READINGS FALL 1997
Yo!
You can keep adulthood! LOL! and if by crusty you mean curmudgeon, well sirrah, I wuz always a young curmudgeon. Yeah, still struggling with the work. I read in D.C. as a part of the inauguration of the Sterling Brown Visiting Professorship at Williams College, my alma mater. I was the last "act" of the weekend and read my poem to him and two of his poems at the filled-to-overflowing services held in the Andrew Rankin Chapel on Howard University's campus.
I had to bear witness to the other black poet who endured the real New England winter, the one that lives in the souls of those who continue to deny our humanity. Sterling Brown was not allowed to live on the Williams College campus when he attended. I could, but had my room bombed freshman year and had my life threatened twice more that same freshman year. My psyche was set upon by the dogs and water hoses of the unrelenting questions on my right to be.
But to know that there was another POET, (that God made a poet black and bid him sing!) another sharing this endeavor that has informed my life, that he worked and struggled in the same place back in the ancient of unimaginable hostile days, and that he was a literary hero, (as my father said, "Sterling was your man") before I even got to Williams, all this made meeting him when he came to Williams in 1973 so singular, such a lifeline for me.
I was so so so proud of these black alumni who worked to put the splendiferous function together, from the sublime to the real, from the tale sharing to the artifact presentation, from the formal to the funk.
We had an incredible weekend. Cornel West addressed the black-tie dinner, Paula Giddings, Sterling Stuckey, and Wahneema Lubiano spoke at the symposium-- same day as the Million Woman March which why I guess Eleanor Holmes Norton didn't linger with us, but commended us for our effort. And I wuz proud and sad!
Howard should have done this! But that's why I praise the Almighty Creator that I was endowed with some modicum of knowingness about my creativity. I am grateful for my dream and my art. My art connects me to the world in ever new and expanding ways.
You *know* I eschewed all the self-deprecating, race and man-hating fads of other brethren and sistren writers. And I am working-class and decided to work, acquire debt to get an education, to get a job. All of which had been reviled. No wonder gangster hip-hop stylee holds such sway. The disparagement of struggle and complexity began back in our younger days.
Yet I was rewarded by this invitation to do what I could where I could. And that rainy Sunday was lit with a warmth of connection and I was filled with the spirit and my reading was inspired. All praises! All praises to seeing the circle unbroken: a black Williams Gospel choir like the one we had started, led by Delbert Wigfall and Bill Tarter in the 70s... and meeting Tarter's daughter at the celebration dinner, already a graduate of Williams College, may the circle be unbroken!
And the glory and the honor to be on the dais with these other eminences, a black futurist, and two committed reverends, with the Chapel's choir behind us, nearly lifting me up out of my seat.
And these wonderful young black men and women there, that civil engineering student, who carried my ten-ton bag in the rain for me... All praises to youth so well cultured. And the young minister-in-training who took step dancing back home, to South Africa, to share with those who boot dance. May the circle be unbroken!
And my heart broke with the sharings of Sterling's story, all the ways those there loved and cherished him, all the ways in which the place he called home, did not.
Many learnings this weekend away from home. The Somalian cab driver who gave me an umbrella against the unanticipated rain. The proud black father cab driver who quizzed me on how his college student daughter should best go about getting her work published.
And the home visit with my friend whose 3 year old was as tall and as articulate as a 7 year old, whose baby brother at1 and a bit appeared to be nearly three... The joy of certain reunions and the comfort of old friends in the struggle of this journey called life.
Lord I miss my mother! I cling so tightly to her excellent home training at times like these, and I tell them mommy, if I mess up, it's not because you didn't try to teach me better.
I did a reading on Halloween in a little place in Pennsylvania-- Mansfield. Met a guy who knew Austin Clark. Austin, the West Indian intellectual-- who taught at Williams.
All we can do is work our work and be ready. The risk I took with EMBOUCHURE has paid off-- both in winning an award and in having several products --- when neither black nor mainstream publishers would publish me, NEA and multi-fellowship winner though I be!
So all praises for Sterling Brown, who embraced the working folk and the folkways in black folk and our varieties of speech an our soul thought and worldview and who renedered them with rigor and with love. All praises to this ancestor straddling the multiplicity and complexity of our beings, holding all the strands together, to braid them into titanium cables, roots and bridge spans, conveyance and connection. May the circle continue.
May the Creator keep you warm and well and inspired,
Akua
November 9, 1997
