlllUSllS / 29

on, her _stories got more elaborate, more outlandish. They were better than any
fiction I had read.in quite a while; funny, morbid and sadly human. •
• Sallie James was born in 1921 in rural Virginia, the youngest of eleven
children. Her father, Burnett, was a sharecropper, who, with a little learning, had
. managed to scrape together enough money to ~uy the small farm that Sallie was
born on. Burnett was in his late forties when he married Sallie's mother Hannah
in 1908. His mother had been a .slave, and he was born just before the end of the
Civil War. Hannah was much younger than her husband, a small, wiry chestnut
woman who ru1ed their household with the strap in one hand and the Bible in the
other.
Sallie grew up with a taste for the land, working it with her family, in
between going to the church school, where she learned to read the Bible, and to
write.JBut her education was limited to a few months out of the year, because
there were no schools for Black children in the South. There were only those
stolen moments of learning that her community could organize around their
subsistence lives.
Sallie left home at eighteen, with little more than-earth under her nails and
dreams in her head. She went to Washington D.C., to ma¼:e a life for herself. She
attended a cosmetology school, paytng her way through by working in a
~cehall, where men paid ~ quarter for the privilege of whirling arouna with the
dark, pretty girl from V,irginia.
She met her first husband one night when a drunk tried io get more for his
quarter than just a dance. Rainey Alston rescued Salli~ from the clutches of her
overzealous customer, smashing his face with one left hook to the applause and
admiration of the other girls. Soon, he came around on a regul~ basis, buying
Sallie's time for the whole night just so they could sit and talk. He didn't dance.
He was a big light brown man with pretty eyes, who spoke little as a rule, but
talked up a storm with Sallie in those days. -They were married three months after
that firstI meeting and moved into a small apartment on M street.
After finishing school; she got a job i}.S a J?eautician in a parlor in
Georgetown. The customers were white men, senators and the like, who often
requested her services. Her husband was a high roller, who ran numbers for Big
John, who was neither' big nor ~amed John, Sall,ie informed me. Times were
pretty good for the Alstons. She had two small children, and was pregnant with
another when Rainey was called up to go join the fighting in Germany. She was
left alone to fend for herself and.her babies, returning briefly to her parents home
in Virginia while Rainey was a~ay.
.
When the war was over, the-man that came back in Rainey's body was no
longer the man she knew. He was a sµ-anger, taken to fits of violence in the·
oddest moments. Unfortunately, Sallie was usually the recipient of these outbursts. Rainey took to drinking, something he had done little of Before the War,·
IS Sallie called it. She divided her husband into the Before the War Rainey, and
Ille After the War Rainey. He began to beat her on a regular basis, which she
.
•
'

30 / Diltl PIIIUSBS

suffered under for almost two years. When he ~tart~d hitting the children as well,
she' packed up and left for New York City.
,
,
1At this point in her ~e, Sallie shoved her' glass at me and winked mischie~ously. I poured her a double, moved her money around and leaned forward on
the bar. I had stopped charging her after the second drink: I would just go to the
. register, call up the check number on th~ computer and service it out. A little bit
, of power makes you do dangerous things. We had a no buy back policy at the
. ' bar, but Sallie was worth it, even if _I lost my job.
•
"Chile, would you like to hear ·about how I met Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
_de famous Negro from Harlem?"
I was sJudyipg Black social movements of the early twentieth century at
the time and immediately recognized the name. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was a
mythic figure in Harlem lore .. He was a maverick, a p~litician, pastor of the
Abyssinian Baptist Church for forty years. His strong voice was heard in the
early Black power movement of_the thirties and forties and continued on through.
the sixties, until his death in 1972. Althougl) a member of the House of Representatives for two decades, he was not a 'representative Negro.' A true man of his
people, he was elected to eleven consecutive terms in Congress by his district. .
Besides being an instigator of social change for Blacks, he was a man who
like to have fun, rfgardless of' his marital status. He partied as hard as he fought
racism and injustice, and- that may have also been his downfall. He was removed
from membership from ~e House for two years for allegedly misappropriating
travel funds and other monies.
Back in 1946, his reputation was common knowledge among his COl1$tituents. Everyone in Harlem knew Powell was a man who liked a littte on the side
✓and enjoyed his.leisure time. It was part of his charm. Harlemites didn't expect
their representative to be perfect. It was his human fallibility that endeared him to
people. He headed his own political organization in Harlem based from his
church, which alone had over 10,000 members. He was unrestrained, both politi• cally and personally, the only truly consistent things about-him. He was a passionate man, who cared about his people and was instrumental in building the
foundation for the Black revolution that King and X took part in.
~allie had my complete attention when she mentioned such a legendary,
~haracter, whose mythic quality made him one of my favo.rite figures from that
period. She had met Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.- a street in Harlem! She leant
• forward and winked at me, she liked to wink, keeping me in suspense a little
longer as she told her stories. She mentioned that Taddy wouldn!t believe.her
about the store and asked me if I could call her house after she left and corroborate her lie so she wouldn't get in any trouble. Of course I agreed, partly because
I was so caught up with her personality and also because 1 wanted her to get on
with the story.
"Well, chile, you knows I was jus a young thing an had three babies an no
man. I did my best to get a job in a beauty parlor in New York but I wasn't
I

•

DARK PIWSBS / 31

certified in dis here state. So I couldn't get'a job I was qualified for unless I paid
eight hunnred dollars to learn what I already piew. I .was forced to take a job as a
cleaning lady. One day I sees dis ad in de paper askin for a person who knows
beauty an makeup no certification ·requested. So I call dis man an come to fin out
he's an 'undertaker an wants me to do de hair an makeup of dead folks. I didn't
like de idea none, but he sayA
s it pays $50 a corpse, an back then that was a lot of
money, three times what I was makin mopping floors so I takes de job.
"H~ tells me he's got three bodfos that needs to be done in two days an I
says o.k.. jus gimme de address an I'll be dere. But come de day I'm suppose to
go, I have a change of heart, I didn't wanna touch ~o·dead people. But de man
shows up on my doorstep sayin 'I know. you're ,scared miss, but dese here dead
bodies gots to be done by tomorrow,' hands me a fifth of whiskey to fortify my
c~urage an takes me to de parlor.
."When we gets to de place, de man gives me a lil tour an den shows me to
' de bodies. Lordhavemercy! My sensibilities was jumpin an·runnin all over de
place. The smell was so strong, I was afraid to look for fear what I might see be
worse den de smell. But Mister Jack Daniel lent me a ban an I finally got down to
bisniss. It wasn't so bad once I figured dat de part dat made dem people was gone
,
anjus de Lord's dressin was left. Dere was two men an one woman. I does de
men first, dey was pretty easy. Den I gets to de girl..."
Sallie pushed her empty glass a~me and I refilled it_At this point, I'm
beginning to wonder what.the hell Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. has to do with this
story. I looked at Sallie's face, her expression of homespun wisdom made me
remember the way my grandmother used to tell stories. She had that older
person's way of holding you ii;i suspense \onger that a good mystery novelist.
When she participated in a discussion, which she always did, she would take the
most roundabout way to make the most insightful point. I Sl!]-iled and resigned
myself to waiting.
It was getting late and Sallie said that she had to go. I implored her to
finish her story first, but she didn't want Taddy to start.worrying. She reminded
me of my promise regarding the phonecall and invited' me over for _tea later in the
week. I tentatively agreed and bade her goodbye as she encased herself in the
acarves and scurried out saying:
.
I
''Wait bout fifteen minutes before you call an tell Taddy that yo'u met me
11 de store an we jus got to1alkin an forgot de time.';
,•
I nodded and waved as she·wobbled out the door. When I called, Taddy
aawered and I asked to speak to Sallie, saying my bit justlike she told.me.
When she got on the phone she commended me on actualiy calling and not
• gwithher:
•
'
'
• •
"You is a true member of de'race. Now I knows I kin count on you. I'll
you next Friday at one o'clock.''
Aweek later, the old lady's charm had-worn off some and I questioned
I should go or not. But she had said that stuff about loyalty so I felt .

82 / D!BX PBIUSBS

I

obligated, and I really wanted to hear the rest of the story. Although the idea of
going over to a customer's house and hanging out seemed a little batty. Sometimes you just have to say "what the fuck," so I picked,up.a pint of vodka at the
liquor store and trekked on over there.
Sallie's retirement home was progressive. Each couple had their own
apartment and was allowed to live fairly independently. When she opened the
door she put her finger to her lips, whispering that Taddy was taking a nap. I
handed her the vodka, then followed her down the hall into the living room. She
poured us both tea, spiking hers with the vodka. We started chatting about the
weather, which had been particularly miserable that week. I tried to put her on
the subject of painting the faces of dead bodies but she would not be swayed. She
took a long time.to saythings and she had a lot to say. So I had to wait for her to
get around to it in her own way.
Finally, she peered at me over her reading glasses and winked saying:
"That Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. sure was a pretty man."
"Oh really, Sallie, what did he look like," I tried to ask nonchalantly, my
'wait,at an end.
•
•
"Oh girl, he was tall, light-skinned with dark wavy hair, a mustache, an
eyes prettier than Rainey's, an my Rainey had him 'some pretty ~yes. He was de
kind of man womens jus throw demselfs at. But let me tell you bout qe girl first.
She was such a pretty young thing, her throat had been cut: It really shook me.
The others had been ready to go, it ha~ been their time . .But here was a girl cut
down in the prime of her life, just beginnin to enjoy it. I had to call in some
reenforcements from Ole Jack before I could takle dat one, it looked to be quite a
job.
•
"Welljus as I'm gettin ready to make her up, in walks Reverend Powell
with dis sad look in his eyes. ,Turns out he knew de girl pretty well, an she had '
been his sweetheart.
He tells me
.
. he loved de girl an asks me if I kin make her
look like this picture he gives me of her: She looks mighty fancy in de picture an
I'm sure she never met his wife. He offers me fifty dollars to do it, but I would
have done it _jus for dat sad look in his eyes. He says to m½ 'Miss please just ,
make her look like she did when she was alive and my favorite girl, make her
look like I remember her. I can't go to the funeral because of appearances but it
will be nice to know that she looks right.'
•
' . "I can't do nothin but agree, an I make her look much like d,e picture.
When I finished, jus as I'm gettin ready to leave, in walks de girl's daddy. Turns
out dat this grown lookin woman was a fifteen-year-old who had run away from
home two years ago. An here I was thinkin she was thirty or so, Rev. Powell too.
He take one look at his baby an begs me to fix her like his lil girl again. I
couldn't refuse de daddy so's I spend two hours makin her look like the _daughter.
he lost so long ago."
Sallie worked for the mortician for forty years, the giver of images of life
to corpses. So that death could be a little e~ier, for the living left behind. I never
'

\

DAU PIDUSBS / ~

saw Sallie again after that day, I quit my job a few weeks later, and haven't
returned to White Plains since. Sometimes I wonder about her, marvelling at her
ability to weave a tale and my ability to suspend disbelief. Getting parf bf
mystory from herstory, and revelling in her elabo_rate t,ruths, her Blackness, and '
her 71 year-old woman's wisdom. Sallie James was a connection to my past.

'

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34 / D.illi PIDliSBS

Vicky Lavergne

I '

DARI PIWSB8 / 85

,

Esta Noche Duermo Sola
'

I

Dejame asf, esperando, sin saber lo que espero,,
con la sed indecible que me dejo tu boca.
Pues hoy, mientras morfan las.ultimas estrellas,
al mirarte a los ojos, supe que eras otra.
Aquf estoy, frente al mar, y no sonrfo,
porque temo que el pecho se me abra, .
y salte al mar mi corazon, y juegue
contigo, amor, y corra por la playa.
- Jose Angel Bue~
Cuando el coraz6n se rompe
no hay vaso que lo contenga.
Ella, tan especial...
Ella, como tantas otras:..
lQue importa la realidad
si puedo yivir en este infiemo
al que llamo fantasia?
Mi rival fue un hombre.
Uno, como tantos otros,
Upo, que le pudo dar
lo que yo nunca pude,
Yo solamente le df •
org4smos momentaneos:
Yo, la mujer de un momento,
E, el hombre de su vida. ,
l,Pero que importa ya?
Ella no estA conmigo
y~ noche duermo sola.
Ella. que fue la protagonista
•.todos mis poemas

la vfctima

mis mas poderosas emociones,
sefue

'

C.M.

3G / D.illl PIDll,SBS

Ella se fue
y con ella se fueron mis ansias de amar.
Cuando el coraz6n se rompe
'
no es reemplazado, se padre hasta tener
una rilelcocha palpitante
dentro de un pecho ajeno.
Pero, l,que importa?
ya no la amo,
si es que ~guna vez la guise.
Cada palabra de su boca
fue una mentira, _
la mentira mas ir6nica de todas,
la que convirti6 mi vida
en un juego frustrado.
Ah, indecisa,
algun dia sabras
que nadie te amara como yo
y lloraras con las mismas lagrimas
que esta noche me permite.
Contigo muere el sueiio mas sagrado,
el que pense encontrar en ti.
Deja que tus labios toquen los suyos,
deja que tus,piemas lo mantengan preso,
y amalo, por Dias, amalo
como nunca pudiste amarme a mi.
Nada duele mas que la palabra escrita
pero ya ves, te deseo lo mejor.
_Brinda por ti y por el.
Lo unico que siempre quize '
es que aprendieras a sentir
sin limitarte.
Y aqui me ves, tratando de enseiiarte,
aunque palabra por palabra .
vaya muriendo mi alma.
Amalo, amalo y porfavor
se feliz haciendolo
aunque solo quede yo
en este rinc6n al que me condenaste.
Te amo, y por eso te dejo ir
aurique esta noche duenna sola.

'

.

,

DAIii PBlli8BS I 3'l

Bui:ning Brides
Ava Ming Hu

Dressed in white
I feel like a flood of cool water
wetting the dry tongue of this dusty road.
I tread lightly on bits of broken rocks
so as not to disturb
their configuration
or to roughen the tender bottoms of
my feet.
I am leaving the courtyard behind;
dust filled and full of
chattering women who have spent
their lives behind veils,
• whispering about the coming of the monsoon.
They are bound behind .bars
' pretending to perform whole heartedly
songs they have sung apout bhakti
since they were able to speak
andremember.
l am folding myself as waves often do
beneath the pieats of my sari.
My eyes are burning like the fires I have seen
women burned in,
runninginto the streets
ICleeching like parrots _.
wilh flames hungrily rising,
eating the air.
quickly they fall to the earth
• g their fists against bas been long ago depleted
water.
• g away from the scraping sou.nd of matches
k against sandpaper.
• g myself of the kerosene
secretly poured around

hut
oning Vishnu
once again thi& world he has created
lfeady fall of a thousand days'of rain .

.

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38 / D!RK PBIUSBS

Delia*--Goddess Of A Separate Species
leslie Peace jubilee

She sits
Stripped to her waist
On her throne
Delia-goddess of a separate speciesThe mammies and breeding wenches
Slaves of houses and of fields
Their progeny-we women who gape like open flesh in ebony
Oak or sienna, we women who rise like keloids
.She is crowned with history
Our language-the blistered back, space of rape, child ·
Sold away or aborted for salvation's sake-Delia' is '
The tongue of a never-whispered secret
Her tears do not fall, but her eyes await worship
Delia, shrouded µi the lies of her captors, waits
Beneath layers of indignity, she waits
Naked, she waits

"

When does child become woman?
The first time she is whipped or raped or sold?
Or does she become woman when she knows .
She is no more than the moon an error of darknessDelia knows, her eyes a satellite
We become the plane of orbit
' We become child who becomes woman in ebony
Oak or sienna stained
With never-fallen tears
*In 1850, B. F. Taylor, a slave owner, gave Louis Agassiz,.a Harvard professor, fifteen
daguerrotypes of South Carolina slaves. One of these daguerrotypes is of Delia-an
adolescent slave girl, naked to her waist. Agassiz studies such photographs to prove his
theory that Black people were a separate species. Delia is also another name for the
,
Greek goddess Artemis, goddess of the moon, of h'Q.llting, and the patroness of unmarried
girls and o~ chastity.

DABI. PIDU8BS / 39

Delia-goddess of a separate species
For salvation's'sake, we come
darkly to her palace
I
Kneel, shrink in awe
Crawl into,her unblinking eyes, press
Our palms against her irises·, stream down
Cheekbones to collarbone, ribcage to thighs
Shins to feet, the banks of sanctity
'
We become holy water
Flow against tne current-

.'

1

'

I

,

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ID I DARK PIIIUSBS •

·•

~

~

~
,;

'

l

'

.' ';,

...
~~:
I;:

"

.

•

~~ ~

.

~

'

,,

~,1'

...
~

'

'

.

'~

"
;.

•

.,.,,

'

-;,>

'

bandera bandera, Elizabeth Miranda

DAU-l'lllUSlm / D

Sex With R.
1 •

,:l.ndre Young
• I

"I'm from Wyoming,
consider myself an honest boy
from Wyoming. Out west the landscape
is more stark:
,piles of grey stone
• interrupt the skyline
of chill blue.
Some horse rovers ·
rent back hoes
when their horses die,
bury their pets
six feet as if burial
was more appropriate
as expression of love
than sending the corpse
to the glue factory.
At night the coyotes'
come digging for hours
with black-nailed claws,
tense bodies not relax.mg
until yellow teeth
pierce flesh of horse.
lam like this," he says.
/

Like this .. , •

I

42 / D!BK PBIUSBS

~

scene of_ ~he city

. Wild and crazy New York nights with angel headed teenaged punks
walking and talking about wars and pe~ce and waking up at the crack of dawn
with nothing but one cigarette left in'your pack and smoking that-one cigarette
' while watching the sun rise strolling and then careening througho_ut that old New
England fog that rolls into every city on the east coast and that not even New
York can escape from with its winding and wet inner city streets and blinking
neon signs spewing up all their corrupt commercialism along with a side artlessness they walk through lusting and loving all there is in their meager lives when
, taught how sex is a long a tortured death now, rain can eat a hole through a pair of
some good old Doc Martins, and how there's nothing left at all but maybe a little
tv and not even that's not too good for you, but it doesn't matter at all, Obladi,
_ Oblada, nothing really matters after seeing a friend getting shoved out of a fast
moving car to meet his end for nothing more than cigarette money or maybe
' seeing another one die at a party in a circle of people freebasing a bong with some
vodka at the bottom instead of water puking out l).11 what little life he had in him
through one open convulsing mouth in a stream of vomit and the rest of the circle
just watch that old red translucent bong waiting for one more taste of ecstasy, no
they've seen and heard and done it all, and nothing really matters much, nothing
really matters .......

.•

;

.

.

D!BK P11R!SBS 1 48

H I D!BK PIIIUSBS
l...

Joju Cleaver

I tell her the traffic's too loud;
It irritates me.
She .doesn't answer.
Sitting on her tattered couch
she lights another cigarette
and offers me wine.
I haven't seen her in a long time
and can think of nothing to say.
"Baby," she coos, "what's the matter?"
The way she pushes the word
thro.ugh her lips.
"Baby."
Soft,
like a whisper.
Feather for a tongue.

DAU P1WSBS / G

Elizabeth Soto

when the snow comes
i lose a little
color
what was brown fades
to pale yellow
shades
•faintly expressing
blood mixtures
of biology
that hair of mine
a li~e straighter
myey~s
i notice
are deeper set
angled different
than people i watch
on tv.
you see
it is the
asian americarl

inme
placing my two feet
aminor inch
further apart
tilting my eyes'
to view
abair line
rather
than the soles
of shoes

is
gth

4G / Dill l'BIUSBS

lifting
belief in
my finge,r tips
can touch
skyscape
visions beyond
my cultural
attachment
there is
anger
,occasionally
daring you
to meet
my stare
shout difference
to this face
i'call her
asian arnerican
-

,

I

I

D.WC PIWSBS I 4'I
I

/

the pussy poem:
on pussy reticence
\

.

•wednesday guyot

my pussy is not as benevolent as
my smile· .
i do not fling it as freely !lS
i whip my hair.
•

,,..

r

(8 / D.illi l'IIIUSBS

A Humble Prayer

I

Almighty God
Creator of Man
Listen·to this humble prayer
For a sef ond creation
A re-designing of the political Man ,
'

'

'

Lord,
You'gaye two front eyes
to the political man
Sink a third large one
on the back of his head
That can see far into dark past
and so avoid same mistakes:
'

Lord,
You designed the stomach in front
protruding and leading the, wa,y
Shift it to the back now
so that h~ thinks of the people first
And not his greedy stomach. '

Lord, .
You gave him a large mouth
shaped like Joshua's trumpet'
Cut dowq tµe dangerous size
so that only honest sense comes out
Instead of lies and death.

"

Lord,
You gave him two ears,
too f~w. and too tiny
Give him another pair now·
large and wide like an elephant's
So that he listens 'more to the people
Almighty God,

'

DABI PIIIUSBS / 49

Heeder of prayers
Grant this humble request
And the world shall be a better place.

Amen.

I

SO / D!BI PIIIUSBS

8:30 AM Stream of Consciousness 1993
'

Kimberly Bliss

I'

Suburbia is a very strange thing. The safety of the tree-lined streets and
manicured lawns gives one a lethargic iqeal of life. Or at least it did with me. I
sometimes wonder about these _mundane autobio,graphical flashes that slip into my
,mind, especially during the morning rush hour number six downtown frantic
crawl of a journey, that finds me being slammed left-right-and-center by crackheads and businessmen. Same difference.
•
"How did I get here?" I mutter it out loud. I didn't mean to but these
things slip out under such circumstances. Never mind, nobody notices. When I
go back home to visit my mom I have whole conversations with myself in public..
People notice. Sometimes in good ways. Like yesterday after work. ,
She was fierce. SoHo is great to work in because the streets ar~ a fucking
runway. And she busted 'round a comer and pumped her stride like nobodyis •
business, least of all mine. But I made it my business.
,
The Manhattan Bistro. Despite the name it's one of the few SoHo eateries
that I can afford, and Miss Thing just walked into it. So I go in. Sit down next to
' her. Say something to the waitress nonchalantly, something about how much is
your cafe au lait, knowing damn well it's a morning drink but in my hormonal •
stupor these things slip by me. So I get my drink, and she gets a salad. Strike
one. I hate salads and know nothing about them. She orders a drink and my mind
spins in a frenzy, chastising me for the baseball analogies. So now what? I drink
the cafeau lait and
-l jQst missed my stop: "Oh,fack me!" I push towards the door, hit my
foot on a baby's stroller and curse the little fucks for exisµng, never mind that I
usually like babies. Nobody notices that I'm talking to myself again, except this
old short bald guy who has the look of Freud in his eyes. Those are the kinds of
subway riders who invade your space with that damn stare they have. I get off
and walk through waftil).g smells of urine and crisp blasts of cool air. On the
other side I wait for the train and I start thinking about her again.
It's so hard to pay attention to my life when I have so many distractions.
Like this diva of a distraction who turns towards me and says, "Can I see the front
page?"
'
"Sure," I look in my bag not_knowing what the hell she's talking about.
She laughs and by now I'm-wet. This is ridiculous.
"No, there's a Times right next to you on the other table:"
"Oh, sure." I hand it to her and add, "I've had a long day."
"Ypu work?"

D!BK PB1USBS,_ / SI

The vintage clothing thing has to go. Miss Thing thinks I'm homeless.
She adds, "I mean around here. I've seen you around." Her smile is
sincere and her tone reeks .of charm. I'm dead if she's straight.
"Yeah, on West Broadway between Houston and Prince."
There goes my subway 'stop again. I didn't realize I had even'gotten back
on. I leap up when the train stops after having only moved a few feet. The do_ors
open and I jump through them an·d bound up the steps. My mode of automatic
pilot gives me license to slide back into my revei;ie.
_
,,
She leans on_the back of the chair and stretches out her legs. The strange
thing is~ I can't remember wliat she looks like. I mean, what she really looks
like. :t-.:1Y memory of the sight of her comes in fragmented recollections of my
:reactions.
.
I stop at Blimpies and sit down with a cup of coffee. I rewind back to
thoughts of home, suburban upstate New York. I obsess about the lawns. Such
patches of green are 'so rare. There are more trees on top of buildings in Manhat- •
tan than there are in Ute ground. That is not normal. Tliis city is not normal. But
I can't leave. I've been here eight years and I refuse to leave'untQ I have sucked
everything out of it, 'cause god only knows it certainly has done that to me. One
• of tliese days I'm going to get even. I left suburbia because the traces of my life,
are more schizophrenic than a-Jackson Pollack painting. Or Etch-a-Sketch. Not
that suburbia is that boring. It has its.own sense of idle excitement, but chaos
dictates my happiness and off to New York I went. For what? Near poverty
•saved by the material' trimmings that boost me into pseudo-class climbing? working class suburbia sure hates me now. But they already do. Adopted into a white
family and-eighteen subsequent years of thinking that I'.m white because it's so
much easier to integrate myself through delusiqn. How do I tell Miss Thing that
my family is the Roseanne Barr Show and I love them- but my skin tolor is the
color of the Manila sky at night and has built up walls of rage that only get the gut
if tliey're,ghettoized? And Miss Thing's skin color is smoother than this cafe au
lait and blacker than it too. And I walked out of there with her number.
Things follow me. Everywhere I go these th~ughts slice up my brain and
balloon out my nerves. I down the last of the coffee, light up a cigarette and step
outside. I think I'm waking up now.
•

52 I DA.BK PHIUSBS

'-

-

...

I

Festival de las Artes, Bernardo Ruiz •

DABI PIIB!SBS / 53

Freedom Fire
Susan N. Kiguli

Crying 'Freedom'
.
In a limitless limbo of starvation
The mammoth of malnutrition
Manacles,our children,
So later we could revel in justice.
Marching to the battlefront
Dying like rodents
Strong youths annihilated
All for a taste of democracy.
Encased in Leotards of tyranny
Fettered slaves of a mad system
We have lived like dogs
For people's liberty.
Branded fire emitting agitators
We have marched forward
To a people's victory . •
But Behold, fellow Compatriot
Gaze at whai-1 see
Our saGred blood so bitterly shed is commemorated
by numbered majestic Chariots.
Our youth so severely wasted
'
is remembered in
Ballrooms and theatres.
Our bravery abused by
Mad_babbling puppets.
Yet our babies die unattended
Our sons condemned to
Bowels of society. .
Our mothers live in hovels
Our women arrayed in tatters
Our men unpaid labourers.
Guns and bayonets • '
Have gorged out their eyes. ·

5( I

D!lll l'Bll!SBS

step forward brother
Living Fuel for the vehicle of justice
A human flame
To burn blind eyes open
A roasting martyr
A protest against
f he Brewers of Injustice.

DAiii l'lllliSBS /

oo

Eve
Krishena Peters

The night grows stars
and the moon, paper-thin,
' has folded against th~ tops of buildings,
• brushed low across her window,
and then rested center, brilliant, white.
She had begun the evening slowly in sips of brandy,
and a glass of cut-red wine
at half past nine begins her night.
The sun fell hours-ago. .
In the darkness of the room she prepares herselfthe 'sheer stoc~ngs, the too-short dress,
and the drugstore makeup
applied last beneath the lamp in the_comer.
Bottle empty, the wine
has ·scraped th~ edges from her face and left
~ roundness, smileless, heartless.
, The sun had fallen hours ago.
She has_lost her shoes.
The floor is dirty, and in the moonlight
she can feel the dust crawl
between her toes and beneath her knees
as she searches for her
, heels
under the four-poster
and tpe fake brown leath.er recliner. .
When she finds them, she brushes her soles with her hands,
then slips them on.
She circles the kitchen once,
not fully listening to the click of her heels upon the tiles,
then reaches for her keys upon the stove •
•
and fastens her locks behind her.
This is the last time.
The last time for this, like this.
~

~

I

In the street the ~et air ·
•

I

5G / DAU FlllllSBS

presses her dress even tighter.
It's humid, like those nights in August, south,
when the doors of the h,ouse were left open
to swallow the breeze:
when the movie theaters were packed,
air conditioners blaring;· ,
when she was out with the boys •
on the lookout, in the backseat,
ankles resting oi;i the edge of the rolled down window.
That, night's boy would smile
because he thc,mght that she liked him,
and she would squeeze between the hands of the clock, late,
after twelve, listening to the ticking
1
of the sweeping second and her heels.
Tonight, the last time, it was th_e same_'._ .
the cars, the rolled down windows
or cold walls, or rough beds,
stockings still pulled urgently to her ankles.
He, .they, still smiled at her,
turned red, but no showed her green, at le'ast, in the end.
Tonight, tomorrow, again, a few more,
the last time is always the last time.
As she walks, the store-fronts reflect themselves
on the doors of the cars that speed by.
The sun fell hours ~go,·
and the brandy fuels the motor,
and the moon continues its swing
through starred black night.
Some falls go unnoticed, some falls.

nm J11WSBS 1 51

The Wedding Night
Ava Ming Hu

White lotus blossoms,
pi'ercing as the stars,
had been harvested with hopeful hands
to camouflage the depressed middle
.of our newly-wed bed.
The spellbound light of the moon
breaks through the slats of wood in the walls
making grids of light apd dark '
across the dusty floor,
otnall}ented with prints and patterns of use.
Jmake circul~ marks shaped lilse unfinished full moons
with my sandal, making the first detectable mark
as a member of his family.
Ifl were to run my fingers over
,
the mountainous terrain of his no~. chin and cheeks,
1 the inclines and depths
would :not be familiar to me.
'I met him once before, but kept my eyes cast 9ownwards
letting the steam from the tea • .
moisten my eyes,
and hoped the pattern of those tea leaves
mapped out good fortune. ·
Mother said he spoke English
.and was a Leo, a fire sigq
compatible with mine.
I remember the raspy voice of grandmo_ther,
"Your husband will be like Krishna
the 'emerald skinned god-lover
whose arias of flute echo
the call of a nightingale.
He will summon you with song,
and like :Sati you must jump
intoI the blazing flames of his funeral fire
to be rebirthed through heat wi~ him

I

'

58 I D!BX PHlU$BS

into wind, r~n, or mist."
I wear the dark as a veil from my sari
to view this breathing god.
_The moon shows no emerald color to his skin.
The thrashing sou.nd of the river,
fui1, with rainwater from the monsoon,
rushes by the thatched hut'. s window.
I feel a strange hand, arm ,
and another arm wrap around me.
His strong hold
mixes with my fear
like a hurricane around a lone palm tree,
, its green leaves shivering before they are torn away.
I remember white flowers,
whole and scented like the air before a storm.
I remember petals becoming dismembered from their ·body
and falling, too silent to .hear,
to the bare, cold earth
who cannot talc~ them back,
who cannot bare to take them back again.

Dm PlllUSBS / &9

,,

I

'

Vicky Lavergne

,

GO / D.illl l'IIIUSBS
/

Adamson Blessed

I•

Ernesto Okello Ogwang

He brandishes the hoe
Casts a glance here, and there
And marches off
A soldier to fortune unknown
. A hero destined to perish unsung
His head no simple rustic garland shall adorn
No crude monument in memento of him
His brow creased, palm cracked, eyes glazed
His chin almost totally withdrawn. ·
•
. He attacks the soil like
It cursed his mpther, or his girl stole
As the bright-eyes sun cynically smiles
At him.
•
. He grows more of this,or that
Responding to the government1s idiot-box broadcast
To double,
triple,
quadruple production.
.
I
Little did adamson know he's a pawn.
A nothing in airy spaces ,
The cold faceless stock-exchange •
That unfixes prices
' Knows nor cares not, for this adamson blessed
That night ants made love on his unsold crop'
And the next day he was arrested; his
Balls tightly.tied; adamson was marched
To jail, he'd not paid his taxes
-~
His crops, unsold, a mattress for ants.

I '

I .

D!BI l'BlliSBS I GI

I

i dream of walking past, letting it go
- Elizabeth Soto

but i will go on in anger
filled to finger edges'
of injustice
wanting to file away
everything distasteful
i will go on in anger
until the last stone hits
the earth 1
resounding through our roots
i keep that circle
going
/
shoveling fists down your throat
for my children born of womanwomb
i would fear
i will grant
them a legacy
in anger fighting .
what was never lost

'

i will extend to them
my identity ·
my song sung in prayer
for my almost darker color
my tilted eyes
full lips
for my too ·light skin
this is your identity too
- legacy of flesh
legacy of soul

I

G2 / D!BK PIIIUSBS

Country Wench*
Tusingwire Jotham
, I

In front of me, aft~r the night rain
Early in the morning, in a narrow dewy path
A stout, dark, robust frame
'
-Leads to-her daily routine on the farm.
A baby strapped to her back
One i'n front, another trotting behind
On her head rests a colossal basket
Laden with various contents:
Four split dry firesticks,
And a bundle of potato stems visible.
On her back a wi~e dark patch,
A conspiracy of soil and baby-urine.
A few 'mes buzz by the baby's eyes.
Suddenly she totters, sways and staggers
And there- poor creature; crumbles
On the muddy slippery way.
The child yells from the back with p~n
The basket is thrown away, scattering contents
And many they were:
A handful of salt wrapped in pumpkin leaves,
A cluster of ripe bananas,
A chunk of cold millet bread,
Scattered cooked cold beans,
A five-litre jerrycan of water,
An aged black peeling knife.
And a shattered calabash splashed with millet gruel.

*In Uganda, the term "wench" more commonly refers to a female peasant farmer and
does no_tcarry the negative connotations present in American English.

• D.illl PBlUSBS / G3

A sµiell of tobacco smoke, a cough from behind
And there he was, her dear man
Growling and spitting curses and abuse
Accusing her of carelessness and stupidity
Attired in a patched and tattered one-sleeved coat
And an aging·unique pair of shorts
Evidently having one~ served as trousers.
P~ga and hoe in hand
•
He approached the scene, an~ I
Still gazing with pity, feared him
And, hearing the bell, took off to school.

~·

'

G-1 / DARl l'lllWBS

..

Ghosts and Smoke
Jamesmith III

"Diego, put your toys away. If something gets broken, you'll 6e crying
all over the·place and it'll be too late."
"Okay, Mommy. Mommy?"
"Hinnn?"
• "Howcum I gotta put away all my toys?"
"Somebody might step on them, baby. Oh shit. I always do that."
"Why don't they just-"
"Baby, hand me that towel. No, the green one. That's it, mijo. Gracias."
"Well?"
"'Well' what, baby?"
"Howcum ... Howcum ... Howcum ... If people gonna step on 'em, howcum
- they don't just step over 'em?"
•
"Step on what? Ah, dios mio! This pilot light is gonna drive me crazy!
Where's the matches?"
"I know where they is, Mommy! I know where they is!" •
"What? What did you ... Diego! Stop that! What did Mommy tell you
about running in the ... Diego! Ai! That boy ... !"
"Look, Mo~ma! I got the matches! See?"
"Diego!! Put those _down, right now." _
"But...Howcuin? Whassa matta, Momma? I got... I got... I got matches,
,
,, Momma."
'!Mi dulce, just do what Momma says and put down the matches, okay?"
. "Okay, Mommy." ,
"Come here, come her_e, baby."
"Whassa matta, Momma? _Howcum you cryiJ!g? Mommy ... ?"
****
"Inez, you ok~y, babe?"
"Ytah, Roberto, it's cool. How was your day?"
"My day ~as fine, babe·. Why are you smoking? You ain't touched a
cancer stick in weeks."
•
"Don't remind me. My hips're as wide as a house."
"You always was the one to go ch~gin' the subject rt' shit. Wll,assup?
Why can't you talk to me?"
"I ju$~ got a little bit of a scare is all. I'm okay."
"You sure?"
"Yeah, I'm cool."

...

DAlll PlllliSBS / GS

"What happened?"
_
"Nothin' ... Don't look at me like that. An' stop petting me, you make-me
nervous. Siddown."
'
. • • , "Inez. •Babe, are you ... ?"
"Nol am not and you're and asshole if you think that's the only thing
that'll piss me off. Iju~t saw,Oiego playin' with so~e matches is all. He's okay,
•,I'm okay. It just.kind of reminded me of my little Maricela is ·all. She was so
, sweet..."
"Inez? Inez? ~ez!"
"Get your hand outta my face ..."
"Put that shit but. I don't want nobody smokin' around my kid. I had to
deal with that shit all my life and it smells like crap. My eyes used to sting when
I'd go anywher near my father's room an' I don't want Diego to go through that
shit too. Now lissen: Maricela is gone. I loved_her too. I still love her, but we
can't bring her back and talking about it like this is only going to make things
worse. Gimme tl\e ashtray, I'll throw it out..."
•
'
****

- "Roberto, pass the peas, will you?"
"Here you go ... ~iego, how Y
"\ doin' champ?"
"I'm fine, Daddy."
"Qon't talk w'hen you eat, honey. Close your mouth, you're getting gravy
all over your shirt. Ah, you little monster...."
"I'm a monster! I'm a morister..."
"Diego! Put your arms down and eat your dinner! Will you... Put them
down! You wanna give me a hand? He?$ your son too, y'know .. .'' . •
"Let 'im be a boy, Inez. I had a son, don't make him into _a girl."

-.

, "Momma?"
"Yes, .baby?"
' "When's Maricela comin' back?"
"Soori, honey. Soon."
****
"Well, Mrs. Pavel, has your ,son exhibited any antisocial behavior~ You
know hitting other children, breaking things for no reason. That sort of thing."
- "Uh... No, not really. Diego is really a very nice boy. He does everyhting
I tell him to do, even if I have to say it several times. m, just'keeps talking to
himself."
•
I
"It's not uncommon for children to develop 'invisible' friends, as a means
of coping witq loneliness. You did say that his sister died, didn't you?"
"Yes, she died in.. .In a fire. Maricela and Diego did everything together.
I know he misses her a lot, but he had a lot of other friends as well. He doesn't

,,

oo·; DARK PlllUSllS

like to play with any of them now. I don't understand it. He seems so normal
when he's at home, but then he turns into a goddamn hermit at school. 'Oh, my
language, I'm sorry."
• "That's quite all right. Tell me, is Diego into any sports?"
"Well, he's just a little boy, you know. He likes to watch football with his
father on the weekends, and sometimes they toss a baseball around; but he
• .doesn't even want to do that anymore." ,
•
'!Oh, his father is around often?"
''He lives here. What made you think he didn't?"
"Oh, no particular reason. I just wanted to know."
"No, there was a reason. What made you think my husband didn't live
here?"
"It was strictly a standard question, Mrs. Pavel..."
'

I

****
"Yeah, Luisa, so then she says 'Oh, is bi's father around often?' and I say
sure, he lives here, y'know? And she makes like it was all in the name of science,
y'know? She can't even own up to the fact that...What? No, he's okay. It's fine.
That bastard knows Roberto didn't take anything, he's-just another AmeriFan with
a chip on his shoulder. Que? Oh, it's cool, I'll just have to start working again.
Diego's in school now, so we don't have to worry about day care or any of that
junk, thank God. Is that Celo? Yeah, I can hear the ol' bear from here. Okay,
talk to you later. bye."
,
"Diego? What are you making noise about, honey?"
"Momniymommymommymommy!" .
''Diego, mijo? What's that matter?"
"Mommympmmymommymommymommymommy !!"
"Die 0 o! Diego! Oh shit, I'm coming. Diego? Honey, Mommy's here.
Wake up, baby, you're having a bad dream! It's okay, baby, Mommy's here.
C'mon, honey, ciµm down, it was j_ust a nightmare."
"Mommy! I saw-!"
"I know, baby, it's okay. Calm down, Mommy's here."
"No, Mommy! I saw Maricela, Mommy! She was standing right over
there, Moinmy! I wanted you to see' her, that's why I called you. When the lights
came on, she went away. ·Why, did yoµ tum on the lights, Mommy? She-!"
. "Maricela wasn't there, baby."
"Uh-huh, yes she was; Mommy! I saw her right-!"
Putyour arrµ down, Diego, and go back to sleep. You did not see
Maricela."
•:uh-huh! Shew~ right over-!"
"Diego! Mommy said go'to bed, didn't she?"
"But-"

,

D..illl PBB!SBS / G7

"Diego"
"Yes, Mommy. But_:_"
"So make Mommy happy and put your head hown and go back to sleep.
That's it, baby. I'm going to my room now. Goodnight, baby. Give Mommy a
kiss. That's it, honey. I love you."
"Mommy? When Maricela comin'. back?"
"Ssshh...Go to sleep ... "
'
'

.

****

"Aahh... Another day another blister. Gimme that paper,.! circled a couple
jobs that don't look so bad. How's my clothes?"
••
"You look fine. Eat something before you go."
.
~'No time, Inez. If you woke my up on time, then I _coulda gotten some.
,,
I
,,
•
thmg.
"Look! I apologized already, didn't I? Shit. .. " •
"Honey, I ain't blamin' you. I fuck up all the time too . .It's cool. You
look pretty tired yourself, maybe you should get some rest." "Later. I gotta take Diego to school."
"Okay, but promise me you'll get some sleep."
"Sure."
"And put that cigarette out."
"Yeah..."
''.See ya."

"Baby, you're coughing. Are you okay?"
"I can't breathe, Mommy . .That smoke's stinky."
"Oh, it's j1,1st a cigarette.· It's cool, you'll live."
"Howcum you gotta do that, Mommy? It's so stinky. I can't breathe-"
"What the hell is this? I can smoke if I want to. Don't forget who you
are, young man. I'm your mother."
"Mommy, I'm-"
"Dqn't give me any of your shit! I'm tired of people giving me all this
crap! Now go.to your room!"
•
"Mommy-!"
"Shut up!!!"
"But-"

"I said shut UPF'
"Oh, baby, what did I do? Diego? Diego? Speak to me, baby. Come on,
baby! Talk to nie! A,i, dios mio! Ayuda me! Please, baby, I didn't mean to hit
you so hard! Please, I'm so .sorry! Please, mijo, talk to me! Speak tom~!!"

G8 / DARI PlllUSBS

Kimono
•
Michel Ng

Kimono wrapped tightly around your waist, ..
trapping your body
showing its lines.
Woodengeta
hobbling
frantically h?bbling along the cobblepath
of faces,
of face.
Click Clock Click ClockMotion stifled by bindings of the past
wov~n into the starched fabric of your soul.
Strong sakura,
_
standing alone amidst the harsh frost
of tall skyscrapers, old businessmen, greedy hearts,
-unfair margins.
You walk abruptly in the cold
don't walk too fast I say,
you run.
Are you afraid of falling tomodachi? •
Ypur sturdy geta made of wood
will always return from whence they came.
Your soul may soar
but your geta,
your geta will always remain of the earth
embraced in her w~th, in your ki.
Geta hobbling, quickly hobbling
Wooden pl'atform upheld by two sticks:
our bushido of honesty,
our bushido of pain.
Fall then,
fall tomodachi.
Do not be afraid of the ground
if not for it, we would keep falling
not knowing how to suffer,
not knowing h?w to cry.
Rise anew, '
I

•

DABl l'BIUSBS / G9

rise like the morning sun
from -the haze of the shallow horizon
Emikosan.
And remember always,
that no matter how tight
the kimono of your soul may feel
_it will always remain glorious and beautiful
tome.

I

\

70 / DABl.1'11,R.lSES

Kaneem L. Smith

D!Bi PIIIUSBS / n

Cry Freedom
.Okot Benge

Cry Freedom, cry
Weep bitter tears
·To wash the wounds of Africa
That tell the shameful tales
Of strangled Independence.
Cry Freedom, ·dry
Wake the fear-gripped sleepers
To the mockery of self-government '
Where editors' pens shy from naked truth
And prisons have glut~onic ~ppetite.
Cry Freedom, cry
For you pissed into the Authority's eyes
And in a single dictatorial arm swing
Your manhood was ripped off
Leaving you castrated and helpless. ,
Cry Freedom, cry
For your tears bathe our hearts
Creating rivers of uncontrollable force
That shall one day burst the banks
Washing the dictators off their seats.

•

'

72 / DlBl PlllUSBS

Vicky Lavergne

DA.Bl l'lllU,SB8 / 73

For One Black Child
in an kll White School, 1967
leslie Pea e-jubilee
See that little girl
digging with a stick in the dirt ,
making maybe mud pies
or burying maybe her dreams
She has heard sounds ,
like sirens with no glare
breaking nights
The white-robed me
call her by name

'

The only iood ni~~er
is a dead ni~ier
/·

Call her •
Louder than as hard
as she can pressthe heels of her hands
against her ears
The only iood, ni~~er
• by name
is a dead ni~ier
Call her
See that little girl
her back against the wall
of her lace-curtained bed room
praying to be good
willi,ig herself a dead thing
So maybe she can walk .
tomorrow Ito school
without being seen

•

'

14 I DARK PBR!SRS

unmolested
The only 200d ni2~er
inhales her own screams
freezes in her veins
her blood
is a dead ni2~er
squeezing her arms across
her chest
Call her
blood red heart
beating
unprotected
in the daytime beats through
the voices that break her
nights
and bury her dreams
The only ~ood ni2~er
stares at the ceiling
when she could be sleeping
walks on eggshells the mile
to school
Plays in dirt '
burying this thing
blood red
, to good
to be strewn
at the hems of white robes
Shapes in mud
the resistance for her
in_lagined babies to eat '

D.llll PIIIUSllS / 7&

Brother and His Sax
. Daphne Osayade Dumas

I

He sits on top of his dugout
at the Saudi-Kuwaiti border.
This barren earth is not the kind in Shea
wher~ players are ireeted after sliding
into home.
It is home for Operation Storm.
A sandpile'for troops in the des~rt,
home away from homelessness, unemployment
and mis-education.
'

This soldier has taken his saxophone all the way_
'from Harlem.
.
,
His duffle bag· is filled with food rations, change of clothes
l}is hair pick and a crumpled picture of his girl friend. . ,
Doesn't know why he is there,
waiting to fight a people who look just like him.
He sits caressing his sax as if he were •
holding his old lady,
belting out Coltrane, Satchmo, Miles and Leon Thomas.
He doesn't like the noise.
H~ just sits there, playing his sax just as he has_done
. on Lenox Aven~e, jamming with the boys at Wells,
and around the comer at a hundred and·43rd.
He closes out the sound of planes overhead,
. eclipsing the quiet. •
He continues to play. ••
•)

He looses himself in that moment,
lulls into ecstasy.
, He hopes to hang on to his sax
while he plays to his old lady wishing he were home, away
from destruction, war.
.
, He lifts the sound one octave up, then lowers it.
He removes the mouth piece, packs up his duffle bag.
The army sargent callf out
Ground patrol begins.

7G / D!RI PlllWllS

american dreamer
wednesday guyot

the.re is a woman in my class
pissed of
because all her money
and tennis lessons
couldn't get her through
them pearly gates
toward white legitimacy.
• such a joke •
singing the star spangled banner
with a mexican accent
smelling of gringo spit
and shame.

D.!RK PIIR!SRS / 77

, Fidf l, Elizabeth Miranda

78 / DABl l'BIUSBS

,

When, Where and Why I Entered
or, What Harlem Means to Me*
Randall Kenan
'

Who knows but that, oq the lower frequencies, ,~speak for you?
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Who am I? Who are you? Well, that's the point, you see. The point
beil)g identity. The question being who, what, when, why. The heart of it, the
down, dark, dirty and nasty of it; both generational and genetic, gender and Gspot. For me it was (is) a strange alchemical journey, a. curious calculus of soul
and body, an ongoing battle of self in the early stages of a long war of identity.
Who am I? Can,I teµ you? Better perhaps to concentrate on the question· wliich
for me raises more and yet more questions. About race. About culture. About
region. About assumptions we all make, have made to remain sane, to live our
lives, to progress in some earthly fashion.
But what do you do when you suddenly realize. all the definitions handed
down by the media and the textbooks, all the assumptions public and private, ,
familial and societal, are inaccurate? When you realize that you have been calling
geese, go~ts and possum, penguins? When you must re-defiqe who you think you
are and ask larger questions about society?' What does itmean to be black? A
simple question. A stupid question, y~m might say. Everybody knows. Descendants of Africans? Or more precisely, Yoruba, Ashanti, Baule, Ibo, Hausa, Jie,
Ouadai, etc.? Or something more? But a question so obvious none ever seeins to
ask it anymore. And yet who can say?
•
I
What Black means to me. For years, decades, I thought I-knew. Then
' . suddenly I stumbled upon the idea, that all my as~umptions were false, all my
beliefs suddenly replaced with deeper, more profound questions. What does it
~ean? What fil.Q. it mean, to be more accurate, for there is a journey I mean to
. imply. Is it genetic? Is it cultural? This Blackness everyone seems to speak of so
authoritatively, so knowingly? Do genetics and culture truly mix? Can culture
grow from chromosomes and amino acid? Questions, questions, questions. Who
'had, has, the answers? But slowly I hit upon the keys. Not keys to the ans1wers,
of course, but to the ,correct questions, the true goal as all good scientists know.
There were three things. One. Two . .Three. One involved skates. One
I

.

.

I

l

*This essay is from a forthcoming book, Walking On Water: A Journey Into African
American.

DARK. PlllUSBS 179

involved Hardees coffee. One involved the New York City subway. They all
involved Blackness. Or what I thought it to be. One day when I was lost...
First, yes, frrst, - much like the Apostle-John's gospel- was home. In the
beginning was home, and home was with me, and home was me. all things were
home. And what was'home to me?: a house, white-shingled on a farm, surrounded by fields of com, soybeans, tobacco; a forest across the dirt road, full of
squirrels among the oak and sassafras trees, possums, wild cats, deer; tractors and
men in coveralls; old women with snuff deep in their bottom lip; black m_en, white
women, black women, white men. Not mucq ·else. Nothing else. Black and
white. Two views, two possibilities. For me one certainty. ,I, we, us,-were black.
They, them, those, were white. This was home. Specific. Rural. South. Black.
Chinquapin, North Carolina, 1963 through 1981 in the years, as James Agee so
aptly put it, "in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a
child." This was my vision, an inherited vision, a preordained text, inviolate,
sacred, as ancient as the Amenhotep throne and as omnipotent as Yahweh - this
vision of being' Black. This caine fast, yes, Iflfst. The idea of self.
But in the beginning came the idea, handed down like·tWo songs from my
father's father's fathers and my mother's mother's mothers resounding through
the cotton~eids of time, a legayy of sorts, specific in fac;t 1 unmovable in concept.
What did it mean to be Black?_In the beginning, in my mind, it meant a
'
pointillism of culture. Collard greens. "Amazing Grace." Grits. Tote. Quilts.
Thundering preachers. Pigs feet "Swing Low Sweet Chariot." Head rags.
Chitlins: "Chain of Fools." Root workers. Prayer cloths. Signs and symbols of a
culture out of which we, I, perceived a brilliant canvas of history and linguistics
and religion and music and fashfr>n and, of which, we were, are --=- and rightly proud. But more than bits and pieces, at home, in the beginning, there was also a
testament of thought binding all these particles, for on t\lose rare occasions When
we stood back to see it all as one would a Monet, we divined whole a portrait of
.endurance, strength, love, community, respect. Platitudinous in retrospect, but
sublime in practice. Or so I thought. Or more precisely, so I thought for fill
Blacks. For this assumption was part of what it meant to be Black. In the beginning, at home.
And at home this perception was mysteriously corroborated on Sanford
and Son anq in EhQDl magazine, by my cousin~ up in New Jersey and New York,
b)t tl_iose lying textbooks and invidious blaxploitation films of that wasted decaqe
in Superfly. Cotton Goes to Harlem, in Shfill, cause he's a bad muther- shut
your mouth! Black was one seamless, undifferentiated culture. And I stoop
proud: We all had an enormous amount to be proud of in Chinquapin, NC: . _
Tubman, King, Prosser, Angelou, Bearden. Ours. My family- teachers, businessmen, farmers, militacy men - taught me and taught me well about being
Black. B,ut f:his was the beginning. ·1n the beginning. The Word. Black.
But frrst, yes, flfst in my journey, this journey of which I speak, were the
skates, in a skating rink in Wal~ace, ~orth Carolina. December, 1988. My flfst

'

I

80 / DARK PBIUSBS

clue that something in my perception was amiss~something left out in the beginning.
'
Home, in 1988, had in fact changed. Wheri I grew up in the bosom of a
large, overly-extended family, in the home of a saintly great-aunt, spied upon by
- aunts and uncles and an inexhaustible supply of cousins, Chinquapin was much
. like it had been in the 1940s. Population was less than a thousand. Farms were, if
not prosperous and thriving, surviving with the coastal cash crops of legend; the
churches's congregations were strong and committed, a binding agent in the
community; many secondary roads were as yet unpaved, and gardens and livestock supplied most of the table fare. Not to romanticize the era: schools were not ,
desegregated untif1969; medical care was twenty-five miles away and then not
particularly competent; water was pumped from priv,ate wells, and many people
had no running water.
But by 1988 Chinquapin had been thrust, more like yanked, into the heady
whorl of the post-modem era with a state-of-the-art EMT ambulance, InterState40 less than nine miles away making the town something of a suburb; a new water
system; a factory; a video store; cable-television; a supermarket and two ~onvenience stores. Aside from the bristling, technological invasion, for me - fresh
off a DC-8 at the nearby Ellis Airport, now replete with a landing sleeve and
rotting luggage belt - for me, Chinquapin was a land of ghosts: here.ft of my
cousin Norman, old when I was born, who taught me to tell stories and drink
coffee; of his son, Roma, a teacher and farmer who taught me how to crop to- '
bacco and ,kill snakes; of my grandmother, from whom I learned good business
sense, how to be regal under pressure, and how to shuffle cards. I could not help
but hear these ghosts about the rooms and fields and barns, now empty and relic\ like. And as sentimental and shamefully nostalgic as it may sound, groups of
people no longer sat about on porches and talked, instead they watche.d television.
Most farms had been bought up by larger farmers, and church congregations
seemed sparse in comparison. Most sadly the old folk seemed yet 9lder, more
frail, halting, ethereal.
My fellow classmates had all, like me, 'moved away after
'
school; while the number of tombstones seemed to multiply exponentially. I
know there exists a sinful danger of artificially raising those.elements of the past
of which we are mos~ fond in our minds, to supplant those P,ainful, passionless
and pathetic memories much closer to reality, to belie the facts of endl,ess days of
dead inertia and boredom, of strife of every manner, of small- mindedness. Chin'quapin did, and still does, abound with a multitude of hateful truths. But on
Christmas vacation, 1988, I must in all honesty admit to being blind to the whole
cloth of the past, and to succumbing to the safer womb of pointless pining and dreaming after those past .shadows pungent with meaning to me. ~hen came the
skating rink.
Of course there was, is, the present: chaotic, hard, real. The present of my
family. The present of my grandfather, emblematic of my family strength, recovering from a disastrous.bum accident and fully recovering at the age of seventy'

DARI PIIB!SBS / 81
.

I

three, and of my brother-in-law literally rising from t_he dead after a near fatal
illness. The present of my larger-than-life sister starting a third career, Candi and •
Nilda, rambunctiously high schooling, my great-aunt whispering about retirement. Of this person who had a stroke. That Qnt: who had a baby. This one who
had altzheimers. Nothing to romanticize about 1988.
I offered to take my nieces to the movies. Okay, they said, fine. And they
would take m~ to the skating rink on Sunday. Fine, ·! said. I haven't been skating •
in yea.is. They giggled. I watched HBO.
•
Sunday, December 18, 1988_. ,No one had toid me, but in truth I had been
prepared. Indirectly. I had seen all the signs, the music, they way my nieces
talked to me, the way they dressed, the body language, the music, most importantly the music, for this is about music and Blackness.
We arrived at the rink, Skate City, at around nine o'clock. They said·
everyone gets there at around ten o'clock. It was importapt to be there at ten.
Why? I said, assuming my older niece had a crush on some boy who was to
rendezvous with her then. Cause, she said. That's when they start to jam. They,
giggled.
•
•
Skate, City, a concrete bunker, long and flat, gussied up in that American
recreational way, with the requisite indoor-outdoor carpet, walls brightly painted
in fat strips, the sarrie as in memory. Except for the kids, kids, kids. All Black
kids, surging about like hordes from "The Birds." Vivacious, loud,_in candycolored running suits_anq reeboks', beautiful, noisesome,1happy, young. All
Black. I reme~ber thinking how odd th·at we still managed to segregate ourselves
with such energetic ~nacity. Or was it merely natural? And I remembered the
contrast betwe~n my earlier trips to Skate City,.tlie calm, mu.ch smaller, integrated
crowd. In _fact I remembered my family being the only Black family there at the

time.
My older niece, Candi, and I got our skates, buffeted by the crowd, and
-took to the treacherous floor. Me, stiff and unpracticed, a monster out of Frankenstein, she, much surer, skating backwards, bopping to the top 40 - Black beat. We zipped around the rink with glee, playfully, the music speeding us
along. · I noticed,th~ crowds·building, buildµig. Girls and boys, all Black, pouring, quite literally, through the door. Nine:fifty-five. An announcement: "All
skates much·& turned in, please."
I turned to my niece, "Huh?"
"We have to stop skating."
"Why?"
.
"They're going to dance now.".
"Huh?"
•
But she was already on her way to turn in her skates.
At 10:05 it began. Harum scarum. Higgledy-piggledy. First came Jhe
music. Loud. Dangerous. Verbal machinegun fire, barely intelligible. Full of
gusto. Militant in its assertion. Rapid. Syllables like bullets. Needles scratching
,

I

\

82 / D!Bl l'HIUSBS

across vinyl creating otherwordly techno-nuevo dimensions, earthbound by the
thump, The beat. The beat. Rap. Everybody in the house say Eyeeaaahaa!
Eyeaaahaaa!
Not that I had never heard rap music before. Quite the contrary, only
weeks before, ironically, I had been what amounts to reverse acculturated back
into lilting rap music, which had just begun to emerge from the underground and
take hold of the zeitgeist'like so many Body Snatchers. I had been a stumble,footed fifteen year-old the year tqe Sugar Hill Gang came on the scene. A-hip,
hop, hippy to the hippy. And Curtis Blow and those grandfathers of the rapid-fire
sing-talk. But by senior year I and a number of my friends had become disenchanted with a form which seemed to have reached its artistic peak, and which
seemed to find no purchase beyond soporific rant ,and rave, and three or four
rhythmic variations. Yet how many babes are pronounced dead only to mysteriously live on to become heads of state? Or in this case revolutionary warlords?
In the cauldron of Hollis, Queens and Bed-Sty and Watts and Southside Chicago,
the infant recovered and went to the school of the streets, and now, in 1988, a
meager seven years later, was less an enfant terrible than a homme d'guerre. Rap.
A rootin-tootin warrior, risen from a premature burial, funking up the place.
But this place was Wallace, North Carolina, home of the poultry factory,
tobacco warehouses and two textile mills. Where the best meal out was barbecue
from a supperhouse with side of coleslaw and hushpuppies. The site of the
'Battle of Rockfish Creek in the War Between the States. The largest city in the
county of Duplin at around 20,000. My home.
Yet before my eyes those kids, from eight to eighteen, had .taken to the
rink, ·th~ now dance floor,,and were conjuring up some post-industrial Damballah,
with bytes for teeth and microchips for eyes. They did not so much dance as jerk,
jerk, jerk their bodies to the beat. Clad as they were in acid-washed jeans, running suits, sweatshirts, heavy gold chains with their names spelled out so large a
Stevie Wonder could see them bobbing ab'out their necks, topped with Kangol
caps, and their teeth fl~hing metal. They created.a voodoo atmosphere so foreign
to me, wif!i i_ts demi-urgic Tropic of Cancer humor, that if someone told me I was
in Kingston, Jamaica or Jamaica, Queens I w<;>uld not have flinched. Jamaica or
Jamaica? An even draw.
For as I stood there transfixed, trying desperately to make odd sense out of
the odd Mppening, I realized how effortlessly these youths of my homeland had
• assim~lated, accommodated and accepted an ethos =-- the rap hauteur - as their
own. Had all this been transmitted through cable TV and tbe local record store?
Pop ~agazines and clothing stores? Had I been seven years younger would I be
out on . the dance floor reebok-shod, robotically
undulating to Salt-n-Pepa? Had
I
home - fixed, inviolate, sacred- shifted so radically in so short a time?
I am not, nor was I, ignorant of the way Black culture unceasingly reinvents itself. The way blues, rag, jazz and R & B evolved up and down the Eastern _ •
Seaboard, from traincars and whistlestops to the Chickenbone Special, out from

a

DARI PBIUSBS / 83

New Orleans to St. Louis to Chicago, from NYC to Buffalo to Detroit to parts
unknown and back. I was respectfully aware of th~ sophisticated under/aboveground railroad of culture translated into a sophi~ticated ·music and language
whicti blossomed into a way of being in the world. 'Winged idioms. Viruses of
culture. '
So why did I stand like Moses before the burning bush, inarticulate and
•dumb, vaguely disquieted by the feverous celebration? Disquieted because in the
back of my mind I began to consider on what level these my young and _animated
kin boys and Jcingirls, related to th~ music to which they boogied. Especially now,
with my having firsthand knowled,ge of the areas which spawn this electrified
hellraising. Few if any of those dancing before me had witnessed city projects
and street gangs, had felt the gut-twisting fear of being picked off by a sniper or
the claustrophobia of six to a one-bedroom apartment. Few had seen a building
taller than four storeys, let alone a subway. On what level did the music, this
•entire lingua fran<;a, commq.nicate with them? lcould understand how the vernacular resonated with 300, 3000 years of signifyin(g), how "stupid fresh the def
jaµi" was. But this jubilee }Vas beyond celebration of the-new, it went deeper thari
mere roll-n-r.ock hysteria, spoke more profo~ndly than response-to-boredom
Beatlemania. This was tantamount to religion.
And again the disquiet. Why did I sense something to be wrong? Was it
the attitude or the music? The dissonance? The dejection? The sexism? Was it
this body language? Communicating a machine-like detachment from their
bodies symbolizing a rejection of their bodies's worth? I felt this to be true of
many of the city dancers lost in an urban wasteland. Was it true here too, in
agricultural Duplin County? Were they truly relating to this music? Or was I
merely an old.fogey at twenty-five? Declaiming: 0 ye wicked generation, looking for a sign. No longer able to synthesize at the speed of light the hip, the
skinny, the beat. But I too liked Fresh Prince and Kid~n-Play and Public Enemy
and L.L. Cool J. My trepidation then - or so I convinced myself - centered on
a deeper level.
.
. Driving home I pond~red and riddled myself, unable to satisfy my questions. Aware of having experienced som~thing vital and phenomenal and altering. But exactly .what I did not know.
This was first. One.
I

Two. Two is the middle. Two is Paul and Silas. Two is the 'divisive number.
Two is intellectual: thesis and antithesis. But we cannot gp on unless we go
throu_gh the gate of two. One, the inside. Two, the outside.
Two }Vas two days later. Two was me and my friend Randy Page.
Randy is my high school friend. My white friend; and in many ways my
closest friend. My intellectual soulmate. Which goes beyond being namesakes.
R~ndy, a raven-haire~, rail-thin, attractive sort, ~spectacled, by turns gravely
-\

84 /·DABI l'HlU811S
•.

.

\

pensive and quixotically mirthful, V'{ith a penchant for affec~ng the down-at-heels
Southern gent, had just earned pis Masters of1Theology at Union Seminary in new
York, and had begun doctoral studies in Church History aJ Vanderbilt.
This ·night we drove about Duplin and Lenoir counties, looking (or a
placed to have coffee and ja~. Our favorite pastime. In so short a: time we had
. accustomed
' to New York's perpetual sche<lule and had taken for granted
become
that _a coffee shop or some such place would always be readily available. Perhaps
a diner in NC? No luck. By ten o'clock door& were shut, lights went out and
Evaline or Ernestine or Sammy ~ere snoozing before the comforting purr of St.
Elsewhere.
,
.
At about twelve we decided to cut our loses and settle for Hardees, the
MacDonalds of the South, a study in orange plastic and tile, brightly lit and
smelling of french fries. A number of folk drifted in and out; high schoolers
giggling reassuringly in one comer; truckers imbibing coffee the way trucks do
gasoline.
I hovered over a ham biscuit and coffee trying to make sense of my experience of two nights before. I was not doing a good job.
· "So?..." Randy always played the role of intellectual superior. Irascible, •,
impatient, quick. My job was thesis. His antithesis. We would synthesis by
• committee. He was left brain. I right.
"But what about it struck you as so peculiar?"
I hemmed and hawed, unable to formulate and argument, I recapitulated
the,event, embellishing it, creating a narrative,.
_
"But what does it mean?" Pushing, always pushing. An exercise in
interpreting experience. Randy cannot abide ,an uriexaminep life.
Inelegantly I began to draw some parallels with Nietzsche and some ideas .
about societal progression, saying that Nietzsche was right up to a point, but ·that
it was also logical for a group to evolve into something similar to nihilism - the
amoral antecedent of bourgeois values - but into another less negative form of
the Superman. My kids, I postulated, throwing in a bit of G.B. Shaw for good
measure, were an example of thesf riew superfolk. Their a~tude and mechanical
•detach~ent evidence of the shift. Pretty good) thought. ·
Randy regarded me with a doubtful glare. He took a beat that would have
' made either Stanisla~ski or Senator Sam Ervin proud.
. "You know what your prciblem is?"
He annoyed the hell out of me when he plared this sort of role.
"You can no longer see yourself as a part of history."
"Excuse me?"
He went on to delineate the work of one Ernst Troelsh. A theologian
around the tum of the century, considered more a prophet tharr a theoretician, he
predicted/prophesied that a time would come; a generation, near the end of the
present century, which would no longer be able to see itself as a part of history.
They could see history, understand history, but would not be able to see them•

1

nm i,nuSBS 1 85
I

selves in it or be able to effect it.
"Excuse me?"
He went on to say that I suffyred, we both suffered, from the onus of this
prophesy and no longet felt ourselves a part of the onrushing river ·of chronology
~d its detritus. We were stuck on the riverbank. He pointed out protagonists in
my fiction caught on that riverbank, uqable to insinuate themselves into time and
suffering due to it. Affroelshian hero. He called me a Troelshian hero. ·
Evicted, mysteriously, from· history.
"Me n,o get it."
,
I liked my Nietzsche evaluation better; and we came to no synthesis that
ht. But the idea, like some unwanted child, remained with me. We talked of
1 nig_
other things that night, the Reagan White House, Margaret Thatcher, Yuppies, the
post-industrial wqrk ethic, but I never came to a satisfying interpretation of the
ska,ting rink. And now I had another bugaboo to contend with. The Holy I. The
divining rod. Had the inability to understand, my discomfiture in the presence of
Southern hip-hop, coine from my inexplicable divorce from my folk? Had I
somehow lost not only the comprehension but the connection to my peoP,le?
What if nature-had somehow churlishly Qanished me,,sent me packing without
home or hog mawls, black eyed peas or boogie-woogie? What then? And what
were the ramificatjons for my Blackness? For my generation? How can you be
Black without understanding Blackness?
Preposterous, I thought. But the thought lingered, lingered then festered.
And like all sores split in two. Two.

Three: the witching number. Beware of three. Three is the magic number. Three '
is the woman at the well. As Bettelheim says: •"Three·is a mystical and often holy
number..." Thr~e is tricky. Three is deadly. Three comes at you from three •
sides. Three is me.
•
Me in New York. Ah, New Yor).(. Spangled~spiked, spread-eagled,
, spick-n~span, splattered, splayed, swirling, city of sin. City 6f fun. City of
danger. Sodom, Gomorrah and Bethlehem.- Place of ~kulls. Canaan Land. Land
of Promise and Decay. Homeless-women begging quarters in ATM corridors.
White stretch limousines with black-tint windows. Crack addicts running down
Tenth Avenue. Financial analysts in rainbow-bright suspenders and Beau
,Brummel suits. Ladies of the evening in bikinis and leather jackets. A Black
1
mayor. Polyglot, multicultural. Capital of the world.
• l'>Tot Chinquapin, North Carolina, I learned long before I got off that first
747, steeped in national NYC lore from the age of five, reading in Newsweek and
Time, seeing the NBC Nightly News. La Manza Roja. I was scared to death.
But I was not alone.
, .
Everyone has New York stories. Ten million and counting, they blend
into a mosaic of truth and lies, anxiety and bliss; cantankery and child-like awe.

BGI JJJJIZIIJJliSBS
Something has to keep all these people here.
Work kept me here. A livelihood, a Horatio Alger wi~h - if not there
where? If not there why? A story so old it chafes with telling; sags with burden
in meaning. ~ut my message is not the coming, not the staying or the fun, but the
real estate. A place to live. ,
,
Also legend within the city of opportunity: the tight squeeze of so many
souls with bodies: where to live? How to find a place affordable to one making
barely above the minimum wage? I first lived with relatives in Newark. I next
moved to the Upper West Side. Then Queens. Brooklyn. The West Village.
Hell's Kitchen. Peripatetic dwelling, also a given.
But the truth 'is, during all the perambulation and vagabondism, as I
searched frantically through newspaper real estate "for rent" sections, courted
realtors, regged friends for apartment tips, and subleted, shared and subleased,
my eyes were set on Harlem. Sweet, sw~et Harlem.
It came to my mind like a sixth grade composition. What (Harlem means
~ - Jazz. -The Cotton Club. 125th Street. The Apollo Theater. The
,Schomburg Library. What... Junkies. Mugging. Shootings. Infant mortality.
Run-down ten~ts. Harlem ... Malcolm X. Abyssinia 1;3aptist Church. Edgecomb
Avenue. The Theresa Hotel. St. Nicholas Avenue. Means... Marcus Garvey.
puke Ellington. Countee Cullen. Langston Hughes. Jessie Fauset. To me.
Black. ~ •
No doubt about it Harlem, U.S.A. Symbol. Bold and Black as life itself.
Yet for one reason or another I was barred from entry, or so I thought.
One place would not even look at someone with a salary.less titan $50,000. One
place, though in a building with a transcendent exterior, horrified the soul in its
paint-chipping, bowed floor and catpiss-smelling interior. Back and forth. Back
and forth. Two extremes. Rarely a middleground.
Plus I had practical reasons to consider. I wor~ed in mid-town in the 50s
apd on the Eastside. Why complicate matters with a commute (it's exceedingly
tedious and time-consuming to get from the western reaches of Harlem to the
Eastside) - instead of living nearer to work, or at least nearer to a trainline which
cut down on time?
, Through chance, luck and practical reasoning I fqund places, but they just
weren't'Harlem. And though there was nd logical reason, I would feel an enormous guilt in the back of my mind, almost a subconscious nagging; though I
would ramble about 125th Street, visit the Apollo, the Schomburg Library, the
Studio Museum, visit friends o~ 135th Street, 143rd Street, Hamilton Hill, I
would feel slightly embarrassed when I had to say I lived "downtown.:' My
family, distressed at my physical vacillation, would, ask: "Well, why don't you
just find a nice place uptown. It's certainly more affordable." Many of my
relatives had lived for decades, decade,s before, in New York, in Harlem, lllld it
held the same meaning and connotations for me, in fact they had given them to
me. My brother-in-law had grown up in Harlem, and story-spun for me a mythic

-

I

•D!Bi l'BlUSBS / 87

Harlem of wonder and excitement throughout m,Y growing up. But I wou14
stubbornly answer that they did not truly,understanµing the dynamics of the
present real estate market and the fact that I had friends all over larger New Yorkwho tended to congregate in the middle of the island. Still they 'made it known,
subtly and unsubtly, thcj.t w)l black people in New York live in Harlem. Those
outside of it were pariahs.
•
- '
I mired and mucked about in my guilt, in a way almost unconscious to me,
thinking mystlf in someway a pseudo-Black person, irrational though it inay seem
now. The choice 'was to be Black and live in Harlem, or live elsewhere and be .
something Other. Consciously I came up with rationalizations, secretly suspecting the few reasqns I had offered up were water-solid and mlcrochip-thin.
Perhaps, in truth, I had deliberately not searched hard enough. Perhaps I
was afraid that to live in Harlem was to invite an onus of negative connotations I
might not live down among my professional - mostly White - colleagues.
Perhaps I was secretly ashamed, despite my bold talk of pride and knowledge and
work, of being Black. After years in an integrated school system, four years at a ,
predominately White university and now·struggling with the manners and mores
of corporate America and having an integrated social life, had I noW'betrayed rpy
culture? And what of those other Blacks across the city, who did not live in
' their Harlem, the capital of thejrHarlem, how did they deal with, think about,
culture? Silly, illogieai, foundation-less preoccupation worried me as I turned
Harlem into the Mecca and·Medina of the religion of Blackness, with me the
heretic. _ '
Until one evening when I was arguing with a young woman, an Ethiopian,
a direct descendent of Haile Selassie, a princess and anthropologist, who had ,
spent a great deal of time in Antigua. We lingered over coffee, quarreling.
"You North American Blacks, you make me so angry. You set yourselves
off from the rest of the Diaspora. As if your experience was somehow ~ .
'We suffered more.' When in fact the slavocracy of the Caribbean was. much
more brutal."
•
, "Th~t' s true, but what separates us is not only the insidious psychological
shackles of our slavocracy, but the extent to which our bloods intermingle-"
"Bullshit. You think there was no.rape and creoles through the world?
That doesn't-"
•
•
"But it goes beyonc,t that. We've become a part of this country in a way no
other Black group has beco~e a P8!1 of a country in the worlq. I mean, we made
this country. We still do. Why was slavery instituted in the first place? Free
labor. And 100!5: what that labor cre~ted, materially, for better or for wotse. Moreover, we've contributed to every· aspect of American life, scientifically,
legislatively, militarily, artistically. Hell, we~ America. We have more claim
than anyone other than the Native Americans. We've been here for three hundred
' :
•year-s, for christ's sake. I don't mean to disparage the Diaspora, but how can we
ignore our blood-and-sweat connection to the land, this very land here? Hell, this
'

'

88 / DABK l'BIUSBS

is my country too, just as much as it is for any white man, if not moreso ..."
As I went on with my oration I slowly became .aware, in a way I had not
before, how strongly I believed this. Days, weeks, months after that debate the
idea stayed with me: How integral Blacks are in the fabric of America. And
slowly it dawned on me that my subconscious guilt over not living in ijarlem,
silly as it was, was not guilt at all, but fear. Fear of b,eing estranged from my
culture, fear of losing some essential Blackness which I was at a loss to pinpoint.
A question not of a place, for I realized that Harlem was simply a place, nothing
more, nothing less, a place of splendid architecture, inhuman squalor, fabulous
wealth, a collection of neighborhoods of all steps of life, just as New York as a
whole is, but at the same time, as they do now, and created and r~invented themselves, again and again.
.
But here li;s the largest irony. Fpr I had been so blind that the blindingly
obvious had not taken hold: at that time I was living in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn,
home of Spike Lee and a thriving Black Bourgeoisie, not far from where I was
born; and before that I had lived in Rego.Park, Queens, another predominately
Black area; and I would later live on Manhattan's west side, Hell's Kitchen, a
place which before the first World War had been heavily Black, Harlem before
Har.lem . .While at that time Harlem had been predominately affluent White
people, and devoid of any of th~ associations I held so sacredly. Irony of ironies.
Were these places, the present repositories of Black culture in some way illegiµ- _
~ate in my eye;? Could Black culture only exist north of'Central Park? The
•
more I thought of it, the more the foolishness of my obsession of the idea sank in.
The very idea that Black culture was, could be contained was ~bsurd. Clusters of
Black people exited all over Nyw York, on the lower Eastside, Flatbush, Crown
Heights, Jackson Heights; the Bronx and beyond to the north in Yonkers, on to
Buffalo and Toronto, beyond to the south and west in New Jersey, Washington,
Virginia, Florida, and as far west as.Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. These
places were not embassies of Black culture on the outskirts of ,some mythic White
nation, they were the nation itself dwelling fully within.. That very moment.
But as I came to a deeper understanding of my fear of estrangement, it led
'
•
me to wonder-about that nation and how it was changing ,and how little we actually knew about it, in all its multifold and powerful manifestations. Moreover,
how were people like me, living on the borders of that great nation, constantly in
danger of being subsumeQ by a larger non-culture, defining themselves? What
did we look to to understand what'it means to-be Black? Beyond objects? Or are
these nuts and bolts of culture the culture itself? Where does one begin and the
otheiend?
, This then explained in "part my initial disquiet in Wallace, North Caroliria,
for I was attempting to solve an equation with too many unknowns. These being
the most crucial elements of the problem: how is the great nation wjthin a nation
evolving? With rap music and desegregation ~d attrition in schools and 50% of
young Black men in prison and a rising rate of teenage pregnancy and more and
j

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D.illl PBlUSBS / 89

more black mayors and judges and representatives and the first Black governor
, and unemployment and drug abuse and The Cosby Show and a Black Joint Chief
of Staff and AIDS and the glass ceiling_:_ so many problems and ac~omplishments - how is this vast society, yoked to a larger country, thinking of itself? So
much is said and written about the "facts" and "realities" of Blacks in America,
but rarely have individuals across the country testified as to how they see themselves. In the media and in books, the assumption is always made for them,
always on the penphery of discus~ion, a given. But how do they define themselves? What do we really know about the whole of Black America, and what
changes in our perceptions would a more comprehensive knowledge bring about?
This was three, triangular and sharp-pointed: Where does the myth of the
descendants of the slaves end and the reality of the African American take over?
Thirty-five millioQ people. Sixty-three states, provinces and territories. An' e'ntire
continent. Three hundred years and counting. Three.

.

'

One, Two, Three. These are the ideas which have plagued m~ and must be
addressed: One, the idea of Black culture as a dynamic organism, doing it's
thang, with the ability to reinvent itself and grow; °Two: the idea of an individual
within a culture defining himself by or against that culture; and Three: the myth
or'culture, the perception of a culture within a culture, and the dangers of underestimating, narrowing or limiting an entire people by a set of truths no longer held
to be self-evident, which bear 1,esser and lesser r~lation ·to reality.

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CONTRiBUTORS'NOTES
OKOT BENGE is a graduate student in the Department of Literature at Makerere
University in Uganda.
KIMBERLY BLISS is a senior at Sarah Lawrence College, and resi_des in .
Kenmore, New York.
JOJlJ CLEAVER is a senior at Sarah Lawrence College, and resides in Atlanta,
Georgia. .
ROSE-ANNE CLERMONT is a senior at Sarah Lawrence College; she.J.s·a
dancer who hopes to join a dance company anc;l find a community bf writers to
work with.
MALKIA CYRIL is a sophomore at Sarah Lawren_ce, and resides in Brooklin,
New York.
.
•
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DAPHNE OSA.YADE DUMAS is the Associate Dean for Multicultural Affairs/
International Students at Sarah Lawrence. She is an MFA candidate in the Ho~ce
Gregory Writing Program. She has studied the healing traditions of the Yoruba
people, the Tineh (Apache) and other indigenous healing techniques. She is
cuqently working Of\ a mythological piece on the middle passage.
WEDNESDAY GUYOT is a senior at Sarah Lawrence College; she is less interested in the ties that bind, than those which elude us. Her influences include Etta
James and her Amazon green parrot, Mack._
KIMIKO HAHN teaches poetry workshops at Sarah Lawrence College. Her
latest book is entitled Earshot
AV A MING HU is a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence.
TUSINGWIRE JOTHAM is an undergraduate student at Makerere Univer~ity in
Uganda.
•
LESLIE PEACE JlJBILEE is a founding editor of Dark Phases. She has an M.A.
in Philosophy from SUNY Stony Brook and an M.F.A. in writing fro.m Sarah
Lawrence College. Her poetry most recently appeared in ~yphen magazine along
with h_er artwork in the exhibit "Healing Through ,Cre~tivity."
WILLIAM MELVIN KELLEY has taught fiction writing workshops·at Sarah
Lawrence College since 1989.

D!Bl PDlUSBS / 91

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'

·RANDALL KENA;N has taught fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College since
1989. He is the author of A Visitation of Spirits (1989), and Let the Dead Bury
Tlbeir Dead (1992). This essay is from a forthcoming book, Walkin~ on Water: A
Joum~y Into African America.
SUSANN. KIGULI is a graduate student in the Department of Literature of
Makerere University in Uganda.
CHRIS LEE is a senior at Sarah Lawrence, and resides in Los Angeles, California.
CHIARA MERINO is a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence, and resides in Puerto
/ ,
ruco.
•
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MICHEL'NG is a sophom_ore at Sarah Lawrence, and resides in Honolulu, Hawaii.
ERNESTO OKELLO OGWANG is a graduate student in the Department of
Literatiµ-e of Makerere University.in Uganda.
KRISHENAPETERS is a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence, and resides in Smyrna,
·Georgia.
•
•
JACQUELINE PRICE received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 1992.
She currently resides' in Rochester, New York •
•
BERNARDO RUIZ is a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence. He was born in
Gua.Q.ajuato, Mexico, and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
ED SHEI is a first year student at Sarah Lawrence, and r~sides in Bloomfield
Hills,-;Minnesota.
JAMESMITH III is a sophdmore at Sarah Lawrence, ;md resides in Washington,
D.C .. When-he is not writing, he is composing, and singing rap songs.

l

ELIZABETH SOTO is a senior at Stlfah Lawrence, and resides in Kailua, Hawaii.
She plans to attend Cambridge University for her graduate studies in Anthropology.
'
.ANDRE,YOUNG is a junior at Sarah Lawrence, and !esides·in Danbury, Connecticut. He is a published poet who has given readings throughout New York
City. .
•



1·

DARK PHRASES
I

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COPYRIGHT 1993 SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE
FUNDED BY STUDENT SENATE
. I

PRINTED BY LIBRA BUSINESS SERVICES
NORWALK, CONNETICUT
COVER ART BY REGINA GARCIA

DARK PHRASES
-EDITOR
Holly Bass

CREATIVE DIRECTOR/CO-EDITOR
Brianna Hynell}ail

ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Cecilia Cortez

EDITORIAL CONS.ULTANT
Diana G..Sandigo
\

TYPESETTING
Wednesday Guyot
Diana G. Sandigo

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The editors of J)ark Phrases 1993 would ijke to offer our sincerest thanks to all the contributors for their outstanding poetry, prose
and art. It is with great pleasure that we extend an additional thanks
to the members of Asian·and Asian-American Students Union,
Harambe, and Unidad for continuing the fight for the inclusion of
. people of color in all aspects of life here at Sarah Lawrence.College.

VOLUME 3, 1993

Table of Contents
. ..

Poetry
So Beautiful, Malkia Cyril 1
Dropping Me Off, Chris Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Bloodlines, leslie Peace jubilee. . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I Shall Sell My Poverty, Okot Benge . . . . . ' . ... . . . . . . . . ,. .• . . . .
Mama 'Zenzile, Daphne 6sayade Dumas . . . . : . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
For My First Teacher, Kimiko Hahn . . . . . . . . . . .
Thin Nothings, Rose-Anne Clennont . . . . . '· .. . . . . . . . . .
flowers: So_metimes, wednesday guyot, . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 • •
Esta Noche Duemw Sola, Chiara Merino. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Burning Brides, Ava Ming Hu •. . r . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . •. .
Delia-Goddess- of a Separate Species, leslie Peace jubilee . •. . .. -. . . .
Sex with R., Andre Young .. . . -. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . •
Piaf, Joju Cleaver . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . • . . . . . . . . . : . . . .
untitled, Elizabeth Soto . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
the pussy poem: on pussy reticence, Wednesday Guyot . . . . . . . . . . .
A Humble Prayer, Okot Benge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Freedom Fire, Susan N.Kiguli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Eve,. Krishena Peters . . . . . . . . . . . .• . : . . . . . . . . .' . . . . . . .
·The Wedding Night, Ava Ming Hu .. . . . .. . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . .
At:/4mson Blessed, Ernesto Okello Ogwang . . . . . . . . •. . . . .
. .
i dream of walking past, letting it go, Elizabeth Soto . . . . . . . .
. .
Country Wench,-Tusingwire Jotham . . . . . . . . .. .. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Kimono, Michel Ng . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Cry Freedom, Okot Benge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . : . . . . . . . . .
For One Black Child In an All White School, 1967, leslie Peace jubl.lee . . . .
Brother and His Sax, Daphne ·6sayade Dumas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
american dreamer, wednesday guyot . . . . . . .
. . . . . ., . . . .

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11
13
14
21
23
25
27
35
36
38
41
44
45 •
47
48
53

55
57
60
61
62
68
71
73
75
76

Fiction
'

For Louis When the Day is Long, Bernardo Ruiz . .
.
. . . . . . . . 15
Sallie, Jacqu~line Price; . . . . . . . . , . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
a scene of the city, Ed Shei. . . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . ~ . . . . . . . . . . 42
8:30a.m. Stream Of Consciousness 1993, Kimberly Bliss : . . . . . . . . . . 50
Ghosts and Smoke, Jamesmith m . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ., . ~ . . . . . 64 ,

Non-Fiction

Raising Women: A Man's Journey into Womanhood, Wm. M. Kelley . . . . . . 5
When, Where And Why 1 Entered, or, What Harlem Means to Me,
Randall Kenan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . .

. . . 78

'. . Art and Photos •
Bernardo Ruiz· . . . . . . .
Elizabeth Miranda . . . . .
Kaneem L. Smith. . . . . .
Vicky Lavergne. . . . . . .
William Kelley. . . . •. . .

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. . . . . . . . . . . . _. . ... . . . . . . . . . '24, 52
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · . 40, 77
. . . . : . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . . . . 14, 70
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34, 72, 59
. . ~ . . . . . . . . . . . . . ,. . . . . . . . . 4, 43

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DARI PlllliSBS / I

So Beautiful
Malkia Cyril

I

There are silences which info~ my pain.
It is in sliced and chopped quiet that I have always known
my body
,
I have not been forever this fat, this uncharacteristically.unhappy •
with the slow path of water down my abdomen,
slick between my thighs
the baby pictures slide memories sweet
down the back of my throat
of mommies cuddling and crowding around
screaming Black children
become Black women in the dark hallways of project buildings
the back rooms of substandard housing
in the streets of Brooklyn ,
we were shot into female comers
and were th~re when·Presidents decided which to keep and cut
I have never beeri worth .saving
so we were Black women
with our heads disconnected from our spirits
we were Black'and women
on tlie bl0od soaked hands of
Korean grocers whose minds saw white projected images
of ho's and crackhed' s
befor~ rainbow of death made in our collective eye
bursting red our veins poppin blue blood •
our bones crushed and crashing onto the
linoleum floors of hard working womeh
for a dollar we became dead niggas
or the dead girlfriends of black women
,,
angry and afraid ,. . .
believing in some shit that is meant to destroy.us
and out of 1960's Black we became women
oilin' our scalps,
scratchin out the dandruff of our ancestors
our lives dirty as fingernails with no hope
and true womanhood slicin' and dicin' like -a blender gadget
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2 I DARK PIIIWIIS

. meant to whip ,us into somethin' c~te and tasty
my name drips off the tongue of this nation like murder
and they wonder
.
these white girls in white colleges sitting in white classrooms _
with white teachers
•
•
enlightened hair whlppin careless and
undaunted by the skidmarks on our faces
bundles of pain learning about the ways their mothers avoided their
fathers luxuries inside someone's black mother
and they
white neverminds in a culture of nevermind its none of your
business anyway give away and give away and think that they've
found liberation in schools remiriiscent of the Mickey Mouse Club by
pointing to that other white girl who mistakenly uttered what they
were all thinking anyway
• "stupid niggers this is my school"
calling her a shame
while they choke buried in coffins of patriarchy
and everytime I turn around some mother is being killed
by her sons and some twisted ~eality of being too dark and too big
and just not right is passed in a needle to some sista
and rests deep in her arms
Oh ... the tracks of my tears, the full of my breasts
the 'thick of my hair couldn't fit into Vogue and I will always be
too much and un-Madamoiselle like
but I wanted so bad when I lived on the fringes of illusion
to be there
not in the pages of Vogue, but in somebody's 'pages
_on somebody's mind I was a Black and lonely woman
who could've killed for a waist introverted into
negative numbers
sometimes I die to be minus
minus 10, or even funny and interesting like prime time
hold people's attention like L.A. Law or Roseanne
be a series to come back to like those girls
whQ give a little pussy to boys in the big house to move
from the kitchen to the prarie
from the back room to the frontier
or think I wouldn't mind security ,

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l)ABI PIIJLlSBS / 3
I

being safe in the hyphenated or nameless existence of marriage
. wouldn't care if my pussy was on a payment plan
if someone would just talk to me and tell me I was
somethin more than an after-school special
and there are so many times
• ,
when I just wanna follow the rules
be in the game
but there is a dry spot in my crying heart
that won't let me play with police who
• shbot the women first
and brothers who quietly caress the night
soft brown horizons gleam honey-colored on their necks
all silk in their voices and cream in their smiles
awkward at ten and interegated then , ,
into a "Bitches ain'. t shjt·but hoes and chicks" mentality
do not hold my interest when instead of a baby
•
they cradle a gun
we will never be the canon _that ~pits a
capitalist deconstruction of the human agenda
but we lick the salty tears from the hole it leaves
in all of our lives when we are forced to
look truth.in its face and believe.
\

I don't understand why I still try to fit the wide of my soul

the scent of the sista I follow
I lead and walk beside
the world of my word
the ocean in my name
,.
into bottles of lighter fluid
or cut out sugar coated cookies that some asshole
will smash to pieces anyway
but even on this edge .
the innuendoes and implications
are not lynched they do,not condense into nothingness
I feel them in this space and know them on my terms
and create myself in the silences I have left behind. •
I am ugly when I'm ugly and when I am

beautiful...?
'
There is no summer longer than mine

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William M. Kelley

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/5

• Raising Women:
A Man's Journey into Womanhood
William M.- Kelley
I wanted children even before I quite realized that women actually played
a part in making them. At first I think I just wanted a brother or sister. But as I
grew older, and having finally caught on that no little companioh would materialize out·of my mother's body, I began to look forward ·to the day when I could
have some children of my own. By now I knew.how people made l;>abies, and
that seemed O.K. too.
• . I suppose that I first rea~zed that babies came out of women because·of
my mother. A modest woman, I hardly ever glimpsed her totally naked, by
accident several times, but til I reached the age of se~ert I saw her often in her
undei:wear. Both my mother and my grandmother, once they got on their bras and
drawers, they let me watch the rest.
I came out of this experience with two realizations, even as young as
seven. First, compared to men, women wore some of the least.functional and
most uncomfortable clothes any mind could devise. From time to time, they let
me stumble around.in their high heels, ankles wobbling. In the winter, my mother
wore woolies but continµed to wear skirts, complaining of the cold Bronx wind on
her legs. In the summer, at least till she reached the age of seventy, my beloved
Nana daily laced herself into a corset, covered -it with a slip, then a dress. Some
sinister tyranny clearly orchestrated this.
Secondly, but more importantly, seeing my mother in bra and halfslip
revealed to met the top of the world's ugliest Caesarian scar, a brown zigzaggy
tear that looked like she'd given birth to me in an open boat off a shipwrecked
oceanliner, my inbringing performed by my father, an amateur upholsterer.
~
Actually she'd had me in New York City, her incision stitched by an incoJllpetent
intern using contaminated medical twine.
'
'
.
I woµld ponder that scar and know that my mother had exhibited bravery
and fortitude and love at least as monumental as any man at that time who fought
Nipponese or Nazis in foreign lands. My mother had clearly visited Hell and
returned with me in her arms, though she always called me God's perfect child, I
daresay more as incentive than description. Later on, reading Macbeth, when
McDuff says that he came "from my mother's wo{Ilb untimely ripp' d", I could
relate visually.
I held women in high.esteem from early in my life. My Nana sewed,
crocheted and knit. I would sit w~th her, threading needles for h~r. learning how,
to sew and listening as she recounted the story of my forebears: .the Haitian
slavegirl aged fourte~n. the Confederate colonel ~ho knocked her up, gave the

6 / DA.BK PlllUSBS

baby to bis spinster sisters to raise as a servant, then sold the Haitian mother in the •
market at New Orleans; the lightskinned baby growing up to watch at fifteen
Sherman's troops marching through Georgia bringing Eman,cipation, becoming
the mistress of Savannah's foremost gunsmith, a German from the Alsace, how
she bore him ten children, how he left his wife and came to live with her, how one
pf the children grew up to become my beloved Nana, who came North and mar-·
ried a Puerto Rican from Ponce;-and more. Nana couldn't cook, so Mama
handled that. (Pop taught me to keep house.) They said they taught me t0 do
most everything a woman did for a man so I wouldn't later on come to depend ort
the wrong kind of woman. They never defined that kind of woman, too Catholic
fo do it, but at least I wouldn't get hooked by one because I cooldn't make a bed
or keep my clothes clean and mended or fry an omelette.
•
Now I tell you all this so you'll know what kind of women nurtured me
,and their great importance in my life, and so that you'll not disbelieve me when I
state that in looking for a wife I looked not so much for someone who would love
and car~ for me, but for a woman who would love and care for my projected
children. Except it didn't work out quite that way. The mother of my children
picked me before I had a chance to pick her. When I took her to meet my Nana
(then aged eighty-six, clearminded, her eyes failing, but still sewing), they ignored me and chatted amiably and intimately for three heurs. At comparable , •
ages, they even resembled each other. In six months, I found myself married.
The doctor who administered us our blood tests gave us some good advice: Wait for a year to have children to see if the marriage will work out. We
wajted for three years. When we had our first child, we really wanted her. It
makes a big difference. We Africamericans bring too many unwanted children
into the world. And it slio~s in the way too many of us keep or don't keep them . .
We all naturally work harder for something we really want rhan for something "
that comes to us by accident. One could say the same thing about acquiring
freedom.
The Sunday after the Thursday my first daughter came into the world,
twenty-one slugs took.Brother Malcolm out'of it in front of his wife and daughters. A year later, I daily attended the tpal of his three accused killers, finally
coming to the firm conviction that the State hadn't proved its case against two of
the three. After the guilty ~erdict came in, I resolved to leave the Plantation,
perhaps forever. I couldn't do any better for my baby daughter than to remove
her from a mediocre, racist and violent environment. We could protest and battle
our lives thro1:1gh, but before we would ever eradicate mediocrity, racism and
violence, their poison would already have infected our daughter.
Deciding to escape the Plantation constituted the first major decision I
made with my new daughter"s welfare in mjnd. I had other reasons too. One time
· somebody came to visit us, a lightskinned Africamerican woman, and during.the
course of her introduction to my first born, innocently exclaimed, "And she's got
such nice soft good p~etty hair!"

D!BI PBIUSBS I 7

Sometimes words sting, and these stung. I never said anything about it to
the woman herself; I smiled and took the compliment But inside I remembered
almost the first thing I'd ever personally heard Brother Malcolm say: "Who taught
you to hate your hair, and your lips and your noses, and _your brown beautiful
.
skin.r
,
As someone who spent long teenage hours in the bathroom trying, with
beeswax and steam; to get my hair to do things contrary to its nature, Brother;
Malcolm had opened me up with_that single question.- Now, here all that ,
bulltwinkie came se~ping into my house. Would my daughter spend her childhood quantified ,and cl~ified· by tlfe quality of her hair? What good to battle
racism in the street if it came into your home on -the lips of friends?
So we went to Paris on the way to Africa'. In Paris we'd meet people from
- Senegal, the place which most interested me, and find out what we'd need to
know, While we learned French and met Africans, my wife had another baby,
planned and much wante_d. The first baby needed company, someone who looked
more' like her in a sea of flaxenhaired blue-eyed Frenchettes.
My second daughter I saw born. My wife opened her legs and out came a
bl~ckhairea·purple bawling creation, a girl. Seeing my daughter-birthed doubled
my respect and !!dmiration for my wife, for all women. I thought about my Nana
Jessie going through all this mainest of events four times ano my other grandmother doing it ten times. Now I ·had two such glorious and lifefilleq beings to
raise, my two precious Pearls, a profound responsibility.
•
In the meantime, the more we learned about Africa and Africans, the more
we realized that we had much work to do to get ready for Africa. Senegal would
take physical strength and we had lived in cities too -long. At thirty:;two years of
•age, and smoking a pack of Camels a day, I would get out of breath climbing five
flights of stairs. And Africa didn't realis,tically seem like a good place to take two
small children. Nor did we have the spiritual strength ~equired fofthe i<?m:ney.
One had really to believe, and we didn't. It just seell)ed so far .away.
But one thing had become clear; we had to leave Paris. First of all, it
rained two hundred days a year. We couldn't get the Pearls outto play. Cooped
up in an apartment for days at a time, the older Pearl (now three) couldn't sleep at
night, had developed respiratory problems. And judgmg from her first few
months, the new baby would have more energy than her older sister~more need •
for regular outdoor exercis~. '
Still I didn't want to return them to the Plantation. By this time, they'd
Dlled Rev. King too. Things would not get better for a long while, if ever. At the .·
same time, I hear more and more good th~gs about Jamaica, in the West Indies;
Xaymaca, the native Arawakans called it, Land of Wood and Water.
As a place to.raise two girls, Jamaica had a lot to recommend it. Besides
sun and sea and sand, the people spoke ·several interesting varieties of English,
ranging from Received Pronunciation to African4 aced patois. The cooking
traditions of Africa, which in the United States lrad begun to wither before ¢e ,
1

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8 / D.illK PIIIUSBS
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_fiery onslaught of Colonel Mickey Donald Feed, still boiled and bubbled among
Jamaican women: To this day, my daughters (now sophisticated New York
women) can feed ten with a handful of red beans, a pound of rice, some onions,
•and one half chicken. Add Dragon Stout and party. In Jamaica in 1968, people
still cooked and ate real food.
,
•
We knew little of this when we got there. We just knew about the sun and
sea. We kne\\' that the ·money we paid for an apartment in Paris now bought us a
,house with a yard.
I entered what I called my shepherding period. I'd spend hours sitting on
the verandah,(nothing fancy, just a covered porch) and watch the Pearls at play.
From afar, I explored every exotic nannybug or poinsettia le;if that they explored.
I watched them because I wanted to find out about them. I began to realize that I
had finally begun to understand women.
'
- Drawing on my early insight about the 'tyranny of women's clothes, as
much as possible we dressed the two Pearls like boys. Their understuff usually
• had frills, but outside they wore T-shirts, shorts or jeans, which made easier
climbing,the hogplum tree in the front yard. Here we bucked the prevailing
Jamaican wind, which turned out little girls in· thighhigh dresses with their
pantyseats showing, stirring the passions of undisciplined men. Jamaicans pegged
the age of consent at fourteen.
When we went to the beach, we put them in bottoms. Why make them
hide something they didn't have yet? And everybody has nipples. Occasionally
someone would notice and look real hard. But mostly nobody cared. When
the.
'
•Pearls began to want to wear tops, years before they had to, we let them. But at
least they'd had a few years of sun on their bare chests.
At the urging of my very middleclass landlady, we started the older Pearl
in nursery school. But it didn't work out; not enough exercise, too much pretension. After a year and a half, we took her out. She and her sister played around in
the yard for another year. Then we noticed them starting to play school, the older
Pearl as teacher and the younger one as pupil. · Obviously they wanted some
learning, but we couldn't bring ~urselves to send them back. Day by day we'd
watched their sisterly bond growing stronger. Even if we sent them to the same
school, they'd hardly see each other. They'. d develop friendships in their age
,·
groups which woµld slowly wear away their link.
,
We decided to set up our own school, a little oneroom schoolhouse for
two. The Pearls named it the Country Garden School.
In Jamaica, children wore uniforms to school, a gobd idea. It cut down on
'clothes competition among students and saved money for the parents. In strange
way, uniforms legitimized childhood, gave school a visual place in society. ,The
Pearls didn't mind very much not going to school, but they insisted on uniforms.
Every school child must have school uniform, Papa, you no see that. So uniforms
they·got.
Each morning at seven, they'd wake up, wash and put on their uniforms,
~

\

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DABK PBIUSBS I S

feed the cats and eat a light breakfast of fruit, bun and cheese, cocoa, brush their
teeth, then leave the house,for Country Garden SchooL From the window, we'd
watch, as _hand in hand and carrying bookladr n bags, the Pearls strolled to our
gate, and later on a safer street to the comer, still in sight of our window, and
there linger, chatting, if waiting for a bus. After a few m<?ments, they'd start
back toward home, enter the gate, walk round the house and knock on,my office
•
'
door, which ,I set up like a schoolroom.
•
Somehow this ritual of departure and arrival had survived from their
earliest playing-school game. But more than just a ri,tual, it helped us to make a
shift in our relationship. I took teaching to them very seriously, marshalling
everything I'd'Ieamed about teaching and learning since 1950 ,and my first camp
counselor job. And to them, in the interval, I became Mr. Windfieldr the name
they'd given their teacher, not a man to !!ifle with like softhearted Papa who
eventually gave you _whatever you needed and most of what you wanted.
Mr. Windfield (he had no first name) taught Grammar & Phonetics,
Caribbea:n History, Spanish, Music (recorders), European & American History &
Lit (affectionately nicknam'ed "Pinkfolks"). We saw no truth in white&black,
preferred pink&brown. Mr. Windfield also tried to handle Math, and conducted
Sports and Nature Walk, which-might include sa~ntering up to the beacli collecting shells, to Biscayne Avenue for a snocone. Mama, who always remaine9
•Mama, taught French, Arts & Crafts, Needlecraft, and Social Investigation, which
meant making a shopping list, estimating the cost of each item, and adding the '
total. ~eri in the open market, as Mama dealt with the niarketlad1es, the Pearls
would check their estimates against reality. We had school twenty hours a week,
in the morning before the day got too hot. .
They did well. Later, after having returned to the Plantation, when they ,
each entered public school i'n seventh grade, they tested high and did well, both
graduating high school, thoqgh the younger Pearl never did much like school until
she found one that would.teach her. how to set a fingerwave and wield a
blowdryer. The older Pearl has broad experience in computers.
Perhaps I got more out of teaching the Pearls than they did, thqugh I hope
their schooling did not suffer because of mine. I had a chance to see them in a
new' way, d~aling with their mi~ds instead of their hearts. .Some will not understand why this matters, might even consider it detrimental to the child to have a
parent as teacher, something like husband teaching a wife to drive a car. I can
only answer that those we hire to teach our Africamerican children have not done
such a good job of it that we should refrain from giving them all the help we can.
And how to explain that each September'we take bright little minds-to kindergarten only to have them come back to us several years later poorly educated, hostile
and diagnosed as demented or defective? As the Native American poet, Spotted
Pony, once Said, "If the schools were .any good, society would improve!"
But I did not inten,d for this to tum into an indictment of the public
schools, but rather wanted to encourage Africamericans to start dealing with our

as

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IO / D.UU!: PlllliSBS

ch~ldren's minds, and to illustrate some of the rewards for doing so. I wanted to
encourage especially the Africamerican man to take an active interest in \he
development of hi§ children, especially his daughters: I've never had a son, so
maybe I don't know, but fcan't imagine a son giving me more than have my
daughters.
.
They reintroduced me to the fine art of walking slow. I got so good at it .
that I could do an entire city block in a full thirty minutes. _And believe me, I
didn't miss a thing, not one dog or flower. They taught me curiosity. I've peeped
through many a fence hole and round many a comer that I'd have missed ifnot
for them. I saw several circuses and a carnival that would've.passed me without
. notice. They impelled me to sto'p smoking cigarettes. The great miracle of them •
turned me-toward the Creator.
But I'd better stop. In a moment, I'll dig out two or three more photograph albums, and really start bragging. I do 'have to say however that most of all,
• my daughters have given II,le the gift of the.good women they have become. Any
time I get to spend with them now brings me great pleasure. They haven't had an
easy life with a creative artist as a papa, so. they've grown up-tough, but they
haven't turned hard or cynical. They haye generous spirits. I figure myself as
40% responsible for what they've become, and I'd like tQ think that \\'.herever my
ancestors dwell, my~Mama and Nana, greatgreatgrandma Josephine, and before
her, the Haitian teenage Ouidette Badu; and grandma Sina, and gre,atgrandma
Alberta and all the female ancestors I didn't name or whose names I don'~know,
that all those glorious and life-filled beings can see the women I played a part in
raising, can rock their rockers, nod their ~eads, and affirm:
Now them '.s two nice young ladies.
~

D.ull FBlliSBS / ll

• Dropp'ing Me Off
'

Chris Lee
I

'

Pulled over for stopping and no one has moved.
There is a lurking percussion
from the radio and we're at the curb
before my house in the lowered white c~.
White, I'm not, but I get out hand~ up to say:
"We're all neighbors, Officers
and I live around here," 1
when I see a K-9 out the door of the black and white run at me
in the red and blue flash of rollers.
I'm a young quic~ guy and hop back in.
At the window are roaring fangs,
extended claws before the,glas's at my face.
No wrong had been done
but once I've been frisked and license chec'ked
a cop warns me, of my gun carrying potential.
Years now,J've been a model minority
but beast be damned:
The night is full of dark pigment.

'

I.

'

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12 / DAHi PBIUSBS

I

•

Kaneem L. Smith

DABI P1WSBS I 13 /

I

Bloodlines
leslie Peace jubilee

'

Trusting shadows and echoes
screaming thinly into the throat of dreams
My mother's voice had begun
to flutter as her mother's voice
Starling caught woman stories
'

Arepetition of wings sharpen
themselves like tongues .
Every time I walk inside myself. she says
her head bowed as if in prayer
Every time I 'Yalk inside myself
I crash into a ~ray wall
impenetrab1e·and I destroy
myself aiainst it
Arepetition of wings sharpen themselves

• Where are your son~s of ~Iory? she asks me

I

What is tacii in touch, tears, echoes
unrequited wishes for salvation
Mother and daughter back to naked back
Hands stretched toward the Father
Oh, heavenly Father, cfeanse
these veins y'ou' ve lain
and lined with rape and blood
and no good grace of god
Where ate my songs of glory?

As though I could answer
when goddesses close their eyes
and girls grope for 'their voices
Arepetition of wings stun
themselves like llumb tongues

'

-

14 / D!BI PIIIUSBS .

' I Shall Sell My Poverty
Okot Benge

I

One day
I shall sell this suffocating poverty
That now hang over me
Like a stinking dirty rag
Like mother hen
Gathering its chicks under her wings
I shall gather together
My sorrows and heartaches
My hunger and social nothingness
My·loneliness and hopelessness
Into a tearful volume of writings ,
I shall write
Of a poverty-caged life
Drowning in a lake of destitution
With no social or economic boats to row ashore
Ever choked with muddy water
of poverty-strangled love affair.
With my pen I shall decorate my poverty
And weave it into a neat book
That shall fetch me cash on the market
Then, my poverty shall be no more
For I shall be a rich po<;>r man .

...

Dm PBB!SBS / 15
.

.

For ~ouis When The Day Is Long ·
Bernardo Ruiz

Help me Louis. If I d<;m't get all the facts straight, forgive me. I don't
, remember everything as clearly as it happened, but I remember the important
parts.
It was a late night at the Korean Fruit and Vegetab\e. You and I had eaten
fried fish sandwiches for dinner but we were hungry again and restless. Out in
front a brown man was chopping chives. Th~ sweet raw vegetable smell made
my mouth water. I stood for a_moment looking at his deft heavy hands. I asked
him where he Wei$ from. Puebla, he said. There were many Mexicans from
Puebla in the1city that summer, cutting carrots and selling fruit in front of Korean
grocers. ije told me !sounded like a Mexican, where was I from ? Guanajuato, I
told him. He ~miled, he looked as out of place as the flowers he had cut and
wrapped in wax paper.
,
Inside, the man behind the counter was giving you looks, Louis. I
watched you pick out a soda on the television monitor. Your skin was flat black.
Themonitor was cheap and one couldn't make out your features, only black.
Pretty soon the Korean man started yelling in Korean to another m~ in the back.
In seconds a young Korean kid, about our age, wearing a Raiders cap, came from
theback and leaned against a shelf with his arms folded. The owner was trying to
get the man out front tQ watch me but he couldn't speak enough English to tell
himwhat he wanted. If he had been able to, I doubt the man from Puebla would
haveunderstood. They were looking at each other in a strained, tower-~f-babel
way. I finally told the man from Puebla in Spanish to watch me. The owner's
facecrimsoned and he didn't look at me again.· Y~u bought a soda, not without
some words, and we left, ~ursing.
,
We were loose in Alphabet city. The sky ~ad a glow behind its darkness.
The streets were loud and chaotic with people. We were silent for awhile, moving
through the swarms. I was dizzy with faces. Conversation was indistinguishable
and the collective hum was unreal. There was a raunchy body smell underneath
the electric lamps. Drunken boyfriends stumbled with heavy arms around their
girls. The homeless had lined the streets with broken shoes and magazines.
There was the warm food smell hitting the street from outdoor restaurants. I
stared at the crowded tables. Candles·flickered and hands gesticulated over halffinished meals. I was hungry and witqout realizing it I had stopped and was,
staring at this one table. The couple looked up from their dinner. My mouth was
open, I felt like afool. You had gone up the block a little but came back and took

myann.

JG / D.!RK PIIIUSBS

-What the fuck do you think you are lookin' at?, you yelled at them.
· . They turned back to their-dinners, shaking their heads and we ran up pie block.
You were itching for trouble. Come to think of it , so was I. Anything to
break the slow monotonous night. We walked over,_past 1st Ave. where the
streets were less crowded. Where the houses looked like they had been bombed. .
We walked' almost to the edge of the highw~y. When we got to a dark comer you
scrambled onto a rubble pile. I followed, scraping my lrnee and cursing. You
were looking around for something. I asked you what you thought you were
doing. You said nothing but picked up a bottle and filled it with gravel.
• -Get something, you said.
•
I grabbed a brick. As we were sliding down the rubble pile you asked if I
remembered your aunt Aida.
-Yeah, I said, the one who used to live right up the block.
,
That's the one. You 'told me that one night a couple of months ago, the landlord of
the building had gone to her in the night and said the kids were making too much
noise. Aida said she'd.keep it down. That wasn't enough, she had been late with
her last three rent payments, he wanted her out·within the week. He said that then
walked downstairs. Before Aida had her and her kids stuff-out, the Landlord's
brother was putting boxes in the living room. He and his wife and his faJ kids
were all settled in_,by the next night.
'
We went up the block a little. I held the brick behind ~y back. We
crossedthe street and crouched near some bushes. A delivery boy was bringing
some pizza inside. A heavy, round man opened the outside door and paid the
delivery boy.
•
We waited as he went upstairs. He walked into Aida's old apartment, and his kids
sat down for dinner. Without a word, as the delivery boy biked up the street and a
car approached, we ran up as close as we could and let the bottle and brick se.t
sail. There was a tremendous crash. We stood sµll, looking at each other, then
w,e made for 1st Ave. like our lives depended on it. For whatever reason we heard
gunshots behind us. We ran straight for three blocks.
yve ducked into an alley and put our hands on our knees, panting. We
were laughing, trying to catch our brea~. At the other end of the all~y I heard
something rustle.
•
•Motherfucker! A tall skinny man with a straw fishing hat and a tom jacket came out of the
darkness and into a yellow shaft of light.
-Say, you cats got a screwdriver on you?, My flutes all busted up. How about a
rubber band? Nah? How about some change? Some motherfucker stepped on .
my flute case and cracked this part here. I was gonna play out in the street, but
it's all fucked up. We fumbled for some change. He was thankful but more
interested in his flute. His face was chocolate brown and his cheeks were sucked
in. He was missing some teeth. He tried to screw his flute toge~~r and pipe out a
time. Wind escaped through a crack on the side.
-Man, it's all fucked up! Say y'all are some good lookin' cats. You make m~ feel

D.µ11. PBBA8BS I 17

old. Damn,Jookit you. When I was twenty-seven I looked like you. I had all my
teeth. But that was before. I used to go aroun4 slapping bartenders, jumping off
buildings, fighting with 'anybody and everybody. Damn, we used to fuck shit up.
He was looking up at the sky.'
-Shit, I was one ~f the first revofotionaries.
We were laughing. You asked him where he was froJTI.
-Where'm I from?, Where the fuck are you from?, ,where you think I'm from.
Right _here. Planet Earth, man, where you from ? Nab I'm just playin', I'm from
right over there. I'm a sculptor, the fuck I want a job that pays four dollars an
hour for, inan. Fuck that. Where y'all from ?
'
,
I said my family was from Mexico, that I was born there, but that I lived in .
Brooklyn.
•
•
'
-Mexican ? Damn you tall for a Mexican, you got all µiese dudes from,Puebla,
Pueblitos, runnin around in the train stations, they're like this tall. •
He put his hand down to his waist.
·I
-I was down in Mexico, I was in Jalisco. I used to live in California. I was
shooting bags of dope .into my arm at 15. I used to stumble around the streets,
doped outta my mind \Yith my1 boy George. Back then, Whitey was like Pow!
I I had already been in and out of men's correctional. One day I was like, "Yo
George, fuck this shit, they ain't nothin here for me." I hitchhiked down to San
Diego, to Tijuana, to Guadalajara, on my way to Brazil to get myself a wife.
He started cracking up.
-When ii get down there, George, man I'm a git me a wife !
-I couldn't believe it when I got to Mexico. I was loose in these villages and I
was broke, drunk - you name it. They had never seen a black man before. They.
thought I was a saint. They came running out oftheir houses, into the street.
They came out and hugged me. That was the first time I had been hugged.
•People put money in my hands and l~t me spend the night in their houses. They
washed me and fed me. When I came back to America fr was like prison, Whitey
was steppin' on my bac~.
-They got these jungles in the south. Man we used to fuck these 500 lb. jungle
women. We got drunk on pulque, sometimes we'd hallucinate. We just kept
going, into the trees, into the iguanas, into everything.
•
-The indians lived in the jungle but the_Federales pushed them out. ~ere were
these young indians, my age, they went to the city to earn money. Their villages
had everything, but they had to go ·out to earn money when the Federales came.
I told them, "Don't go into the city !, It'll kill you ! Don't you understand?". But
they would go in. When I saw them later they were working in factories or on the
roads. Their eyes wtre empty - they were getting pale. This city, he pointed. to a
building, All cites are bullshit, man !
-What's your name ?, I asked after awhile.
-They call me Tonny, that's what they used to call me back then. You cats are
tooyoung. You look so good, damn. You get fucked up quick in this world.
They won't let you stay in the jungle forever.

18 / D!BK PIIIUSBS

Louis, do you remember that night ? We sto9d in that alley half the night. When
the humidity broke it started to rain, but we didn't care. Tanny was talking and
we·were listening.
'
-How long were you down there ?
-Almost ten years. And some time in a p(ison in Mazatlan.
He wouldn't tell us what he'd gone to prison for, but he remembered the place
realwell. He said there were about twenty-five men in this pit. The rain carny in
through big holes in·the ceiling. There were rats everywhere. No one stayed
longer than a month in this place. One time they had to 'eat dog bones.
-It's not like prisons here. The guards hated it. They would sneak us food it was
so bad. Everybody ,shared. If someone had ~ Coke, you could bet it went around
twenty-four tim~s and the last man got a sip. One time this guy froqi Belize came
into the joint with eighty-five pesos.- Me and this dude, the tallest Mexican, were
tight y'know. We knew each other from outside. One night we drank a whole
bottle of pulque without stopping. We just passed it back and forth. As a matter
of fact, it was us that got busted together in the frr$t place, he started laughing
again.·
-Anyway, me and the tallest Mexican, Jorge were waiting up one night. We knew
the Bylizean had his pesos stashed in his underwear. And we were starviQg - so
was everybody. And when you had anything you shared it: So that night me and Jorge stay,ed up till everybody was asleep. I got his back and Jorge was one
stealthy motherfucker. He stepped over all th-ese sleeping bo<;lies. I don't know
how, but he ·pulled the bills from the Belizean's underwear. The next momfng,
we bribed some guards and everyone in the joint had a feast. The Belizean was
•
furious, but the guards kept him quiet
I was numb. The rain was soft, but a cold wind had set in and I fou~d that
I was trembling. I had forgotten who I was or what I was doing. Tonny' s words
kept me going. The stories were so vivid, I didn't want them to end.
•
-The tallest Mexican, Tonny ·started coughing, He got sick from a rat bite: He was
like a brother, that dude. I gave him my.food. I held his head at night, but he had
a fever. He died while I was there. I went numb. f didn't eat. The rats ,ate my
food and I didn't have the energy anymore to push them away. My lips were
cracked. My eyes were swollen. There were motherfuckin' flies in my hair.
There was shi,t all around me and I didn't care. Then this dude came in. This guy
who had crashed a plane full of drugs and money into the jungle. You see, I
hadn't.eaten anything and I started seeing things the others didn't. That night I
had a dream. Me and this dude were ri~ing motorcycles, side by side, down this
long, hot, road. His engine died out and we had to stop. Then I saw this plane,
clearer than I had ever seen anything. I swear I could ·see all the pieces of the
plane like they were real,- but better and clearer. I understood it. It was a t\Vin
engine. I watched from above as the engine on the left failed. The propeller
stuttered then.stalled. The plane dropped a little, then the other engine went out but this engine was shut off. I watched tile ptane crash land in the jungle. It was
in
. this spot where I had been'fishing with these lndians. I didn't remember all- the
I

•

' D.wl PBIUSB8 I 19

different parts of the dream,'but I remembered where the plane crashed. In the
morning I woke up and I drew this dude a picture in the dirt of the pl~e. I told
•him the first engine died but that the second was shut off. I told him where it 'Yas
and he just looked at me.
'
-Later he told me he had to ,tµrn off the other engine so he wouldn't be d~tected
by the Federales. He was hoping to coast, but he crashed the rqotherfucker into
this place, then fled. He got busted that afternoon. Then this dude, he fed me his
soup. He promised to share half the mpney in· the plane if we ever got out. I
could only eat enough at night, and I was still weak. Then a telegram came to the
prison office. My mother arranged for my release, with s~ine money in my hand,
even though most of it was stolen. I had just enough to get this other guy out.
Wewent to his house. He put me in the shower. He·washed my feet and put
rubber sandals on my them. We slept in this bed for almost three days straight.
When I woke up, I had my appetite again. Then we drove down the Yucatan, to ,
the fishing village.· The Federales had been trailing us, but we lost them. We
found the plane. Some of the drugs were gone, but there was a suitc¥e full of
American dollars. He gave me half. We made our way up north, where some ·
prison officials caught up with us and separated us. They escorted me to t,he
border. They told me I couldn't come back. -I been in this shithole ever since. I
lived in Harlem, east side, you name it. Damn !, you cats make me sad.
He shifted the weight from his left foot to his right foot. , He anxiously
wrapped his jacket around his neck and looked up at the sky. In the cold ·he was
shivering. His body was jittery. I watched him try to control the shaking in his
left hand.
-1, I'm gonna go shoot a bag of dope into my arm, you cats want to watch?,
We shook.our heads. Tonny slapped our hands, then took off across the street to a
shitty building that was nin down. There was one light in a window
with red
I
,
cloth over it. Tonny stepped out of the light from the street Tonny, an angel.
Louis, were you as cold as I was? We didn't say anything. We were
empty. We walked through the deserted streets back to your apartment. We took
some bread from the refrigerator and ate it greedily. 11 felt heavy and tired. There
was only the one bed. We undressed and got under the covers. When we turned
out the,light, I couldn't sleep. I w.as ex'hausted but my eyes were' wide open.
-Louis, what do you think ?
•
-We don't belong here. ,Tonny was right. Cities are bullshit, we're not supposed
to be like this, degraded, in prison, working for other people's gain. We're dying
like this. We're crowded like rats, we're all go~g to kill eacp other.
•We were pretty much silent for the rest of the night. I held the covers tightly
around my neck. I thought I was getting a sore throat and my eyes stung. Near
dawn, when the sky was bright I finally fell asleep. I got up later and took the
train home. I knew there was no food
. in the house. I was walking to the super- '
market when I saw a Muslim kneeling to pray. He-had set up his mat, he was
facing east and ,PraY.ing, right ~ere in front of Key Food. The light was fading
across theHudson and people were passing him by O\J there way home with .
\

20 / D!BI. PBIUSBS

shopping bags and briefcases. It was ridiculous. He was somewhere else, he
prayed while drunks spat, horns honked, and lights changed. Louis, I never told
you that. I stood there for awhile watching him. It's been a long time since I've
seen you, since we've spoken the same language or shared a soda. It feels like
years since we broke the lan,dlords window or smoked joints in your stairwell. I
don't know when we'll see each other again, but !just wanted to say that I
haven't forgotten.
•
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DAIi PIIB!SM I 21

Mama Zenzile
for Miriam Makeba
Daphne Osayade Dumas

She does not know if the church stands, or
if the theatre is still ~gregated-Blacks
in the balcony and Whites
gathered in front down below. Mama Zenzile
recreates the landmarks 'in her memory as she
bends and touches the ground. . . .
She has not attended a funeral, nor witnessed
a birth, a_wedding in Soweto. Click!
Escape took her to England, then to America where
she washed the hot iron curls from her hair
making her over to New World "Negr9" woman.
21 years.
It took a qero's freedom tq ~~t her to walk
from Exile to her birthplace. Click!
Zenzile promised t6 return when her people were free
and could celebrate together.
Zenzile stands, greets Baba Mandela. She
places her hands to her heart and •
tou~hes the land, sifting red earth
through her fingers. Her hair draped ,
South African. She wears tlie robes
of a Homecoming Queen.
The sad children's faces that Apartheid made
smile now. They only want
bread, a boo~. and milk from
their mothers' breasts. A field of faces
collapses the distance as
Zenzile slices the applause
with her high pitched
CUck! Xhosa style.
She talces the wind from the trees and
ripples through the crowd with her song.
Zenzile sings. Click!
•

22 I nm PIIIUSBS

The old ones call her Zenzile,
-Bird voice. Zenzile, The Click song woman. '
Zenzile looks out over the crowd to those who
measured to her waist before she left Soweto.
They stand tall in her view now. A picture flashes ·
from an album .. Click! Xhosa woman
sings the Click song. Her eyes moist,
Zenzile raises a litany to her elders, ,
to the land for receiving her.
Mama Zenzile
home now in Soweto.
27 years of exil~,

-1

I

nm PIWSBS 123
'

For My First Teacher
Kimiko Hahn

the starling over head '
would collide with branches of birch
were it not for your call

I

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21 / D!BK PerusBS

\

Poultry Slaughterhouse in Red Hook, Bernardo Ruiz

D!BI PlllliSBS I 25

Thin Nothings
Rose-Anne Clermont
I

-''This rock is ~hat real is, 'not clouds or mist, which make mysterious
promises and when you go through them they are nothing."
Maxine Hong Kingston
When the other dance teachers told us you were sick
we thought you had a ba_d cold,
or a kidney stone, or something.
But then; they would have told us
about a cold or a kidney stone.
While you were away,
at the hospital, we wererf t , .
allowed to visit until your memorial service,
you had left somewhere, just away.
like clouds that have moved or
. spread out through the sky iqto thin nothings,
changing,
playing an unfair game of hide and seek.
,

The priest at your service
said you are still around, maybe
laughing your silly laugh,
because I can't see you?
But thinking that is not enough.
I wish I could have known you then
your skin, picked at
' '
by Kaposi's Sarcoma
your cheeks, swollen
fromthe Candida Albicans
I know those terms, I know what happens
\
to people who have A.I.p.s ...
I understand manifestations.

.

2G / Billi PlllUSJIS

dying of cancer, bald,
a cholostemy bag around her waist,
why is it alright to see her?
To see her delirious apd weak?
\

You pretended a lot,
but this A.I.D.S thing was real, William
real as our black skin
real as the dirt I used to chew on
when I was a child, so that I could crunch
the tiny_granules hidden in the earth.
Any place I dug I eould find a soft clump,
but as soon as the paste touched my tongue
I would taste hardness.
I can't taste you
I can not taste A.I.D.S,
although I knew you and you died
~from it, it is still-abstract to me. Ten million people is also abstract,
I know it means a lot of people,
but what is that?
Is that intermission at BAM?
No, that's not even one million people.
I can only imagine a landscape,
with people all around,
but even landscapes, to me,
have always been through frames
or windows.
I can not accept
that you have left and your
soul has remained, I don't
buy that yet.
How can I believe that you are gone
when I haven't even seen you leave?

\

/

DAIii ~ / 'J:/

flowers: Sometines
I

Wednesday guyot

Flowers Sometimes have bad habits
of picking grandfathers
who wanna be.boyfriends
and boyfriends who act like fathers
not wanting to be daddies
who won't even be cordial
when the babies leave

/

flowers Sometimes lay dormant ,
on beds with whitemen hungry
, for the scent of desperation and panic
in Castles and grapefields
as sisters scream through clenched teeth
at the madness
at the madness
of spunk and domination
flowers Sometimes wilt
from the pressure of brothers
w~o grow weeds in their hair
and who seek out the convenience
of prone women distracted .
and sisters hungry for a
brother's love
flowers Sometimes dance

in aworld of winds ungodly

because they forget that they love themselves
stuck sometimes
strapped to chairs left listening to heartbeats .
begging for a laying on of hands
111d everyone needs a healing _

28 / D!BK.PBIUSBS

'Sallie'
Jacqueline Pri9e

. Policemen, lawyers, yuppies, students and consquction workers were the
main customers at the place I bartended at in downtown )Vhite Plains. This
mostly white, male, middle-class crowd was at its best uninteresting, and at its
worst obnoxious and rude. I usually occupied my time gossiping with the waiters
in between pouring .beers and martinis.
,
.The long line of,the bar dissected the front of the restaurant and I had a
modest view of the front door. It was a bitter cold Saturday night and the restaurant was dead. Bored, I was leaning against the end.of the service bar when a ,
little Black woman with woolly-white hair walked in bundled in layers of scarves
and sweaters. When she planted herself at the bar and ordered a double Smirnoff
on the rocks; I knew I would be entertained for the night.
There was a retirement home around the corner and although quite a few
old 'pe9ple ate in the restaurant, very few of them sat at the bar. There was one
man who used to come in and watch the Yankee games on MSG, but he only
.drank diet coke and tried to give me stock tips.
From the opening of the restaurant last January, until the day I quit in
December, I was the only front of the hou~e Black employee. ,Pf course, back of
the,·house, everyone was Black or Latino. There would be days when quite a few '
Black people came in, but that happei;ied about as often as the average American
votes. Usually, I made a show of announcing the presence of any Black person in
the restaurant, it was a dramatic moment When this r~ty occurred. It was very •
lonely at times.
•
I've always had a special respect for older Black pec;>ple. I immediately
felt kinship with this woman whose stories were written in ihe lines on her face.
She represented my grandmother and my aunts, a symbol of Black womanhood
that demanded my reverence and attention. There was an unspoken sense of
' community between us; a shared experience of being Black in this country, which
could b{! manifested in saying hi to someone in passing on the street to sharing
confidences with a complete stranger. Sallie was~ survivor, an example of
determination and strength.
' As Sallie sat sipping her drink, after we had introduced ourselves, she
parted her lips, and the stories started spilling from her mouth and into my ears,
making an indelible impression. Her second, and current husband, Taddy, did not
like her drinking, she confided. So she drank vodka: which wouldn't show on her
breath as much as whiskey. He thought that she was at the store right now, she
told me. She tallced for hours. I encouraged her with refills. As the night wore

D.&BK PlllUSllS / 29

on, her _stories got more elaborate, more outlandish. They were better than any
fiction I had read.in quite a while; funny, morbid and sadly human. •
• Sallie James was born in 1921 in rural Virginia, the youngest of eleven
children. Her father, Burnett, was a sharecropper, who, with a little learning, had
. managed to scrape together enough money to ~uy the small farm that Sallie was
born on. Burnett was in his late forties when he married Sallie's mother Hannah
in 1908. His mother had been a .slave, and he was born just before the end of the
Civil War. Hannah was much younger than her husband, a small, wiry chestnut
woman who ru1ed their household with the strap in one hand and the Bible in the
other.
Sallie grew up with a taste for the land, working it with her family, in
between going to the church school, where she learned to read the Bible, and to
write.JBut her education was limited to a few months out of the year, because
there were no schools for Black children in the South. There were only those
stolen moments of learning that her community could organize around their
subsistence lives.
Sallie left home at eighteen, with little more than-earth under her nails and
dreams in her head. She went to Washington D.C., to ma¼:e a life for herself. She
attended a cosmetology school, paytng her way through by working in a
~cehall, where men paid ~ quarter for the privilege of whirling arouna with the
dark, pretty girl from V,irginia.
She met her first husband one night when a drunk tried io get more for his
quarter than just a dance. Rainey Alston rescued Salli~ from the clutches of her
overzealous customer, smashing his face with one left hook to the applause and
admiration of the other girls. Soon, he came around on a regul~ basis, buying
Sallie's time for the whole night just so they could sit and talk. He didn't dance.
He was a big light brown man with pretty eyes, who spoke little as a rule, but
talked up a storm with Sallie in those days. -They were married three months after
that firstI meeting and moved into a small apartment on M street.
After finishing school; she got a job i}.S a J?eautician in a parlor in
Georgetown. The customers were white men, senators and the like, who often
requested her services. Her husband was a high roller, who ran numbers for Big
John, who was neither' big nor ~amed John, Sall,ie informed me. Times were
pretty good for the Alstons. She had two small children, and was pregnant with
another when Rainey was called up to go join the fighting in Germany. She was
left alone to fend for herself and.her babies, returning briefly to her parents home
in Virginia while Rainey was a~ay.
.
When the war was over, the-man that came back in Rainey's body was no
longer the man she knew. He was a sµ-anger, taken to fits of violence in the·
oddest moments. Unfortunately, Sallie was usually the recipient of these outbursts. Rainey took to drinking, something he had done little of Before the War,·
IS Sallie called it. She divided her husband into the Before the War Rainey, and
Ille After the War Rainey. He began to beat her on a regular basis, which she
.
•
'

30 / Diltl PIIIUSBS

suffered under for almost two years. When he ~tart~d hitting the children as well,
she' packed up and left for New York City.
,
,
1At this point in her ~e, Sallie shoved her' glass at me and winked mischie~ously. I poured her a double, moved her money around and leaned forward on
the bar. I had stopped charging her after the second drink: I would just go to the
. register, call up the check number on th~ computer and service it out. A little bit
, of power makes you do dangerous things. We had a no buy back policy at the
. ' bar, but Sallie was worth it, even if _I lost my job.
•
"Chile, would you like to hear ·about how I met Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
_de famous Negro from Harlem?"
I was sJudyipg Black social movements of the early twentieth century at
the time and immediately recognized the name. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was a
mythic figure in Harlem lore .. He was a maverick, a p~litician, pastor of the
Abyssinian Baptist Church for forty years. His strong voice was heard in the
early Black power movement of_the thirties and forties and continued on through.
the sixties, until his death in 1972. Althougl) a member of the House of Representatives for two decades, he was not a 'representative Negro.' A true man of his
people, he was elected to eleven consecutive terms in Congress by his district. .
Besides being an instigator of social change for Blacks, he was a man who
like to have fun, rfgardless of' his marital status. He partied as hard as he fought
racism and injustice, and- that may have also been his downfall. He was removed
from membership from ~e House for two years for allegedly misappropriating
travel funds and other monies.
Back in 1946, his reputation was common knowledge among his COl1$tituents. Everyone in Harlem knew Powell was a man who liked a littte on the side
✓and enjoyed his.leisure time. It was part of his charm. Harlemites didn't expect
their representative to be perfect. It was his human fallibility that endeared him to
people. He headed his own political organization in Harlem based from his
church, which alone had over 10,000 members. He was unrestrained, both politi• cally and personally, the only truly consistent things about-him. He was a passionate man, who cared about his people and was instrumental in building the
foundation for the Black revolution that King and X took part in.
~allie had my complete attention when she mentioned such a legendary,
~haracter, whose mythic quality made him one of my favo.rite figures from that
period. She had met Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.- a street in Harlem! She leant
• forward and winked at me, she liked to wink, keeping me in suspense a little
longer as she told her stories. She mentioned that Taddy wouldn!t believe.her
about the store and asked me if I could call her house after she left and corroborate her lie so she wouldn't get in any trouble. Of course I agreed, partly because
I was so caught up with her personality and also because 1 wanted her to get on
with the story.
"Well, chile, you knows I was jus a young thing an had three babies an no
man. I did my best to get a job in a beauty parlor in New York but I wasn't
I

•

DARK PIWSBS / 31

certified in dis here state. So I couldn't get'a job I was qualified for unless I paid
eight hunnred dollars to learn what I already piew. I .was forced to take a job as a
cleaning lady. One day I sees dis ad in de paper askin for a person who knows
beauty an makeup no certification ·requested. So I call dis man an come to fin out
he's an 'undertaker an wants me to do de hair an makeup of dead folks. I didn't
like de idea none, but he sayA
s it pays $50 a corpse, an back then that was a lot of
money, three times what I was makin mopping floors so I takes de job.
"H~ tells me he's got three bodfos that needs to be done in two days an I
says o.k.. jus gimme de address an I'll be dere. But come de day I'm suppose to
go, I have a change of heart, I didn't wanna touch ~o·dead people. But de man
shows up on my doorstep sayin 'I know. you're ,scared miss, but dese here dead
bodies gots to be done by tomorrow,' hands me a fifth of whiskey to fortify my
c~urage an takes me to de parlor.
."When we gets to de place, de man gives me a lil tour an den shows me to
' de bodies. Lordhavemercy! My sensibilities was jumpin an·runnin all over de
place. The smell was so strong, I was afraid to look for fear what I might see be
worse den de smell. But Mister Jack Daniel lent me a ban an I finally got down to
bisniss. It wasn't so bad once I figured dat de part dat made dem people was gone
,
anjus de Lord's dressin was left. Dere was two men an one woman. I does de
men first, dey was pretty easy. Den I gets to de girl..."
Sallie pushed her empty glass a~me and I refilled it_At this point, I'm
beginning to wonder what.the hell Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. has to do with this
story. I looked at Sallie's face, her expression of homespun wisdom made me
remember the way my grandmother used to tell stories. She had that older
person's way of holding you ii;i suspense \onger that a good mystery novelist.
When she participated in a discussion, which she always did, she would take the
most roundabout way to make the most insightful point. I Sl!]-iled and resigned
myself to waiting.
It was getting late and Sallie said that she had to go. I implored her to
finish her story first, but she didn't want Taddy to start.worrying. She reminded
me of my promise regarding the phonecall and invited' me over for _tea later in the
week. I tentatively agreed and bade her goodbye as she encased herself in the
acarves and scurried out saying:
.
I
''Wait bout fifteen minutes before you call an tell Taddy that yo'u met me
11 de store an we jus got to1alkin an forgot de time.';
,•
I nodded and waved as she·wobbled out the door. When I called, Taddy
aawered and I asked to speak to Sallie, saying my bit justlike she told.me.
When she got on the phone she commended me on actualiy calling and not
• gwithher:
•
'
'
• •
"You is a true member of de'race. Now I knows I kin count on you. I'll
you next Friday at one o'clock.''
Aweek later, the old lady's charm had-worn off some and I questioned
I should go or not. But she had said that stuff about loyalty so I felt .

82 / D!BX PBIUSBS

I

obligated, and I really wanted to hear the rest of the story. Although the idea of
going over to a customer's house and hanging out seemed a little batty. Sometimes you just have to say "what the fuck," so I picked,up.a pint of vodka at the
liquor store and trekked on over there.
Sallie's retirement home was progressive. Each couple had their own
apartment and was allowed to live fairly independently. When she opened the
door she put her finger to her lips, whispering that Taddy was taking a nap. I
handed her the vodka, then followed her down the hall into the living room. She
poured us both tea, spiking hers with the vodka. We started chatting about the
weather, which had been particularly miserable that week. I tried to put her on
the subject of painting the faces of dead bodies but she would not be swayed. She
took a long time.to saythings and she had a lot to say. So I had to wait for her to
get around to it in her own way.
Finally, she peered at me over her reading glasses and winked saying:
"That Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. sure was a pretty man."
"Oh really, Sallie, what did he look like," I tried to ask nonchalantly, my
'wait,at an end.
•
•
"Oh girl, he was tall, light-skinned with dark wavy hair, a mustache, an
eyes prettier than Rainey's, an my Rainey had him 'some pretty ~yes. He was de
kind of man womens jus throw demselfs at. But let me tell you bout qe girl first.
She was such a pretty young thing, her throat had been cut: It really shook me.
The others had been ready to go, it ha~ been their time . .But here was a girl cut
down in the prime of her life, just beginnin to enjoy it. I had to call in some
reenforcements from Ole Jack before I could takle dat one, it looked to be quite a
job.
•
"Welljus as I'm gettin ready to make her up, in walks Reverend Powell
with dis sad look in his eyes. ,Turns out he knew de girl pretty well, an she had '
been his sweetheart.
He tells me
.
. he loved de girl an asks me if I kin make her
look like this picture he gives me of her: She looks mighty fancy in de picture an
I'm sure she never met his wife. He offers me fifty dollars to do it, but I would
have done it _jus for dat sad look in his eyes. He says to m½ 'Miss please just ,
make her look like she did when she was alive and my favorite girl, make her
look like I remember her. I can't go to the funeral because of appearances but it
will be nice to know that she looks right.'
•
' . "I can't do nothin but agree, an I make her look much like d,e picture.
When I finished, jus as I'm gettin ready to leave, in walks de girl's daddy. Turns
out dat this grown lookin woman was a fifteen-year-old who had run away from
home two years ago. An here I was thinkin she was thirty or so, Rev. Powell too.
He take one look at his baby an begs me to fix her like his lil girl again. I
couldn't refuse de daddy so's I spend two hours makin her look like the _daughter.
he lost so long ago."
Sallie worked for the mortician for forty years, the giver of images of life
to corpses. So that death could be a little e~ier, for the living left behind. I never
'

\

DAU PIDUSBS / ~

saw Sallie again after that day, I quit my job a few weeks later, and haven't
returned to White Plains since. Sometimes I wonder about her, marvelling at her
ability to weave a tale and my ability to suspend disbelief. Getting parf bf
mystory from herstory, and revelling in her elabo_rate t,ruths, her Blackness, and '
her 71 year-old woman's wisdom. Sallie James was a connection to my past.

'

'

34 / D.illi PIDliSBS

Vicky Lavergne

I '

DARI PIWSB8 / 85

,

Esta Noche Duermo Sola
'

I

Dejame asf, esperando, sin saber lo que espero,,
con la sed indecible que me dejo tu boca.
Pues hoy, mientras morfan las.ultimas estrellas,
al mirarte a los ojos, supe que eras otra.
Aquf estoy, frente al mar, y no sonrfo,
porque temo que el pecho se me abra, .
y salte al mar mi corazon, y juegue
contigo, amor, y corra por la playa.
- Jose Angel Bue~
Cuando el coraz6n se rompe
no hay vaso que lo contenga.
Ella, tan especial...
Ella, como tantas otras:..
lQue importa la realidad
si puedo yivir en este infiemo
al que llamo fantasia?
Mi rival fue un hombre.
Uno, como tantos otros,
Upo, que le pudo dar
lo que yo nunca pude,
Yo solamente le df •
org4smos momentaneos:
Yo, la mujer de un momento,
E, el hombre de su vida. ,
l,Pero que importa ya?
Ella no estA conmigo
y~ noche duermo sola.
Ella. que fue la protagonista
•.todos mis poemas

la vfctima

mis mas poderosas emociones,
sefue

'

C.M.

3G / D.illl PIDll,SBS

Ella se fue
y con ella se fueron mis ansias de amar.
Cuando el coraz6n se rompe
'
no es reemplazado, se padre hasta tener
una rilelcocha palpitante
dentro de un pecho ajeno.
Pero, l,que importa?
ya no la amo,
si es que ~guna vez la guise.
Cada palabra de su boca
fue una mentira, _
la mentira mas ir6nica de todas,
la que convirti6 mi vida
en un juego frustrado.
Ah, indecisa,
algun dia sabras
que nadie te amara como yo
y lloraras con las mismas lagrimas
que esta noche me permite.
Contigo muere el sueiio mas sagrado,
el que pense encontrar en ti.
Deja que tus labios toquen los suyos,
deja que tus,piemas lo mantengan preso,
y amalo, por Dias, amalo
como nunca pudiste amarme a mi.
Nada duele mas que la palabra escrita
pero ya ves, te deseo lo mejor.
_Brinda por ti y por el.
Lo unico que siempre quize '
es que aprendieras a sentir
sin limitarte.
Y aqui me ves, tratando de enseiiarte,
aunque palabra por palabra .
vaya muriendo mi alma.
Amalo, amalo y porfavor
se feliz haciendolo
aunque solo quede yo
en este rinc6n al que me condenaste.
Te amo, y por eso te dejo ir
aurique esta noche duenna sola.

'

.

,

DAIii PBlli8BS I 3'l

Bui:ning Brides
Ava Ming Hu

Dressed in white
I feel like a flood of cool water
wetting the dry tongue of this dusty road.
I tread lightly on bits of broken rocks
so as not to disturb
their configuration
or to roughen the tender bottoms of
my feet.
I am leaving the courtyard behind;
dust filled and full of
chattering women who have spent
their lives behind veils,
• whispering about the coming of the monsoon.
They are bound behind .bars
' pretending to perform whole heartedly
songs they have sung apout bhakti
since they were able to speak
andremember.
l am folding myself as waves often do
beneath the pieats of my sari.
My eyes are burning like the fires I have seen
women burned in,
runninginto the streets
ICleeching like parrots _.
wilh flames hungrily rising,
eating the air.
quickly they fall to the earth
• g their fists against bas been long ago depleted
water.
• g away from the scraping sou.nd of matches
k against sandpaper.
• g myself of the kerosene
secretly poured around

hut
oning Vishnu
once again thi& world he has created
lfeady fall of a thousand days'of rain .

.

,

38 / D!RK PBIUSBS

Delia*--Goddess Of A Separate Species
leslie Peace jubilee

She sits
Stripped to her waist
On her throne
Delia-goddess of a separate speciesThe mammies and breeding wenches
Slaves of houses and of fields
Their progeny-we women who gape like open flesh in ebony
Oak or sienna, we women who rise like keloids
.She is crowned with history
Our language-the blistered back, space of rape, child ·
Sold away or aborted for salvation's sake-Delia' is '
The tongue of a never-whispered secret
Her tears do not fall, but her eyes await worship
Delia, shrouded µi the lies of her captors, waits
Beneath layers of indignity, she waits
Naked, she waits

"

When does child become woman?
The first time she is whipped or raped or sold?
Or does she become woman when she knows .
She is no more than the moon an error of darknessDelia knows, her eyes a satellite
We become the plane of orbit
' We become child who becomes woman in ebony
Oak or sienna stained
With never-fallen tears
*In 1850, B. F. Taylor, a slave owner, gave Louis Agassiz,.a Harvard professor, fifteen
daguerrotypes of South Carolina slaves. One of these daguerrotypes is of Delia-an
adolescent slave girl, naked to her waist. Agassiz studies such photographs to prove his
theory that Black people were a separate species. Delia is also another name for the
,
Greek goddess Artemis, goddess of the moon, of h'Q.llting, and the patroness of unmarried
girls and o~ chastity.

DABI. PIDU8BS / 39

Delia-goddess of a separate species
For salvation's'sake, we come
darkly to her palace
I
Kneel, shrink in awe
Crawl into,her unblinking eyes, press
Our palms against her irises·, stream down
Cheekbones to collarbone, ribcage to thighs
Shins to feet, the banks of sanctity
'
We become holy water
Flow against tne current-

.'

1

'

I

,

'

ID I DARK PIIIUSBS •

·•

~

~

~
,;

'

l

'

.' ';,

...
~~:
I;:

"

.

•

~~ ~

.

~

'

,,

~,1'

...
~

'

'

.

'~

"
;.

•

.,.,,

'

-;,>

'

bandera bandera, Elizabeth Miranda

DAU-l'lllUSlm / D

Sex With R.
1 •

,:l.ndre Young
• I

"I'm from Wyoming,
consider myself an honest boy
from Wyoming. Out west the landscape
is more stark:
,piles of grey stone
• interrupt the skyline
of chill blue.
Some horse rovers ·
rent back hoes
when their horses die,
bury their pets
six feet as if burial
was more appropriate
as expression of love
than sending the corpse
to the glue factory.
At night the coyotes'
come digging for hours
with black-nailed claws,
tense bodies not relax.mg
until yellow teeth
pierce flesh of horse.
lam like this," he says.
/

Like this .. , •

I

42 / D!BK PBIUSBS

~

scene of_ ~he city

. Wild and crazy New York nights with angel headed teenaged punks
walking and talking about wars and pe~ce and waking up at the crack of dawn
with nothing but one cigarette left in'your pack and smoking that-one cigarette
' while watching the sun rise strolling and then careening througho_ut that old New
England fog that rolls into every city on the east coast and that not even New
York can escape from with its winding and wet inner city streets and blinking
neon signs spewing up all their corrupt commercialism along with a side artlessness they walk through lusting and loving all there is in their meager lives when
, taught how sex is a long a tortured death now, rain can eat a hole through a pair of
some good old Doc Martins, and how there's nothing left at all but maybe a little
tv and not even that's not too good for you, but it doesn't matter at all, Obladi,
_ Oblada, nothing really matters after seeing a friend getting shoved out of a fast
moving car to meet his end for nothing more than cigarette money or maybe
' seeing another one die at a party in a circle of people freebasing a bong with some
vodka at the bottom instead of water puking out l).11 what little life he had in him
through one open convulsing mouth in a stream of vomit and the rest of the circle
just watch that old red translucent bong waiting for one more taste of ecstasy, no
they've seen and heard and done it all, and nothing really matters much, nothing
really matters .......

.•

;

.

.

D!BK P11R!SBS 1 48

H I D!BK PIIIUSBS
l...

Joju Cleaver

I tell her the traffic's too loud;
It irritates me.
She .doesn't answer.
Sitting on her tattered couch
she lights another cigarette
and offers me wine.
I haven't seen her in a long time
and can think of nothing to say.
"Baby," she coos, "what's the matter?"
The way she pushes the word
thro.ugh her lips.
"Baby."
Soft,
like a whisper.
Feather for a tongue.

DAU P1WSBS / G

Elizabeth Soto

when the snow comes
i lose a little
color
what was brown fades
to pale yellow
shades
•faintly expressing
blood mixtures
of biology
that hair of mine
a li~e straighter
myey~s
i notice
are deeper set
angled different
than people i watch
on tv.
you see
it is the
asian americarl

inme
placing my two feet
aminor inch
further apart
tilting my eyes'
to view
abair line
rather
than the soles
of shoes

is
gth

4G / Dill l'BIUSBS

lifting
belief in
my finge,r tips
can touch
skyscape
visions beyond
my cultural
attachment
there is
anger
,occasionally
daring you
to meet
my stare
shout difference
to this face
i'call her
asian arnerican
-

,

I

I

D.WC PIWSBS I 4'I
I

/

the pussy poem:
on pussy reticence
\

.

•wednesday guyot

my pussy is not as benevolent as
my smile· .
i do not fling it as freely !lS
i whip my hair.
•

,,..

r

(8 / D.illi l'IIIUSBS

A Humble Prayer

I

Almighty God
Creator of Man
Listen·to this humble prayer
For a sef ond creation
A re-designing of the political Man ,
'

'

'

Lord,
You'gaye two front eyes
to the political man
Sink a third large one
on the back of his head
That can see far into dark past
and so avoid same mistakes:
'

Lord,
You designed the stomach in front
protruding and leading the, wa,y
Shift it to the back now
so that h~ thinks of the people first
And not his greedy stomach. '

Lord, .
You gave him a large mouth
shaped like Joshua's trumpet'
Cut dowq tµe dangerous size
so that only honest sense comes out
Instead of lies and death.

"

Lord,
You gave him two ears,
too f~w. and too tiny
Give him another pair now·
large and wide like an elephant's
So that he listens 'more to the people
Almighty God,

'

DABI PIIIUSBS / 49

Heeder of prayers
Grant this humble request
And the world shall be a better place.

Amen.

I

SO / D!BI PIIIUSBS

8:30 AM Stream of Consciousness 1993
'

Kimberly Bliss

I'

Suburbia is a very strange thing. The safety of the tree-lined streets and
manicured lawns gives one a lethargic iqeal of life. Or at least it did with me. I
sometimes wonder about these _mundane autobio,graphical flashes that slip into my
,mind, especially during the morning rush hour number six downtown frantic
crawl of a journey, that finds me being slammed left-right-and-center by crackheads and businessmen. Same difference.
•
"How did I get here?" I mutter it out loud. I didn't mean to but these
things slip out under such circumstances. Never mind, nobody notices. When I
go back home to visit my mom I have whole conversations with myself in public..
People notice. Sometimes in good ways. Like yesterday after work. ,
She was fierce. SoHo is great to work in because the streets ar~ a fucking
runway. And she busted 'round a comer and pumped her stride like nobodyis •
business, least of all mine. But I made it my business.
,
The Manhattan Bistro. Despite the name it's one of the few SoHo eateries
that I can afford, and Miss Thing just walked into it. So I go in. Sit down next to
' her. Say something to the waitress nonchalantly, something about how much is
your cafe au lait, knowing damn well it's a morning drink but in my hormonal •
stupor these things slip by me. So I get my drink, and she gets a salad. Strike
one. I hate salads and know nothing about them. She orders a drink and my mind
spins in a frenzy, chastising me for the baseball analogies. So now what? I drink
the cafeau lait and
-l jQst missed my stop: "Oh,fack me!" I push towards the door, hit my
foot on a baby's stroller and curse the little fucks for exisµng, never mind that I
usually like babies. Nobody notices that I'm talking to myself again, except this
old short bald guy who has the look of Freud in his eyes. Those are the kinds of
subway riders who invade your space with that damn stare they have. I get off
and walk through waftil).g smells of urine and crisp blasts of cool air. On the
other side I wait for the train and I start thinking about her again.
It's so hard to pay attention to my life when I have so many distractions.
Like this diva of a distraction who turns towards me and says, "Can I see the front
page?"
'
"Sure," I look in my bag not_knowing what the hell she's talking about.
She laughs and by now I'm-wet. This is ridiculous.
"No, there's a Times right next to you on the other table:"
"Oh, sure." I hand it to her and add, "I've had a long day."
"Ypu work?"

D!BK PB1USBS,_ / SI

The vintage clothing thing has to go. Miss Thing thinks I'm homeless.
She adds, "I mean around here. I've seen you around." Her smile is
sincere and her tone reeks .of charm. I'm dead if she's straight.
"Yeah, on West Broadway between Houston and Prince."
There goes my subway 'stop again. I didn't realize I had even'gotten back
on. I leap up when the train stops after having only moved a few feet. The do_ors
open and I jump through them an·d bound up the steps. My mode of automatic
pilot gives me license to slide back into my revei;ie.
_
,,
She leans on_the back of the chair and stretches out her legs. The strange
thing is~ I can't remember wliat she looks like. I mean, what she really looks
like. :t-.:1Y memory of the sight of her comes in fragmented recollections of my
:reactions.
.
I stop at Blimpies and sit down with a cup of coffee. I rewind back to
thoughts of home, suburban upstate New York. I obsess about the lawns. Such
patches of green are 'so rare. There are more trees on top of buildings in Manhat- •
tan than there are in Ute ground. That is not normal. Tliis city is not normal. But
I can't leave. I've been here eight years and I refuse to leave'untQ I have sucked
everything out of it, 'cause god only knows it certainly has done that to me. One
• of tliese days I'm going to get even. I left suburbia because the traces of my life,
are more schizophrenic than a-Jackson Pollack painting. Or Etch-a-Sketch. Not
that suburbia is that boring. It has its.own sense of idle excitement, but chaos
dictates my happiness and off to New York I went. For what? Near poverty
•saved by the material' trimmings that boost me into pseudo-class climbing? working class suburbia sure hates me now. But they already do. Adopted into a white
family and-eighteen subsequent years of thinking that I'.m white because it's so
much easier to integrate myself through delusiqn. How do I tell Miss Thing that
my family is the Roseanne Barr Show and I love them- but my skin tolor is the
color of the Manila sky at night and has built up walls of rage that only get the gut
if tliey're,ghettoized? And Miss Thing's skin color is smoother than this cafe au
lait and blacker than it too. And I walked out of there with her number.
Things follow me. Everywhere I go these th~ughts slice up my brain and
balloon out my nerves. I down the last of the coffee, light up a cigarette and step
outside. I think I'm waking up now.
•

52 I DA.BK PHIUSBS

'-

-

...

I

Festival de las Artes, Bernardo Ruiz •

DABI PIIB!SBS / 53

Freedom Fire
Susan N. Kiguli

Crying 'Freedom'
.
In a limitless limbo of starvation
The mammoth of malnutrition
Manacles,our children,
So later we could revel in justice.
Marching to the battlefront
Dying like rodents
Strong youths annihilated
All for a taste of democracy.
Encased in Leotards of tyranny
Fettered slaves of a mad system
We have lived like dogs
For people's liberty.
Branded fire emitting agitators
We have marched forward
To a people's victory . •
But Behold, fellow Compatriot
Gaze at whai-1 see
Our saGred blood so bitterly shed is commemorated
by numbered majestic Chariots.
Our youth so severely wasted
'
is remembered in
Ballrooms and theatres.
Our bravery abused by
Mad_babbling puppets.
Yet our babies die unattended
Our sons condemned to
Bowels of society. .
Our mothers live in hovels
Our women arrayed in tatters
Our men unpaid labourers.
Guns and bayonets • '
Have gorged out their eyes. ·

5( I

D!lll l'Bll!SBS

step forward brother
Living Fuel for the vehicle of justice
A human flame
To burn blind eyes open
A roasting martyr
A protest against
f he Brewers of Injustice.

DAiii l'lllliSBS /

oo

Eve
Krishena Peters

The night grows stars
and the moon, paper-thin,
' has folded against th~ tops of buildings,
• brushed low across her window,
and then rested center, brilliant, white.
She had begun the evening slowly in sips of brandy,
and a glass of cut-red wine
at half past nine begins her night.
The sun fell hours-ago. .
In the darkness of the room she prepares herselfthe 'sheer stoc~ngs, the too-short dress,
and the drugstore makeup
applied last beneath the lamp in the_comer.
Bottle empty, the wine
has ·scraped th~ edges from her face and left
~ roundness, smileless, heartless.
, The sun had fallen hours ago.
She has_lost her shoes.
The floor is dirty, and in the moonlight
she can feel the dust crawl
between her toes and beneath her knees
as she searches for her
, heels
under the four-poster
and tpe fake brown leath.er recliner. .
When she finds them, she brushes her soles with her hands,
then slips them on.
She circles the kitchen once,
not fully listening to the click of her heels upon the tiles,
then reaches for her keys upon the stove •
•
and fastens her locks behind her.
This is the last time.
The last time for this, like this.
~

~

I

In the street the ~et air ·
•

I

5G / DAU FlllllSBS

presses her dress even tighter.
It's humid, like those nights in August, south,
when the doors of the h,ouse were left open
to swallow the breeze:
when the movie theaters were packed,
air conditioners blaring;· ,
when she was out with the boys •
on the lookout, in the backseat,
ankles resting oi;i the edge of the rolled down window.
That, night's boy would smile
because he thc,mght that she liked him,
and she would squeeze between the hands of the clock, late,
after twelve, listening to the ticking
1
of the sweeping second and her heels.
Tonight, the last time, it was th_e same_'._ .
the cars, the rolled down windows
or cold walls, or rough beds,
stockings still pulled urgently to her ankles.
He, .they, still smiled at her,
turned red, but no showed her green, at le'ast, in the end.
Tonight, tomorrow, again, a few more,
the last time is always the last time.
As she walks, the store-fronts reflect themselves
on the doors of the cars that speed by.
The sun fell hours ~go,·
and the brandy fuels the motor,
and the moon continues its swing
through starred black night.
Some falls go unnoticed, some falls.

nm J11WSBS 1 51

The Wedding Night
Ava Ming Hu

White lotus blossoms,
pi'ercing as the stars,
had been harvested with hopeful hands
to camouflage the depressed middle
.of our newly-wed bed.
The spellbound light of the moon
breaks through the slats of wood in the walls
making grids of light apd dark '
across the dusty floor,
otnall}ented with prints and patterns of use.
Jmake circul~ marks shaped lilse unfinished full moons
with my sandal, making the first detectable mark
as a member of his family.
Ifl were to run my fingers over
,
the mountainous terrain of his no~. chin and cheeks,
1 the inclines and depths
would :not be familiar to me.
'I met him once before, but kept my eyes cast 9ownwards
letting the steam from the tea • .
moisten my eyes,
and hoped the pattern of those tea leaves
mapped out good fortune. ·
Mother said he spoke English
.and was a Leo, a fire sigq
compatible with mine.
I remember the raspy voice of grandmo_ther,
"Your husband will be like Krishna
the 'emerald skinned god-lover
whose arias of flute echo
the call of a nightingale.
He will summon you with song,
and like :Sati you must jump
intoI the blazing flames of his funeral fire
to be rebirthed through heat wi~ him

I

'

58 I D!BX PHlU$BS

into wind, r~n, or mist."
I wear the dark as a veil from my sari
to view this breathing god.
_The moon shows no emerald color to his skin.
The thrashing sou.nd of the river,
fui1, with rainwater from the monsoon,
rushes by the thatched hut'. s window.
I feel a strange hand, arm ,
and another arm wrap around me.
His strong hold
mixes with my fear
like a hurricane around a lone palm tree,
, its green leaves shivering before they are torn away.
I remember white flowers,
whole and scented like the air before a storm.
I remember petals becoming dismembered from their ·body
and falling, too silent to .hear,
to the bare, cold earth
who cannot talc~ them back,
who cannot bare to take them back again.

Dm PlllUSBS / &9

,,

I

'

Vicky Lavergne

,

GO / D.illl l'IIIUSBS
/

Adamson Blessed

I•

Ernesto Okello Ogwang

He brandishes the hoe
Casts a glance here, and there
And marches off
A soldier to fortune unknown
. A hero destined to perish unsung
His head no simple rustic garland shall adorn
No crude monument in memento of him
His brow creased, palm cracked, eyes glazed
His chin almost totally withdrawn. ·
•
. He attacks the soil like
It cursed his mpther, or his girl stole
As the bright-eyes sun cynically smiles
At him.
•
. He grows more of this,or that
Responding to the government1s idiot-box broadcast
To double,
triple,
quadruple production.
.
I
Little did adamson know he's a pawn.
A nothing in airy spaces ,
The cold faceless stock-exchange •
That unfixes prices
' Knows nor cares not, for this adamson blessed
That night ants made love on his unsold crop'
And the next day he was arrested; his
Balls tightly.tied; adamson was marched
To jail, he'd not paid his taxes
-~
His crops, unsold, a mattress for ants.

I '

I .

D!BI l'BlliSBS I GI

I

i dream of walking past, letting it go
- Elizabeth Soto

but i will go on in anger
filled to finger edges'
of injustice
wanting to file away
everything distasteful
i will go on in anger
until the last stone hits
the earth 1
resounding through our roots
i keep that circle
going
/
shoveling fists down your throat
for my children born of womanwomb
i would fear
i will grant
them a legacy
in anger fighting .
what was never lost

'

i will extend to them
my identity ·
my song sung in prayer
for my almost darker color
my tilted eyes
full lips
for my too ·light skin
this is your identity too
- legacy of flesh
legacy of soul

I

G2 / D!BK PIIIUSBS

Country Wench*
Tusingwire Jotham
, I

In front of me, aft~r the night rain
Early in the morning, in a narrow dewy path
A stout, dark, robust frame
'
-Leads to-her daily routine on the farm.
A baby strapped to her back
One i'n front, another trotting behind
On her head rests a colossal basket
Laden with various contents:
Four split dry firesticks,
And a bundle of potato stems visible.
On her back a wi~e dark patch,
A conspiracy of soil and baby-urine.
A few 'mes buzz by the baby's eyes.
Suddenly she totters, sways and staggers
And there- poor creature; crumbles
On the muddy slippery way.
The child yells from the back with p~n
The basket is thrown away, scattering contents
And many they were:
A handful of salt wrapped in pumpkin leaves,
A cluster of ripe bananas,
A chunk of cold millet bread,
Scattered cooked cold beans,
A five-litre jerrycan of water,
An aged black peeling knife.
And a shattered calabash splashed with millet gruel.

*In Uganda, the term "wench" more commonly refers to a female peasant farmer and
does no_tcarry the negative connotations present in American English.

• D.illl PBlUSBS / G3

A sµiell of tobacco smoke, a cough from behind
And there he was, her dear man
Growling and spitting curses and abuse
Accusing her of carelessness and stupidity
Attired in a patched and tattered one-sleeved coat
And an aging·unique pair of shorts
Evidently having one~ served as trousers.
P~ga and hoe in hand
•
He approached the scene, an~ I
Still gazing with pity, feared him
And, hearing the bell, took off to school.

~·

'

G-1 / DARl l'lllWBS

..

Ghosts and Smoke
Jamesmith III

"Diego, put your toys away. If something gets broken, you'll 6e crying
all over the·place and it'll be too late."
"Okay, Mommy. Mommy?"
"Hinnn?"
• "Howcum I gotta put away all my toys?"
"Somebody might step on them, baby. Oh shit. I always do that."
"Why don't they just-"
"Baby, hand me that towel. No, the green one. That's it, mijo. Gracias."
"Well?"
"'Well' what, baby?"
"Howcum ... Howcum ... Howcum ... If people gonna step on 'em, howcum
- they don't just step over 'em?"
•
"Step on what? Ah, dios mio! This pilot light is gonna drive me crazy!
Where's the matches?"
"I know where they is, Mommy! I know where they is!" •
"What? What did you ... Diego! Stop that! What did Mommy tell you
about running in the ... Diego! Ai! That boy ... !"
"Look, Mo~ma! I got the matches! See?"
"Diego!! Put those _down, right now." _
"But...Howcuin? Whassa matta, Momma? I got... I got... I got matches,
,
,, Momma."
'!Mi dulce, just do what Momma says and put down the matches, okay?"
. "Okay, Mommy." ,
"Come here, come her_e, baby."
"Whassa matta, Momma? _Howcum you cryiJ!g? Mommy ... ?"
****
"Inez, you ok~y, babe?"
"Ytah, Roberto, it's cool. How was your day?"
"My day ~as fine, babe·. Why are you smoking? You ain't touched a
cancer stick in weeks."
•
"Don't remind me. My hips're as wide as a house."
"You always was the one to go ch~gin' the subject rt' shit. Wll,assup?
Why can't you talk to me?"
"I ju$~ got a little bit of a scare is all. I'm okay."
"You sure?"
"Yeah, I'm cool."

...

DAlll PlllliSBS / GS

"What happened?"
_
"Nothin' ... Don't look at me like that. An' stop petting me, you make-me
nervous. Siddown."
'
. • • , "Inez. •Babe, are you ... ?"
"Nol am not and you're and asshole if you think that's the only thing
that'll piss me off. Iju~t saw,Oiego playin' with so~e matches is all. He's okay,
•,I'm okay. It just.kind of reminded me of my little Maricela is ·all. She was so
, sweet..."
"Inez? Inez? ~ez!"
"Get your hand outta my face ..."
"Put that shit but. I don't want nobody smokin' around my kid. I had to
deal with that shit all my life and it smells like crap. My eyes used to sting when
I'd go anywher near my father's room an' I don't want Diego to go through that
shit too. Now lissen: Maricela is gone. I loved_her too. I still love her, but we
can't bring her back and talking about it like this is only going to make things
worse. Gimme tl\e ashtray, I'll throw it out..."
•
'
****

- "Roberto, pass the peas, will you?"
"Here you go ... ~iego, how Y
"\ doin' champ?"
"I'm fine, Daddy."
"Qon't talk w'hen you eat, honey. Close your mouth, you're getting gravy
all over your shirt. Ah, you little monster...."
"I'm a monster! I'm a morister..."
"Diego! Put your arms down and eat your dinner! Will you... Put them
down! You wanna give me a hand? He?$ your son too, y'know .. .'' . •
"Let 'im be a boy, Inez. I had a son, don't make him into _a girl."

-.

, "Momma?"
"Yes, .baby?"
' "When's Maricela comin' back?"
"Soori, honey. Soon."
****
"Well, Mrs. Pavel, has your ,son exhibited any antisocial behavior~ You
know hitting other children, breaking things for no reason. That sort of thing."
- "Uh... No, not really. Diego is really a very nice boy. He does everyhting
I tell him to do, even if I have to say it several times. m, just'keeps talking to
himself."
•
I
"It's not uncommon for children to develop 'invisible' friends, as a means
of coping witq loneliness. You did say that his sister died, didn't you?"
"Yes, she died in.. .In a fire. Maricela and Diego did everything together.
I know he misses her a lot, but he had a lot of other friends as well. He doesn't

,,

oo·; DARK PlllUSllS

like to play with any of them now. I don't understand it. He seems so normal
when he's at home, but then he turns into a goddamn hermit at school. 'Oh, my
language, I'm sorry."
• "That's quite all right. Tell me, is Diego into any sports?"
"Well, he's just a little boy, you know. He likes to watch football with his
father on the weekends, and sometimes they toss a baseball around; but he
• .doesn't even want to do that anymore." ,
•
'!Oh, his father is around often?"
''He lives here. What made you think he didn't?"
"Oh, no particular reason. I just wanted to know."
"No, there was a reason. What made you think my husband didn't live
here?"
"It was strictly a standard question, Mrs. Pavel..."
'

I

****
"Yeah, Luisa, so then she says 'Oh, is bi's father around often?' and I say
sure, he lives here, y'know? And she makes like it was all in the name of science,
y'know? She can't even own up to the fact that...What? No, he's okay. It's fine.
That bastard knows Roberto didn't take anything, he's-just another AmeriFan with
a chip on his shoulder. Que? Oh, it's cool, I'll just have to start working again.
Diego's in school now, so we don't have to worry about day care or any of that
junk, thank God. Is that Celo? Yeah, I can hear the ol' bear from here. Okay,
talk to you later. bye."
,
"Diego? What are you making noise about, honey?"
"Momniymommymommymommy!" .
''Diego, mijo? What's that matter?"
"Mommympmmymommymommymommymommy !!"
"Die 0 o! Diego! Oh shit, I'm coming. Diego? Honey, Mommy's here.
Wake up, baby, you're having a bad dream! It's okay, baby, Mommy's here.
C'mon, honey, ciµm down, it was j_ust a nightmare."
"Mommy! I saw-!"
"I know, baby, it's okay. Calm down, Mommy's here."
"No, Mommy! I saw Maricela, Mommy! She was standing right over
there, Moinmy! I wanted you to see' her, that's why I called you. When the lights
came on, she went away. ·Why, did yoµ tum on the lights, Mommy? She-!"
. "Maricela wasn't there, baby."
"Uh-huh, yes she was; Mommy! I saw her right-!"
Putyour arrµ down, Diego, and go back to sleep. You did not see
Maricela."
•:uh-huh! Shew~ right over-!"
"Diego! Mommy said go'to bed, didn't she?"
"But-"

,

D..illl PBB!SBS / G7

"Diego"
"Yes, Mommy. But_:_"
"So make Mommy happy and put your head hown and go back to sleep.
That's it, baby. I'm going to my room now. Goodnight, baby. Give Mommy a
kiss. That's it, honey. I love you."
"Mommy? When Maricela comin'. back?"
"Ssshh...Go to sleep ... "
'
'

.

****

"Aahh... Another day another blister. Gimme that paper,.! circled a couple
jobs that don't look so bad. How's my clothes?"
••
"You look fine. Eat something before you go."
.
~'No time, Inez. If you woke my up on time, then I _coulda gotten some.
,,
I
,,
•
thmg.
"Look! I apologized already, didn't I? Shit. .. " •
"Honey, I ain't blamin' you. I fuck up all the time too . .It's cool. You
look pretty tired yourself, maybe you should get some rest." "Later. I gotta take Diego to school."
"Okay, but promise me you'll get some sleep."
"Sure."
"And put that cigarette out."
"Yeah..."
''.See ya."

"Baby, you're coughing. Are you okay?"
"I can't breathe, Mommy . .That smoke's stinky."
"Oh, it's j1,1st a cigarette.· It's cool, you'll live."
"Howcum you gotta do that, Mommy? It's so stinky. I can't breathe-"
"What the hell is this? I can smoke if I want to. Don't forget who you
are, young man. I'm your mother."
"Mommy, I'm-"
"Dqn't give me any of your shit! I'm tired of people giving me all this
crap! Now go.to your room!"
•
"Mommy-!"
"Shut up!!!"
"But-"

"I said shut UPF'
"Oh, baby, what did I do? Diego? Diego? Speak to me, baby. Come on,
baby! Talk to nie! A,i, dios mio! Ayuda me! Please, baby, I didn't mean to hit
you so hard! Please, I'm so .sorry! Please, mijo, talk to me! Speak tom~!!"

G8 / DARI PlllUSBS

Kimono
•
Michel Ng

Kimono wrapped tightly around your waist, ..
trapping your body
showing its lines.
Woodengeta
hobbling
frantically h?bbling along the cobblepath
of faces,
of face.
Click Clock Click ClockMotion stifled by bindings of the past
wov~n into the starched fabric of your soul.
Strong sakura,
_
standing alone amidst the harsh frost
of tall skyscrapers, old businessmen, greedy hearts,
-unfair margins.
You walk abruptly in the cold
don't walk too fast I say,
you run.
Are you afraid of falling tomodachi? •
Ypur sturdy geta made of wood
will always return from whence they came.
Your soul may soar
but your geta,
your geta will always remain of the earth
embraced in her w~th, in your ki.
Geta hobbling, quickly hobbling
Wooden pl'atform upheld by two sticks:
our bushido of honesty,
our bushido of pain.
Fall then,
fall tomodachi.
Do not be afraid of the ground
if not for it, we would keep falling
not knowing how to suffer,
not knowing h?w to cry.
Rise anew, '
I

•

DABl l'BIUSBS / G9

rise like the morning sun
from -the haze of the shallow horizon
Emikosan.
And remember always,
that no matter how tight
the kimono of your soul may feel
_it will always remain glorious and beautiful
tome.

I

\

70 / DABl.1'11,R.lSES

Kaneem L. Smith

D!Bi PIIIUSBS / n

Cry Freedom
.Okot Benge

Cry Freedom, cry
Weep bitter tears
·To wash the wounds of Africa
That tell the shameful tales
Of strangled Independence.
Cry Freedom, ·dry
Wake the fear-gripped sleepers
To the mockery of self-government '
Where editors' pens shy from naked truth
And prisons have glut~onic ~ppetite.
Cry Freedom, cry
For you pissed into the Authority's eyes
And in a single dictatorial arm swing
Your manhood was ripped off
Leaving you castrated and helpless. ,
Cry Freedom, cry
For your tears bathe our hearts
Creating rivers of uncontrollable force
That shall one day burst the banks
Washing the dictators off their seats.

•

'

72 / DlBl PlllUSBS

Vicky Lavergne

DA.Bl l'lllU,SB8 / 73

For One Black Child
in an kll White School, 1967
leslie Pea e-jubilee
See that little girl
digging with a stick in the dirt ,
making maybe mud pies
or burying maybe her dreams
She has heard sounds ,
like sirens with no glare
breaking nights
The white-robed me
call her by name

'

The only iood ni~~er
is a dead ni~ier
/·

Call her •
Louder than as hard
as she can pressthe heels of her hands
against her ears
The only iood, ni~~er
• by name
is a dead ni~ier
Call her
See that little girl
her back against the wall
of her lace-curtained bed room
praying to be good
willi,ig herself a dead thing
So maybe she can walk .
tomorrow Ito school
without being seen

•

'

14 I DARK PBR!SRS

unmolested
The only 200d ni2~er
inhales her own screams
freezes in her veins
her blood
is a dead ni2~er
squeezing her arms across
her chest
Call her
blood red heart
beating
unprotected
in the daytime beats through
the voices that break her
nights
and bury her dreams
The only ~ood ni2~er
stares at the ceiling
when she could be sleeping
walks on eggshells the mile
to school
Plays in dirt '
burying this thing
blood red
, to good
to be strewn
at the hems of white robes
Shapes in mud
the resistance for her
in_lagined babies to eat '

D.llll PIIIUSllS / 7&

Brother and His Sax
. Daphne Osayade Dumas

I

He sits on top of his dugout
at the Saudi-Kuwaiti border.
This barren earth is not the kind in Shea
wher~ players are ireeted after sliding
into home.
It is home for Operation Storm.
A sandpile'for troops in the des~rt,
home away from homelessness, unemployment
and mis-education.
'

This soldier has taken his saxophone all the way_
'from Harlem.
.
,
His duffle bag· is filled with food rations, change of clothes
l}is hair pick and a crumpled picture of his girl friend. . ,
Doesn't know why he is there,
waiting to fight a people who look just like him.
He sits caressing his sax as if he were •
holding his old lady,
belting out Coltrane, Satchmo, Miles and Leon Thomas.
He doesn't like the noise.
H~ just sits there, playing his sax just as he has_done
. on Lenox Aven~e, jamming with the boys at Wells,
and around the comer at a hundred and·43rd.
He closes out the sound of planes overhead,
. eclipsing the quiet. •
He continues to play. ••
•)

He looses himself in that moment,
lulls into ecstasy.
, He hopes to hang on to his sax
while he plays to his old lady wishing he were home, away
from destruction, war.
.
, He lifts the sound one octave up, then lowers it.
He removes the mouth piece, packs up his duffle bag.
The army sargent callf out
Ground patrol begins.

7G / D!RI PlllWllS

american dreamer
wednesday guyot

the.re is a woman in my class
pissed of
because all her money
and tennis lessons
couldn't get her through
them pearly gates
toward white legitimacy.
• such a joke •
singing the star spangled banner
with a mexican accent
smelling of gringo spit
and shame.

D.!RK PIIR!SRS / 77

, Fidf l, Elizabeth Miranda

78 / DABl l'BIUSBS

,

When, Where and Why I Entered
or, What Harlem Means to Me*
Randall Kenan
'

Who knows but that, oq the lower frequencies, ,~speak for you?
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Who am I? Who are you? Well, that's the point, you see. The point
beil)g identity. The question being who, what, when, why. The heart of it, the
down, dark, dirty and nasty of it; both generational and genetic, gender and Gspot. For me it was (is) a strange alchemical journey, a. curious calculus of soul
and body, an ongoing battle of self in the early stages of a long war of identity.
Who am I? Can,I teµ you? Better perhaps to concentrate on the question· wliich
for me raises more and yet more questions. About race. About culture. About
region. About assumptions we all make, have made to remain sane, to live our
lives, to progress in some earthly fashion.
But what do you do when you suddenly realize. all the definitions handed
down by the media and the textbooks, all the assumptions public and private, ,
familial and societal, are inaccurate? When you realize that you have been calling
geese, go~ts and possum, penguins? When you must re-defiqe who you think you
are and ask larger questions about society?' What does itmean to be black? A
simple question. A stupid question, y~m might say. Everybody knows. Descendants of Africans? Or more precisely, Yoruba, Ashanti, Baule, Ibo, Hausa, Jie,
Ouadai, etc.? Or something more? But a question so obvious none ever seeins to
ask it anymore. And yet who can say?
•
I
What Black means to me. For years, decades, I thought I-knew. Then
' . suddenly I stumbled upon the idea, that all my as~umptions were false, all my
beliefs suddenly replaced with deeper, more profound questions. What does it
~ean? What fil.Q. it mean, to be more accurate, for there is a journey I mean to
. imply. Is it genetic? Is it cultural? This Blackness everyone seems to speak of so
authoritatively, so knowingly? Do genetics and culture truly mix? Can culture
grow from chromosomes and amino acid? Questions, questions, questions. Who
'had, has, the answers? But slowly I hit upon the keys. Not keys to the ans1wers,
of course, but to the ,correct questions, the true goal as all good scientists know.
There were three things. One. Two . .Three. One involved skates. One
I

.

.

I

l

*This essay is from a forthcoming book, Walking On Water: A Journey Into African
American.

DARK. PlllUSBS 179

involved Hardees coffee. One involved the New York City subway. They all
involved Blackness. Or what I thought it to be. One day when I was lost...
First, yes, frrst, - much like the Apostle-John's gospel- was home. In the
beginning was home, and home was with me, and home was me. all things were
home. And what was'home to me?: a house, white-shingled on a farm, surrounded by fields of com, soybeans, tobacco; a forest across the dirt road, full of
squirrels among the oak and sassafras trees, possums, wild cats, deer; tractors and
men in coveralls; old women with snuff deep in their bottom lip; black m_en, white
women, black women, white men. Not mucq ·else. Nothing else. Black and
white. Two views, two possibilities. For me one certainty. ,I, we, us,-were black.
They, them, those, were white. This was home. Specific. Rural. South. Black.
Chinquapin, North Carolina, 1963 through 1981 in the years, as James Agee so
aptly put it, "in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a
child." This was my vision, an inherited vision, a preordained text, inviolate,
sacred, as ancient as the Amenhotep throne and as omnipotent as Yahweh - this
vision of being' Black. This caine fast, yes, Iflfst. The idea of self.
But in the beginning came the idea, handed down like·tWo songs from my
father's father's fathers and my mother's mother's mothers resounding through
the cotton~eids of time, a legayy of sorts, specific in fac;t 1 unmovable in concept.
What did it mean to be Black?_In the beginning, in my mind, it meant a
'
pointillism of culture. Collard greens. "Amazing Grace." Grits. Tote. Quilts.
Thundering preachers. Pigs feet "Swing Low Sweet Chariot." Head rags.
Chitlins: "Chain of Fools." Root workers. Prayer cloths. Signs and symbols of a
culture out of which we, I, perceived a brilliant canvas of history and linguistics
and religion and music and fashfr>n and, of which, we were, are --=- and rightly proud. But more than bits and pieces, at home, in the beginning, there was also a
testament of thought binding all these particles, for on t\lose rare occasions When
we stood back to see it all as one would a Monet, we divined whole a portrait of
.endurance, strength, love, community, respect. Platitudinous in retrospect, but
sublime in practice. Or so I thought. Or more precisely, so I thought for fill
Blacks. For this assumption was part of what it meant to be Black. In the beginning, at home.
And at home this perception was mysteriously corroborated on Sanford
and Son anq in EhQDl magazine, by my cousin~ up in New Jersey and New York,
b)t tl_iose lying textbooks and invidious blaxploitation films of that wasted decaqe
in Superfly. Cotton Goes to Harlem, in Shfill, cause he's a bad muther- shut
your mouth! Black was one seamless, undifferentiated culture. And I stoop
proud: We all had an enormous amount to be proud of in Chinquapin, NC: . _
Tubman, King, Prosser, Angelou, Bearden. Ours. My family- teachers, businessmen, farmers, militacy men - taught me and taught me well about being
Black. B,ut f:his was the beginning. ·1n the beginning. The Word. Black.
But frrst, yes, flfst in my journey, this journey of which I speak, were the
skates, in a skating rink in Wal~ace, ~orth Carolina. December, 1988. My flfst

'

I

80 / DARK PBIUSBS

clue that something in my perception was amiss~something left out in the beginning.
'
Home, in 1988, had in fact changed. Wheri I grew up in the bosom of a
large, overly-extended family, in the home of a saintly great-aunt, spied upon by
- aunts and uncles and an inexhaustible supply of cousins, Chinquapin was much
. like it had been in the 1940s. Population was less than a thousand. Farms were, if
not prosperous and thriving, surviving with the coastal cash crops of legend; the
churches's congregations were strong and committed, a binding agent in the
community; many secondary roads were as yet unpaved, and gardens and livestock supplied most of the table fare. Not to romanticize the era: schools were not ,
desegregated untif1969; medical care was twenty-five miles away and then not
particularly competent; water was pumped from priv,ate wells, and many people
had no running water.
But by 1988 Chinquapin had been thrust, more like yanked, into the heady
whorl of the post-modem era with a state-of-the-art EMT ambulance, InterState40 less than nine miles away making the town something of a suburb; a new water
system; a factory; a video store; cable-television; a supermarket and two ~onvenience stores. Aside from the bristling, technological invasion, for me - fresh
off a DC-8 at the nearby Ellis Airport, now replete with a landing sleeve and
rotting luggage belt - for me, Chinquapin was a land of ghosts: here.ft of my
cousin Norman, old when I was born, who taught me to tell stories and drink
coffee; of his son, Roma, a teacher and farmer who taught me how to crop to- '
bacco and ,kill snakes; of my grandmother, from whom I learned good business
sense, how to be regal under pressure, and how to shuffle cards. I could not help
but hear these ghosts about the rooms and fields and barns, now empty and relic\ like. And as sentimental and shamefully nostalgic as it may sound, groups of
people no longer sat about on porches and talked, instead they watche.d television.
Most farms had been bought up by larger farmers, and church congregations
seemed sparse in comparison. Most sadly the old folk seemed yet 9lder, more
frail, halting, ethereal.
My fellow classmates had all, like me, 'moved away after
'
school; while the number of tombstones seemed to multiply exponentially. I
know there exists a sinful danger of artificially raising those.elements of the past
of which we are mos~ fond in our minds, to supplant those P,ainful, passionless
and pathetic memories much closer to reality, to belie the facts of endl,ess days of
dead inertia and boredom, of strife of every manner, of small- mindedness. Chin'quapin did, and still does, abound with a multitude of hateful truths. But on
Christmas vacation, 1988, I must in all honesty admit to being blind to the whole
cloth of the past, and to succumbing to the safer womb of pointless pining and dreaming after those past .shadows pungent with meaning to me. ~hen came the
skating rink.
Of course there was, is, the present: chaotic, hard, real. The present of my
family. The present of my grandfather, emblematic of my family strength, recovering from a disastrous.bum accident and fully recovering at the age of seventy'

DARI PIIB!SBS / 81
.

I

three, and of my brother-in-law literally rising from t_he dead after a near fatal
illness. The present of my larger-than-life sister starting a third career, Candi and •
Nilda, rambunctiously high schooling, my great-aunt whispering about retirement. Of this person who had a stroke. That Qnt: who had a baby. This one who
had altzheimers. Nothing to romanticize about 1988.
I offered to take my nieces to the movies. Okay, they said, fine. And they
would take m~ to the skating rink on Sunday. Fine, ·! said. I haven't been skating •
in yea.is. They giggled. I watched HBO.
•
Sunday, December 18, 1988_. ,No one had toid me, but in truth I had been
prepared. Indirectly. I had seen all the signs, the music, they way my nieces
talked to me, the way they dressed, the body language, the music, most importantly the music, for this is about music and Blackness.
We arrived at the rink, Skate City, at around nine o'clock. They said·
everyone gets there at around ten o'clock. It was importapt to be there at ten.
Why? I said, assuming my older niece had a crush on some boy who was to
rendezvous with her then. Cause, she said. That's when they start to jam. They,
giggled.
•
•
Skate, City, a concrete bunker, long and flat, gussied up in that American
recreational way, with the requisite indoor-outdoor carpet, walls brightly painted
in fat strips, the sarrie as in memory. Except for the kids, kids, kids. All Black
kids, surging about like hordes from "The Birds." Vivacious, loud,_in candycolored running suits_anq reeboks', beautiful, noisesome,1happy, young. All
Black. I reme~ber thinking how odd th·at we still managed to segregate ourselves
with such energetic ~nacity. Or was it merely natural? And I remembered the
contrast betwe~n my earlier trips to Skate City,.tlie calm, mu.ch smaller, integrated
crowd. In _fact I remembered my family being the only Black family there at the

time.
My older niece, Candi, and I got our skates, buffeted by the crowd, and
-took to the treacherous floor. Me, stiff and unpracticed, a monster out of Frankenstein, she, much surer, skating backwards, bopping to the top 40 - Black beat. We zipped around the rink with glee, playfully, the music speeding us
along. · I noticed,th~ crowds·building, buildµig. Girls and boys, all Black, pouring, quite literally, through the door. Nine:fifty-five. An announcement: "All
skates much·& turned in, please."
I turned to my niece, "Huh?"
"We have to stop skating."
"Why?"
.
"They're going to dance now.".
"Huh?"
•
But she was already on her way to turn in her skates.
At 10:05 it began. Harum scarum. Higgledy-piggledy. First came Jhe
music. Loud. Dangerous. Verbal machinegun fire, barely intelligible. Full of
gusto. Militant in its assertion. Rapid. Syllables like bullets. Needles scratching
,

I

\

82 / D!Bl l'HIUSBS

across vinyl creating otherwordly techno-nuevo dimensions, earthbound by the
thump, The beat. The beat. Rap. Everybody in the house say Eyeeaaahaa!
Eyeaaahaaa!
Not that I had never heard rap music before. Quite the contrary, only
weeks before, ironically, I had been what amounts to reverse acculturated back
into lilting rap music, which had just begun to emerge from the underground and
take hold of the zeitgeist'like so many Body Snatchers. I had been a stumble,footed fifteen year-old the year tqe Sugar Hill Gang came on the scene. A-hip,
hop, hippy to the hippy. And Curtis Blow and those grandfathers of the rapid-fire
sing-talk. But by senior year I and a number of my friends had become disenchanted with a form which seemed to have reached its artistic peak, and which
seemed to find no purchase beyond soporific rant ,and rave, and three or four
rhythmic variations. Yet how many babes are pronounced dead only to mysteriously live on to become heads of state? Or in this case revolutionary warlords?
In the cauldron of Hollis, Queens and Bed-Sty and Watts and Southside Chicago,
the infant recovered and went to the school of the streets, and now, in 1988, a
meager seven years later, was less an enfant terrible than a homme d'guerre. Rap.
A rootin-tootin warrior, risen from a premature burial, funking up the place.
But this place was Wallace, North Carolina, home of the poultry factory,
tobacco warehouses and two textile mills. Where the best meal out was barbecue
from a supperhouse with side of coleslaw and hushpuppies. The site of the
'Battle of Rockfish Creek in the War Between the States. The largest city in the
county of Duplin at around 20,000. My home.
Yet before my eyes those kids, from eight to eighteen, had .taken to the
rink, ·th~ now dance floor,,and were conjuring up some post-industrial Damballah,
with bytes for teeth and microchips for eyes. They did not so much dance as jerk,
jerk, jerk their bodies to the beat. Clad as they were in acid-washed jeans, running suits, sweatshirts, heavy gold chains with their names spelled out so large a
Stevie Wonder could see them bobbing ab'out their necks, topped with Kangol
caps, and their teeth fl~hing metal. They created.a voodoo atmosphere so foreign
to me, wif!i i_ts demi-urgic Tropic of Cancer humor, that if someone told me I was
in Kingston, Jamaica or Jamaica, Queens I w<;>uld not have flinched. Jamaica or
Jamaica? An even draw.
For as I stood there transfixed, trying desperately to make odd sense out of
the odd Mppening, I realized how effortlessly these youths of my homeland had
• assim~lated, accommodated and accepted an ethos =-- the rap hauteur - as their
own. Had all this been transmitted through cable TV and tbe local record store?
Pop ~agazines and clothing stores? Had I been seven years younger would I be
out on . the dance floor reebok-shod, robotically
undulating to Salt-n-Pepa? Had
I
home - fixed, inviolate, sacred- shifted so radically in so short a time?
I am not, nor was I, ignorant of the way Black culture unceasingly reinvents itself. The way blues, rag, jazz and R & B evolved up and down the Eastern _ •
Seaboard, from traincars and whistlestops to the Chickenbone Special, out from

a

DARI PBIUSBS / 83

New Orleans to St. Louis to Chicago, from NYC to Buffalo to Detroit to parts
unknown and back. I was respectfully aware of th~ sophisticated under/aboveground railroad of culture translated into a sophi~ticated ·music and language
whicti blossomed into a way of being in the world. 'Winged idioms. Viruses of
culture. '
So why did I stand like Moses before the burning bush, inarticulate and
•dumb, vaguely disquieted by the feverous celebration? Disquieted because in the
back of my mind I began to consider on what level these my young and _animated
kin boys and Jcingirls, related to th~ music to which they boogied. Especially now,
with my having firsthand knowled,ge of the areas which spawn this electrified
hellraising. Few if any of those dancing before me had witnessed city projects
and street gangs, had felt the gut-twisting fear of being picked off by a sniper or
the claustrophobia of six to a one-bedroom apartment. Few had seen a building
taller than four storeys, let alone a subway. On what level did the music, this
•entire lingua fran<;a, commq.nicate with them? lcould understand how the vernacular resonated with 300, 3000 years of signifyin(g), how "stupid fresh the def
jaµi" was. But this jubilee }Vas beyond celebration of the-new, it went deeper thari
mere roll-n-r.ock hysteria, spoke more profo~ndly than response-to-boredom
Beatlemania. This was tantamount to religion.
And again the disquiet. Why did I sense something to be wrong? Was it
the attitude or the music? The dissonance? The dejection? The sexism? Was it
this body language? Communicating a machine-like detachment from their
bodies symbolizing a rejection of their bodies's worth? I felt this to be true of
many of the city dancers lost in an urban wasteland. Was it true here too, in
agricultural Duplin County? Were they truly relating to this music? Or was I
merely an old.fogey at twenty-five? Declaiming: 0 ye wicked generation, looking for a sign. No longer able to synthesize at the speed of light the hip, the
skinny, the beat. But I too liked Fresh Prince and Kid~n-Play and Public Enemy
and L.L. Cool J. My trepidation then - or so I convinced myself - centered on
a deeper level.
.
. Driving home I pond~red and riddled myself, unable to satisfy my questions. Aware of having experienced som~thing vital and phenomenal and altering. But exactly .what I did not know.
This was first. One.
I

Two. Two is the middle. Two is Paul and Silas. Two is the 'divisive number.
Two is intellectual: thesis and antithesis. But we cannot gp on unless we go
throu_gh the gate of two. One, the inside. Two, the outside.
Two }Vas two days later. Two was me and my friend Randy Page.
Randy is my high school friend. My white friend; and in many ways my
closest friend. My intellectual soulmate. Which goes beyond being namesakes.
R~ndy, a raven-haire~, rail-thin, attractive sort, ~spectacled, by turns gravely
-\

84 /·DABI l'HlU811S
•.

.

\

pensive and quixotically mirthful, V'{ith a penchant for affec~ng the down-at-heels
Southern gent, had just earned pis Masters of1Theology at Union Seminary in new
York, and had begun doctoral studies in Church History aJ Vanderbilt.
This ·night we drove about Duplin and Lenoir counties, looking (or a
placed to have coffee and ja~. Our favorite pastime. In so short a: time we had
. accustomed
' to New York's perpetual sche<lule and had taken for granted
become
that _a coffee shop or some such place would always be readily available. Perhaps
a diner in NC? No luck. By ten o'clock door& were shut, lights went out and
Evaline or Ernestine or Sammy ~ere snoozing before the comforting purr of St.
Elsewhere.
,
.
At about twelve we decided to cut our loses and settle for Hardees, the
MacDonalds of the South, a study in orange plastic and tile, brightly lit and
smelling of french fries. A number of folk drifted in and out; high schoolers
giggling reassuringly in one comer; truckers imbibing coffee the way trucks do
gasoline.
I hovered over a ham biscuit and coffee trying to make sense of my experience of two nights before. I was not doing a good job.
· "So?..." Randy always played the role of intellectual superior. Irascible, •,
impatient, quick. My job was thesis. His antithesis. We would synthesis by
• committee. He was left brain. I right.
"But what about it struck you as so peculiar?"
I hemmed and hawed, unable to formulate and argument, I recapitulated
the,event, embellishing it, creating a narrative,.
_
"But what does it mean?" Pushing, always pushing. An exercise in
interpreting experience. Randy cannot abide ,an uriexaminep life.
Inelegantly I began to draw some parallels with Nietzsche and some ideas .
about societal progression, saying that Nietzsche was right up to a point, but ·that
it was also logical for a group to evolve into something similar to nihilism - the
amoral antecedent of bourgeois values - but into another less negative form of
the Superman. My kids, I postulated, throwing in a bit of G.B. Shaw for good
measure, were an example of thesf riew superfolk. Their a~tude and mechanical
•detach~ent evidence of the shift. Pretty good) thought. ·
Randy regarded me with a doubtful glare. He took a beat that would have
' made either Stanisla~ski or Senator Sam Ervin proud.
. "You know what your prciblem is?"
He annoyed the hell out of me when he plared this sort of role.
"You can no longer see yourself as a part of history."
"Excuse me?"
He went on to delineate the work of one Ernst Troelsh. A theologian
around the tum of the century, considered more a prophet tharr a theoretician, he
predicted/prophesied that a time would come; a generation, near the end of the
present century, which would no longer be able to see itself as a part of history.
They could see history, understand history, but would not be able to see them•

1

nm i,nuSBS 1 85
I

selves in it or be able to effect it.
"Excuse me?"
He went on to say that I suffyred, we both suffered, from the onus of this
prophesy and no longet felt ourselves a part of the onrushing river ·of chronology
~d its detritus. We were stuck on the riverbank. He pointed out protagonists in
my fiction caught on that riverbank, uqable to insinuate themselves into time and
suffering due to it. Affroelshian hero. He called me a Troelshian hero. ·
Evicted, mysteriously, from· history.
"Me n,o get it."
,
I liked my Nietzsche evaluation better; and we came to no synthesis that
ht. But the idea, like some unwanted child, remained with me. We talked of
1 nig_
other things that night, the Reagan White House, Margaret Thatcher, Yuppies, the
post-industrial wqrk ethic, but I never came to a satisfying interpretation of the
ska,ting rink. And now I had another bugaboo to contend with. The Holy I. The
divining rod. Had the inability to understand, my discomfiture in the presence of
Southern hip-hop, coine from my inexplicable divorce from my folk? Had I
somehow lost not only the comprehension but the connection to my peoP,le?
What if nature-had somehow churlishly Qanished me,,sent me packing without
home or hog mawls, black eyed peas or boogie-woogie? What then? And what
were the ramificatjons for my Blackness? For my generation? How can you be
Black without understanding Blackness?
Preposterous, I thought. But the thought lingered, lingered then festered.
And like all sores split in two. Two.

Three: the witching number. Beware of three. Three is the magic number. Three '
is the woman at the well. As Bettelheim says: •"Three·is a mystical and often holy
number..." Thr~e is tricky. Three is deadly. Three comes at you from three •
sides. Three is me.
•
Me in New York. Ah, New Yor).(. Spangled~spiked, spread-eagled,
, spick-n~span, splattered, splayed, swirling, city of sin. City 6f fun. City of
danger. Sodom, Gomorrah and Bethlehem.- Place of ~kulls. Canaan Land. Land
of Promise and Decay. Homeless-women begging quarters in ATM corridors.
White stretch limousines with black-tint windows. Crack addicts running down
Tenth Avenue. Financial analysts in rainbow-bright suspenders and Beau
,Brummel suits. Ladies of the evening in bikinis and leather jackets. A Black
1
mayor. Polyglot, multicultural. Capital of the world.
• l'>Tot Chinquapin, North Carolina, I learned long before I got off that first
747, steeped in national NYC lore from the age of five, reading in Newsweek and
Time, seeing the NBC Nightly News. La Manza Roja. I was scared to death.
But I was not alone.
, .
Everyone has New York stories. Ten million and counting, they blend
into a mosaic of truth and lies, anxiety and bliss; cantankery and child-like awe.

BGI JJJJIZIIJJliSBS
Something has to keep all these people here.
Work kept me here. A livelihood, a Horatio Alger wi~h - if not there
where? If not there why? A story so old it chafes with telling; sags with burden
in meaning. ~ut my message is not the coming, not the staying or the fun, but the
real estate. A place to live. ,
,
Also legend within the city of opportunity: the tight squeeze of so many
souls with bodies: where to live? How to find a place affordable to one making
barely above the minimum wage? I first lived with relatives in Newark. I next
moved to the Upper West Side. Then Queens. Brooklyn. The West Village.
Hell's Kitchen. Peripatetic dwelling, also a given.
But the truth 'is, during all the perambulation and vagabondism, as I
searched frantically through newspaper real estate "for rent" sections, courted
realtors, regged friends for apartment tips, and subleted, shared and subleased,
my eyes were set on Harlem. Sweet, sw~et Harlem.
It came to my mind like a sixth grade composition. What (Harlem means
~ - Jazz. -The Cotton Club. 125th Street. The Apollo Theater. The
,Schomburg Library. What... Junkies. Mugging. Shootings. Infant mortality.
Run-down ten~ts. Harlem ... Malcolm X. Abyssinia 1;3aptist Church. Edgecomb
Avenue. The Theresa Hotel. St. Nicholas Avenue. Means... Marcus Garvey.
puke Ellington. Countee Cullen. Langston Hughes. Jessie Fauset. To me.
Black. ~ •
No doubt about it Harlem, U.S.A. Symbol. Bold and Black as life itself.
Yet for one reason or another I was barred from entry, or so I thought.
One place would not even look at someone with a salary.less titan $50,000. One
place, though in a building with a transcendent exterior, horrified the soul in its
paint-chipping, bowed floor and catpiss-smelling interior. Back and forth. Back
and forth. Two extremes. Rarely a middleground.
Plus I had practical reasons to consider. I wor~ed in mid-town in the 50s
apd on the Eastside. Why complicate matters with a commute (it's exceedingly
tedious and time-consuming to get from the western reaches of Harlem to the
Eastside) - instead of living nearer to work, or at least nearer to a trainline which
cut down on time?
, Through chance, luck and practical reasoning I fqund places, but they just
weren't'Harlem. And though there was nd logical reason, I would feel an enormous guilt in the back of my mind, almost a subconscious nagging; though I
would ramble about 125th Street, visit the Apollo, the Schomburg Library, the
Studio Museum, visit friends o~ 135th Street, 143rd Street, Hamilton Hill, I
would feel slightly embarrassed when I had to say I lived "downtown.:' My
family, distressed at my physical vacillation, would, ask: "Well, why don't you
just find a nice place uptown. It's certainly more affordable." Many of my
relatives had lived for decades, decade,s before, in New York, in Harlem, lllld it
held the same meaning and connotations for me, in fact they had given them to
me. My brother-in-law had grown up in Harlem, and story-spun for me a mythic

-

I

•D!Bi l'BlUSBS / 87

Harlem of wonder and excitement throughout m,Y growing up. But I wou14
stubbornly answer that they did not truly,understanµing the dynamics of the
present real estate market and the fact that I had friends all over larger New Yorkwho tended to congregate in the middle of the island. Still they 'made it known,
subtly and unsubtly, thcj.t w)l black people in New York live in Harlem. Those
outside of it were pariahs.
•
- '
I mired and mucked about in my guilt, in a way almost unconscious to me,
thinking mystlf in someway a pseudo-Black person, irrational though it inay seem
now. The choice 'was to be Black and live in Harlem, or live elsewhere and be .
something Other. Consciously I came up with rationalizations, secretly suspecting the few reasqns I had offered up were water-solid and mlcrochip-thin.
Perhaps, in truth, I had deliberately not searched hard enough. Perhaps I
was afraid that to live in Harlem was to invite an onus of negative connotations I
might not live down among my professional - mostly White - colleagues.
Perhaps I was secretly ashamed, despite my bold talk of pride and knowledge and
work, of being Black. After years in an integrated school system, four years at a ,
predominately White university and now·struggling with the manners and mores
of corporate America and having an integrated social life, had I noW'betrayed rpy
culture? And what of those other Blacks across the city, who did not live in
' their Harlem, the capital of thejrHarlem, how did they deal with, think about,
culture? Silly, illogieai, foundation-less preoccupation worried me as I turned
Harlem into the Mecca and·Medina of the religion of Blackness, with me the
heretic. _ '
Until one evening when I was arguing with a young woman, an Ethiopian,
a direct descendent of Haile Selassie, a princess and anthropologist, who had ,
spent a great deal of time in Antigua. We lingered over coffee, quarreling.
"You North American Blacks, you make me so angry. You set yourselves
off from the rest of the Diaspora. As if your experience was somehow ~ .
'We suffered more.' When in fact the slavocracy of the Caribbean was. much
more brutal."
•
, "Th~t' s true, but what separates us is not only the insidious psychological
shackles of our slavocracy, but the extent to which our bloods intermingle-"
"Bullshit. You think there was no.rape and creoles through the world?
That doesn't-"
•
•
"But it goes beyonc,t that. We've become a part of this country in a way no
other Black group has beco~e a P8!1 of a country in the worlq. I mean, we made
this country. We still do. Why was slavery instituted in the first place? Free
labor. And 100!5: what that labor cre~ted, materially, for better or for wotse. Moreover, we've contributed to every· aspect of American life, scientifically,
legislatively, militarily, artistically. Hell, we~ America. We have more claim
than anyone other than the Native Americans. We've been here for three hundred
' :
•year-s, for christ's sake. I don't mean to disparage the Diaspora, but how can we
ignore our blood-and-sweat connection to the land, this very land here? Hell, this
'

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88 / DABK l'BIUSBS

is my country too, just as much as it is for any white man, if not moreso ..."
As I went on with my oration I slowly became .aware, in a way I had not
before, how strongly I believed this. Days, weeks, months after that debate the
idea stayed with me: How integral Blacks are in the fabric of America. And
slowly it dawned on me that my subconscious guilt over not living in ijarlem,
silly as it was, was not guilt at all, but fear. Fear of b,eing estranged from my
culture, fear of losing some essential Blackness which I was at a loss to pinpoint.
A question not of a place, for I realized that Harlem was simply a place, nothing
more, nothing less, a place of splendid architecture, inhuman squalor, fabulous
wealth, a collection of neighborhoods of all steps of life, just as New York as a
whole is, but at the same time, as they do now, and created and r~invented themselves, again and again.
.
But here li;s the largest irony. Fpr I had been so blind that the blindingly
obvious had not taken hold: at that time I was living in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn,
home of Spike Lee and a thriving Black Bourgeoisie, not far from where I was
born; and before that I had lived in Rego.Park, Queens, another predominately
Black area; and I would later live on Manhattan's west side, Hell's Kitchen, a
place which before the first World War had been heavily Black, Harlem before
Har.lem . .While at that time Harlem had been predominately affluent White
people, and devoid of any of th~ associations I held so sacredly. Irony of ironies.
Were these places, the present repositories of Black culture in some way illegiµ- _
~ate in my eye;? Could Black culture only exist north of'Central Park? The
•
more I thought of it, the more the foolishness of my obsession of the idea sank in.
The very idea that Black culture was, could be contained was ~bsurd. Clusters of
Black people exited all over Nyw York, on the lower Eastside, Flatbush, Crown
Heights, Jackson Heights; the Bronx and beyond to the north in Yonkers, on to
Buffalo and Toronto, beyond to the south and west in New Jersey, Washington,
Virginia, Florida, and as far west as.Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. These
places were not embassies of Black culture on the outskirts of ,some mythic White
nation, they were the nation itself dwelling fully within.. That very moment.
But as I came to a deeper understanding of my fear of estrangement, it led
'
•
me to wonder-about that nation and how it was changing ,and how little we actually knew about it, in all its multifold and powerful manifestations. Moreover,
how were people like me, living on the borders of that great nation, constantly in
danger of being subsumeQ by a larger non-culture, defining themselves? What
did we look to to understand what'it means to-be Black? Beyond objects? Or are
these nuts and bolts of culture the culture itself? Where does one begin and the
otheiend?
, This then explained in "part my initial disquiet in Wallace, North Caroliria,
for I was attempting to solve an equation with too many unknowns. These being
the most crucial elements of the problem: how is the great nation wjthin a nation
evolving? With rap music and desegregation ~d attrition in schools and 50% of
young Black men in prison and a rising rate of teenage pregnancy and more and
j

•

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D.illl PBlUSBS / 89

more black mayors and judges and representatives and the first Black governor
, and unemployment and drug abuse and The Cosby Show and a Black Joint Chief
of Staff and AIDS and the glass ceiling_:_ so many problems and ac~omplishments - how is this vast society, yoked to a larger country, thinking of itself? So
much is said and written about the "facts" and "realities" of Blacks in America,
but rarely have individuals across the country testified as to how they see themselves. In the media and in books, the assumption is always made for them,
always on the penphery of discus~ion, a given. But how do they define themselves? What do we really know about the whole of Black America, and what
changes in our perceptions would a more comprehensive knowledge bring about?
This was three, triangular and sharp-pointed: Where does the myth of the
descendants of the slaves end and the reality of the African American take over?
Thirty-five millioQ people. Sixty-three states, provinces and territories. An' e'ntire
continent. Three hundred years and counting. Three.

.

'

One, Two, Three. These are the ideas which have plagued m~ and must be
addressed: One, the idea of Black culture as a dynamic organism, doing it's
thang, with the ability to reinvent itself and grow; °Two: the idea of an individual
within a culture defining himself by or against that culture; and Three: the myth
or'culture, the perception of a culture within a culture, and the dangers of underestimating, narrowing or limiting an entire people by a set of truths no longer held
to be self-evident, which bear 1,esser and lesser r~lation ·to reality.

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• 00 / D.mK PlllUSRS

CONTRiBUTORS'NOTES
OKOT BENGE is a graduate student in the Department of Literature at Makerere
University in Uganda.
KIMBERLY BLISS is a senior at Sarah Lawrence College, and resi_des in .
Kenmore, New York.
JOJlJ CLEAVER is a senior at Sarah Lawrence College, and resides in Atlanta,
Georgia. .
ROSE-ANNE CLERMONT is a senior at Sarah Lawrence College; she.J.s·a
dancer who hopes to join a dance company anc;l find a community bf writers to
work with.
MALKIA CYRIL is a sophomore at Sarah Lawren_ce, and resides in Brooklin,
New York.
.
•
'
DAPHNE OSA.YADE DUMAS is the Associate Dean for Multicultural Affairs/
International Students at Sarah Lawrence. She is an MFA candidate in the Ho~ce
Gregory Writing Program. She has studied the healing traditions of the Yoruba
people, the Tineh (Apache) and other indigenous healing techniques. She is
cuqently working Of\ a mythological piece on the middle passage.
WEDNESDAY GUYOT is a senior at Sarah Lawrence College; she is less interested in the ties that bind, than those which elude us. Her influences include Etta
James and her Amazon green parrot, Mack._
KIMIKO HAHN teaches poetry workshops at Sarah Lawrence College. Her
latest book is entitled Earshot
AV A MING HU is a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence.
TUSINGWIRE JOTHAM is an undergraduate student at Makerere Univer~ity in
Uganda.
•
LESLIE PEACE JlJBILEE is a founding editor of Dark Phases. She has an M.A.
in Philosophy from SUNY Stony Brook and an M.F.A. in writing fro.m Sarah
Lawrence College. Her poetry most recently appeared in ~yphen magazine along
with h_er artwork in the exhibit "Healing Through ,Cre~tivity."
WILLIAM MELVIN KELLEY has taught fiction writing workshops·at Sarah
Lawrence College since 1989.

D!Bl PDlUSBS / 91

.

'

·RANDALL KENA;N has taught fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College since
1989. He is the author of A Visitation of Spirits (1989), and Let the Dead Bury
Tlbeir Dead (1992). This essay is from a forthcoming book, Walkin~ on Water: A
Joum~y Into African America.
SUSANN. KIGULI is a graduate student in the Department of Literature of
Makerere University in Uganda.
CHRIS LEE is a senior at Sarah Lawrence, and resides in Los Angeles, California.
CHIARA MERINO is a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence, and resides in Puerto
/ ,
ruco.
•
. ,

~

MICHEL'NG is a sophom_ore at Sarah Lawrence, and resides in Honolulu, Hawaii.
ERNESTO OKELLO OGWANG is a graduate student in the Department of
Literatiµ-e of Makerere University.in Uganda.
KRISHENAPETERS is a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence, and resides in Smyrna,
·Georgia.
•
•
JACQUELINE PRICE received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 1992.
She currently resides' in Rochester, New York •
•
BERNARDO RUIZ is a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence. He was born in
Gua.Q.ajuato, Mexico, and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
ED SHEI is a first year student at Sarah Lawrence, and r~sides in Bloomfield
Hills,-;Minnesota.
JAMESMITH III is a sophdmore at Sarah Lawrence, ;md resides in Washington,
D.C .. When-he is not writing, he is composing, and singing rap songs.

l

ELIZABETH SOTO is a senior at Stlfah Lawrence, and resides in Kailua, Hawaii.
She plans to attend Cambridge University for her graduate studies in Anthropology.
'
.ANDRE,YOUNG is a junior at Sarah Lawrence, and !esides·in Danbury, Connecticut. He is a published poet who has given readings throughout New York
City. .
•



1·

DARK PHRASES
I

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\

,.

COPYRIGHT 1993 SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE
FUNDED BY STUDENT SENATE
. I

PRINTED BY LIBRA BUSINESS SERVICES
NORWALK, CONNETICUT
COVER ART BY REGINA GARCIA

DARK PHRASES
-EDITOR
Holly Bass

CREATIVE DIRECTOR/CO-EDITOR
Brianna Hynell}ail

ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Cecilia Cortez

EDITORIAL CONS.ULTANT
Diana G..Sandigo
\

TYPESETTING
Wednesday Guyot
Diana G. Sandigo

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The editors of J)ark Phrases 1993 would ijke to offer our sincerest thanks to all the contributors for their outstanding poetry, prose
and art. It is with great pleasure that we extend an additional thanks
to the members of Asian·and Asian-American Students Union,
Harambe, and Unidad for continuing the fight for the inclusion of
. people of color in all aspects of life here at Sarah Lawrence.College.

VOLUME 3, 1993

Table of Contents
. ..

Poetry
So Beautiful, Malkia Cyril 1
Dropping Me Off, Chris Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Bloodlines, leslie Peace jubilee. . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I Shall Sell My Poverty, Okot Benge . . . . . ' . ... . . . . . . . . ,. .• . . . .
Mama 'Zenzile, Daphne 6sayade Dumas . . . . : . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
For My First Teacher, Kimiko Hahn . . . . . . . . . . .
Thin Nothings, Rose-Anne Clennont . . . . . '· .. . . . . . . . . .
flowers: So_metimes, wednesday guyot, . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 • •
Esta Noche Duemw Sola, Chiara Merino. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Burning Brides, Ava Ming Hu •. . r . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . •. .
Delia-Goddess- of a Separate Species, leslie Peace jubilee . •. . .. -. . . .
Sex with R., Andre Young .. . . -. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . •
Piaf, Joju Cleaver . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . • . . . . . . . . . : . . . .
untitled, Elizabeth Soto . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
the pussy poem: on pussy reticence, Wednesday Guyot . . . . . . . . . . .
A Humble Prayer, Okot Benge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Freedom Fire, Susan N.Kiguli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Eve,. Krishena Peters . . . . . . . . . . . .• . : . . . . . . . . .' . . . . . . .
·The Wedding Night, Ava Ming Hu .. . . . .. . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . .
At:/4mson Blessed, Ernesto Okello Ogwang . . . . . . . . •. . . . .
. .
i dream of walking past, letting it go, Elizabeth Soto . . . . . . . .
. .
Country Wench,-Tusingwire Jotham . . . . . . . . .. .. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Kimono, Michel Ng . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Cry Freedom, Okot Benge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . : . . . . . . . . .
For One Black Child In an All White School, 1967, leslie Peace jubl.lee . . . .
Brother and His Sax, Daphne ·6sayade Dumas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
american dreamer, wednesday guyot . . . . . . .
. . . . . ., . . . .

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11
13
14
21
23
25
27
35
36
38
41
44
45 •
47
48
53

55
57
60
61
62
68
71
73
75
76

Fiction
'

For Louis When the Day is Long, Bernardo Ruiz . .
.
. . . . . . . . 15
Sallie, Jacqu~line Price; . . . . . . . . , . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
a scene of the city, Ed Shei. . . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . ~ . . . . . . . . . . 42
8:30a.m. Stream Of Consciousness 1993, Kimberly Bliss : . . . . . . . . . . 50
Ghosts and Smoke, Jamesmith m . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ., . ~ . . . . . 64 ,

Non-Fiction

Raising Women: A Man's Journey into Womanhood, Wm. M. Kelley . . . . . . 5
When, Where And Why 1 Entered, or, What Harlem Means to Me,
Randall Kenan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . .

. . . 78

'. . Art and Photos •
Bernardo Ruiz· . . . . . . .
Elizabeth Miranda . . . . .
Kaneem L. Smith. . . . . .
Vicky Lavergne. . . . . . .
William Kelley. . . . •. . .

.
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. . . . . . . . . . . . _. . ... . . . . . . . . . '24, 52
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · . 40, 77
. . . . : . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . . . . 14, 70
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34, 72, 59
. . ~ . . . . . . . . . . . . . ,. . . . . . . . . 4, 43

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DARI PlllliSBS / I

So Beautiful
Malkia Cyril

I

There are silences which info~ my pain.
It is in sliced and chopped quiet that I have always known
my body
,
I have not been forever this fat, this uncharacteristically.unhappy •
with the slow path of water down my abdomen,
slick between my thighs
the baby pictures slide memories sweet
down the back of my throat
of mommies cuddling and crowding around
screaming Black children
become Black women in the dark hallways of project buildings
the back rooms of substandard housing
in the streets of Brooklyn ,
we were shot into female comers
and were th~re when·Presidents decided which to keep and cut
I have never beeri worth .saving
so we were Black women
with our heads disconnected from our spirits
we were Black'and women
on tlie bl0od soaked hands of
Korean grocers whose minds saw white projected images
of ho's and crackhed' s
befor~ rainbow of death made in our collective eye
bursting red our veins poppin blue blood •
our bones crushed and crashing onto the
linoleum floors of hard working womeh
for a dollar we became dead niggas
or the dead girlfriends of black women
,,
angry and afraid ,. . .
believing in some shit that is meant to destroy.us
and out of 1960's Black we became women
oilin' our scalps,
scratchin out the dandruff of our ancestors
our lives dirty as fingernails with no hope
and true womanhood slicin' and dicin' like -a blender gadget
I

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2 I DARK PIIIWIIS

. meant to whip ,us into somethin' c~te and tasty
my name drips off the tongue of this nation like murder
and they wonder
.
these white girls in white colleges sitting in white classrooms _
with white teachers
•
•
enlightened hair whlppin careless and
undaunted by the skidmarks on our faces
bundles of pain learning about the ways their mothers avoided their
fathers luxuries inside someone's black mother
and they
white neverminds in a culture of nevermind its none of your
business anyway give away and give away and think that they've
found liberation in schools remiriiscent of the Mickey Mouse Club by
pointing to that other white girl who mistakenly uttered what they
were all thinking anyway
• "stupid niggers this is my school"
calling her a shame
while they choke buried in coffins of patriarchy
and everytime I turn around some mother is being killed
by her sons and some twisted ~eality of being too dark and too big
and just not right is passed in a needle to some sista
and rests deep in her arms
Oh ... the tracks of my tears, the full of my breasts
the 'thick of my hair couldn't fit into Vogue and I will always be
too much and un-Madamoiselle like
but I wanted so bad when I lived on the fringes of illusion
to be there
not in the pages of Vogue, but in somebody's 'pages
_on somebody's mind I was a Black and lonely woman
who could've killed for a waist introverted into
negative numbers
sometimes I die to be minus
minus 10, or even funny and interesting like prime time
hold people's attention like L.A. Law or Roseanne
be a series to come back to like those girls
whQ give a little pussy to boys in the big house to move
from the kitchen to the prarie
from the back room to the frontier
or think I wouldn't mind security ,

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l)ABI PIIJLlSBS / 3
I

being safe in the hyphenated or nameless existence of marriage
. wouldn't care if my pussy was on a payment plan
if someone would just talk to me and tell me I was
somethin more than an after-school special
and there are so many times
• ,
when I just wanna follow the rules
be in the game
but there is a dry spot in my crying heart
that won't let me play with police who
• shbot the women first
and brothers who quietly caress the night
soft brown horizons gleam honey-colored on their necks
all silk in their voices and cream in their smiles
awkward at ten and interegated then , ,
into a "Bitches ain'. t shjt·but hoes and chicks" mentality
do not hold my interest when instead of a baby
•
they cradle a gun
we will never be the canon _that ~pits a
capitalist deconstruction of the human agenda
but we lick the salty tears from the hole it leaves
in all of our lives when we are forced to
look truth.in its face and believe.
\

I don't understand why I still try to fit the wide of my soul

the scent of the sista I follow
I lead and walk beside
the world of my word
the ocean in my name
,.
into bottles of lighter fluid
or cut out sugar coated cookies that some asshole
will smash to pieces anyway
but even on this edge .
the innuendoes and implications
are not lynched they do,not condense into nothingness
I feel them in this space and know them on my terms
and create myself in the silences I have left behind. •
I am ugly when I'm ugly and when I am

beautiful...?
'
There is no summer longer than mine

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4 I D!BK PlllUSBS

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William M. Kelley

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1D.lRK PlllWBS

/5

• Raising Women:
A Man's Journey into Womanhood
William M.- Kelley
I wanted children even before I quite realized that women actually played
a part in making them. At first I think I just wanted a brother or sister. But as I
grew older, and having finally caught on that no little companioh would materialize out·of my mother's body, I began to look forward ·to the day when I could
have some children of my own. By now I knew.how people made l;>abies, and
that seemed O.K. too.
• . I suppose that I first rea~zed that babies came out of women because·of
my mother. A modest woman, I hardly ever glimpsed her totally naked, by
accident several times, but til I reached the age of se~ert I saw her often in her
undei:wear. Both my mother and my grandmother, once they got on their bras and
drawers, they let me watch the rest.
I came out of this experience with two realizations, even as young as
seven. First, compared to men, women wore some of the least.functional and
most uncomfortable clothes any mind could devise. From time to time, they let
me stumble around.in their high heels, ankles wobbling. In the winter, my mother
wore woolies but continµed to wear skirts, complaining of the cold Bronx wind on
her legs. In the summer, at least till she reached the age of seventy, my beloved
Nana daily laced herself into a corset, covered -it with a slip, then a dress. Some
sinister tyranny clearly orchestrated this.
Secondly, but more importantly, seeing my mother in bra and halfslip
revealed to met the top of the world's ugliest Caesarian scar, a brown zigzaggy
tear that looked like she'd given birth to me in an open boat off a shipwrecked
oceanliner, my inbringing performed by my father, an amateur upholsterer.
~
Actually she'd had me in New York City, her incision stitched by an incoJllpetent
intern using contaminated medical twine.
'
'
.
I woµld ponder that scar and know that my mother had exhibited bravery
and fortitude and love at least as monumental as any man at that time who fought
Nipponese or Nazis in foreign lands. My mother had clearly visited Hell and
returned with me in her arms, though she always called me God's perfect child, I
daresay more as incentive than description. Later on, reading Macbeth, when
McDuff says that he came "from my mother's wo{Ilb untimely ripp' d", I could
relate visually.
I held women in high.esteem from early in my life. My Nana sewed,
crocheted and knit. I would sit w~th her, threading needles for h~r. learning how,
to sew and listening as she recounted the story of my forebears: .the Haitian
slavegirl aged fourte~n. the Confederate colonel ~ho knocked her up, gave the

6 / DA.BK PlllUSBS

baby to bis spinster sisters to raise as a servant, then sold the Haitian mother in the •
market at New Orleans; the lightskinned baby growing up to watch at fifteen
Sherman's troops marching through Georgia bringing Eman,cipation, becoming
the mistress of Savannah's foremost gunsmith, a German from the Alsace, how
she bore him ten children, how he left his wife and came to live with her, how one
pf the children grew up to become my beloved Nana, who came North and mar-·
ried a Puerto Rican from Ponce;-and more. Nana couldn't cook, so Mama
handled that. (Pop taught me to keep house.) They said they taught me t0 do
most everything a woman did for a man so I wouldn't later on come to depend ort
the wrong kind of woman. They never defined that kind of woman, too Catholic
fo do it, but at least I wouldn't get hooked by one because I cooldn't make a bed
or keep my clothes clean and mended or fry an omelette.
•
Now I tell you all this so you'll know what kind of women nurtured me
,and their great importance in my life, and so that you'll not disbelieve me when I
state that in looking for a wife I looked not so much for someone who would love
and car~ for me, but for a woman who would love and care for my projected
children. Except it didn't work out quite that way. The mother of my children
picked me before I had a chance to pick her. When I took her to meet my Nana
(then aged eighty-six, clearminded, her eyes failing, but still sewing), they ignored me and chatted amiably and intimately for three heurs. At comparable , •
ages, they even resembled each other. In six months, I found myself married.
The doctor who administered us our blood tests gave us some good advice: Wait for a year to have children to see if the marriage will work out. We
wajted for three years. When we had our first child, we really wanted her. It
makes a big difference. We Africamericans bring too many unwanted children
into the world. And it slio~s in the way too many of us keep or don't keep them . .
We all naturally work harder for something we really want rhan for something "
that comes to us by accident. One could say the same thing about acquiring
freedom.
The Sunday after the Thursday my first daughter came into the world,
twenty-one slugs took.Brother Malcolm out'of it in front of his wife and daughters. A year later, I daily attended the tpal of his three accused killers, finally
coming to the firm conviction that the State hadn't proved its case against two of
the three. After the guilty ~erdict came in, I resolved to leave the Plantation,
perhaps forever. I couldn't do any better for my baby daughter than to remove
her from a mediocre, racist and violent environment. We could protest and battle
our lives thro1:1gh, but before we would ever eradicate mediocrity, racism and
violence, their poison would already have infected our daughter.
Deciding to escape the Plantation constituted the first major decision I
made with my new daughter"s welfare in mjnd. I had other reasons too. One time
· somebody came to visit us, a lightskinned Africamerican woman, and during.the
course of her introduction to my first born, innocently exclaimed, "And she's got
such nice soft good p~etty hair!"

D!BI PBIUSBS I 7

Sometimes words sting, and these stung. I never said anything about it to
the woman herself; I smiled and took the compliment But inside I remembered
almost the first thing I'd ever personally heard Brother Malcolm say: "Who taught
you to hate your hair, and your lips and your noses, and _your brown beautiful
.
skin.r
,
As someone who spent long teenage hours in the bathroom trying, with
beeswax and steam; to get my hair to do things contrary to its nature, Brother;
Malcolm had opened me up with_that single question.- Now, here all that ,
bulltwinkie came se~ping into my house. Would my daughter spend her childhood quantified ,and cl~ified· by tlfe quality of her hair? What good to battle
racism in the street if it came into your home on -the lips of friends?
So we went to Paris on the way to Africa'. In Paris we'd meet people from
- Senegal, the place which most interested me, and find out what we'd need to
know, While we learned French and met Africans, my wife had another baby,
planned and much wante_d. The first baby needed company, someone who looked
more' like her in a sea of flaxenhaired blue-eyed Frenchettes.
My second daughter I saw born. My wife opened her legs and out came a
bl~ckhairea·purple bawling creation, a girl. Seeing my daughter-birthed doubled
my respect and !!dmiration for my wife, for all women. I thought about my Nana
Jessie going through all this mainest of events four times ano my other grandmother doing it ten times. Now I ·had two such glorious and lifefilleq beings to
raise, my two precious Pearls, a profound responsibility.
•
In the meantime, the more we learned about Africa and Africans, the more
we realized that we had much work to do to get ready for Africa. Senegal would
take physical strength and we had lived in cities too -long. At thirty:;two years of
•age, and smoking a pack of Camels a day, I would get out of breath climbing five
flights of stairs. And Africa didn't realis,tically seem like a good place to take two
small children. Nor did we have the spiritual strength ~equired fofthe i<?m:ney.
One had really to believe, and we didn't. It just seell)ed so far .away.
But one thing had become clear; we had to leave Paris. First of all, it
rained two hundred days a year. We couldn't get the Pearls outto play. Cooped
up in an apartment for days at a time, the older Pearl (now three) couldn't sleep at
night, had developed respiratory problems. And judgmg from her first few
months, the new baby would have more energy than her older sister~more need •
for regular outdoor exercis~. '
Still I didn't want to return them to the Plantation. By this time, they'd
Dlled Rev. King too. Things would not get better for a long while, if ever. At the .·
same time, I hear more and more good th~gs about Jamaica, in the West Indies;
Xaymaca, the native Arawakans called it, Land of Wood and Water.
As a place to.raise two girls, Jamaica had a lot to recommend it. Besides
sun and sea and sand, the people spoke ·several interesting varieties of English,
ranging from Received Pronunciation to African4 aced patois. The cooking
traditions of Africa, which in the United States lrad begun to wither before ¢e ,
1

•

'

8 / D.illK PIIIUSBS
\

_fiery onslaught of Colonel Mickey Donald Feed, still boiled and bubbled among
Jamaican women: To this day, my daughters (now sophisticated New York
women) can feed ten with a handful of red beans, a pound of rice, some onions,
•and one half chicken. Add Dragon Stout and party. In Jamaica in 1968, people
still cooked and ate real food.
,
•
We knew little of this when we got there. We just knew about the sun and
sea. We kne\\' that the ·money we paid for an apartment in Paris now bought us a
,house with a yard.
I entered what I called my shepherding period. I'd spend hours sitting on
the verandah,(nothing fancy, just a covered porch) and watch the Pearls at play.
From afar, I explored every exotic nannybug or poinsettia le;if that they explored.
I watched them because I wanted to find out about them. I began to realize that I
had finally begun to understand women.
'
- Drawing on my early insight about the 'tyranny of women's clothes, as
much as possible we dressed the two Pearls like boys. Their understuff usually
• had frills, but outside they wore T-shirts, shorts or jeans, which made easier
climbing,the hogplum tree in the front yard. Here we bucked the prevailing
Jamaican wind, which turned out little girls in· thighhigh dresses with their
pantyseats showing, stirring the passions of undisciplined men. Jamaicans pegged
the age of consent at fourteen.
When we went to the beach, we put them in bottoms. Why make them
hide something they didn't have yet? And everybody has nipples. Occasionally
someone would notice and look real hard. But mostly nobody cared. When
the.
'
•Pearls began to want to wear tops, years before they had to, we let them. But at
least they'd had a few years of sun on their bare chests.
At the urging of my very middleclass landlady, we started the older Pearl
in nursery school. But it didn't work out; not enough exercise, too much pretension. After a year and a half, we took her out. She and her sister played around in
the yard for another year. Then we noticed them starting to play school, the older
Pearl as teacher and the younger one as pupil. · Obviously they wanted some
learning, but we couldn't bring ~urselves to send them back. Day by day we'd
watched their sisterly bond growing stronger. Even if we sent them to the same
school, they'd hardly see each other. They'. d develop friendships in their age
,·
groups which woµld slowly wear away their link.
,
We decided to set up our own school, a little oneroom schoolhouse for
two. The Pearls named it the Country Garden School.
In Jamaica, children wore uniforms to school, a gobd idea. It cut down on
'clothes competition among students and saved money for the parents. In strange
way, uniforms legitimized childhood, gave school a visual place in society. ,The
Pearls didn't mind very much not going to school, but they insisted on uniforms.
Every school child must have school uniform, Papa, you no see that. So uniforms
they·got.
Each morning at seven, they'd wake up, wash and put on their uniforms,
~

\

a

DABK PBIUSBS I S

feed the cats and eat a light breakfast of fruit, bun and cheese, cocoa, brush their
teeth, then leave the house,for Country Garden SchooL From the window, we'd
watch, as _hand in hand and carrying bookladr n bags, the Pearls strolled to our
gate, and later on a safer street to the comer, still in sight of our window, and
there linger, chatting, if waiting for a bus. After a few m<?ments, they'd start
back toward home, enter the gate, walk round the house and knock on,my office
•
'
door, which ,I set up like a schoolroom.
•
Somehow this ritual of departure and arrival had survived from their
earliest playing-school game. But more than just a ri,tual, it helped us to make a
shift in our relationship. I took teaching to them very seriously, marshalling
everything I'd'Ieamed about teaching and learning since 1950 ,and my first camp
counselor job. And to them, in the interval, I became Mr. Windfieldr the name
they'd given their teacher, not a man to !!ifle with like softhearted Papa who
eventually gave you _whatever you needed and most of what you wanted.
Mr. Windfield (he had no first name) taught Grammar & Phonetics,
Caribbea:n History, Spanish, Music (recorders), European & American History &
Lit (affectionately nicknam'ed "Pinkfolks"). We saw no truth in white&black,
preferred pink&brown. Mr. Windfield also tried to handle Math, and conducted
Sports and Nature Walk, which-might include sa~ntering up to the beacli collecting shells, to Biscayne Avenue for a snocone. Mama, who always remaine9
•Mama, taught French, Arts & Crafts, Needlecraft, and Social Investigation, which
meant making a shopping list, estimating the cost of each item, and adding the '
total. ~eri in the open market, as Mama dealt with the niarketlad1es, the Pearls
would check their estimates against reality. We had school twenty hours a week,
in the morning before the day got too hot. .
They did well. Later, after having returned to the Plantation, when they ,
each entered public school i'n seventh grade, they tested high and did well, both
graduating high school, thoqgh the younger Pearl never did much like school until
she found one that would.teach her. how to set a fingerwave and wield a
blowdryer. The older Pearl has broad experience in computers.
Perhaps I got more out of teaching the Pearls than they did, thqugh I hope
their schooling did not suffer because of mine. I had a chance to see them in a
new' way, d~aling with their mi~ds instead of their hearts. .Some will not understand why this matters, might even consider it detrimental to the child to have a
parent as teacher, something like husband teaching a wife to drive a car. I can
only answer that those we hire to teach our Africamerican children have not done
such a good job of it that we should refrain from giving them all the help we can.
And how to explain that each September'we take bright little minds-to kindergarten only to have them come back to us several years later poorly educated, hostile
and diagnosed as demented or defective? As the Native American poet, Spotted
Pony, once Said, "If the schools were .any good, society would improve!"
But I did not inten,d for this to tum into an indictment of the public
schools, but rather wanted to encourage Africamericans to start dealing with our

as

,

I

-r

IO / D.UU!: PlllliSBS

ch~ldren's minds, and to illustrate some of the rewards for doing so. I wanted to
encourage especially the Africamerican man to take an active interest in \he
development of hi§ children, especially his daughters: I've never had a son, so
maybe I don't know, but fcan't imagine a son giving me more than have my
daughters.
.
They reintroduced me to the fine art of walking slow. I got so good at it .
that I could do an entire city block in a full thirty minutes. _And believe me, I
didn't miss a thing, not one dog or flower. They taught me curiosity. I've peeped
through many a fence hole and round many a comer that I'd have missed ifnot
for them. I saw several circuses and a carnival that would've.passed me without
. notice. They impelled me to sto'p smoking cigarettes. The great miracle of them •
turned me-toward the Creator.
But I'd better stop. In a moment, I'll dig out two or three more photograph albums, and really start bragging. I do 'have to say however that most of all,
• my daughters have given II,le the gift of the.good women they have become. Any
time I get to spend with them now brings me great pleasure. They haven't had an
easy life with a creative artist as a papa, so. they've grown up-tough, but they
haven't turned hard or cynical. They haye generous spirits. I figure myself as
40% responsible for what they've become, and I'd like tQ think that \\'.herever my
ancestors dwell, my~Mama and Nana, greatgreatgrandma Josephine, and before
her, the Haitian teenage Ouidette Badu; and grandma Sina, and gre,atgrandma
Alberta and all the female ancestors I didn't name or whose names I don'~know,
that all those glorious and life-filled beings can see the women I played a part in
raising, can rock their rockers, nod their ~eads, and affirm:
Now them '.s two nice young ladies.
~

D.ull FBlliSBS / ll

• Dropp'ing Me Off
'

Chris Lee
I

'

Pulled over for stopping and no one has moved.
There is a lurking percussion
from the radio and we're at the curb
before my house in the lowered white c~.
White, I'm not, but I get out hand~ up to say:
"We're all neighbors, Officers
and I live around here," 1
when I see a K-9 out the door of the black and white run at me
in the red and blue flash of rollers.
I'm a young quic~ guy and hop back in.
At the window are roaring fangs,
extended claws before the,glas's at my face.
No wrong had been done
but once I've been frisked and license chec'ked
a cop warns me, of my gun carrying potential.
Years now,J've been a model minority
but beast be damned:
The night is full of dark pigment.

'

I.

'

I

,

'

12 / DAHi PBIUSBS

I

•

Kaneem L. Smith

DABI P1WSBS I 13 /

I

Bloodlines
leslie Peace jubilee

'

Trusting shadows and echoes
screaming thinly into the throat of dreams
My mother's voice had begun
to flutter as her mother's voice
Starling caught woman stories
'

Arepetition of wings sharpen
themselves like tongues .
Every time I walk inside myself. she says
her head bowed as if in prayer
Every time I 'Yalk inside myself
I crash into a ~ray wall
impenetrab1e·and I destroy
myself aiainst it
Arepetition of wings sharpen themselves

• Where are your son~s of ~Iory? she asks me

I

What is tacii in touch, tears, echoes
unrequited wishes for salvation
Mother and daughter back to naked back
Hands stretched toward the Father
Oh, heavenly Father, cfeanse
these veins y'ou' ve lain
and lined with rape and blood
and no good grace of god
Where ate my songs of glory?

As though I could answer
when goddesses close their eyes
and girls grope for 'their voices
Arepetition of wings stun
themselves like llumb tongues

'

-

14 / D!BI PIIIUSBS .

' I Shall Sell My Poverty
Okot Benge

I

One day
I shall sell this suffocating poverty
That now hang over me
Like a stinking dirty rag
Like mother hen
Gathering its chicks under her wings
I shall gather together
My sorrows and heartaches
My hunger and social nothingness
My·loneliness and hopelessness
Into a tearful volume of writings ,
I shall write
Of a poverty-caged life
Drowning in a lake of destitution
With no social or economic boats to row ashore
Ever choked with muddy water
of poverty-strangled love affair.
With my pen I shall decorate my poverty
And weave it into a neat book
That shall fetch me cash on the market
Then, my poverty shall be no more
For I shall be a rich po<;>r man .

...

Dm PBB!SBS / 15
.

.

For ~ouis When The Day Is Long ·
Bernardo Ruiz

Help me Louis. If I d<;m't get all the facts straight, forgive me. I don't
, remember everything as clearly as it happened, but I remember the important
parts.
It was a late night at the Korean Fruit and Vegetab\e. You and I had eaten
fried fish sandwiches for dinner but we were hungry again and restless. Out in
front a brown man was chopping chives. Th~ sweet raw vegetable smell made
my mouth water. I stood for a_moment looking at his deft heavy hands. I asked
him where he Wei$ from. Puebla, he said. There were many Mexicans from
Puebla in the1city that summer, cutting carrots and selling fruit in front of Korean
grocers. ije told me !sounded like a Mexican, where was I from ? Guanajuato, I
told him. He ~miled, he looked as out of place as the flowers he had cut and
wrapped in wax paper.
,
Inside, the man behind the counter was giving you looks, Louis. I
watched you pick out a soda on the television monitor. Your skin was flat black.
Themonitor was cheap and one couldn't make out your features, only black.
Pretty soon the Korean man started yelling in Korean to another m~ in the back.
In seconds a young Korean kid, about our age, wearing a Raiders cap, came from
theback and leaned against a shelf with his arms folded. The owner was trying to
get the man out front tQ watch me but he couldn't speak enough English to tell
himwhat he wanted. If he had been able to, I doubt the man from Puebla would
haveunderstood. They were looking at each other in a strained, tower-~f-babel
way. I finally told the man from Puebla in Spanish to watch me. The owner's
facecrimsoned and he didn't look at me again.· Y~u bought a soda, not without
some words, and we left, ~ursing.
,
We were loose in Alphabet city. The sky ~ad a glow behind its darkness.
The streets were loud and chaotic with people. We were silent for awhile, moving
through the swarms. I was dizzy with faces. Conversation was indistinguishable
and the collective hum was unreal. There was a raunchy body smell underneath
the electric lamps. Drunken boyfriends stumbled with heavy arms around their
girls. The homeless had lined the streets with broken shoes and magazines.
There was the warm food smell hitting the street from outdoor restaurants. I
stared at the crowded tables. Candles·flickered and hands gesticulated over halffinished meals. I was hungry and witqout realizing it I had stopped and was,
staring at this one table. The couple looked up from their dinner. My mouth was
open, I felt like afool. You had gone up the block a little but came back and took

myann.

JG / D.!RK PIIIUSBS

-What the fuck do you think you are lookin' at?, you yelled at them.
· . They turned back to their-dinners, shaking their heads and we ran up pie block.
You were itching for trouble. Come to think of it , so was I. Anything to
break the slow monotonous night. We walked over,_past 1st Ave. where the
streets were less crowded. Where the houses looked like they had been bombed. .
We walked' almost to the edge of the highw~y. When we got to a dark comer you
scrambled onto a rubble pile. I followed, scraping my lrnee and cursing. You
were looking around for something. I asked you what you thought you were
doing. You said nothing but picked up a bottle and filled it with gravel.
• -Get something, you said.
•
I grabbed a brick. As we were sliding down the rubble pile you asked if I
remembered your aunt Aida.
-Yeah, I said, the one who used to live right up the block.
,
That's the one. You 'told me that one night a couple of months ago, the landlord of
the building had gone to her in the night and said the kids were making too much
noise. Aida said she'd.keep it down. That wasn't enough, she had been late with
her last three rent payments, he wanted her out·within the week. He said that then
walked downstairs. Before Aida had her and her kids stuff-out, the Landlord's
brother was putting boxes in the living room. He and his wife and his faJ kids
were all settled in_,by the next night.
'
We went up the block a little. I held the brick behind ~y back. We
crossedthe street and crouched near some bushes. A delivery boy was bringing
some pizza inside. A heavy, round man opened the outside door and paid the
delivery boy.
•
We waited as he went upstairs. He walked into Aida's old apartment, and his kids
sat down for dinner. Without a word, as the delivery boy biked up the street and a
car approached, we ran up as close as we could and let the bottle and brick se.t
sail. There was a tremendous crash. We stood sµll, looking at each other, then
w,e made for 1st Ave. like our lives depended on it. For whatever reason we heard
gunshots behind us. We ran straight for three blocks.
yve ducked into an alley and put our hands on our knees, panting. We
were laughing, trying to catch our brea~. At the other end of the all~y I heard
something rustle.
•
•Motherfucker! A tall skinny man with a straw fishing hat and a tom jacket came out of the
darkness and into a yellow shaft of light.
-Say, you cats got a screwdriver on you?, My flutes all busted up. How about a
rubber band? Nah? How about some change? Some motherfucker stepped on .
my flute case and cracked this part here. I was gonna play out in the street, but
it's all fucked up. We fumbled for some change. He was thankful but more
interested in his flute. His face was chocolate brown and his cheeks were sucked
in. He was missing some teeth. He tried to screw his flute toge~~r and pipe out a
time. Wind escaped through a crack on the side.
-Man, it's all fucked up! Say y'all are some good lookin' cats. You make m~ feel

D.µ11. PBBA8BS I 17

old. Damn,Jookit you. When I was twenty-seven I looked like you. I had all my
teeth. But that was before. I used to go aroun4 slapping bartenders, jumping off
buildings, fighting with 'anybody and everybody. Damn, we used to fuck shit up.
He was looking up at the sky.'
-Shit, I was one ~f the first revofotionaries.
We were laughing. You asked him where he was froJTI.
-Where'm I from?, Where the fuck are you from?, ,where you think I'm from.
Right _here. Planet Earth, man, where you from ? Nab I'm just playin', I'm from
right over there. I'm a sculptor, the fuck I want a job that pays four dollars an
hour for, inan. Fuck that. Where y'all from ?
'
,
I said my family was from Mexico, that I was born there, but that I lived in .
Brooklyn.
•
•
'
-Mexican ? Damn you tall for a Mexican, you got all µiese dudes from,Puebla,
Pueblitos, runnin around in the train stations, they're like this tall. •
He put his hand down to his waist.
·I
-I was down in Mexico, I was in Jalisco. I used to live in California. I was
shooting bags of dope .into my arm at 15. I used to stumble around the streets,
doped outta my mind \Yith my1 boy George. Back then, Whitey was like Pow!
I I had already been in and out of men's correctional. One day I was like, "Yo
George, fuck this shit, they ain't nothin here for me." I hitchhiked down to San
Diego, to Tijuana, to Guadalajara, on my way to Brazil to get myself a wife.
He started cracking up.
-When ii get down there, George, man I'm a git me a wife !
-I couldn't believe it when I got to Mexico. I was loose in these villages and I
was broke, drunk - you name it. They had never seen a black man before. They.
thought I was a saint. They came running out oftheir houses, into the street.
They came out and hugged me. That was the first time I had been hugged.
•People put money in my hands and l~t me spend the night in their houses. They
washed me and fed me. When I came back to America fr was like prison, Whitey
was steppin' on my bac~.
-They got these jungles in the south. Man we used to fuck these 500 lb. jungle
women. We got drunk on pulque, sometimes we'd hallucinate. We just kept
going, into the trees, into the iguanas, into everything.
•
-The indians lived in the jungle but the_Federales pushed them out. ~ere were
these young indians, my age, they went to the city to earn money. Their villages
had everything, but they had to go ·out to earn money when the Federales came.
I told them, "Don't go into the city !, It'll kill you ! Don't you understand?". But
they would go in. When I saw them later they were working in factories or on the
roads. Their eyes wtre empty - they were getting pale. This city, he pointed. to a
building, All cites are bullshit, man !
-What's your name ?, I asked after awhile.
-They call me Tonny, that's what they used to call me back then. You cats are
tooyoung. You look so good, damn. You get fucked up quick in this world.
They won't let you stay in the jungle forever.

18 / D!BK PIIIUSBS

Louis, do you remember that night ? We sto9d in that alley half the night. When
the humidity broke it started to rain, but we didn't care. Tanny was talking and
we·were listening.
'
-How long were you down there ?
-Almost ten years. And some time in a p(ison in Mazatlan.
He wouldn't tell us what he'd gone to prison for, but he remembered the place
realwell. He said there were about twenty-five men in this pit. The rain carny in
through big holes in·the ceiling. There were rats everywhere. No one stayed
longer than a month in this place. One time they had to 'eat dog bones.
-It's not like prisons here. The guards hated it. They would sneak us food it was
so bad. Everybody ,shared. If someone had ~ Coke, you could bet it went around
twenty-four tim~s and the last man got a sip. One time this guy froqi Belize came
into the joint with eighty-five pesos.- Me and this dude, the tallest Mexican, were
tight y'know. We knew each other from outside. One night we drank a whole
bottle of pulque without stopping. We just passed it back and forth. As a matter
of fact, it was us that got busted together in the frr$t place, he started laughing
again.·
-Anyway, me and the tallest Mexican, Jorge were waiting up one night. We knew
the Bylizean had his pesos stashed in his underwear. And we were starviQg - so
was everybody. And when you had anything you shared it: So that night me and Jorge stay,ed up till everybody was asleep. I got his back and Jorge was one
stealthy motherfucker. He stepped over all th-ese sleeping bo<;lies. I don't know
how, but he ·pulled the bills from the Belizean's underwear. The next momfng,
we bribed some guards and everyone in the joint had a feast. The Belizean was
•
furious, but the guards kept him quiet
I was numb. The rain was soft, but a cold wind had set in and I fou~d that
I was trembling. I had forgotten who I was or what I was doing. Tonny' s words
kept me going. The stories were so vivid, I didn't want them to end.
•
-The tallest Mexican, Tonny ·started coughing, He got sick from a rat bite: He was
like a brother, that dude. I gave him my.food. I held his head at night, but he had
a fever. He died while I was there. I went numb. f didn't eat. The rats ,ate my
food and I didn't have the energy anymore to push them away. My lips were
cracked. My eyes were swollen. There were motherfuckin' flies in my hair.
There was shi,t all around me and I didn't care. Then this dude came in. This guy
who had crashed a plane full of drugs and money into the jungle. You see, I
hadn't.eaten anything and I started seeing things the others didn't. That night I
had a dream. Me and this dude were ri~ing motorcycles, side by side, down this
long, hot, road. His engine died out and we had to stop. Then I saw this plane,
clearer than I had ever seen anything. I swear I could ·see all the pieces of the
plane like they were real,- but better and clearer. I understood it. It was a t\Vin
engine. I watched from above as the engine on the left failed. The propeller
stuttered then.stalled. The plane dropped a little, then the other engine went out but this engine was shut off. I watched tile ptane crash land in the jungle. It was
in
. this spot where I had been'fishing with these lndians. I didn't remember all- the
I

•

' D.wl PBIUSB8 I 19

different parts of the dream,'but I remembered where the plane crashed. In the
morning I woke up and I drew this dude a picture in the dirt of the pl~e. I told
•him the first engine died but that the second was shut off. I told him where it 'Yas
and he just looked at me.
'
-Later he told me he had to ,tµrn off the other engine so he wouldn't be d~tected
by the Federales. He was hoping to coast, but he crashed the rqotherfucker into
this place, then fled. He got busted that afternoon. Then this dude, he fed me his
soup. He promised to share half the mpney in· the plane if we ever got out. I
could only eat enough at night, and I was still weak. Then a telegram came to the
prison office. My mother arranged for my release, with s~ine money in my hand,
even though most of it was stolen. I had just enough to get this other guy out.
Wewent to his house. He put me in the shower. He·washed my feet and put
rubber sandals on my them. We slept in this bed for almost three days straight.
When I woke up, I had my appetite again. Then we drove down the Yucatan, to ,
the fishing village.· The Federales had been trailing us, but we lost them. We
found the plane. Some of the drugs were gone, but there was a suitc¥e full of
American dollars. He gave me half. We made our way up north, where some ·
prison officials caught up with us and separated us. They escorted me to t,he
border. They told me I couldn't come back. -I been in this shithole ever since. I
lived in Harlem, east side, you name it. Damn !, you cats make me sad.
He shifted the weight from his left foot to his right foot. , He anxiously
wrapped his jacket around his neck and looked up at the sky. In the cold ·he was
shivering. His body was jittery. I watched him try to control the shaking in his
left hand.
-1, I'm gonna go shoot a bag of dope into my arm, you cats want to watch?,
We shook.our heads. Tonny slapped our hands, then took off across the street to a
shitty building that was nin down. There was one light in a window
with red
I
,
cloth over it. Tonny stepped out of the light from the street Tonny, an angel.
Louis, were you as cold as I was? We didn't say anything. We were
empty. We walked through the deserted streets back to your apartment. We took
some bread from the refrigerator and ate it greedily. 11 felt heavy and tired. There
was only the one bed. We undressed and got under the covers. When we turned
out the,light, I couldn't sleep. I w.as ex'hausted but my eyes were' wide open.
-Louis, what do you think ?
•
-We don't belong here. ,Tonny was right. Cities are bullshit, we're not supposed
to be like this, degraded, in prison, working for other people's gain. We're dying
like this. We're crowded like rats, we're all go~g to kill eacp other.
•We were pretty much silent for the rest of the night. I held the covers tightly
around my neck. I thought I was getting a sore throat and my eyes stung. Near
dawn, when the sky was bright I finally fell asleep. I got up later and took the
train home. I knew there was no food
. in the house. I was walking to the super- '
market when I saw a Muslim kneeling to pray. He-had set up his mat, he was
facing east and ,PraY.ing, right ~ere in front of Key Food. The light was fading
across theHudson and people were passing him by O\J there way home with .
\

20 / D!BI. PBIUSBS

shopping bags and briefcases. It was ridiculous. He was somewhere else, he
prayed while drunks spat, horns honked, and lights changed. Louis, I never told
you that. I stood there for awhile watching him. It's been a long time since I've
seen you, since we've spoken the same language or shared a soda. It feels like
years since we broke the lan,dlords window or smoked joints in your stairwell. I
don't know when we'll see each other again, but !just wanted to say that I
haven't forgotten.
•
•

I

I

'

DAIi PIIB!SM I 21

Mama Zenzile
for Miriam Makeba
Daphne Osayade Dumas

She does not know if the church stands, or
if the theatre is still ~gregated-Blacks
in the balcony and Whites
gathered in front down below. Mama Zenzile
recreates the landmarks 'in her memory as she
bends and touches the ground. . . .
She has not attended a funeral, nor witnessed
a birth, a_wedding in Soweto. Click!
Escape took her to England, then to America where
she washed the hot iron curls from her hair
making her over to New World "Negr9" woman.
21 years.
It took a qero's freedom tq ~~t her to walk
from Exile to her birthplace. Click!
Zenzile promised t6 return when her people were free
and could celebrate together.
Zenzile stands, greets Baba Mandela. She
places her hands to her heart and •
tou~hes the land, sifting red earth
through her fingers. Her hair draped ,
South African. She wears tlie robes
of a Homecoming Queen.
The sad children's faces that Apartheid made
smile now. They only want
bread, a boo~. and milk from
their mothers' breasts. A field of faces
collapses the distance as
Zenzile slices the applause
with her high pitched
CUck! Xhosa style.
She talces the wind from the trees and
ripples through the crowd with her song.
Zenzile sings. Click!
•

22 I nm PIIIUSBS

The old ones call her Zenzile,
-Bird voice. Zenzile, The Click song woman. '
Zenzile looks out over the crowd to those who
measured to her waist before she left Soweto.
They stand tall in her view now. A picture flashes ·
from an album .. Click! Xhosa woman
sings the Click song. Her eyes moist,
Zenzile raises a litany to her elders, ,
to the land for receiving her.
Mama Zenzile
home now in Soweto.
27 years of exil~,

-1

I

nm PIWSBS 123
'

For My First Teacher
Kimiko Hahn

the starling over head '
would collide with branches of birch
were it not for your call

I

•

•

21 / D!BK PerusBS

\

Poultry Slaughterhouse in Red Hook, Bernardo Ruiz

D!BI PlllliSBS I 25

Thin Nothings
Rose-Anne Clermont
I

-''This rock is ~hat real is, 'not clouds or mist, which make mysterious
promises and when you go through them they are nothing."
Maxine Hong Kingston
When the other dance teachers told us you were sick
we thought you had a ba_d cold,
or a kidney stone, or something.
But then; they would have told us
about a cold or a kidney stone.
While you were away,
at the hospital, we wererf t , .
allowed to visit until your memorial service,
you had left somewhere, just away.
like clouds that have moved or
. spread out through the sky iqto thin nothings,
changing,
playing an unfair game of hide and seek.
,

The priest at your service
said you are still around, maybe
laughing your silly laugh,
because I can't see you?
But thinking that is not enough.
I wish I could have known you then
your skin, picked at
' '
by Kaposi's Sarcoma
your cheeks, swollen
fromthe Candida Albicans
I know those terms, I know what happens
\
to people who have A.I.p.s ...
I understand manifestations.

.

2G / Billi PlllUSJIS

dying of cancer, bald,
a cholostemy bag around her waist,
why is it alright to see her?
To see her delirious apd weak?
\

You pretended a lot,
but this A.I.D.S thing was real, William
real as our black skin
real as the dirt I used to chew on
when I was a child, so that I could crunch
the tiny_granules hidden in the earth.
Any place I dug I eould find a soft clump,
but as soon as the paste touched my tongue
I would taste hardness.
I can't taste you
I can not taste A.I.D.S,
although I knew you and you died
~from it, it is still-abstract to me. Ten million people is also abstract,
I know it means a lot of people,
but what is that?
Is that intermission at BAM?
No, that's not even one million people.
I can only imagine a landscape,
with people all around,
but even landscapes, to me,
have always been through frames
or windows.
I can not accept
that you have left and your
soul has remained, I don't
buy that yet.
How can I believe that you are gone
when I haven't even seen you leave?

\

/

DAIii ~ / 'J:/

flowers: Sometines
I

Wednesday guyot

Flowers Sometimes have bad habits
of picking grandfathers
who wanna be.boyfriends
and boyfriends who act like fathers
not wanting to be daddies
who won't even be cordial
when the babies leave

/

flowers Sometimes lay dormant ,
on beds with whitemen hungry
, for the scent of desperation and panic
in Castles and grapefields
as sisters scream through clenched teeth
at the madness
at the madness
of spunk and domination
flowers Sometimes wilt
from the pressure of brothers
w~o grow weeds in their hair
and who seek out the convenience
of prone women distracted .
and sisters hungry for a
brother's love
flowers Sometimes dance

in aworld of winds ungodly

because they forget that they love themselves
stuck sometimes
strapped to chairs left listening to heartbeats .
begging for a laying on of hands
111d everyone needs a healing _

28 / D!BK.PBIUSBS

'Sallie'
Jacqueline Pri9e

. Policemen, lawyers, yuppies, students and consquction workers were the
main customers at the place I bartended at in downtown )Vhite Plains. This
mostly white, male, middle-class crowd was at its best uninteresting, and at its
worst obnoxious and rude. I usually occupied my time gossiping with the waiters
in between pouring .beers and martinis.
,
.The long line of,the bar dissected the front of the restaurant and I had a
modest view of the front door. It was a bitter cold Saturday night and the restaurant was dead. Bored, I was leaning against the end.of the service bar when a ,
little Black woman with woolly-white hair walked in bundled in layers of scarves
and sweaters. When she planted herself at the bar and ordered a double Smirnoff
on the rocks; I knew I would be entertained for the night.
There was a retirement home around the corner and although quite a few
old 'pe9ple ate in the restaurant, very few of them sat at the bar. There was one
man who used to come in and watch the Yankee games on MSG, but he only
.drank diet coke and tried to give me stock tips.
From the opening of the restaurant last January, until the day I quit in
December, I was the only front of the hou~e Black employee. ,Pf course, back of
the,·house, everyone was Black or Latino. There would be days when quite a few '
Black people came in, but that happei;ied about as often as the average American
votes. Usually, I made a show of announcing the presence of any Black person in
the restaurant, it was a dramatic moment When this r~ty occurred. It was very •
lonely at times.
•
I've always had a special respect for older Black pec;>ple. I immediately
felt kinship with this woman whose stories were written in ihe lines on her face.
She represented my grandmother and my aunts, a symbol of Black womanhood
that demanded my reverence and attention. There was an unspoken sense of
' community between us; a shared experience of being Black in this country, which
could b{! manifested in saying hi to someone in passing on the street to sharing
confidences with a complete stranger. Sallie was~ survivor, an example of
determination and strength.
' As Sallie sat sipping her drink, after we had introduced ourselves, she
parted her lips, and the stories started spilling from her mouth and into my ears,
making an indelible impression. Her second, and current husband, Taddy, did not
like her drinking, she confided. So she drank vodka: which wouldn't show on her
breath as much as whiskey. He thought that she was at the store right now, she
told me. She tallced for hours. I encouraged her with refills. As the night wore

D.&BK PlllUSllS / 29

on, her _stories got more elaborate, more outlandish. They were better than any
fiction I had read.in quite a while; funny, morbid and sadly human. •
• Sallie James was born in 1921 in rural Virginia, the youngest of eleven
children. Her father, Burnett, was a sharecropper, who, with a little learning, had
. managed to scrape together enough money to ~uy the small farm that Sallie was
born on. Burnett was in his late forties when he married Sallie's mother Hannah
in 1908. His mother had been a .slave, and he was born just before the end of the
Civil War. Hannah was much younger than her husband, a small, wiry chestnut
woman who ru1ed their household with the strap in one hand and the Bible in the
other.
Sallie grew up with a taste for the land, working it with her family, in
between going to the church school, where she learned to read the Bible, and to
write.JBut her education was limited to a few months out of the year, because
there were no schools for Black children in the South. There were only those
stolen moments of learning that her community could organize around their
subsistence lives.
Sallie left home at eighteen, with little more than-earth under her nails and
dreams in her head. She went to Washington D.C., to ma¼:e a life for herself. She
attended a cosmetology school, paytng her way through by working in a
~cehall, where men paid ~ quarter for the privilege of whirling arouna with the
dark, pretty girl from V,irginia.
She met her first husband one night when a drunk tried io get more for his
quarter than just a dance. Rainey Alston rescued Salli~ from the clutches of her
overzealous customer, smashing his face with one left hook to the applause and
admiration of the other girls. Soon, he came around on a regul~ basis, buying
Sallie's time for the whole night just so they could sit and talk. He didn't dance.
He was a big light brown man with pretty eyes, who spoke little as a rule, but
talked up a storm with Sallie in those days. -They were married three months after
that firstI meeting and moved into a small apartment on M street.
After finishing school; she got a job i}.S a J?eautician in a parlor in
Georgetown. The customers were white men, senators and the like, who often
requested her services. Her husband was a high roller, who ran numbers for Big
John, who was neither' big nor ~amed John, Sall,ie informed me. Times were
pretty good for the Alstons. She had two small children, and was pregnant with
another when Rainey was called up to go join the fighting in Germany. She was
left alone to fend for herself and.her babies, returning briefly to her parents home
in Virginia while Rainey was a~ay.
.
When the war was over, the-man that came back in Rainey's body was no
longer the man she knew. He was a sµ-anger, taken to fits of violence in the·
oddest moments. Unfortunately, Sallie was usually the recipient of these outbursts. Rainey took to drinking, something he had done little of Before the War,·
IS Sallie called it. She divided her husband into the Before the War Rainey, and
Ille After the War Rainey. He began to beat her on a regular basis, which she
.
•
'

30 / Diltl PIIIUSBS

suffered under for almost two years. When he ~tart~d hitting the children as well,
she' packed up and left for New York City.
,
,
1At this point in her ~e, Sallie shoved her' glass at me and winked mischie~ously. I poured her a double, moved her money around and leaned forward on
the bar. I had stopped charging her after the second drink: I would just go to the
. register, call up the check number on th~ computer and service it out. A little bit
, of power makes you do dangerous things. We had a no buy back policy at the
. ' bar, but Sallie was worth it, even if _I lost my job.
•
"Chile, would you like to hear ·about how I met Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
_de famous Negro from Harlem?"
I was sJudyipg Black social movements of the early twentieth century at
the time and immediately recognized the name. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was a
mythic figure in Harlem lore .. He was a maverick, a p~litician, pastor of the
Abyssinian Baptist Church for forty years. His strong voice was heard in the
early Black power movement of_the thirties and forties and continued on through.
the sixties, until his death in 1972. Althougl) a member of the House of Representatives for two decades, he was not a 'representative Negro.' A true man of his
people, he was elected to eleven consecutive terms in Congress by his district. .
Besides being an instigator of social change for Blacks, he was a man who
like to have fun, rfgardless of' his marital status. He partied as hard as he fought
racism and injustice, and- that may have also been his downfall. He was removed
from membership from ~e House for two years for allegedly misappropriating
travel funds and other monies.
Back in 1946, his reputation was common knowledge among his COl1$tituents. Everyone in Harlem knew Powell was a man who liked a littte on the side
✓and enjoyed his.leisure time. It was part of his charm. Harlemites didn't expect
their representative to be perfect. It was his human fallibility that endeared him to
people. He headed his own political organization in Harlem based from his
church, which alone had over 10,000 members. He was unrestrained, both politi• cally and personally, the only truly consistent things about-him. He was a passionate man, who cared about his people and was instrumental in building the
foundation for the Black revolution that King and X took part in.
~allie had my complete attention when she mentioned such a legendary,
~haracter, whose mythic quality made him one of my favo.rite figures from that
period. She had met Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.- a street in Harlem! She leant
• forward and winked at me, she liked to wink, keeping me in suspense a little
longer as she told her stories. She mentioned that Taddy wouldn!t believe.her
about the store and asked me if I could call her house after she left and corroborate her lie so she wouldn't get in any trouble. Of course I agreed, partly because
I was so caught up with her personality and also because 1 wanted her to get on
with the story.
"Well, chile, you knows I was jus a young thing an had three babies an no
man. I did my best to get a job in a beauty parlor in New York but I wasn't
I

•

DARK PIWSBS / 31

certified in dis here state. So I couldn't get'a job I was qualified for unless I paid
eight hunnred dollars to learn what I already piew. I .was forced to take a job as a
cleaning lady. One day I sees dis ad in de paper askin for a person who knows
beauty an makeup no certification ·requested. So I call dis man an come to fin out
he's an 'undertaker an wants me to do de hair an makeup of dead folks. I didn't
like de idea none, but he sayA
s it pays $50 a corpse, an back then that was a lot of
money, three times what I was makin mopping floors so I takes de job.
"H~ tells me he's got three bodfos that needs to be done in two days an I
says o.k.. jus gimme de address an I'll be dere. But come de day I'm suppose to
go, I have a change of heart, I didn't wanna touch ~o·dead people. But de man
shows up on my doorstep sayin 'I know. you're ,scared miss, but dese here dead
bodies gots to be done by tomorrow,' hands me a fifth of whiskey to fortify my
c~urage an takes me to de parlor.
."When we gets to de place, de man gives me a lil tour an den shows me to
' de bodies. Lordhavemercy! My sensibilities was jumpin an·runnin all over de
place. The smell was so strong, I was afraid to look for fear what I might see be
worse den de smell. But Mister Jack Daniel lent me a ban an I finally got down to
bisniss. It wasn't so bad once I figured dat de part dat made dem people was gone
,
anjus de Lord's dressin was left. Dere was two men an one woman. I does de
men first, dey was pretty easy. Den I gets to de girl..."
Sallie pushed her empty glass a~me and I refilled it_At this point, I'm
beginning to wonder what.the hell Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. has to do with this
story. I looked at Sallie's face, her expression of homespun wisdom made me
remember the way my grandmother used to tell stories. She had that older
person's way of holding you ii;i suspense \onger that a good mystery novelist.
When she participated in a discussion, which she always did, she would take the
most roundabout way to make the most insightful point. I Sl!]-iled and resigned
myself to waiting.
It was getting late and Sallie said that she had to go. I implored her to
finish her story first, but she didn't want Taddy to start.worrying. She reminded
me of my promise regarding the phonecall and invited' me over for _tea later in the
week. I tentatively agreed and bade her goodbye as she encased herself in the
acarves and scurried out saying:
.
I
''Wait bout fifteen minutes before you call an tell Taddy that yo'u met me
11 de store an we jus got to1alkin an forgot de time.';
,•
I nodded and waved as she·wobbled out the door. When I called, Taddy
aawered and I asked to speak to Sallie, saying my bit justlike she told.me.
When she got on the phone she commended me on actualiy calling and not
• gwithher:
•
'
'
• •
"You is a true member of de'race. Now I knows I kin count on you. I'll
you next Friday at one o'clock.''
Aweek later, the old lady's charm had-worn off some and I questioned
I should go or not. But she had said that stuff about loyalty so I felt .

82 / D!BX PBIUSBS

I

obligated, and I really wanted to hear the rest of the story. Although the idea of
going over to a customer's house and hanging out seemed a little batty. Sometimes you just have to say "what the fuck," so I picked,up.a pint of vodka at the
liquor store and trekked on over there.
Sallie's retirement home was progressive. Each couple had their own
apartment and was allowed to live fairly independently. When she opened the
door she put her finger to her lips, whispering that Taddy was taking a nap. I
handed her the vodka, then followed her down the hall into the living room. She
poured us both tea, spiking hers with the vodka. We started chatting about the
weather, which had been particularly miserable that week. I tried to put her on
the subject of painting the faces of dead bodies but she would not be swayed. She
took a long time.to saythings and she had a lot to say. So I had to wait for her to
get around to it in her own way.
Finally, she peered at me over her reading glasses and winked saying:
"That Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. sure was a pretty man."
"Oh really, Sallie, what did he look like," I tried to ask nonchalantly, my
'wait,at an end.
•
•
"Oh girl, he was tall, light-skinned with dark wavy hair, a mustache, an
eyes prettier than Rainey's, an my Rainey had him 'some pretty ~yes. He was de
kind of man womens jus throw demselfs at. But let me tell you bout qe girl first.
She was such a pretty young thing, her throat had been cut: It really shook me.
The others had been ready to go, it ha~ been their time . .But here was a girl cut
down in the prime of her life, just beginnin to enjoy it. I had to call in some
reenforcements from Ole Jack before I could takle dat one, it looked to be quite a
job.
•
"Welljus as I'm gettin ready to make her up, in walks Reverend Powell
with dis sad look in his eyes. ,Turns out he knew de girl pretty well, an she had '
been his sweetheart.
He tells me
.
. he loved de girl an asks me if I kin make her
look like this picture he gives me of her: She looks mighty fancy in de picture an
I'm sure she never met his wife. He offers me fifty dollars to do it, but I would
have done it _jus for dat sad look in his eyes. He says to m½ 'Miss please just ,
make her look like she did when she was alive and my favorite girl, make her
look like I remember her. I can't go to the funeral because of appearances but it
will be nice to know that she looks right.'
•
' . "I can't do nothin but agree, an I make her look much like d,e picture.
When I finished, jus as I'm gettin ready to leave, in walks de girl's daddy. Turns
out dat this grown lookin woman was a fifteen-year-old who had run away from
home two years ago. An here I was thinkin she was thirty or so, Rev. Powell too.
He take one look at his baby an begs me to fix her like his lil girl again. I
couldn't refuse de daddy so's I spend two hours makin her look like the _daughter.
he lost so long ago."
Sallie worked for the mortician for forty years, the giver of images of life
to corpses. So that death could be a little e~ier, for the living left behind. I never
'

\

DAU PIDUSBS / ~

saw Sallie again after that day, I quit my job a few weeks later, and haven't
returned to White Plains since. Sometimes I wonder about her, marvelling at her
ability to weave a tale and my ability to suspend disbelief. Getting parf bf
mystory from herstory, and revelling in her elabo_rate t,ruths, her Blackness, and '
her 71 year-old woman's wisdom. Sallie James was a connection to my past.

'

'

34 / D.illi PIDliSBS

Vicky Lavergne

I '

DARI PIWSB8 / 85

,

Esta Noche Duermo Sola
'

I

Dejame asf, esperando, sin saber lo que espero,,
con la sed indecible que me dejo tu boca.
Pues hoy, mientras morfan las.ultimas estrellas,
al mirarte a los ojos, supe que eras otra.
Aquf estoy, frente al mar, y no sonrfo,
porque temo que el pecho se me abra, .
y salte al mar mi corazon, y juegue
contigo, amor, y corra por la playa.
- Jose Angel Bue~
Cuando el coraz6n se rompe
no hay vaso que lo contenga.
Ella, tan especial...
Ella, como tantas otras:..
lQue importa la realidad
si puedo yivir en este infiemo
al que llamo fantasia?
Mi rival fue un hombre.
Uno, como tantos otros,
Upo, que le pudo dar
lo que yo nunca pude,
Yo solamente le df •
org4smos momentaneos:
Yo, la mujer de un momento,
E, el hombre de su vida. ,
l,Pero que importa ya?
Ella no estA conmigo
y~ noche duermo sola.
Ella. que fue la protagonista
•.todos mis poemas

la vfctima

mis mas poderosas emociones,
sefue

'

C.M.

3G / D.illl PIDll,SBS

Ella se fue
y con ella se fueron mis ansias de amar.
Cuando el coraz6n se rompe
'
no es reemplazado, se padre hasta tener
una rilelcocha palpitante
dentro de un pecho ajeno.
Pero, l,que importa?
ya no la amo,
si es que ~guna vez la guise.
Cada palabra de su boca
fue una mentira, _
la mentira mas ir6nica de todas,
la que convirti6 mi vida
en un juego frustrado.
Ah, indecisa,
algun dia sabras
que nadie te amara como yo
y lloraras con las mismas lagrimas
que esta noche me permite.
Contigo muere el sueiio mas sagrado,
el que pense encontrar en ti.
Deja que tus labios toquen los suyos,
deja que tus,piemas lo mantengan preso,
y amalo, por Dias, amalo
como nunca pudiste amarme a mi.
Nada duele mas que la palabra escrita
pero ya ves, te deseo lo mejor.
_Brinda por ti y por el.
Lo unico que siempre quize '
es que aprendieras a sentir
sin limitarte.
Y aqui me ves, tratando de enseiiarte,
aunque palabra por palabra .
vaya muriendo mi alma.
Amalo, amalo y porfavor
se feliz haciendolo
aunque solo quede yo
en este rinc6n al que me condenaste.
Te amo, y por eso te dejo ir
aurique esta noche duenna sola.

'

.

,

DAIii PBlli8BS I 3'l

Bui:ning Brides
Ava Ming Hu

Dressed in white
I feel like a flood of cool water
wetting the dry tongue of this dusty road.
I tread lightly on bits of broken rocks
so as not to disturb
their configuration
or to roughen the tender bottoms of
my feet.
I am leaving the courtyard behind;
dust filled and full of
chattering women who have spent
their lives behind veils,
• whispering about the coming of the monsoon.
They are bound behind .bars
' pretending to perform whole heartedly
songs they have sung apout bhakti
since they were able to speak
andremember.
l am folding myself as waves often do
beneath the pieats of my sari.
My eyes are burning like the fires I have seen
women burned in,
runninginto the streets
ICleeching like parrots _.
wilh flames hungrily rising,
eating the air.
quickly they fall to the earth
• g their fists against bas been long ago depleted
water.
• g away from the scraping sou.nd of matches
k against sandpaper.
• g myself of the kerosene
secretly poured around

hut
oning Vishnu
once again thi& world he has created
lfeady fall of a thousand days'of rain .

.

,

38 / D!RK PBIUSBS

Delia*--Goddess Of A Separate Species
leslie Peace jubilee

She sits
Stripped to her waist
On her throne
Delia-goddess of a separate speciesThe mammies and breeding wenches
Slaves of houses and of fields
Their progeny-we women who gape like open flesh in ebony
Oak or sienna, we women who rise like keloids
.She is crowned with history
Our language-the blistered back, space of rape, child ·
Sold away or aborted for salvation's sake-Delia' is '
The tongue of a never-whispered secret
Her tears do not fall, but her eyes await worship
Delia, shrouded µi the lies of her captors, waits
Beneath layers of indignity, she waits
Naked, she waits

"

When does child become woman?
The first time she is whipped or raped or sold?
Or does she become woman when she knows .
She is no more than the moon an error of darknessDelia knows, her eyes a satellite
We become the plane of orbit
' We become child who becomes woman in ebony
Oak or sienna stained
With never-fallen tears
*In 1850, B. F. Taylor, a slave owner, gave Louis Agassiz,.a Harvard professor, fifteen
daguerrotypes of South Carolina slaves. One of these daguerrotypes is of Delia-an
adolescent slave girl, naked to her waist. Agassiz studies such photographs to prove his
theory that Black people were a separate species. Delia is also another name for the
,
Greek goddess Artemis, goddess of the moon, of h'Q.llting, and the patroness of unmarried
girls and o~ chastity.

DABI. PIDU8BS / 39

Delia-goddess of a separate species
For salvation's'sake, we come
darkly to her palace
I
Kneel, shrink in awe
Crawl into,her unblinking eyes, press
Our palms against her irises·, stream down
Cheekbones to collarbone, ribcage to thighs
Shins to feet, the banks of sanctity
'
We become holy water
Flow against tne current-

.'

1

'

I

,

'

ID I DARK PIIIUSBS •

·•

~

~

~
,;

'

l

'

.' ';,

...
~~:
I;:

"

.

•

~~ ~

.

~

'

,,

~,1'

...
~

'

'

.

'~

"
;.

•

.,.,,

'

-;,>

'

bandera bandera, Elizabeth Miranda

DAU-l'lllUSlm / D

Sex With R.
1 •

,:l.ndre Young
• I

"I'm from Wyoming,
consider myself an honest boy
from Wyoming. Out west the landscape
is more stark:
,piles of grey stone
• interrupt the skyline
of chill blue.
Some horse rovers ·
rent back hoes
when their horses die,
bury their pets
six feet as if burial
was more appropriate
as expression of love
than sending the corpse
to the glue factory.
At night the coyotes'
come digging for hours
with black-nailed claws,
tense bodies not relax.mg
until yellow teeth
pierce flesh of horse.
lam like this," he says.
/

Like this .. , •

I

42 / D!BK PBIUSBS

~

scene of_ ~he city

. Wild and crazy New York nights with angel headed teenaged punks
walking and talking about wars and pe~ce and waking up at the crack of dawn
with nothing but one cigarette left in'your pack and smoking that-one cigarette
' while watching the sun rise strolling and then careening througho_ut that old New
England fog that rolls into every city on the east coast and that not even New
York can escape from with its winding and wet inner city streets and blinking
neon signs spewing up all their corrupt commercialism along with a side artlessness they walk through lusting and loving all there is in their meager lives when
, taught how sex is a long a tortured death now, rain can eat a hole through a pair of
some good old Doc Martins, and how there's nothing left at all but maybe a little
tv and not even that's not too good for you, but it doesn't matter at all, Obladi,
_ Oblada, nothing really matters after seeing a friend getting shoved out of a fast
moving car to meet his end for nothing more than cigarette money or maybe
' seeing another one die at a party in a circle of people freebasing a bong with some
vodka at the bottom instead of water puking out l).11 what little life he had in him
through one open convulsing mouth in a stream of vomit and the rest of the circle
just watch that old red translucent bong waiting for one more taste of ecstasy, no
they've seen and heard and done it all, and nothing really matters much, nothing
really matters .......

.•

;

.

.

D!BK P11R!SBS 1 48

H I D!BK PIIIUSBS
l...

Joju Cleaver

I tell her the traffic's too loud;
It irritates me.
She .doesn't answer.
Sitting on her tattered couch
she lights another cigarette
and offers me wine.
I haven't seen her in a long time
and can think of nothing to say.
"Baby," she coos, "what's the matter?"
The way she pushes the word
thro.ugh her lips.
"Baby."
Soft,
like a whisper.
Feather for a tongue.

DAU P1WSBS / G

Elizabeth Soto

when the snow comes
i lose a little
color
what was brown fades
to pale yellow
shades
•faintly expressing
blood mixtures
of biology
that hair of mine
a li~e straighter
myey~s
i notice
are deeper set
angled different
than people i watch
on tv.
you see
it is the
asian americarl

inme
placing my two feet
aminor inch
further apart
tilting my eyes'
to view
abair line
rather
than the soles
of shoes

is
gth

4G / Dill l'BIUSBS

lifting
belief in
my finge,r tips
can touch
skyscape
visions beyond
my cultural
attachment
there is
anger
,occasionally
daring you
to meet
my stare
shout difference
to this face
i'call her
asian arnerican
-

,

I

I

D.WC PIWSBS I 4'I
I

/

the pussy poem:
on pussy reticence
\

.

•wednesday guyot

my pussy is not as benevolent as
my smile· .
i do not fling it as freely !lS
i whip my hair.
•

,,..

r

(8 / D.illi l'IIIUSBS

A Humble Prayer

I

Almighty God
Creator of Man
Listen·to this humble prayer
For a sef ond creation
A re-designing of the political Man ,
'

'

'

Lord,
You'gaye two front eyes
to the political man
Sink a third large one
on the back of his head
That can see far into dark past
and so avoid same mistakes:
'

Lord,
You designed the stomach in front
protruding and leading the, wa,y
Shift it to the back now
so that h~ thinks of the people first
And not his greedy stomach. '

Lord, .
You gave him a large mouth
shaped like Joshua's trumpet'
Cut dowq tµe dangerous size
so that only honest sense comes out
Instead of lies and death.

"

Lord,
You gave him two ears,
too f~w. and too tiny
Give him another pair now·
large and wide like an elephant's
So that he listens 'more to the people
Almighty God,

'

DABI PIIIUSBS / 49

Heeder of prayers
Grant this humble request
And the world shall be a better place.

Amen.

I

SO / D!BI PIIIUSBS

8:30 AM Stream of Consciousness 1993
'

Kimberly Bliss

I'

Suburbia is a very strange thing. The safety of the tree-lined streets and
manicured lawns gives one a lethargic iqeal of life. Or at least it did with me. I
sometimes wonder about these _mundane autobio,graphical flashes that slip into my
,mind, especially during the morning rush hour number six downtown frantic
crawl of a journey, that finds me being slammed left-right-and-center by crackheads and businessmen. Same difference.
•
"How did I get here?" I mutter it out loud. I didn't mean to but these
things slip out under such circumstances. Never mind, nobody notices. When I
go back home to visit my mom I have whole conversations with myself in public..
People notice. Sometimes in good ways. Like yesterday after work. ,
She was fierce. SoHo is great to work in because the streets ar~ a fucking
runway. And she busted 'round a comer and pumped her stride like nobodyis •
business, least of all mine. But I made it my business.
,
The Manhattan Bistro. Despite the name it's one of the few SoHo eateries
that I can afford, and Miss Thing just walked into it. So I go in. Sit down next to
' her. Say something to the waitress nonchalantly, something about how much is
your cafe au lait, knowing damn well it's a morning drink but in my hormonal •
stupor these things slip by me. So I get my drink, and she gets a salad. Strike
one. I hate salads and know nothing about them. She orders a drink and my mind
spins in a frenzy, chastising me for the baseball analogies. So now what? I drink
the cafeau lait and
-l jQst missed my stop: "Oh,fack me!" I push towards the door, hit my
foot on a baby's stroller and curse the little fucks for exisµng, never mind that I
usually like babies. Nobody notices that I'm talking to myself again, except this
old short bald guy who has the look of Freud in his eyes. Those are the kinds of
subway riders who invade your space with that damn stare they have. I get off
and walk through waftil).g smells of urine and crisp blasts of cool air. On the
other side I wait for the train and I start thinking about her again.
It's so hard to pay attention to my life when I have so many distractions.
Like this diva of a distraction who turns towards me and says, "Can I see the front
page?"
'
"Sure," I look in my bag not_knowing what the hell she's talking about.
She laughs and by now I'm-wet. This is ridiculous.
"No, there's a Times right next to you on the other table:"
"Oh, sure." I hand it to her and add, "I've had a long day."
"Ypu work?"

D!BK PB1USBS,_ / SI

The vintage clothing thing has to go. Miss Thing thinks I'm homeless.
She adds, "I mean around here. I've seen you around." Her smile is
sincere and her tone reeks .of charm. I'm dead if she's straight.
"Yeah, on West Broadway between Houston and Prince."
There goes my subway 'stop again. I didn't realize I had even'gotten back
on. I leap up when the train stops after having only moved a few feet. The do_ors
open and I jump through them an·d bound up the steps. My mode of automatic
pilot gives me license to slide back into my revei;ie.
_
,,
She leans on_the back of the chair and stretches out her legs. The strange
thing is~ I can't remember wliat she looks like. I mean, what she really looks
like. :t-.:1Y memory of the sight of her comes in fragmented recollections of my
:reactions.
.
I stop at Blimpies and sit down with a cup of coffee. I rewind back to
thoughts of home, suburban upstate New York. I obsess about the lawns. Such
patches of green are 'so rare. There are more trees on top of buildings in Manhat- •
tan than there are in Ute ground. That is not normal. Tliis city is not normal. But
I can't leave. I've been here eight years and I refuse to leave'untQ I have sucked
everything out of it, 'cause god only knows it certainly has done that to me. One
• of tliese days I'm going to get even. I left suburbia because the traces of my life,
are more schizophrenic than a-Jackson Pollack painting. Or Etch-a-Sketch. Not
that suburbia is that boring. It has its.own sense of idle excitement, but chaos
dictates my happiness and off to New York I went. For what? Near poverty
•saved by the material' trimmings that boost me into pseudo-class climbing? working class suburbia sure hates me now. But they already do. Adopted into a white
family and-eighteen subsequent years of thinking that I'.m white because it's so
much easier to integrate myself through delusiqn. How do I tell Miss Thing that
my family is the Roseanne Barr Show and I love them- but my skin tolor is the
color of the Manila sky at night and has built up walls of rage that only get the gut
if tliey're,ghettoized? And Miss Thing's skin color is smoother than this cafe au
lait and blacker than it too. And I walked out of there with her number.
Things follow me. Everywhere I go these th~ughts slice up my brain and
balloon out my nerves. I down the last of the coffee, light up a cigarette and step
outside. I think I'm waking up now.
•

52 I DA.BK PHIUSBS

'-

-

...

I

Festival de las Artes, Bernardo Ruiz •

DABI PIIB!SBS / 53

Freedom Fire
Susan N. Kiguli

Crying 'Freedom'
.
In a limitless limbo of starvation
The mammoth of malnutrition
Manacles,our children,
So later we could revel in justice.
Marching to the battlefront
Dying like rodents
Strong youths annihilated
All for a taste of democracy.
Encased in Leotards of tyranny
Fettered slaves of a mad system
We have lived like dogs
For people's liberty.
Branded fire emitting agitators
We have marched forward
To a people's victory . •
But Behold, fellow Compatriot
Gaze at whai-1 see
Our saGred blood so bitterly shed is commemorated
by numbered majestic Chariots.
Our youth so severely wasted
'
is remembered in
Ballrooms and theatres.
Our bravery abused by
Mad_babbling puppets.
Yet our babies die unattended
Our sons condemned to
Bowels of society. .
Our mothers live in hovels
Our women arrayed in tatters
Our men unpaid labourers.
Guns and bayonets • '
Have gorged out their eyes. ·

5( I

D!lll l'Bll!SBS

step forward brother
Living Fuel for the vehicle of justice
A human flame
To burn blind eyes open
A roasting martyr
A protest against
f he Brewers of Injustice.

DAiii l'lllliSBS /

oo

Eve
Krishena Peters

The night grows stars
and the moon, paper-thin,
' has folded against th~ tops of buildings,
• brushed low across her window,
and then rested center, brilliant, white.
She had begun the evening slowly in sips of brandy,
and a glass of cut-red wine
at half past nine begins her night.
The sun fell hours-ago. .
In the darkness of the room she prepares herselfthe 'sheer stoc~ngs, the too-short dress,
and the drugstore makeup
applied last beneath the lamp in the_comer.
Bottle empty, the wine
has ·scraped th~ edges from her face and left
~ roundness, smileless, heartless.
, The sun had fallen hours ago.
She has_lost her shoes.
The floor is dirty, and in the moonlight
she can feel the dust crawl
between her toes and beneath her knees
as she searches for her
, heels
under the four-poster
and tpe fake brown leath.er recliner. .
When she finds them, she brushes her soles with her hands,
then slips them on.
She circles the kitchen once,
not fully listening to the click of her heels upon the tiles,
then reaches for her keys upon the stove •
•
and fastens her locks behind her.
This is the last time.
The last time for this, like this.
~

~

I

In the street the ~et air ·
•

I

5G / DAU FlllllSBS

presses her dress even tighter.
It's humid, like those nights in August, south,
when the doors of the h,ouse were left open
to swallow the breeze:
when the movie theaters were packed,
air conditioners blaring;· ,
when she was out with the boys •
on the lookout, in the backseat,
ankles resting oi;i the edge of the rolled down window.
That, night's boy would smile
because he thc,mght that she liked him,
and she would squeeze between the hands of the clock, late,
after twelve, listening to the ticking
1
of the sweeping second and her heels.
Tonight, the last time, it was th_e same_'._ .
the cars, the rolled down windows
or cold walls, or rough beds,
stockings still pulled urgently to her ankles.
He, .they, still smiled at her,
turned red, but no showed her green, at le'ast, in the end.
Tonight, tomorrow, again, a few more,
the last time is always the last time.
As she walks, the store-fronts reflect themselves
on the doors of the cars that speed by.
The sun fell hours ~go,·
and the brandy fuels the motor,
and the moon continues its swing
through starred black night.
Some falls go unnoticed, some falls.

nm J11WSBS 1 51

The Wedding Night
Ava Ming Hu

White lotus blossoms,
pi'ercing as the stars,
had been harvested with hopeful hands
to camouflage the depressed middle
.of our newly-wed bed.
The spellbound light of the moon
breaks through the slats of wood in the walls
making grids of light apd dark '
across the dusty floor,
otnall}ented with prints and patterns of use.
Jmake circul~ marks shaped lilse unfinished full moons
with my sandal, making the first detectable mark
as a member of his family.
Ifl were to run my fingers over
,
the mountainous terrain of his no~. chin and cheeks,
1 the inclines and depths
would :not be familiar to me.
'I met him once before, but kept my eyes cast 9ownwards
letting the steam from the tea • .
moisten my eyes,
and hoped the pattern of those tea leaves
mapped out good fortune. ·
Mother said he spoke English
.and was a Leo, a fire sigq
compatible with mine.
I remember the raspy voice of grandmo_ther,
"Your husband will be like Krishna
the 'emerald skinned god-lover
whose arias of flute echo
the call of a nightingale.
He will summon you with song,
and like :Sati you must jump
intoI the blazing flames of his funeral fire
to be rebirthed through heat wi~ him

I

'

58 I D!BX PHlU$BS

into wind, r~n, or mist."
I wear the dark as a veil from my sari
to view this breathing god.
_The moon shows no emerald color to his skin.
The thrashing sou.nd of the river,
fui1, with rainwater from the monsoon,
rushes by the thatched hut'. s window.
I feel a strange hand, arm ,
and another arm wrap around me.
His strong hold
mixes with my fear
like a hurricane around a lone palm tree,
, its green leaves shivering before they are torn away.
I remember white flowers,
whole and scented like the air before a storm.
I remember petals becoming dismembered from their ·body
and falling, too silent to .hear,
to the bare, cold earth
who cannot talc~ them back,
who cannot bare to take them back again.

Dm PlllUSBS / &9

,,

I

'

Vicky Lavergne

,

GO / D.illl l'IIIUSBS
/

Adamson Blessed

I•

Ernesto Okello Ogwang

He brandishes the hoe
Casts a glance here, and there
And marches off
A soldier to fortune unknown
. A hero destined to perish unsung
His head no simple rustic garland shall adorn
No crude monument in memento of him
His brow creased, palm cracked, eyes glazed
His chin almost totally withdrawn. ·
•
. He attacks the soil like
It cursed his mpther, or his girl stole
As the bright-eyes sun cynically smiles
At him.
•
. He grows more of this,or that
Responding to the government1s idiot-box broadcast
To double,
triple,
quadruple production.
.
I
Little did adamson know he's a pawn.
A nothing in airy spaces ,
The cold faceless stock-exchange •
That unfixes prices
' Knows nor cares not, for this adamson blessed
That night ants made love on his unsold crop'
And the next day he was arrested; his
Balls tightly.tied; adamson was marched
To jail, he'd not paid his taxes
-~
His crops, unsold, a mattress for ants.

I '

I .

D!BI l'BlliSBS I GI

I

i dream of walking past, letting it go
- Elizabeth Soto

but i will go on in anger
filled to finger edges'
of injustice
wanting to file away
everything distasteful
i will go on in anger
until the last stone hits
the earth 1
resounding through our roots
i keep that circle
going
/
shoveling fists down your throat
for my children born of womanwomb
i would fear
i will grant
them a legacy
in anger fighting .
what was never lost

'

i will extend to them
my identity ·
my song sung in prayer
for my almost darker color
my tilted eyes
full lips
for my too ·light skin
this is your identity too
- legacy of flesh
legacy of soul

I

G2 / D!BK PIIIUSBS

Country Wench*
Tusingwire Jotham
, I

In front of me, aft~r the night rain
Early in the morning, in a narrow dewy path
A stout, dark, robust frame
'
-Leads to-her daily routine on the farm.
A baby strapped to her back
One i'n front, another trotting behind
On her head rests a colossal basket
Laden with various contents:
Four split dry firesticks,
And a bundle of potato stems visible.
On her back a wi~e dark patch,
A conspiracy of soil and baby-urine.
A few 'mes buzz by the baby's eyes.
Suddenly she totters, sways and staggers
And there- poor creature; crumbles
On the muddy slippery way.
The child yells from the back with p~n
The basket is thrown away, scattering contents
And many they were:
A handful of salt wrapped in pumpkin leaves,
A cluster of ripe bananas,
A chunk of cold millet bread,
Scattered cooked cold beans,
A five-litre jerrycan of water,
An aged black peeling knife.
And a shattered calabash splashed with millet gruel.

*In Uganda, the term "wench" more commonly refers to a female peasant farmer and
does no_tcarry the negative connotations present in American English.

• D.illl PBlUSBS / G3

A sµiell of tobacco smoke, a cough from behind
And there he was, her dear man
Growling and spitting curses and abuse
Accusing her of carelessness and stupidity
Attired in a patched and tattered one-sleeved coat
And an aging·unique pair of shorts
Evidently having one~ served as trousers.
P~ga and hoe in hand
•
He approached the scene, an~ I
Still gazing with pity, feared him
And, hearing the bell, took off to school.

~·

'

G-1 / DARl l'lllWBS

..

Ghosts and Smoke
Jamesmith III

"Diego, put your toys away. If something gets broken, you'll 6e crying
all over the·place and it'll be too late."
"Okay, Mommy. Mommy?"
"Hinnn?"
• "Howcum I gotta put away all my toys?"
"Somebody might step on them, baby. Oh shit. I always do that."
"Why don't they just-"
"Baby, hand me that towel. No, the green one. That's it, mijo. Gracias."
"Well?"
"'Well' what, baby?"
"Howcum ... Howcum ... Howcum ... If people gonna step on 'em, howcum
- they don't just step over 'em?"
•
"Step on what? Ah, dios mio! This pilot light is gonna drive me crazy!
Where's the matches?"
"I know where they is, Mommy! I know where they is!" •
"What? What did you ... Diego! Stop that! What did Mommy tell you
about running in the ... Diego! Ai! That boy ... !"
"Look, Mo~ma! I got the matches! See?"
"Diego!! Put those _down, right now." _
"But...Howcuin? Whassa matta, Momma? I got... I got... I got matches,
,
,, Momma."
'!Mi dulce, just do what Momma says and put down the matches, okay?"
. "Okay, Mommy." ,
"Come here, come her_e, baby."
"Whassa matta, Momma? _Howcum you cryiJ!g? Mommy ... ?"
****
"Inez, you ok~y, babe?"
"Ytah, Roberto, it's cool. How was your day?"
"My day ~as fine, babe·. Why are you smoking? You ain't touched a
cancer stick in weeks."
•
"Don't remind me. My hips're as wide as a house."
"You always was the one to go ch~gin' the subject rt' shit. Wll,assup?
Why can't you talk to me?"
"I ju$~ got a little bit of a scare is all. I'm okay."
"You sure?"
"Yeah, I'm cool."

...

DAlll PlllliSBS / GS

"What happened?"
_
"Nothin' ... Don't look at me like that. An' stop petting me, you make-me
nervous. Siddown."
'
. • • , "Inez. •Babe, are you ... ?"
"Nol am not and you're and asshole if you think that's the only thing
that'll piss me off. Iju~t saw,Oiego playin' with so~e matches is all. He's okay,
•,I'm okay. It just.kind of reminded me of my little Maricela is ·all. She was so
, sweet..."
"Inez? Inez? ~ez!"
"Get your hand outta my face ..."
"Put that shit but. I don't want nobody smokin' around my kid. I had to
deal with that shit all my life and it smells like crap. My eyes used to sting when
I'd go anywher near my father's room an' I don't want Diego to go through that
shit too. Now lissen: Maricela is gone. I loved_her too. I still love her, but we
can't bring her back and talking about it like this is only going to make things
worse. Gimme tl\e ashtray, I'll throw it out..."
•
'
****

- "Roberto, pass the peas, will you?"
"Here you go ... ~iego, how Y
"\ doin' champ?"
"I'm fine, Daddy."
"Qon't talk w'hen you eat, honey. Close your mouth, you're getting gravy
all over your shirt. Ah, you little monster...."
"I'm a monster! I'm a morister..."
"Diego! Put your arms down and eat your dinner! Will you... Put them
down! You wanna give me a hand? He?$ your son too, y'know .. .'' . •
"Let 'im be a boy, Inez. I had a son, don't make him into _a girl."

-.

, "Momma?"
"Yes, .baby?"
' "When's Maricela comin' back?"
"Soori, honey. Soon."
****
"Well, Mrs. Pavel, has your ,son exhibited any antisocial behavior~ You
know hitting other children, breaking things for no reason. That sort of thing."
- "Uh... No, not really. Diego is really a very nice boy. He does everyhting
I tell him to do, even if I have to say it several times. m, just'keeps talking to
himself."
•
I
"It's not uncommon for children to develop 'invisible' friends, as a means
of coping witq loneliness. You did say that his sister died, didn't you?"
"Yes, she died in.. .In a fire. Maricela and Diego did everything together.
I know he misses her a lot, but he had a lot of other friends as well. He doesn't

,,

oo·; DARK PlllUSllS

like to play with any of them now. I don't understand it. He seems so normal
when he's at home, but then he turns into a goddamn hermit at school. 'Oh, my
language, I'm sorry."
• "That's quite all right. Tell me, is Diego into any sports?"
"Well, he's just a little boy, you know. He likes to watch football with his
father on the weekends, and sometimes they toss a baseball around; but he
• .doesn't even want to do that anymore." ,
•
'!Oh, his father is around often?"
''He lives here. What made you think he didn't?"
"Oh, no particular reason. I just wanted to know."
"No, there was a reason. What made you think my husband didn't live
here?"
"It was strictly a standard question, Mrs. Pavel..."
'

I

****
"Yeah, Luisa, so then she says 'Oh, is bi's father around often?' and I say
sure, he lives here, y'know? And she makes like it was all in the name of science,
y'know? She can't even own up to the fact that...What? No, he's okay. It's fine.
That bastard knows Roberto didn't take anything, he's-just another AmeriFan with
a chip on his shoulder. Que? Oh, it's cool, I'll just have to start working again.
Diego's in school now, so we don't have to worry about day care or any of that
junk, thank God. Is that Celo? Yeah, I can hear the ol' bear from here. Okay,
talk to you later. bye."
,
"Diego? What are you making noise about, honey?"
"Momniymommymommymommy!" .
''Diego, mijo? What's that matter?"
"Mommympmmymommymommymommymommy !!"
"Die 0 o! Diego! Oh shit, I'm coming. Diego? Honey, Mommy's here.
Wake up, baby, you're having a bad dream! It's okay, baby, Mommy's here.
C'mon, honey, ciµm down, it was j_ust a nightmare."
"Mommy! I saw-!"
"I know, baby, it's okay. Calm down, Mommy's here."
"No, Mommy! I saw Maricela, Mommy! She was standing right over
there, Moinmy! I wanted you to see' her, that's why I called you. When the lights
came on, she went away. ·Why, did yoµ tum on the lights, Mommy? She-!"
. "Maricela wasn't there, baby."
"Uh-huh, yes she was; Mommy! I saw her right-!"
Putyour arrµ down, Diego, and go back to sleep. You did not see
Maricela."
•:uh-huh! Shew~ right over-!"
"Diego! Mommy said go'to bed, didn't she?"
"But-"

,

D..illl PBB!SBS / G7

"Diego"
"Yes, Mommy. But_:_"
"So make Mommy happy and put your head hown and go back to sleep.
That's it, baby. I'm going to my room now. Goodnight, baby. Give Mommy a
kiss. That's it, honey. I love you."
"Mommy? When Maricela comin'. back?"
"Ssshh...Go to sleep ... "
'
'

.

****

"Aahh... Another day another blister. Gimme that paper,.! circled a couple
jobs that don't look so bad. How's my clothes?"
••
"You look fine. Eat something before you go."
.
~'No time, Inez. If you woke my up on time, then I _coulda gotten some.
,,
I
,,
•
thmg.
"Look! I apologized already, didn't I? Shit. .. " •
"Honey, I ain't blamin' you. I fuck up all the time too . .It's cool. You
look pretty tired yourself, maybe you should get some rest." "Later. I gotta take Diego to school."
"Okay, but promise me you'll get some sleep."
"Sure."
"And put that cigarette out."
"Yeah..."
''.See ya."

"Baby, you're coughing. Are you okay?"
"I can't breathe, Mommy . .That smoke's stinky."
"Oh, it's j1,1st a cigarette.· It's cool, you'll live."
"Howcum you gotta do that, Mommy? It's so stinky. I can't breathe-"
"What the hell is this? I can smoke if I want to. Don't forget who you
are, young man. I'm your mother."
"Mommy, I'm-"
"Dqn't give me any of your shit! I'm tired of people giving me all this
crap! Now go.to your room!"
•
"Mommy-!"
"Shut up!!!"
"But-"

"I said shut UPF'
"Oh, baby, what did I do? Diego? Diego? Speak to me, baby. Come on,
baby! Talk to nie! A,i, dios mio! Ayuda me! Please, baby, I didn't mean to hit
you so hard! Please, I'm so .sorry! Please, mijo, talk to me! Speak tom~!!"

G8 / DARI PlllUSBS

Kimono
•
Michel Ng

Kimono wrapped tightly around your waist, ..
trapping your body
showing its lines.
Woodengeta
hobbling
frantically h?bbling along the cobblepath
of faces,
of face.
Click Clock Click ClockMotion stifled by bindings of the past
wov~n into the starched fabric of your soul.
Strong sakura,
_
standing alone amidst the harsh frost
of tall skyscrapers, old businessmen, greedy hearts,
-unfair margins.
You walk abruptly in the cold
don't walk too fast I say,
you run.
Are you afraid of falling tomodachi? •
Ypur sturdy geta made of wood
will always return from whence they came.
Your soul may soar
but your geta,
your geta will always remain of the earth
embraced in her w~th, in your ki.
Geta hobbling, quickly hobbling
Wooden pl'atform upheld by two sticks:
our bushido of honesty,
our bushido of pain.
Fall then,
fall tomodachi.
Do not be afraid of the ground
if not for it, we would keep falling
not knowing how to suffer,
not knowing h?w to cry.
Rise anew, '
I

•

DABl l'BIUSBS / G9

rise like the morning sun
from -the haze of the shallow horizon
Emikosan.
And remember always,
that no matter how tight
the kimono of your soul may feel
_it will always remain glorious and beautiful
tome.

I

\

70 / DABl.1'11,R.lSES

Kaneem L. Smith

D!Bi PIIIUSBS / n

Cry Freedom
.Okot Benge

Cry Freedom, cry
Weep bitter tears
·To wash the wounds of Africa
That tell the shameful tales
Of strangled Independence.
Cry Freedom, ·dry
Wake the fear-gripped sleepers
To the mockery of self-government '
Where editors' pens shy from naked truth
And prisons have glut~onic ~ppetite.
Cry Freedom, cry
For you pissed into the Authority's eyes
And in a single dictatorial arm swing
Your manhood was ripped off
Leaving you castrated and helpless. ,
Cry Freedom, cry
For your tears bathe our hearts
Creating rivers of uncontrollable force
That shall one day burst the banks
Washing the dictators off their seats.

•

'

72 / DlBl PlllUSBS

Vicky Lavergne

DA.Bl l'lllU,SB8 / 73

For One Black Child
in an kll White School, 1967
leslie Pea e-jubilee
See that little girl
digging with a stick in the dirt ,
making maybe mud pies
or burying maybe her dreams
She has heard sounds ,
like sirens with no glare
breaking nights
The white-robed me
call her by name

'

The only iood ni~~er
is a dead ni~ier
/·

Call her •
Louder than as hard
as she can pressthe heels of her hands
against her ears
The only iood, ni~~er
• by name
is a dead ni~ier
Call her
See that little girl
her back against the wall
of her lace-curtained bed room
praying to be good
willi,ig herself a dead thing
So maybe she can walk .
tomorrow Ito school
without being seen

•

'

14 I DARK PBR!SRS

unmolested
The only 200d ni2~er
inhales her own screams
freezes in her veins
her blood
is a dead ni2~er
squeezing her arms across
her chest
Call her
blood red heart
beating
unprotected
in the daytime beats through
the voices that break her
nights
and bury her dreams
The only ~ood ni2~er
stares at the ceiling
when she could be sleeping
walks on eggshells the mile
to school
Plays in dirt '
burying this thing
blood red
, to good
to be strewn
at the hems of white robes
Shapes in mud
the resistance for her
in_lagined babies to eat '

D.llll PIIIUSllS / 7&

Brother and His Sax
. Daphne Osayade Dumas

I

He sits on top of his dugout
at the Saudi-Kuwaiti border.
This barren earth is not the kind in Shea
wher~ players are ireeted after sliding
into home.
It is home for Operation Storm.
A sandpile'for troops in the des~rt,
home away from homelessness, unemployment
and mis-education.
'

This soldier has taken his saxophone all the way_
'from Harlem.
.
,
His duffle bag· is filled with food rations, change of clothes
l}is hair pick and a crumpled picture of his girl friend. . ,
Doesn't know why he is there,
waiting to fight a people who look just like him.
He sits caressing his sax as if he were •
holding his old lady,
belting out Coltrane, Satchmo, Miles and Leon Thomas.
He doesn't like the noise.
H~ just sits there, playing his sax just as he has_done
. on Lenox Aven~e, jamming with the boys at Wells,
and around the comer at a hundred and·43rd.
He closes out the sound of planes overhead,
. eclipsing the quiet. •
He continues to play. ••
•)

He looses himself in that moment,
lulls into ecstasy.
, He hopes to hang on to his sax
while he plays to his old lady wishing he were home, away
from destruction, war.
.
, He lifts the sound one octave up, then lowers it.
He removes the mouth piece, packs up his duffle bag.
The army sargent callf out
Ground patrol begins.

7G / D!RI PlllWllS

american dreamer
wednesday guyot

the.re is a woman in my class
pissed of
because all her money
and tennis lessons
couldn't get her through
them pearly gates
toward white legitimacy.
• such a joke •
singing the star spangled banner
with a mexican accent
smelling of gringo spit
and shame.

D.!RK PIIR!SRS / 77

, Fidf l, Elizabeth Miranda

78 / DABl l'BIUSBS

,

When, Where and Why I Entered
or, What Harlem Means to Me*
Randall Kenan
'

Who knows but that, oq the lower frequencies, ,~speak for you?
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Who am I? Who are you? Well, that's the point, you see. The point
beil)g identity. The question being who, what, when, why. The heart of it, the
down, dark, dirty and nasty of it; both generational and genetic, gender and Gspot. For me it was (is) a strange alchemical journey, a. curious calculus of soul
and body, an ongoing battle of self in the early stages of a long war of identity.
Who am I? Can,I teµ you? Better perhaps to concentrate on the question· wliich
for me raises more and yet more questions. About race. About culture. About
region. About assumptions we all make, have made to remain sane, to live our
lives, to progress in some earthly fashion.
But what do you do when you suddenly realize. all the definitions handed
down by the media and the textbooks, all the assumptions public and private, ,
familial and societal, are inaccurate? When you realize that you have been calling
geese, go~ts and possum, penguins? When you must re-defiqe who you think you
are and ask larger questions about society?' What does itmean to be black? A
simple question. A stupid question, y~m might say. Everybody knows. Descendants of Africans? Or more precisely, Yoruba, Ashanti, Baule, Ibo, Hausa, Jie,
Ouadai, etc.? Or something more? But a question so obvious none ever seeins to
ask it anymore. And yet who can say?
•
I
What Black means to me. For years, decades, I thought I-knew. Then
' . suddenly I stumbled upon the idea, that all my as~umptions were false, all my
beliefs suddenly replaced with deeper, more profound questions. What does it
~ean? What fil.Q. it mean, to be more accurate, for there is a journey I mean to
. imply. Is it genetic? Is it cultural? This Blackness everyone seems to speak of so
authoritatively, so knowingly? Do genetics and culture truly mix? Can culture
grow from chromosomes and amino acid? Questions, questions, questions. Who
'had, has, the answers? But slowly I hit upon the keys. Not keys to the ans1wers,
of course, but to the ,correct questions, the true goal as all good scientists know.
There were three things. One. Two . .Three. One involved skates. One
I

.

.

I

l

*This essay is from a forthcoming book, Walking On Water: A Journey Into African
American.

DARK. PlllUSBS 179

involved Hardees coffee. One involved the New York City subway. They all
involved Blackness. Or what I thought it to be. One day when I was lost...
First, yes, frrst, - much like the Apostle-John's gospel- was home. In the
beginning was home, and home was with me, and home was me. all things were
home. And what was'home to me?: a house, white-shingled on a farm, surrounded by fields of com, soybeans, tobacco; a forest across the dirt road, full of
squirrels among the oak and sassafras trees, possums, wild cats, deer; tractors and
men in coveralls; old women with snuff deep in their bottom lip; black m_en, white
women, black women, white men. Not mucq ·else. Nothing else. Black and
white. Two views, two possibilities. For me one certainty. ,I, we, us,-were black.
They, them, those, were white. This was home. Specific. Rural. South. Black.
Chinquapin, North Carolina, 1963 through 1981 in the years, as James Agee so
aptly put it, "in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a
child." This was my vision, an inherited vision, a preordained text, inviolate,
sacred, as ancient as the Amenhotep throne and as omnipotent as Yahweh - this
vision of being' Black. This caine fast, yes, Iflfst. The idea of self.
But in the beginning came the idea, handed down like·tWo songs from my
father's father's fathers and my mother's mother's mothers resounding through
the cotton~eids of time, a legayy of sorts, specific in fac;t 1 unmovable in concept.
What did it mean to be Black?_In the beginning, in my mind, it meant a
'
pointillism of culture. Collard greens. "Amazing Grace." Grits. Tote. Quilts.
Thundering preachers. Pigs feet "Swing Low Sweet Chariot." Head rags.
Chitlins: "Chain of Fools." Root workers. Prayer cloths. Signs and symbols of a
culture out of which we, I, perceived a brilliant canvas of history and linguistics
and religion and music and fashfr>n and, of which, we were, are --=- and rightly proud. But more than bits and pieces, at home, in the beginning, there was also a
testament of thought binding all these particles, for on t\lose rare occasions When
we stood back to see it all as one would a Monet, we divined whole a portrait of
.endurance, strength, love, community, respect. Platitudinous in retrospect, but
sublime in practice. Or so I thought. Or more precisely, so I thought for fill
Blacks. For this assumption was part of what it meant to be Black. In the beginning, at home.
And at home this perception was mysteriously corroborated on Sanford
and Son anq in EhQDl magazine, by my cousin~ up in New Jersey and New York,
b)t tl_iose lying textbooks and invidious blaxploitation films of that wasted decaqe
in Superfly. Cotton Goes to Harlem, in Shfill, cause he's a bad muther- shut
your mouth! Black was one seamless, undifferentiated culture. And I stoop
proud: We all had an enormous amount to be proud of in Chinquapin, NC: . _
Tubman, King, Prosser, Angelou, Bearden. Ours. My family- teachers, businessmen, farmers, militacy men - taught me and taught me well about being
Black. B,ut f:his was the beginning. ·1n the beginning. The Word. Black.
But frrst, yes, flfst in my journey, this journey of which I speak, were the
skates, in a skating rink in Wal~ace, ~orth Carolina. December, 1988. My flfst

'

I

80 / DARK PBIUSBS

clue that something in my perception was amiss~something left out in the beginning.
'
Home, in 1988, had in fact changed. Wheri I grew up in the bosom of a
large, overly-extended family, in the home of a saintly great-aunt, spied upon by
- aunts and uncles and an inexhaustible supply of cousins, Chinquapin was much
. like it had been in the 1940s. Population was less than a thousand. Farms were, if
not prosperous and thriving, surviving with the coastal cash crops of legend; the
churches's congregations were strong and committed, a binding agent in the
community; many secondary roads were as yet unpaved, and gardens and livestock supplied most of the table fare. Not to romanticize the era: schools were not ,
desegregated untif1969; medical care was twenty-five miles away and then not
particularly competent; water was pumped from priv,ate wells, and many people
had no running water.
But by 1988 Chinquapin had been thrust, more like yanked, into the heady
whorl of the post-modem era with a state-of-the-art EMT ambulance, InterState40 less than nine miles away making the town something of a suburb; a new water
system; a factory; a video store; cable-television; a supermarket and two ~onvenience stores. Aside from the bristling, technological invasion, for me - fresh
off a DC-8 at the nearby Ellis Airport, now replete with a landing sleeve and
rotting luggage belt - for me, Chinquapin was a land of ghosts: here.ft of my
cousin Norman, old when I was born, who taught me to tell stories and drink
coffee; of his son, Roma, a teacher and farmer who taught me how to crop to- '
bacco and ,kill snakes; of my grandmother, from whom I learned good business
sense, how to be regal under pressure, and how to shuffle cards. I could not help
but hear these ghosts about the rooms and fields and barns, now empty and relic\ like. And as sentimental and shamefully nostalgic as it may sound, groups of
people no longer sat about on porches and talked, instead they watche.d television.
Most farms had been bought up by larger farmers, and church congregations
seemed sparse in comparison. Most sadly the old folk seemed yet 9lder, more
frail, halting, ethereal.
My fellow classmates had all, like me, 'moved away after
'
school; while the number of tombstones seemed to multiply exponentially. I
know there exists a sinful danger of artificially raising those.elements of the past
of which we are mos~ fond in our minds, to supplant those P,ainful, passionless
and pathetic memories much closer to reality, to belie the facts of endl,ess days of
dead inertia and boredom, of strife of every manner, of small- mindedness. Chin'quapin did, and still does, abound with a multitude of hateful truths. But on
Christmas vacation, 1988, I must in all honesty admit to being blind to the whole
cloth of the past, and to succumbing to the safer womb of pointless pining and dreaming after those past .shadows pungent with meaning to me. ~hen came the
skating rink.
Of course there was, is, the present: chaotic, hard, real. The present of my
family. The present of my grandfather, emblematic of my family strength, recovering from a disastrous.bum accident and fully recovering at the age of seventy'

DARI PIIB!SBS / 81
.

I

three, and of my brother-in-law literally rising from t_he dead after a near fatal
illness. The present of my larger-than-life sister starting a third career, Candi and •
Nilda, rambunctiously high schooling, my great-aunt whispering about retirement. Of this person who had a stroke. That Qnt: who had a baby. This one who
had altzheimers. Nothing to romanticize about 1988.
I offered to take my nieces to the movies. Okay, they said, fine. And they
would take m~ to the skating rink on Sunday. Fine, ·! said. I haven't been skating •
in yea.is. They giggled. I watched HBO.
•
Sunday, December 18, 1988_. ,No one had toid me, but in truth I had been
prepared. Indirectly. I had seen all the signs, the music, they way my nieces
talked to me, the way they dressed, the body language, the music, most importantly the music, for this is about music and Blackness.
We arrived at the rink, Skate City, at around nine o'clock. They said·
everyone gets there at around ten o'clock. It was importapt to be there at ten.
Why? I said, assuming my older niece had a crush on some boy who was to
rendezvous with her then. Cause, she said. That's when they start to jam. They,
giggled.
•
•
Skate, City, a concrete bunker, long and flat, gussied up in that American
recreational way, with the requisite indoor-outdoor carpet, walls brightly painted
in fat strips, the sarrie as in memory. Except for the kids, kids, kids. All Black
kids, surging about like hordes from "The Birds." Vivacious, loud,_in candycolored running suits_anq reeboks', beautiful, noisesome,1happy, young. All
Black. I reme~ber thinking how odd th·at we still managed to segregate ourselves
with such energetic ~nacity. Or was it merely natural? And I remembered the
contrast betwe~n my earlier trips to Skate City,.tlie calm, mu.ch smaller, integrated
crowd. In _fact I remembered my family being the only Black family there at the

time.
My older niece, Candi, and I got our skates, buffeted by the crowd, and
-took to the treacherous floor. Me, stiff and unpracticed, a monster out of Frankenstein, she, much surer, skating backwards, bopping to the top 40 - Black beat. We zipped around the rink with glee, playfully, the music speeding us
along. · I noticed,th~ crowds·building, buildµig. Girls and boys, all Black, pouring, quite literally, through the door. Nine:fifty-five. An announcement: "All
skates much·& turned in, please."
I turned to my niece, "Huh?"
"We have to stop skating."
"Why?"
.
"They're going to dance now.".
"Huh?"
•
But she was already on her way to turn in her skates.
At 10:05 it began. Harum scarum. Higgledy-piggledy. First came Jhe
music. Loud. Dangerous. Verbal machinegun fire, barely intelligible. Full of
gusto. Militant in its assertion. Rapid. Syllables like bullets. Needles scratching
,

I

\

82 / D!Bl l'HIUSBS

across vinyl creating otherwordly techno-nuevo dimensions, earthbound by the
thump, The beat. The beat. Rap. Everybody in the house say Eyeeaaahaa!
Eyeaaahaaa!
Not that I had never heard rap music before. Quite the contrary, only
weeks before, ironically, I had been what amounts to reverse acculturated back
into lilting rap music, which had just begun to emerge from the underground and
take hold of the zeitgeist'like so many Body Snatchers. I had been a stumble,footed fifteen year-old the year tqe Sugar Hill Gang came on the scene. A-hip,
hop, hippy to the hippy. And Curtis Blow and those grandfathers of the rapid-fire
sing-talk. But by senior year I and a number of my friends had become disenchanted with a form which seemed to have reached its artistic peak, and which
seemed to find no purchase beyond soporific rant ,and rave, and three or four
rhythmic variations. Yet how many babes are pronounced dead only to mysteriously live on to become heads of state? Or in this case revolutionary warlords?
In the cauldron of Hollis, Queens and Bed-Sty and Watts and Southside Chicago,
the infant recovered and went to the school of the streets, and now, in 1988, a
meager seven years later, was less an enfant terrible than a homme d'guerre. Rap.
A rootin-tootin warrior, risen from a premature burial, funking up the place.
But this place was Wallace, North Carolina, home of the poultry factory,
tobacco warehouses and two textile mills. Where the best meal out was barbecue
from a supperhouse with side of coleslaw and hushpuppies. The site of the
'Battle of Rockfish Creek in the War Between the States. The largest city in the
county of Duplin at around 20,000. My home.
Yet before my eyes those kids, from eight to eighteen, had .taken to the
rink, ·th~ now dance floor,,and were conjuring up some post-industrial Damballah,
with bytes for teeth and microchips for eyes. They did not so much dance as jerk,
jerk, jerk their bodies to the beat. Clad as they were in acid-washed jeans, running suits, sweatshirts, heavy gold chains with their names spelled out so large a
Stevie Wonder could see them bobbing ab'out their necks, topped with Kangol
caps, and their teeth fl~hing metal. They created.a voodoo atmosphere so foreign
to me, wif!i i_ts demi-urgic Tropic of Cancer humor, that if someone told me I was
in Kingston, Jamaica or Jamaica, Queens I w<;>uld not have flinched. Jamaica or
Jamaica? An even draw.
For as I stood there transfixed, trying desperately to make odd sense out of
the odd Mppening, I realized how effortlessly these youths of my homeland had
• assim~lated, accommodated and accepted an ethos =-- the rap hauteur - as their
own. Had all this been transmitted through cable TV and tbe local record store?
Pop ~agazines and clothing stores? Had I been seven years younger would I be
out on . the dance floor reebok-shod, robotically
undulating to Salt-n-Pepa? Had
I
home - fixed, inviolate, sacred- shifted so radically in so short a time?
I am not, nor was I, ignorant of the way Black culture unceasingly reinvents itself. The way blues, rag, jazz and R & B evolved up and down the Eastern _ •
Seaboard, from traincars and whistlestops to the Chickenbone Special, out from

a

DARI PBIUSBS / 83

New Orleans to St. Louis to Chicago, from NYC to Buffalo to Detroit to parts
unknown and back. I was respectfully aware of th~ sophisticated under/aboveground railroad of culture translated into a sophi~ticated ·music and language
whicti blossomed into a way of being in the world. 'Winged idioms. Viruses of
culture. '
So why did I stand like Moses before the burning bush, inarticulate and
•dumb, vaguely disquieted by the feverous celebration? Disquieted because in the
back of my mind I began to consider on what level these my young and _animated
kin boys and Jcingirls, related to th~ music to which they boogied. Especially now,
with my having firsthand knowled,ge of the areas which spawn this electrified
hellraising. Few if any of those dancing before me had witnessed city projects
and street gangs, had felt the gut-twisting fear of being picked off by a sniper or
the claustrophobia of six to a one-bedroom apartment. Few had seen a building
taller than four storeys, let alone a subway. On what level did the music, this
•entire lingua fran<;a, commq.nicate with them? lcould understand how the vernacular resonated with 300, 3000 years of signifyin(g), how "stupid fresh the def
jaµi" was. But this jubilee }Vas beyond celebration of the-new, it went deeper thari
mere roll-n-r.ock hysteria, spoke more profo~ndly than response-to-boredom
Beatlemania. This was tantamount to religion.
And again the disquiet. Why did I sense something to be wrong? Was it
the attitude or the music? The dissonance? The dejection? The sexism? Was it
this body language? Communicating a machine-like detachment from their
bodies symbolizing a rejection of their bodies's worth? I felt this to be true of
many of the city dancers lost in an urban wasteland. Was it true here too, in
agricultural Duplin County? Were they truly relating to this music? Or was I
merely an old.fogey at twenty-five? Declaiming: 0 ye wicked generation, looking for a sign. No longer able to synthesize at the speed of light the hip, the
skinny, the beat. But I too liked Fresh Prince and Kid~n-Play and Public Enemy
and L.L. Cool J. My trepidation then - or so I convinced myself - centered on
a deeper level.
.
. Driving home I pond~red and riddled myself, unable to satisfy my questions. Aware of having experienced som~thing vital and phenomenal and altering. But exactly .what I did not know.
This was first. One.
I

Two. Two is the middle. Two is Paul and Silas. Two is the 'divisive number.
Two is intellectual: thesis and antithesis. But we cannot gp on unless we go
throu_gh the gate of two. One, the inside. Two, the outside.
Two }Vas two days later. Two was me and my friend Randy Page.
Randy is my high school friend. My white friend; and in many ways my
closest friend. My intellectual soulmate. Which goes beyond being namesakes.
R~ndy, a raven-haire~, rail-thin, attractive sort, ~spectacled, by turns gravely
-\

84 /·DABI l'HlU811S
•.

.

\

pensive and quixotically mirthful, V'{ith a penchant for affec~ng the down-at-heels
Southern gent, had just earned pis Masters of1Theology at Union Seminary in new
York, and had begun doctoral studies in Church History aJ Vanderbilt.
This ·night we drove about Duplin and Lenoir counties, looking (or a
placed to have coffee and ja~. Our favorite pastime. In so short a: time we had
. accustomed
' to New York's perpetual sche<lule and had taken for granted
become
that _a coffee shop or some such place would always be readily available. Perhaps
a diner in NC? No luck. By ten o'clock door& were shut, lights went out and
Evaline or Ernestine or Sammy ~ere snoozing before the comforting purr of St.
Elsewhere.
,
.
At about twelve we decided to cut our loses and settle for Hardees, the
MacDonalds of the South, a study in orange plastic and tile, brightly lit and
smelling of french fries. A number of folk drifted in and out; high schoolers
giggling reassuringly in one comer; truckers imbibing coffee the way trucks do
gasoline.
I hovered over a ham biscuit and coffee trying to make sense of my experience of two nights before. I was not doing a good job.
· "So?..." Randy always played the role of intellectual superior. Irascible, •,
impatient, quick. My job was thesis. His antithesis. We would synthesis by
• committee. He was left brain. I right.
"But what about it struck you as so peculiar?"
I hemmed and hawed, unable to formulate and argument, I recapitulated
the,event, embellishing it, creating a narrative,.
_
"But what does it mean?" Pushing, always pushing. An exercise in
interpreting experience. Randy cannot abide ,an uriexaminep life.
Inelegantly I began to draw some parallels with Nietzsche and some ideas .
about societal progression, saying that Nietzsche was right up to a point, but ·that
it was also logical for a group to evolve into something similar to nihilism - the
amoral antecedent of bourgeois values - but into another less negative form of
the Superman. My kids, I postulated, throwing in a bit of G.B. Shaw for good
measure, were an example of thesf riew superfolk. Their a~tude and mechanical
•detach~ent evidence of the shift. Pretty good) thought. ·
Randy regarded me with a doubtful glare. He took a beat that would have
' made either Stanisla~ski or Senator Sam Ervin proud.
. "You know what your prciblem is?"
He annoyed the hell out of me when he plared this sort of role.
"You can no longer see yourself as a part of history."
"Excuse me?"
He went on to delineate the work of one Ernst Troelsh. A theologian
around the tum of the century, considered more a prophet tharr a theoretician, he
predicted/prophesied that a time would come; a generation, near the end of the
present century, which would no longer be able to see itself as a part of history.
They could see history, understand history, but would not be able to see them•

1

nm i,nuSBS 1 85
I

selves in it or be able to effect it.
"Excuse me?"
He went on to say that I suffyred, we both suffered, from the onus of this
prophesy and no longet felt ourselves a part of the onrushing river ·of chronology
~d its detritus. We were stuck on the riverbank. He pointed out protagonists in
my fiction caught on that riverbank, uqable to insinuate themselves into time and
suffering due to it. Affroelshian hero. He called me a Troelshian hero. ·
Evicted, mysteriously, from· history.
"Me n,o get it."
,
I liked my Nietzsche evaluation better; and we came to no synthesis that
ht. But the idea, like some unwanted child, remained with me. We talked of
1 nig_
other things that night, the Reagan White House, Margaret Thatcher, Yuppies, the
post-industrial wqrk ethic, but I never came to a satisfying interpretation of the
ska,ting rink. And now I had another bugaboo to contend with. The Holy I. The
divining rod. Had the inability to understand, my discomfiture in the presence of
Southern hip-hop, coine from my inexplicable divorce from my folk? Had I
somehow lost not only the comprehension but the connection to my peoP,le?
What if nature-had somehow churlishly Qanished me,,sent me packing without
home or hog mawls, black eyed peas or boogie-woogie? What then? And what
were the ramificatjons for my Blackness? For my generation? How can you be
Black without understanding Blackness?
Preposterous, I thought. But the thought lingered, lingered then festered.
And like all sores split in two. Two.

Three: the witching number. Beware of three. Three is the magic number. Three '
is the woman at the well. As Bettelheim says: •"Three·is a mystical and often holy
number..." Thr~e is tricky. Three is deadly. Three comes at you from three •
sides. Three is me.
•
Me in New York. Ah, New Yor).(. Spangled~spiked, spread-eagled,
, spick-n~span, splattered, splayed, swirling, city of sin. City 6f fun. City of
danger. Sodom, Gomorrah and Bethlehem.- Place of ~kulls. Canaan Land. Land
of Promise and Decay. Homeless-women begging quarters in ATM corridors.
White stretch limousines with black-tint windows. Crack addicts running down
Tenth Avenue. Financial analysts in rainbow-bright suspenders and Beau
,Brummel suits. Ladies of the evening in bikinis and leather jackets. A Black
1
mayor. Polyglot, multicultural. Capital of the world.
• l'>Tot Chinquapin, North Carolina, I learned long before I got off that first
747, steeped in national NYC lore from the age of five, reading in Newsweek and
Time, seeing the NBC Nightly News. La Manza Roja. I was scared to death.
But I was not alone.
, .
Everyone has New York stories. Ten million and counting, they blend
into a mosaic of truth and lies, anxiety and bliss; cantankery and child-like awe.

BGI JJJJIZIIJJliSBS
Something has to keep all these people here.
Work kept me here. A livelihood, a Horatio Alger wi~h - if not there
where? If not there why? A story so old it chafes with telling; sags with burden
in meaning. ~ut my message is not the coming, not the staying or the fun, but the
real estate. A place to live. ,
,
Also legend within the city of opportunity: the tight squeeze of so many
souls with bodies: where to live? How to find a place affordable to one making
barely above the minimum wage? I first lived with relatives in Newark. I next
moved to the Upper West Side. Then Queens. Brooklyn. The West Village.
Hell's Kitchen. Peripatetic dwelling, also a given.
But the truth 'is, during all the perambulation and vagabondism, as I
searched frantically through newspaper real estate "for rent" sections, courted
realtors, regged friends for apartment tips, and subleted, shared and subleased,
my eyes were set on Harlem. Sweet, sw~et Harlem.
It came to my mind like a sixth grade composition. What (Harlem means
~ - Jazz. -The Cotton Club. 125th Street. The Apollo Theater. The
,Schomburg Library. What... Junkies. Mugging. Shootings. Infant mortality.
Run-down ten~ts. Harlem ... Malcolm X. Abyssinia 1;3aptist Church. Edgecomb
Avenue. The Theresa Hotel. St. Nicholas Avenue. Means... Marcus Garvey.
puke Ellington. Countee Cullen. Langston Hughes. Jessie Fauset. To me.
Black. ~ •
No doubt about it Harlem, U.S.A. Symbol. Bold and Black as life itself.
Yet for one reason or another I was barred from entry, or so I thought.
One place would not even look at someone with a salary.less titan $50,000. One
place, though in a building with a transcendent exterior, horrified the soul in its
paint-chipping, bowed floor and catpiss-smelling interior. Back and forth. Back
and forth. Two extremes. Rarely a middleground.
Plus I had practical reasons to consider. I wor~ed in mid-town in the 50s
apd on the Eastside. Why complicate matters with a commute (it's exceedingly
tedious and time-consuming to get from the western reaches of Harlem to the
Eastside) - instead of living nearer to work, or at least nearer to a trainline which
cut down on time?
, Through chance, luck and practical reasoning I fqund places, but they just
weren't'Harlem. And though there was nd logical reason, I would feel an enormous guilt in the back of my mind, almost a subconscious nagging; though I
would ramble about 125th Street, visit the Apollo, the Schomburg Library, the
Studio Museum, visit friends o~ 135th Street, 143rd Street, Hamilton Hill, I
would feel slightly embarrassed when I had to say I lived "downtown.:' My
family, distressed at my physical vacillation, would, ask: "Well, why don't you
just find a nice place uptown. It's certainly more affordable." Many of my
relatives had lived for decades, decade,s before, in New York, in Harlem, lllld it
held the same meaning and connotations for me, in fact they had given them to
me. My brother-in-law had grown up in Harlem, and story-spun for me a mythic

-

I

•D!Bi l'BlUSBS / 87

Harlem of wonder and excitement throughout m,Y growing up. But I wou14
stubbornly answer that they did not truly,understanµing the dynamics of the
present real estate market and the fact that I had friends all over larger New Yorkwho tended to congregate in the middle of the island. Still they 'made it known,
subtly and unsubtly, thcj.t w)l black people in New York live in Harlem. Those
outside of it were pariahs.
•
- '
I mired and mucked about in my guilt, in a way almost unconscious to me,
thinking mystlf in someway a pseudo-Black person, irrational though it inay seem
now. The choice 'was to be Black and live in Harlem, or live elsewhere and be .
something Other. Consciously I came up with rationalizations, secretly suspecting the few reasqns I had offered up were water-solid and mlcrochip-thin.
Perhaps, in truth, I had deliberately not searched hard enough. Perhaps I
was afraid that to live in Harlem was to invite an onus of negative connotations I
might not live down among my professional - mostly White - colleagues.
Perhaps I was secretly ashamed, despite my bold talk of pride and knowledge and
work, of being Black. After years in an integrated school system, four years at a ,
predominately White university and now·struggling with the manners and mores
of corporate America and having an integrated social life, had I noW'betrayed rpy
culture? And what of those other Blacks across the city, who did not live in
' their Harlem, the capital of thejrHarlem, how did they deal with, think about,
culture? Silly, illogieai, foundation-less preoccupation worried me as I turned
Harlem into the Mecca and·Medina of the religion of Blackness, with me the
heretic. _ '
Until one evening when I was arguing with a young woman, an Ethiopian,
a direct descendent of Haile Selassie, a princess and anthropologist, who had ,
spent a great deal of time in Antigua. We lingered over coffee, quarreling.
"You North American Blacks, you make me so angry. You set yourselves
off from the rest of the Diaspora. As if your experience was somehow ~ .
'We suffered more.' When in fact the slavocracy of the Caribbean was. much
more brutal."
•
, "Th~t' s true, but what separates us is not only the insidious psychological
shackles of our slavocracy, but the extent to which our bloods intermingle-"
"Bullshit. You think there was no.rape and creoles through the world?
That doesn't-"
•
•
"But it goes beyonc,t that. We've become a part of this country in a way no
other Black group has beco~e a P8!1 of a country in the worlq. I mean, we made
this country. We still do. Why was slavery instituted in the first place? Free
labor. And 100!5: what that labor cre~ted, materially, for better or for wotse. Moreover, we've contributed to every· aspect of American life, scientifically,
legislatively, militarily, artistically. Hell, we~ America. We have more claim
than anyone other than the Native Americans. We've been here for three hundred
' :
•year-s, for christ's sake. I don't mean to disparage the Diaspora, but how can we
ignore our blood-and-sweat connection to the land, this very land here? Hell, this
'

'

88 / DABK l'BIUSBS

is my country too, just as much as it is for any white man, if not moreso ..."
As I went on with my oration I slowly became .aware, in a way I had not
before, how strongly I believed this. Days, weeks, months after that debate the
idea stayed with me: How integral Blacks are in the fabric of America. And
slowly it dawned on me that my subconscious guilt over not living in ijarlem,
silly as it was, was not guilt at all, but fear. Fear of b,eing estranged from my
culture, fear of losing some essential Blackness which I was at a loss to pinpoint.
A question not of a place, for I realized that Harlem was simply a place, nothing
more, nothing less, a place of splendid architecture, inhuman squalor, fabulous
wealth, a collection of neighborhoods of all steps of life, just as New York as a
whole is, but at the same time, as they do now, and created and r~invented themselves, again and again.
.
But here li;s the largest irony. Fpr I had been so blind that the blindingly
obvious had not taken hold: at that time I was living in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn,
home of Spike Lee and a thriving Black Bourgeoisie, not far from where I was
born; and before that I had lived in Rego.Park, Queens, another predominately
Black area; and I would later live on Manhattan's west side, Hell's Kitchen, a
place which before the first World War had been heavily Black, Harlem before
Har.lem . .While at that time Harlem had been predominately affluent White
people, and devoid of any of th~ associations I held so sacredly. Irony of ironies.
Were these places, the present repositories of Black culture in some way illegiµ- _
~ate in my eye;? Could Black culture only exist north of'Central Park? The
•
more I thought of it, the more the foolishness of my obsession of the idea sank in.
The very idea that Black culture was, could be contained was ~bsurd. Clusters of
Black people exited all over Nyw York, on the lower Eastside, Flatbush, Crown
Heights, Jackson Heights; the Bronx and beyond to the north in Yonkers, on to
Buffalo and Toronto, beyond to the south and west in New Jersey, Washington,
Virginia, Florida, and as far west as.Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. These
places were not embassies of Black culture on the outskirts of ,some mythic White
nation, they were the nation itself dwelling fully within.. That very moment.
But as I came to a deeper understanding of my fear of estrangement, it led
'
•
me to wonder-about that nation and how it was changing ,and how little we actually knew about it, in all its multifold and powerful manifestations. Moreover,
how were people like me, living on the borders of that great nation, constantly in
danger of being subsumeQ by a larger non-culture, defining themselves? What
did we look to to understand what'it means to-be Black? Beyond objects? Or are
these nuts and bolts of culture the culture itself? Where does one begin and the
otheiend?
, This then explained in "part my initial disquiet in Wallace, North Caroliria,
for I was attempting to solve an equation with too many unknowns. These being
the most crucial elements of the problem: how is the great nation wjthin a nation
evolving? With rap music and desegregation ~d attrition in schools and 50% of
young Black men in prison and a rising rate of teenage pregnancy and more and
j

•

.

.

D.illl PBlUSBS / 89

more black mayors and judges and representatives and the first Black governor
, and unemployment and drug abuse and The Cosby Show and a Black Joint Chief
of Staff and AIDS and the glass ceiling_:_ so many problems and ac~omplishments - how is this vast society, yoked to a larger country, thinking of itself? So
much is said and written about the "facts" and "realities" of Blacks in America,
but rarely have individuals across the country testified as to how they see themselves. In the media and in books, the assumption is always made for them,
always on the penphery of discus~ion, a given. But how do they define themselves? What do we really know about the whole of Black America, and what
changes in our perceptions would a more comprehensive knowledge bring about?
This was three, triangular and sharp-pointed: Where does the myth of the
descendants of the slaves end and the reality of the African American take over?
Thirty-five millioQ people. Sixty-three states, provinces and territories. An' e'ntire
continent. Three hundred years and counting. Three.

.

'

One, Two, Three. These are the ideas which have plagued m~ and must be
addressed: One, the idea of Black culture as a dynamic organism, doing it's
thang, with the ability to reinvent itself and grow; °Two: the idea of an individual
within a culture defining himself by or against that culture; and Three: the myth
or'culture, the perception of a culture within a culture, and the dangers of underestimating, narrowing or limiting an entire people by a set of truths no longer held
to be self-evident, which bear 1,esser and lesser r~lation ·to reality.

'

I

• 00 / D.mK PlllUSRS

CONTRiBUTORS'NOTES
OKOT BENGE is a graduate student in the Department of Literature at Makerere
University in Uganda.
KIMBERLY BLISS is a senior at Sarah Lawrence College, and resi_des in .
Kenmore, New York.
JOJlJ CLEAVER is a senior at Sarah Lawrence College, and resides in Atlanta,
Georgia. .
ROSE-ANNE CLERMONT is a senior at Sarah Lawrence College; she.J.s·a
dancer who hopes to join a dance company anc;l find a community bf writers to
work with.
MALKIA CYRIL is a sophomore at Sarah Lawren_ce, and resides in Brooklin,
New York.
.
•
'
DAPHNE OSA.YADE DUMAS is the Associate Dean for Multicultural Affairs/
International Students at Sarah Lawrence. She is an MFA candidate in the Ho~ce
Gregory Writing Program. She has studied the healing traditions of the Yoruba
people, the Tineh (Apache) and other indigenous healing techniques. She is
cuqently working Of\ a mythological piece on the middle passage.
WEDNESDAY GUYOT is a senior at Sarah Lawrence College; she is less interested in the ties that bind, than those which elude us. Her influences include Etta
James and her Amazon green parrot, Mack._
KIMIKO HAHN teaches poetry workshops at Sarah Lawrence College. Her
latest book is entitled Earshot
AV A MING HU is a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence.
TUSINGWIRE JOTHAM is an undergraduate student at Makerere Univer~ity in
Uganda.
•
LESLIE PEACE JlJBILEE is a founding editor of Dark Phases. She has an M.A.
in Philosophy from SUNY Stony Brook and an M.F.A. in writing fro.m Sarah
Lawrence College. Her poetry most recently appeared in ~yphen magazine along
with h_er artwork in the exhibit "Healing Through ,Cre~tivity."
WILLIAM MELVIN KELLEY has taught fiction writing workshops·at Sarah
Lawrence College since 1989.

D!Bl PDlUSBS / 91

.

'

·RANDALL KENA;N has taught fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College since
1989. He is the author of A Visitation of Spirits (1989), and Let the Dead Bury
Tlbeir Dead (1992). This essay is from a forthcoming book, Walkin~ on Water: A
Joum~y Into African America.
SUSANN. KIGULI is a graduate student in the Department of Literature of
Makerere University in Uganda.
CHRIS LEE is a senior at Sarah Lawrence, and resides in Los Angeles, California.
CHIARA MERINO is a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence, and resides in Puerto
/ ,
ruco.
•
. ,

~

MICHEL'NG is a sophom_ore at Sarah Lawrence, and resides in Honolulu, Hawaii.
ERNESTO OKELLO OGWANG is a graduate student in the Department of
Literatiµ-e of Makerere University.in Uganda.
KRISHENAPETERS is a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence, and resides in Smyrna,
·Georgia.
•
•
JACQUELINE PRICE received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 1992.
She currently resides' in Rochester, New York •
•
BERNARDO RUIZ is a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence. He was born in
Gua.Q.ajuato, Mexico, and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
ED SHEI is a first year student at Sarah Lawrence, and r~sides in Bloomfield
Hills,-;Minnesota.
JAMESMITH III is a sophdmore at Sarah Lawrence, ;md resides in Washington,
D.C .. When-he is not writing, he is composing, and singing rap songs.

l

ELIZABETH SOTO is a senior at Stlfah Lawrence, and resides in Kailua, Hawaii.
She plans to attend Cambridge University for her graduate studies in Anthropology.
'
.ANDRE,YOUNG is a junior at Sarah Lawrence, and !esides·in Danbury, Connecticut. He is a published poet who has given readings throughout New York
City. .
•