photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

 

BLACK STACEY:

saul williams, my generational son,

the punk-hop poet/musician

 

new orleans, 22 nov. 2004. when he got in my car, i told him i was proud of him, “very proud, really.”

 

 

it hardly seemed over a decade ago when we sat on the carpeted floor together in a barely furnished apartment in atlanta. he was at morehouse. my daughter kiini was at spelman. and their small group of friends, the red clay collective, was groping forward toward a glorious future, or more accurately groping toward a gloriously-hoped-for future. they were poets and writers, photographers and dancers, some were into the hard sciences, not saul williams, he was a philosophy major.

 

they published a journal and i contributed writing and advice. after graduation when a hard core of them, kiini included, moved to new york, saul would go to graduate school at nyu in acting. kiini traveled for a year and then did a masters in publishing at pace university.

 

i would visit them in new york, not often but whenever i visited it was good to get together with them. their energy was energizing to me; always left me with more to contemplate, inspired to do more. at one program they asked me to read poetry in a feature spot—kiini cried that night, so happy, so proud.

 

in later years, as saul’s star rose, he and i would sometimes share platforms and panels—once in boston i stood with him as old heads attacked what they perceived as the irrelevance of these black youth for whom blackness was neither a badge of honor nor courage; indeed, from the youth perspective, their blackness was, in fact, not a badge of any kind.

 

 

many of us, the black power generation of parents, never dreamed of children who were not focused on the color, culture and consciousness of their/our blackness.

 

now, in 2004, our future has arrived but the reality of our social landscape is no dream zone; bitterness sours our intergenerational relationships. it’s complex. it’s blatant. it’s infuriating. it’s tough being black in the 21^st century if you were born before the sixties. and it’s even tougher relating to today’s young people, particularly those born in the eighties or later.

 

we old heads figured that if richard pryor could publicly give up the word nigger, well nobody had an excuse to keep slinging that epithet. but little did we know that eddie murphy, crouch-grabbing, cursing and generally acting like a, well, like a niggah, was only the beginning. murphy was cool compared to martin, and def comedy jam, and gangsta rap, and shit, what the fuck is going on? these young negroes really are crazy!

 

i once asked a group of young people what they thought was the biggest problem with “today’s youth.” one perceptive young man fired back without a moment of hesitation: “today’s adults.”

 

 

and i knew precisely what he meant. there is not only a disconnect, there is also deep disappointment. young and old look at each other and are thoroughly uncomfortable with what the other has become. are these our children/are these my parents? what happened to them?

 

except for the older men still trying to hit on the younger women, most of my peers are uncomfortable around young people. whereas, i tend to be uncomfortable around many of my nostalgia-loving, over-50 peers, a significant number of whom are former rebels now turned responsible citizens.

 

as saul and i sat in café nicaud, he drinking a latte and eating a portabella mushroom and avocado sandwich with a fruit salad cup on the side, me chugging down nantucket lemonade, our conversation unfolded at a leisurely pace.

 

i asked him what he was up to.

 

he was in town for a gig at the house of blues with his band.

 

same band as amethyst (which was a rock group he led for his first album)?

 

no. this was stripped down, a quartet. he was now into “punk-hop,” kind of a mixture of punk and hip hop. violin, turntables & bass, i believe he said drums, and i know saul said he was doing guitar.

 

i didn’t know he played guitar.

 

he didn’t really play. he kind of just played what he wanted to play.

 

ok, i thought, i’m sure that’s an interesting aggregation.

 

we talked on about his daughter saturn, his son (i forget his name). i had met saturn in new york, but never met his son. they have different mothers. saul is a twice-time, proud father/single parent—he had been the primary care-giver for his daughter for two years while marcia returned to college for a masters.

 

i asked saul about acting. he said he really wanted to continue acting, if he could get good parts. he was signed on for a handful of films he looked forward to but none of them had yet been “greenlighted.” actors actually spend more time waiting for other people to get their act together than they do actually acting.

 

saul’s music career was not so interesting to me because i’m not into the type of music he’s making. saul views it as a role he’s developing for himself, a role that gives him a platform, partially because, as saul explained, actors don’t have a public platform. even when they get a hit movie, as he had with slam, they don’t get to interact with their audiences and say whatever they want to tell folk.

 

i was more interested in his writing career. saul told me about his next book, which he is committed to delivering to his publisher (mtv, yeah, mtv is publishing books) in late may 2005. i won’t give away the subject matter, except to say it is a mix of fiction and autobiography (parts of the book are literal transcriptions from saul’s journaling). as saul described the structure of his book, a point snapped into focus.

 

then saul got a cell call from frosty, his tour manager, he had to get back to check out early because they were going to get on the road right after the show rather than leave in the morning as originally planned. but before we left, saul urged me to finish making the point about the differences going down.

 

 

our relationship to race was radically different. he with his dark skin and nappy-headed fro—you know, not neatly trimmed like a superfly, more like the raggedness of a runaway whose head knows neither comb nor scissors. i, with my dark skin (although a shade or two lighter than saul), and my grey beard and uncut-but-not-uncombed afro, we could easily have passed for father and son, except we were talking amicably, laughing, and enjoying each other’s company.

 

i explained that in the seventies there was a major clash between the black power folk and the integrationists. we believed in nationtime and worked hard at creating alternatives: political organizations, schools, musical groups that didn’t include whites, hell, some of our venues didn’t even allow whites in the audience. and also at the same time we were doing that, there was a major push to counter our every move with mainstream supported, integrationist organizations. thus, at the height of the black arts theatre movement, rockerfeller and/or ford funded, in a major way, the “negro” ensemble company. how much clearer could they make it that there was a battle going on for the hearts and minds of black folk? moreover, the mainstream did not intend to concede one iota, indeed, they intended to win. and win they did.

 

i pointed out to saul that i recently read that the venerable dance theatre of harlem was defunct, kaput, finished, stick-a-fork-in-them; they started up in harlem teaching ballet at a time when blacks in modern dance were doing eleo pomare or else following chuck davis into institutionalizing african dance among african americans. and it was but a short pirouette from n.e.c. and d.t.h. to the modern day golddust twins, colin & condi. as i pointed out to saul, the twins had been groomed to do the jobs they were doing and they were good at it.

 

we have a whole generation of black folk who are deep into americanism, which reductively means into western values: fundamental christianity, winner-take-all democracy and global capitalism. but that was a choice and that was their right to choose to do so, even as i felt it my responsibility to chart a separate course. a course which includes a complex relationship to whites in general.

 

i recalled attending the sixth pan african conference in tanzania and meeting liberation leaders and seeing their european spouses. we had thought the struggle was for black freedom. both saul and i laughed as he said, yeah, it meant to be free to marry europeans.

 

part of me understood. during the civil rights era, the union of interracial couples was a very specific, and often very brave, political statement, a statement that could not be easily dismissed (even though many of us were often casually contemptuous of such relationships). and, as i told saul, today i co-direct a writing program in the orleans public schools. my fellow co-director and founder of the program is jim randels, a twenty-year-veteran public school teacher and union organizer. we work at black high schools. some of the kids call jim “jesus” because of his appearance: beard, long hair and white skin: the irony, of course, is that jim does not really look like jesus looked, only like the picture that europe has enshrined of how racists wanted jesus to look. many of the older teachers hate jim, for them he represents white supremacy still asserting itself in what they perceived is the guise of benevolence. yet, their politics is the flip story.

 

on the one hand, white-skinned jim is opposed to the status quo. on the other hand dark-skinned colleagues want to force our students to conform to the american way. i know where i stand on that issue, but i also know that race camouflages the major class, cultural and identify contradictions. this is a hard issue to deal with because of the emotional buttons that integration continues to push, less so with the youth, more so with the adults.

 

 

saul grunts and relates experiences in brazil where folk were asking him what did it feel like to be fire-hosed, and he had to explain that it was his parents’ generation who were fire-hosed, not him. but the brazilians with their history-lives tradition, found it hard to understand saul saying he and his parents were fundamentally different.

 

likewise, we, the parents of the saul williams-es of the world, wanted our children to be free of the burden of racism, but at the same time we tacitly expected them to wave the flag of racial solidarity—an action our children rightly perceive as equally burdensome. but there was more.

 

i got around to one of the harder aspects of our relationships while driving saul back to the hotel, which once had been a major department store and was now remolded as a luxury french quarter location. tourism is how new orleans’ makes its money. saul had wondered aloud about the young kids tap dancing on the sidewalk, hustling chump change, their bare torsos shinning, their air jordan sneakers with bottle caps embedded in the soles as surrogate taps. what could one say: don’t dance for your supper? in one way or another, don’t we all dance to the system’s piper in order to receive money?

 

“i believe we males are divided by the absent father syndrome.” saul quietly listened. it’s the dominant social reality of black family life. we older men are not there. and i wasn’t saying it as some lofty abstraction—i am in my second marriage. although i have a good relationship with my offspring, there was a time when i was not there.

 

far too many of our young men wouldn’t recognize their fathers if they were confronted at gunpoint. this male alienation, youth from elder, also too often unavoidably leads to a psychosis of self-hatred as young men father children but are estranged from the mothers of those children, except that the manifestation of the self-hatred is actualized in a visceral hatred by the single-father young black man for the absent-father older black man.

 

as we pulled up to the hotel, saul tentatively asked if i had time to attend his show, he would put my name at the door, although he knew i was really busy and probably didn’t have… i told him i would try to make it. we both knew a 10:30pm, punk-hop show wasn’t my particular cup of herbal peppermint tea.

 

i had forgotten that saul was coming to town, so i was pleasantly surprised when he had called me before noon the morning of the show. it was a touching act of filial respect. he didn’t have to reach out. i immediately suggested we go out for coffee, tea, or whatever. he agreed. now he was inviting me to go out. would i agree?

 

finding agreement is the question confronting our respective generations: can we agree to support each other, agree to participate in each other’s lives, even as we recognize that although we are both black, we are actually born of two different worlds, actually see each other and our respective futures in two different and sometimes contentious ways?

 

* * *

 

embracing black stacey

 

new orleans, 22 nov. 2004. when he came off the stage, even though i was standing near the steps, he didn’t see me. they had done a high energy set for over an hour, i knew the spaced-out look that was in his eyes.

 

 

at such moments you don’t really be seeing what is physically before you. you are seeing everything you remember from those past moments of using the power of performance to hurl yourself into the way-out-a-sphere, you are still immersed in that floating feeling, remembering your imagination boosted by the adrenalin of art creation. as he turned to head to the green room, i caught up to him quickly and shouted out a greeting. he turned. recognized. and embraced me like a lover, full body press. we were lovers and my presence made clear, in a way that no words or nothing else could: i care. i love. you. brother. son. man.

 

i’m glad you came.

 

i’m glad i came.

 

and we smiled at each other saying nothing for a couple of seconds. just smiling.

 

i was glad i got a chance to see the set. the punk element was really strong, as was the spoken word. saul is really figuring a way to mix it up. there were a number of moments i really, really liked although approximately 25% of the time the music, the beats, were so loud the words were indecipherable. but when you could hear, saul gave you an earful.

 

one headbanger had the hook: where my niggaz at? and the answer was incarcerated, in the military (“some benefits and a gun”). then there was a song called african student movement, during which saul cajoled us: instead of fighting for them, why not fight for health care, education… you get the point. but it was not all protest and hard beats, there was a tender moment—which is oxymoronic to talk about tenderness and punk-hop in the same breath, but tender is what it was.

 

 

saul started off making a point of what he saw as a difference between emcees and poets, the image of being hard and the reality of being human. he spoke out against “motherfuckers” whom he defined as anyone/everyone that denigrated and disrespected the feminine. saul challenged us to have the heart to acknowledge our human hearts. beautiful.

 

i watched the audience of approximately 120 people on a monday night in the ‘parish,” which is the new orleans house of blues’ small upstairs venue. the three-fifths filled room was approximately 75% white and 99.9 percent young. yours truly was the .1 percent that was old. at one point when saul was talking between numbers, someone asked for more beats and less talk. saul talked on. another time someone was on a cell phone, no, they were taking a picture...

 

another interesting note is that there was a hard core of saul-heads down front. on more than a few occasions, as saul recited a number they knew, the followers would loudly declaim the hook lines in unison with saul. it was undeniable: saul had found a way to penetrate into the consciousness of a core of folk in new orleans without the aid of radio and television, which was in fact one of saul’s objectives. earlier when he told me that going commercial was a way to reach folk, i nodded but retained reservations—how many times had i heard musicians say when i get famous i’m going to really come out with some stuff. my experience and analysis suggests that if you ain’t doing it when you’re unknown, you would not be likely to do it when you had fame and fortune at stake. but saul is not weighted down with my perspective.

 

for me, punk-hop is far, far removed from anything commercial, but saul has a recording deal, has a video about to be aired on mtv, has a book publishing deal, is making movies. so, the reality is: he’s commercial. and the reality also is he’s saying something and reaching people. more power to him. still, this is not my kind of scene, not the kind of venue i desire nor the type of music i enjoy.

 

but, even so, i realize, not only should i tolerate it, i should also embrace it and learn from what saul is doing. why? simply because when i was him, i too was striking out in startling new directions, directions that my parents would not have explored. he was black like i had been, i was then and am now no blacker than he.

 

for my money (i had a complimentary admission, but if i had paid to get in, for my money…) the best number was black stacey, an autobiographical number about growing up the son of haitian parents, his father a minister, and he dark-skinned and skinny. he talked about some of his more self-depreciating moments, and then hollered out the chorus: blaccckkkk stacey (which is his middle name).

 

 

he left nothing on the stage. was holding back nothing. gave it his all. the veins on the side of his neck buldging. his eyes bugging. throwing himself spastically into some of the more hyper-energetic numbers.

 

once again i was proud of what he was doing, even though it was clear he couldn’t play guitar (thankfully he only stabbed out chords on one number, wisely relying mostly on his mouth chops rather than his non-existant guitar chops—yet, wait a minute, this is punk, and it doesn’t matter that you are still learning some of the basics of your craft.

 

even though we had been standing at the foot of the stage steps less than five seconds, a bunch of stuff ran through my head in the brief interval. the crowd was hollering wildly, they wanted more.

 

saul leaned into me. “you know that piano poem?”

 

he was talking about my cecil taylor homage, “let me ‘splain it to ya.” i had to tell him no, i didn’t know it by heart. he asked me, you sure you don’t know it. i knew where this was going. he wanted to call me up to do a number with him for the encore. i declined. i told him, no, i didn’t remember it.

 

earlier while he was performing, there had been a couple of mili-moments when i thought about what i would do if i was on the stage, but no, this was saul’s night, this was his time, not mine. i didn’t need to be out there, especially since performing in this kind of venue was not something i wanted to do.

 

saul jumped back on the stage with his band. acknowledged me on mic and then they did two numbers. since i was now standing backstage, behind the bank of speakers, it was even more difficult to hear the words, but i watched the drummer. he was pounding full force, but while knocking out the hard rock rhythm, he was also mouthing the lyrics, clearly enjoying playing as much as the raucous crowd enjoyed receiving the music. it was a moment of oneness.

 

afterwards, saul asked, you want to come back, i said, no. i was headed home to get some sleep. i didn’t need to hang out with the band and the other young people who would invariably be there surrounding saul, one of the major voices of their generation. this was their time to step forward, and, in that specific context, my time to offer background support.

 

i didn’t need to hang out. it was sufficient that i had come and seen him perform, and had been there to embrace him when he came off the stage.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear 

 

 

 

Jevetta Steele

 

            "Don't look at me that way. I tried to warn you. I told you, 'don't love me.' You would not listen. I'm a cardinal, just a red flash through the dawn and then gone. Morning breeze disappeared at noon."

            I remember those words. The sound of the words. The way you spoke. The purse of your lips when you were thinking or silently asking for a kiss. Wide lips. Big lips. The taste of your breath. The aroma of your words. You were that close when you said them. I smelled each exhale of syllables.

            My sheetrocked wall remembers. The carpeted floor does too. My wristwatch could tell you the time. Sometimes you wouldn't wear your watch when we went out. When you were getting bored I could always tell because you would always want to know what time it was and then I would know what time it was.

            Like when we were sucking on those crawfish and you were telling me they tasted O.K. but they weren't worth the mess of cracking open those muddy red crustacean shells. I tried to tell you the trick was to suck them rather than rip them open.

            You opened your mouth and laughed. You opened me and laughed. I could see your teeth, your tongue, your gums. The palate of your mouth. The half chewed pieces of crawfish. Your laugh. Then you closed your mouth, smiled, leaned over and kissed me, the salty flavor of the shellfish still on your lips.

            I wonder how I tasted. Once you kissed my genitals. No, it was more than once, but I remember that specific "once". Just like that "once" when I hit a high fastball home run further then I had ever swung before. Although we had no fence and the ball was being chased down by Pop-pee with his strong right field arm, I still didn't even have to run. I trotted and clowned slowly around second base backing into third watching Pop-pee pick up the ball and knowing, no matter how strong he was, he couldn't get the ball all the way home before I shuffled across the plate. I'm not a fast runner but that's just how hard, how far I had hit that ball.

            You laughed in my groin, coloring my pubic hairs with the paint of your smile. I got hard like long ago when I was at the Golden Pheasant Lounge dancing close with Inez who told me, "if you don't hold me so tight I can move better."

            I didn't and she did. I don't remember what music we danced to but I remember her hips and the locomotion of the ocean. I was in way over my young head but didn't care.

            The closest I ever got to the red bird was fifteen feet or so, and then it was gone a streak of red ribbon in motion. I grabbed your arm once, not meaning to stop you or pin you down or anything, but just to momentarily delay you. As hard as I held you, tight like my bat, I still hit nothing but air. Even though I held you I completely missed you. You hissed like the swish of the bat fanning the air and the thick thud off the ball burrowing into the catcher's mitt. Or like a snake warning me you didn't stand holding.

            I think all I really wanted was for you to look at me, admiringly, just like I looked at that ball shooting off high into the atmosphere off my bat, which I still held in the tingle of my left hand, the wood's vibration massaging my palms. When I hit it I could feel it.

            Inez hardly seemed to be moving. I looked down as best I could at her pelvis, at her hips to see what she was doing but I could not see anything. No motion that suggested how she extracted the excruciating pleasure her subtle unseen motions were awakening in me. The warmness in my pants, the throb, and the absolute let down of the three minute record ending an hour too soon. The rest of the night sitting around the table talking, they drinking beer and me drinking a soft drink. All of us taking turns dancing, although Inez was not my girl she had rolled on me and taught me not to hold too tightly.

            I had seen the pitch coming in high and outside and I knew I could hit it, knew I could reach for it, knew I could. When I started swinging, even before I hit it, I knew it would be gone. It would be out of here.

            Sure enough, I call you three days later, or however many minutes later and the sound reverberates around in emptiness because there is no you to receive it. Your ear is not there to catch my call.

            The telephone wires don't care. The cardinal's red is so strong that even after it is gone I still see red. I once saw the dull red blotches on the edge of the sanitary napkin you had folded and thrown into the dark brown trash can in the bathroom. The blazing red of the lipstick you threaten to wear just to tease me knowing I don't like the taste and feel of lipstick on my lips or yours. The vermilion red of your blood the time you cut yourself. The emergency red of the pain of you almost doubled over suffering the cramps the same day I saw the leavings in the trash can. The succulent red of that watermelon and its translucent red juice dripping down your chin. The off-red of your gums, and of course the moist fleshy red of the inside of your vagina. The indistinct red of your eyes one night when you hadn't had much sleep in two days. The primary red colored ticket for William's party that neither of us went to even though we were both invited. This was before we got together, and before we broke up too like the way one pulls a round loaf of bread apart. The messy red of the pizza sauce with the sliced tomatoes and the brownish red of cooked bell peppers on it. Some of it stained your sleeve. Common red at the stoplight when you were in that borrowed car and took off with the wheels spinning and smoking I imagine, but because I was inside the car grinning at how you reveled in the power behind the wheel I didn't see the rear wheels raising up.

            What other red was there? I can't remember. The cardinal is gone. "Don't love me," you said even though you never directly said those words. What is this the twenty-eighth time I called you. I don't know. You don't know cause you're not there to answer, or if you're there, you are not answering.

            Red is such a different bird color, you always remember a red bird. You remember the way it flew. And fire. Van Gogh with his hand in the flame ready to settle for seeing her only as long as he could hold his hand in the flame. Gordon Liddy in prison scaring hard timers with his ability to hold a cigarette lighter to his arm and let it burn. The red of the flame burning hairs on Liddy's arm. And burning skin on Liddy's arm. And burning flesh on Liddy's arm. And burning up the blood on Liddy's arm. And the other hand, Liddy's other hand steady holding the flame steady. Not just standing the pain without a hint of what was going on reflected in his eyes, in fact holding a conversation about something he had read earlier in the day. Some of the hard timers dodging his eyes fascinated by that flame burning up that arm but more fascinated, and, if the truth be told, not only fascinated but also frightened by those eyes that were somehow disconnected from that arm. Any eyes that were not part of the body not only could not be trusted, but that body could not be trusted either. He probably could cut his hand off and throw it away with the other hand while steady talking about the weather or the cost of airline tickets going up. Liddy's other hand steady holding that flame, keeping the tab on the lighter depressed so the flame wouldn't go out, so the flame would burn his arm up.

            My hand was in your flame and I thought I could stand it. I could stand it. I could take your red and paint my life with it. But I couldn't hold it. I couldn't keep it. Your red had wings and my ability to stand pain only had feet.

            I got cocky and stood nearby home plate, waiting for them to relay the ball and try to throw me out. I knew they couldn't. They knew they couldn't. I had hit that ball. I thought I had hit you like that, high into the sky, but your red arm was faster than my feet.

             What is this, the thirty-ninth time? Really it's the last time even though I don't know it's the last time. I'm still thinking I'll see you. You never know when you'll stop looking for the red bird, but you do. Soon the memory is not red. Soon? No, not soon, but eventually.

            It was almost evening as I remember it and the sun was going down. The sky was rouged on the horizon like a cardinal streaking cross the edge of the world. I guess you're not going to answer me are you, even though I keep calling you long, long after the red is gone.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear 

 

 

 

milton nascimento

 

in the scheme of things, as flows this river called life, our barges momentarily close to each other, because the currents are what they are, fast running & strong, with an undertow that will sweep you off into areas you don't want to go if you don't steer your craft with determination, because there are also so many lights and sights on the shore, so many distractions, so many invitations to dock and get lost in enjoying the landside diversions, because there is sometimes fog on the river and also because of our natural wariness—and that's really a wrong description, our wariness is not natural, our wariness is "nurtured," after being on the river awhile one learns that everybody who rides a barge is not necessarily a fellow traveler—because of all of that and more, especially this fog and just the speed we travel, a speed which discourages skipping around from boat to boat, a speed which sometimes does not allow us to fully grasp what is happening as someone whizzes by us and we are also moving real fast and here passes us somebody else moving faster, like amiri baraka says, somebody's fast is another body's slow, and who knows when you are on your boat alone or I on mine, alone, who knows, and we be trying to make our way, even those of us straining to push our barge up river, no matter the direction we all are struggling along, all of us once issued from the mouth waters of our mother's womb are actually headed downward toward that big sea wherein we will become part of the eternal dust/water & spirit of this universe, how long do we have on the river, who knows, where we dock, that is our choice, how long we sit there, and then again, sometimes it is not really our choice, sometimes, like our ancestors we are forced into spaces and not given choices, not given the space to decide how to maneuver and negotiate our time on the river, fortunately, for us, we have a bit more leeway than did our ancestors in this regard—and I give thanx and praise to them because their struggles on, or should I say "in" the river, swimming without aid of boat or oar, swimming sometimes without even driftwood to hold to, swimming with balls and chains shackled to their limbs, the ways in which they miraculously waded through and parted the waters to make a way for us, to create an opportunity for us to acquire barges and boats and other vessels, the navigational lessons they learned and passed down to us, learned on the sly, on the fly, anyway they could, and passed on, goodness, we must give thanx and praise -- so here float we, sometimes moving on our own steam, crisscrossing the river of life, sometimes out of fuel just drifting, some times shut down in despair, and sometimes we're just out there and we've got everything we need to keep going except the will to do the hard work of moving our boats along on the big muddy of this river whose waters are increasingly polluted and stinking and sometimes even on fire, rivers literally on fire burning oil slicks, or sometimes we are in serious disrepair, rudders broke, holes in the hull and the like, sometimes got everything we need to move except good common sense so we waste our resources and the richness of our legacies handed down to us from those who struggled to get to the water in the first place, who waged the herculean battle just to get down by the riverside, when I use this metaphor of floating on the river of life, I mean more than just you and i, more than just a line I toss out to make conversation, I mean something so deep, so deep, so when I call out to you in the lightless night or through the morning fog, when I holler out my identifying shout and momentarily maneuver close, close enough so that our barges bump gently against each other, touch and go, as we float on down the river, and it is morning, or just after noon in a crowded river, or late past midnight and we are the only vessels visible in the darkness, or whenever, when I shout and sing my request, ask your permission to board, it is in the fullest awareness that my request is not about a merger of companies but rather a momentary sharing, a temporal but not temporary alignment of spaces and personalities, temporal in that it is time bound, you've got places to go, people to meet, things to do, and so do i, and neither of us intends to leave our vessels unattended for long, nor either of us give up our vessel for life aboard the other's, and similarly, I understand should I hear you sing, unlike sailors mythisizing some madness about the sound of women singing on the water is a siren song that will lead them to ruin, I understand—i'm listening to milton nascimento at this moment and his music is so mystically beautiful, so ethereal, I mean his voice climbs like sunlight descending on a shaft through the clouds except that it reverses the flow and rises where the sunbeam comes down his voice ascends and the melodies he utters and the stories in his voice, I don't speak portuguese but I hear milton's meaningful beauty, and when I read the lyrics translated it helps or doesn't help, but all i've really got to do is open my ears and listen, and that is the beauty of great art, we don't have to know how it was done, in many cases don't even have to know the language, especially when it's music or visual, all we have to do is be open to beauty and it will take our hand and lead us there, it will kiss us full on the mouth, lips open with the surprise of the tongue moving lucidly in and out our mouths thrilling us to our toes, ah milton nascimento—I understand you are not asking for anything all the time even though this knowing is forever, the paradox of life on the river, nothing lasts, everything flows on, everything changes, but awareness and knowledge of the deepness and connections between soul mates stretches pass any fence that time can erect, breeches the dams built to hold us back and exploit the movement of our waters, so sometimes I will call to you, or you to me, and if we are close enough and if the time permits, I mean if we are not busy steering through some particular rough waters or on a mission that requires all our attention, if there is time we will tie up to each other and one board the other for a moment, and that's all I ask, permission to board, not to stay, nor to take anything with me, but to be in you, with you for whatever sharing time there is for us on this river called life, encircled in your embrace, and, of course, you in mine, for whatever time…

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

Horace Silver

 

            Where is the orange pumpkin face with the lit candle inside? Where the wide snaggle tooth smile like the one Ma'dear used to beam at us? But she also used to bust our butts and that warm smile would turn to a grimace just like the one you got now, and just like I never pleaded with Ma'dear to slack up on whipping us, I'm not going to beg you to stay.

            You used to glow radiant like you were plugged into god's bright light when you first came here in that happy yellow dress I liked to see you wear. Although you arrived in December, in winter, your aura was so unwintery, plus you had yellow shoes with spaghetti straps. From the beginning you were always munching fruit.

            "You like jazz?" I asked. You nodded. I gestured toward the sofa and dropped a record on my system. You sat listening attentively to Horace Silver blowing the "Tokyo Blues." I don't know why I chose that album to play to you, or why I asked did you like jazz, or even why I invited you over.

            You were so thin, thinner than any woman I had ever been with at that time. I don't even like thin women, so I mean you were already way ahead of the game. Maybe it was the geisha girls on the cover with Horace sitting between them that caused me to pause while flipping through the stack searching for suitably impressive sounds to play. Maybe your bright red lipstick, the rouge tastefully spread on your cheek, and, of course, your quietness reminding me of the way I imagine Japanese women are, and your carefully painted fingernails, and the small amber ring you wore, with matching earrings, your legs crossed listening to "Cherry Blossom," saying you had that record in your collection.

            Before the LP was over you looked up at me. I was standing tall. You smiled and then sat back and looked away briefly, then looked back and gave me a full, big eyed stare like you had already figured what you wanted out of this. I was just steady looking at you, at how small your breasts were and trying to think was this going to be worth my time. If I knew what I know now, I never would have cared about you, but I didn't know. You let me fall in love with you, and now that I do, you don't care.

            I still remember standing in my living room the evening of the first day. It was already December dark even though it was only like a quarter to seven. You were admiring my African sculpture that my sister gave me from her trip to Ghana and I had on a cranberry colored sweater. Horace Silver was spinning exactly at 33 and 1/3 revolutions a minute. The orange lights on the turntable gauge where perfect squares standing still. I remember all that. I just kind of stood there listening to Blue Mitchell's exuberant trumpet calls and was wondering what all this was about.

            Yeah I'm a little upset. I mean I care. Yeah, I would prefer if we worked this out, if you would glow like you used to when you looked at me with your huge brown eyes telling me about some book you had read or how you liked the way I touched you, glow like you did that first evening when I was standing surrounded by Horace Silver's hip sounds washing over us and you returned your face to me and told me, "I don't want anything serious. I want this to be light. I want us to enjoy it. I'll stay as long as it's light."

            I suppose I was supposed to kiss you at that moment, but Horace was playing so beautifully I had to be more subtle than that. So I squatted in front of you, touched your knee briefly and simply said, "yeah, that's what I want too. As long as it's good." I never intended to really, really love you. I mean you wanted it "light," and I imagined this could be very convenient, us seeing each other and seeing other people too.

            I asked you if you wanted something to eat and you held up the apple you were chewing and smiled. You never liked to cook. I never met a woman like you that was so open about not wanting to cook, about refusing to cook. I cooked more than you did and I can't cook, and my surprise to learn you were a school teacher. I guess I thought all school teachers were also supposed to know how to cook.

            You never corrected the way I talked so I couldn't imagine you an English teacher but I guess you had to be something. I never really knew you before that day you came over and right now I'm realizing that I have never really got to know you since.

            It's only a few months later. The weather has just turned to spring, nevertheless, here you are intoning in that husky voice of yours (a sexy huskiness that first attracted me to you, a voice which initially sounds too deep for such a petit body, that voice which tipped me off that maybe there was more to you than it looked like there was), here you are saying "Harold, it's not light anymore."

            When did it stop being light. It's still light for me. For a teacher you sure do get a lot of stuff backwards. Winter is heavy, spring is light. Look at you right now, you're hunched into that frog position you like so much lately: your heels pulled up on the edge of the chair, your arms wrapped around your legs, your chin on your knee.

            "Is this because I don't want to drive to Atlanta to see Nelson Mandela?" You answer "no," dragging out the short response, but it sounds like yes to me.

            "Was it about that AIDS walk I didn't want to go to and you went by yourself?" You answer me "no" but here we go again, it sounds like yes.

            "Is it because I don't want to use condoms? I mean it's mainly you and me right..."

            You slowly close your eyes.

            "I mean you did say you wanted this to be light, right?"

            I can hear you not listening to me.

            "What do you want? You want us to live together? You already said you don't want to be married. What, huh? I don't understand..."

            I looked at you. You are fading before my eyes. I reach out to touch you, to hold you. My hand goes right through your body and touches the back of the chair.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

 

Emilio Santiago

 

I woke up, slowly, or I thought I woke up. Maybe I was still dreaming. Next thing I knew I had quit my job at the factory, and at the office, and on the assembly line and I was sitting on the warm ground with my father fishing in City Park. We both had on freshly washed jeans and old shirts. His had a torn pocket and a hole in the left sleeve, mine had chocolate milk stains on it from that morning when I went to drink the milk and missed my mouth.

 

My dad was showing me things he never showed me when he was alive, or maybe it was things he showed me but things somehow I was unable to see then even though he tried to show me. I smile as I see myself learning stuff from my dad. I was 13 and I was learning how to smile like a man.

 

When the sun started going down we walked home. He walked slowly enough that I could keep up without rushing. I was holding the poles and the empty bucket, we had released all the fish we caught. Daddy had said there was no need to take what we didn't need, we had food at home. I asked him why had we come fishing then, and he put his arm around my shoulder, loosely around my shoulders, and kissed me on the nose.

 

Fully awake now, I look over at you. You are still sleeping. The windows in our room are shaded but the morning light is spread around the edges like the crust on bread. You make a very light whistling sound as you inhale while sleeping. I don't want to turn the TV on. I don't want to see anymore hostages. If I turn the tv on I will become a hostage too. What does your mother think of me now? I am in the middle of my life and there are no bells on my shoulders, no post graduate degrees on my wall.

 

I can hear the traffic in the street outside. Where do people think they are going? I wish everyday I could go somewhere I've never been before, touch the doors of houses I've never entered, walk in the wash of seas that have never wet me. I start to wake you and ask you the last time we walked along in the park wandering hand in hand through the flock of ducks or when was it I most recently kissed you in public. Over all I'm pretty satisfied with our furniture, it's just the nagging thought that we didn't really need a leather sofa and glass topped coffee table to be happy, but it's just a thought.

 

I see the shape of you beneath the thin sheet pulled up almost to your shoulders. The radio has come on automatically, and as the jazz filters into the room and into my consciousness I realize it's on WWOZ and someone is on the radio saying that this is a gorgeous Monday, that Mondays are the best days of the week. I look at him queerly. The music is nice.

 

Suddenly there is this sound, this song that doesn't quite sound like the average song, it sounds so, so, so I don't know, so lonely, no not lonely, so incomplete, unfinished. It sounds like he is in my head, or I mean that music is music that is inside me, and somehow he saw it. Did my father tell him to play this music? And then the track is over. I listen for who the artist is and the DJ calls my name, but I never made any music. I never made the music I wanted to, maybe he is trying to tell me something.

 

The next song that plays is a ballad in some language I don't recognize but I clearly see myself singing this foreign song on a red tiled patio early in the morning with five freshly cut yellow roses in my hand.

 

I stand up to listen to the music better. Both my hands are on top of my head with my fingers interlaced. I am nude. You wake up. I can feel you watching me. My eyes are closed.

 

When the song ends you ask me what am I thinking. I tell you I don't know and you kiss my hand, the hand with which I reached down to touch your thick dark brown hair.

 

Is this still a dream? No, my fingers are wet where you kissed me. The music is filling our bedroom. Maybe I am supposed to be an artist. Finally I tell you as much of the truth as I am able to understand at this moment, "I was just listening to that music and it made me think about a lot of things I've always wanted to do...."

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

Just Like A Woman

 

         You know I ain’t scared of nothing. Not nothing. Mainly cause I been tried, tested and found true. I been stabbed. I been shot. I ain’t never been poisoned but I done slept in the same cell with the most vicious bunch of cut throats in the world, thanks to old cigar smoking Judge Shea who sentenced me to a double dime on accessory to armed robbery. I wasn’t armed but I was there when we stuck that store up when Peety popped the dude upside the head with the gun, I just stepped politely over the blood and tears flowing on the floor, and went on about my business of rahzooing the cash register. We had sense enough to shoot out the video camera eye, but not sense enough to take the video tape before we left. Aw well, you know, you live and learn. Time ain’t nothing but a classroom, and either you learn and move on, or you stay stupid and just keep doing time. I did a dime and loose change behind some stupid shit.

         You know the joint is good for getting your head together. It didn’t take me long to realize that sticking up poor people was both stupid and evil. First they ain’t got nothing much and second why take anything from somebody who ain’t got next to nothing? You hear what I’m saying? I view the joint just like grade school, you do that shit once and you ain’t never supposed to return. Me, myself, I ain’t never going back to the joint, twelve years is a motherfucking-Ph.-motherfucking-D. Besides them young thugs what’s showing up now in the slams is straight out ignorant ass fools, you know what I mean?

         As I look round this funny ass hole in the wall, it seems to me that everybody in this motherfucker done been up on the yard except for that pretty boy sitting over there checking out every hard leg what walk up in here, I guess he know how long he would last in the joint, and then again, some of them living better in prison than they ever could live out here in the world cause there ain’t no big time faking and fronting up in the joint. Damn near everybody is ether sticking and getting sucked or else sucking and getting stuck, so you know, you kind of get used to men being women. Dudes like pretty boy is a prize that brothers fight and die over everyday. Lil dude like him get a big time murderer to be his old man, ya know, a cat who got more time than Methusaleem, or whatever that old dude in the bible was called, anyway, they get sponsored by one of them kind of dudes who ain’t gon never see the sun shine again.

         Being in the joint is just like anything else after you get used to it, it becomes your life. The joint be your life just like being in the world is somebody else’s life. You do what you got to do to live. And you do whatever you can do to enjoy your life, you know what I’m saying? At first it be different, but after you spend a bunch of years doing it with dudes, you get used to it. Some people don’t, but most people do. It ain’t no big thing, not like it seem…

         Well ain’t this a bitch, here come Popeye Henry. How in the fuck did he get out? And who that woman he got with him? She look too fine to be Popeye’s squeeze. She must be a whore and he must be buying his first piece since getting out. The motherfucker acting like he don’t know nobody, strutting around with that real pussy by his side.

         “You want another beer?”

         “Yeah, give me another one.”

         “We don’t give nobody shit around here. You can buy another one.”

         “I got money, motherfucker…”

         “Man, have some respect for your mama. Call me Mr. Motherfucker.”

         Me and Euclid the bartender been going at it for over two hours now. Euclid’s a funny ass motherfucker. He claim he got his name cause he was conceived in the back seat of a Ford when his mama was in high school and she opened up a book that was on the floor and picked the first name she saw. Ain’t that some shit?

         You don’t talk much, do you? You ain’t said a word since we been sitting here.

         Aw shit, now look at this. Look like Popeye and that broad got some kind of major static happening.

         “…I can say whatever I want to say.”

         “See how much you can say with a fist all up in your big ass mouth.”

         Oh Popeye, that ain’t no way to treat a lady. Boy, you know I taught you better than that. “Henry, my man, why don’t you cool it.” She must not be no whore he just met, cause I don’t believe he giving her enough money to take a ass whipping like that.

         “Who that dipping they lip in my business?”

         Look at him fronting. He ain’t even so much as looked over here to see who it is sounding on him. Reaching his hand up in his coat like he packing and I’m supposed to be scared or something.

         “It don’t matter who it is, right is right, and right ain’t never wronged nobody. Just cause you got a beef with your lady, you ain’t got to go upside her head.”

         “Fuck all that shit. A man take care a business wherever the business is.”

         Now where this motherfucker get off challenging somebody’s manhood. See, before I went to the joint I would have been all over that nigga talking that murder mouth shit. But like I told you, I don’t plan on going back, and seeing as how I’m still on parole, I don’t need to be getting into no fight behind somebody else funny business. Except, you know, I know this nigga. We did time together up on the yard. I know him in ways he don’t want nobody to know. Maybe he didn’t recognize my voice.

         Now look at this shit. He hitting her again just to show me he can hit on a woman. Hey, man watch my back. I don’t want no heat slipping up on me while I’m dealing with this roach-ass nigga.

         “Miss, you ok?”

         “Steve, this ain’t your business man.”

         So, you did recognize me. You just fronting but I got something for your fronting ass.

         I look at the woman, and she don’t say nothing. “I said, are you ok, lady.”

         “Hey man…”

         “I’m talking to the lady, Henry. Not to you.”

         “Yeah, but that lady is with me.”

         “Meaning?”

         “Meaning, this ain’t none of your business.”

         “I’m alright,” she finally says cutting the silence of me and Popeye squaring off like some typical Saturday-night, two-dudes-fighting-over-a-bitch shit.

         I can hear the place get quiet. There’s always this silence before some shit jump off, sometimes the silence is less than a second, sometimes it be a minute or two, but there’s always this point where it could go any which way, and it’s like everybody be holding their breadth. And waiting. The dangerous quiet. That’s when you got to act fast.

         Popeye slips his hand back in his pocket. Knowing this nigga, I’m sure he got a shank, might even be packing a piece. I turn my attention away from him, hoping to cool the scene out, “What’s your name, baby?”

         She looks at Popeye when I ask her that. “I’m Marlene.”

         Popeeye glares at her. “What difference it make to you what her name is?”

         Look at this motherfucker fronting. “My name is Steve. Me and Henry go back a long ways. We did time together. Did you tell her about me, Popeye?”

         “She know I did time. I’m just saying that was then, this here shit is now. And I don’t appreciate…” I watch him make exaggerated hand motions in his pocket. “…you butting into my business.”

         “When you got out?”

         He don’t answer me. After we exchange snake eyes for a minute or two, I let it drop and head back to my seat. From over my shoulder I hear the ruckus. “What the fuck you looking at him for, bitch?” And I hear him slap her again. I know Popeye is just acting out on account of he just got out the joint, and he sitting up in here with a bunch of motherfuckers who been up in the joint, so he trying to prove that he’s a man and not a turned out, jailhouse bitch, but he ain’t got to be beating all over that broad to prove he a man. I can’t stand to see no shit like this go down, so I got to do what I got to do.

         “Popeye,” I say to him as I turn around and walk up in his face. “When you was my woman in the joint, did I treat you this way?”

         Henry don’t say shit. He kind of shrink back into himself a little, take his empty hand out his pocket, don’t say shit, and just walk away straight out the door. Marlene looks confused as a motherfucker.

         But, see Popeye should have been cool from the jump and I wouldn’t have had to call him out on that mishandling a woman shit. It reflects bad on me for him to act like a thug. Right is right and wrong ain’t nothing nice. And, like I said, ain’t nothing wrong in doing right cause right ain’t never wronged nobody. You know what I mean?

         “Hey, Euclid, sell me another beer, mister motherfucker.”

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Cfreedom

 

 

 

NICENESS

(for the girl in the next block)

There was a time when beauty was so beautiful. Those moments before the rose wilts, the flame turns to an ember, when you smiled because you could see that I was happy to see you and that made you happy. We were going somewhere. Winston and his girl were in the front seat driving, you and I were in the back, hanging on to each other like a delicious cookie in the hands of a two year old. Both of us were newly past the age of majority, able to go anywhere, do whatever, and at that moment the “whatever” was your hand lightly on my knee, and, to my great delight, palm pressed lightly on the inside of my left thigh, that same hand that was now making haste very slowly up the arc my legs, which I opened slightly to make room for your fingers.

The night was no longer young. We had been dancing and drinking, and neither one of us was ready to let the other go, and rather than romantically kiss me you leaned back, your right cheek resting on my chest just below my goateed chin, then you sighed contentedly and simply said: it’s a nice night.

I knew what you meant. I hadn’t kissed you yet but it was nice—I don’t often use that square word to describe the sublime but within the confines of the car that warm night, the windows down, the darkness of our breathing synchronizing like birds and bees, “nice” was a just right way to describe what we felt for each other. We was nice. I hadn’t much even touched your breast or anything, but there was a knowing in our closeness, and more than closeness there was a palpable intimacy hovering over us even though we were not alone in this car speeding through the night. Everything was niceness.

 —kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

The Breeze And I

 

Last Thursday I drove out of town to Lulling, Louisiana, only thirty or so miles upriver from New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi River. I was there to see a neurologist, Dr. Hightower, who was an associate of my brother Keith. Keith is a cardiologist and arranged the visit because he suspected I might be exhibiting symptoms of the onset of Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative illness for which there is no known cure. Additionally, Parkinson’s is idiopathic, there are no known causes of the illness. The best modern science can do is a drug regimen that will offset some of the effects.

 

In the early seventies I never thought about health issues when we were traveling back and forth all over Mississippi, often racing each other cross the length and breadth of an extremely hostile terrain for young black firebrands such as those of us in The Free Southern Theatre. I remember we were speeding from West Point, Mississippi headed over to Cleveland, Mississippi. Their infamous highway patrol caught me.

 

“Boy, you know where the courthouse in Oxford is, don’t you?”

 

“No sir, I don’t.”

 

“Well, you best go find it and pay this here ticket.”

 

I found it.

 

The court clerk was an old, white man straight out of In The Heat Of The Night. He pulled down a big, weathered ledger book. I remember his hand was trembling and the book shook as he lowered it to the counter top. At that time, I saw absolutely no commonality between me and that wrinkled, old presumed racist. Today I realize he probably had Parkinson’s.

 

I know now what I didn’t know then: all of we humans have more in common than are apparent when we judge each other by easy to discern differences such as gender, race, ethnicity or social behavior. I wonder was the old man’s tremors ever diagnosed or was he doing what I had done, simply accepting the inevitably of the shakes and coping with it as best he could.

 

How long would I have gone without professional attention had not my physician brother spotted something and had he not been able to track down a neurologist to check me out. We’re over five years after Katrina and medical care in New Orleans is still very much a spotty proposition, particularly for specialties and for mental health. I mention the latter because so many of us are suffering various stages and/or severities of depression. Our vary states of dementia, from mildly retarded to full out, bona fide crazy, often inhibit us seeking help for preventable and/or curable illnesses.

 

Worst than the paucity of health care in post-Katrina New Orleans was my general antipathy toward hospitals and medication, and it’s not just me. I recall Keith was hospitalized once with a fever and the physicians couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. He had an infected appendix but the protrusion had lodged behind a rib bone or something and was not detected by normal x-rays. They wanted to do exploratory surgery. Keith nixed that. I think they finally found it when they did a CAT-scan x-ray or something like that and with a proper diagnosis, the doctors were able to operate before Keith’s appendix burst.

 

Also influencing my attitude was the way my father died of a mysterious illness. Friday evening he was talking. Friday night he slipped into a coma. Sunday morning he expired. Keith said when he arrived from out of town early Sunday morning there was not one doctor present who could tell him anything definitive about what was happening with daddy.

 

My father was not into taking medications. I’m like him. I don’t even take aspirins, but even if I was to seek treatment, without Keith’s expertise and assistance I probably would still be waiting for an initial screening. When obtaining health care is difficult, many of us just shuffle along, self medicating ourselves with over the counter pain killers. Worse, we generally ignore early signs of trouble and don’t seek treatment until we have some kind of major incident or incapacitation. And don’t even bring up the question of health insurance—if you’re poor and don’t have good health insurance, you can’t afford to get sick. It’s depressing.

 

Lucky for me my wife had Blue Cross insurance from her previous job as an X-ray technician at Veteran’s Hospital and my physician brother had excellent contacts, so I was able to receive first class health care shortly after a potential problem was spotted. My relatively stable mental state is due in part to the social safety net surrounding me.

 

It was a warm, late fall day in December and I was driving out to see a doctor. The temperature was inching up towards the high sixties, too warm to be considered a proper late autumn by New Yorkers but just the way we like fall and winter in the Crescent City. The drive over went well. I had music I’d burned to CD and when I got really close to the destination, I called for the final directions. I had just passed the non-descript gate and had to double back half a block.

 

Keith had seen a tremor in my right hand. Of course I had noticed it before but at sixty-three, I just passed it off as one of the many physical breakdowns that occur with getting old. I paid it no mind because the malady was infrequent and not serious enough to prevent me from using my hand.

 

From somewhere in my stored memory cells an image came to mind: a cut kite, fluttering downward. We used to have the kite patrol, a bunch of us adolescents on our bikes chasing after kites that broke away or were intentionally let loose. We would tear off, racing to see who would be the first to find the errant kite.

 

Back in the late fifties flying kites was a big thing in New Orleans. Most of us made kites. And even a lot of the adults would join in the fun. Miss Vivian who lived across the street from us and who sold chickens that she raised in her back yard would cross the street to the empty lot that was next door to our house to join the fun.

 

Sometimes we would make spending money by helping Miss Vivian slaughter young chickens but I didn’t have much stomach for it, so after two or three times I just stopped going. I hope my hand never goes spastic like those headless chickens whose wings beat against our pants as we held them still after Miss Vivian had sliced off their heads.

 

We had cut down most of the trees in the lot and that’s where we played baseball and football instead of in the street like we did when we played two-handed touch with the big boys. Lionel could throw the ball with some degree of accuracy damn near the full length of the block, three quarters of the block easy. But the street was no good for kite flying because car antennas and kite strings didn’t go well together, so when it was kite season, we generally stuck to the empty lot.

 

A white man whom I never saw or met owned the empty lot between our house and the corner house and refused to sell it to my father. Eventually, my father bought the corner house, which was on the other side of the lot between the two properties. My daddy’s father stayed by himself in the corner property until Betsy, when my grandfather drowned after retreating into a closet as the water rushed in.

 

My brothers had tried to go get him but they said the water came up too fast, and wires and trees were knocked down and all kinds of stuff was flying through the air. I believe Keith almost got hit, or was blown over, or something, and my father called Keith and Kenneth to come back. My family spent that night in the attic of our brick house before somebody in a boat carried them down to the roof of Hardin Elementary School in the next block from our house, the same school where my mother taught third grade. At that point my father must have deduced that his father was lost to the storm.

 

I was in the army in Texas when the hurricane hit. Kenneth says my daddy didn’t talk about his father drowning. They didn’t find the body until the following week, after the water had subsided and they were able to get into the house. Maybe it was even two weeks later. I know now that daddy was deeply affected—how do I know?

 

To quote my brother Kenneth’s favorite explanation for a lot of the behavior of we three brothers, “it must be genetic.” Over twenty years later I’m still deeply affected by daddy’s death even though on the surface I seem to have made peace with my father’s departure. I can talk about his transition without wincing or crying aloud. Such stoicism is typical of we Ferdinands, we take our blows and move on without lingering over the pain.

 

I don’t much remember my grandfather. I recall visiting him before he moved in after our family purchased the corner property. I have a deep but extremely fuzzy recollection of how my father would go check on his father when the old man stayed in some musty, two-room apartment. I believe it was somewhere in the upper ninth ward but I don’t accurately recall. My grandfather liked those old, big, square soda crackers—much thicker and more puffy than the thin saltine crackers like the ones we ate with cheese.

 

After grandpa relocated on the corner, my brothers and I would take turns crossing the lot to bring dinner plates to him in the evenings. He didn’t talk much. I don’t think we ever had an extended conversation beyond “here’s your dinner. You need anything else?”

 

I don’t have any image of my mother ever going over there, nor even my daddy spending any significant amount of time talking with his father on the porch or anything. I didn’t have words for it but it seemed to me my grandfather wanted to be alone, wanted to live hermit-like. I don’t even remember a radio over there. My father loved listening to the radio but wasn’t crazy about television. We used to watch the Gillette Friday Night boxing matches but that’s about all I remember my father regularly watching on television. I’m beginning to think solitude runs in my bloodline.

 

My grandfather was a big, red-bone man. Didn’t look much like my father. My daddy’s mama had died when he was very young, maybe five or six. From the one picture we found of her, years later, she was a dark-skinned woman—we couldn’t really make out her features on the blurry photo. Daddy undoubtedly took after her in appearance. I don’t think my daddy remembered his mother. In fact, my daddy didn’t even know exactly when he was born. The courthouse out in Napoleonville, or was it Donaldsonville, had burned down and the records were lost and none of the family knew for sure. So much history gets lost in the wind.

 

Even when the wind is blowing real hard, a kite doesn’t fall like a plane with engine failure, or even a balloon that springs a serious leak. The kite just sort of slowly flutters downward until caught in the branches of a tree or on a power line, occasionally on the roof of a house, seldom settling on the ground.

 

There were a lot of trees all over the Lower Ninth Ward when I was growing up in the fifties. It was sort of like living in the country. Indeed, we had a real farm with cows, horses, pigs and stuff in the next block before the city bought the two block stretch and built a school in the late fifties or early sixties. I never got to go to Harden Elementary because I was too old by the time it opened. It’s funny the bits of unconnected things you remember when you plummet your past.

 

I never made a box kite. I had wanted to, like the kites I saw in a book, or even construct one of those Chinese dragon kites, but I got so wrapped up in building fighter kites with razor blades embedded in the frames. We would crash the kites into each other trying to see who would have the last kite flying. In fact, now that I think about it, chasing down kites that had been knocked out of the sky was how the kite patrol started.

 

A red kite descending against a blue sky towards a not too distant green tree line. That’s what I think every time I remember my hand trembling until I dropped my fingers down to the desk top or atop my knee. It seems Keith’s suspicions were on target. Dr. Hightower—what a name, I wondered during the drive over whether he would be a black man. Leslie Hightower. I was willing to bet he was a brother. I was right. Anyway, after the check up, I listened with equanimity, even cracking a joke or two as Dr. Hightower delivered his preliminary diagnosis. I indeed was exhibiting symptoms of the onset of Parkinson’s Disease.

 

It’s days later I can’t resist the urge: from time to time I hold my hand out to see if it’s shaking. So far, every time I’ve checked it’s been relatively still, but I take note whenever I feel a brief tremor and it reminds me of catching a falling kite whose string has been cut.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

22 december 2010

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

HOW I BECAME THE WALRUS

 

 

1.

Recently on Twitter, a student called me a walrus [Darian said my teacher(Kalamu) looks like a big ass walrus with one tooth. Smh cuz he right.].

 

a big old, one-tooth walrus. I smiled. That was a nice succinct image: something both strange and known, mysterious and by implication “knowing,” as in: I knew something and the observers knew I knew something without necessarily knowing what it was I knew or whether what I knew was valuable (to me, to them, or to anyone). A walrus.

 

2.

I remember when I consciously became me, i.e. when I made the intellectual decision to pursue being “me,” which after all meant not so much deciding “who am i?” but rather really meant, without either self-flattery or sentimentality, identifying “who have I been”: what made me, who made me, how family life and growing up where I grew up shaped me and how I responded to the shaping, like how certain tree branches made better bows that others and how to know when you had a good bow, a stretch of wood that was limber enough to bend but resistant enough to snap back and power the arrow where you wanted the arrow to go, as far as you needed the projectile to fly and with as much force as you need the missile to hit the intended target, like that, and then after identifying the antecedents, i.e. all the forces and influences that shaped me, then the really crucial part was deciding who I wanted to make me be

 

Who? Given the material that was me, who would I make me be/come? Hence, I was both the sculptor and the piece of wood or metal, or the lump of clay, except my material had a mind and part of my mind wanted to be what I was, while another part of my will wanted to be something else, and the most fierce battle was always internal, always the struggle to stop being who I was and give birth to who I wanted to be

 

3.

another student responded [I remember ribbin his funky az].

 

Reminder: don’t take yourself too seriously.

 

4.

I was always overweight as a child, sometimes slightly, a few moments grossly, but normally always a little more so than those around me.

 

Being different always makes a difference.

 

5.

The moment I consciously decided to be me was precisely the moment I decided not to be someone else.

 

I was walking quickly thru the chill toward the dorm door, a walk I would make at least a couple of hundred times more, even trampling through snow. I was seventeen. Snow was new to me. Just starting college. I’m from New Orleans, a city on the river, near the mouth of the Mississippi; a place where it is perpetually green, seldom snows, and even in winter grass grows. I was going to school in Northfield, Minnesota, not too far from where the Mississippi river starts its southward flow. And as I reached for the handle on the door, which was mostly super thick glass with a heavy metal frame, I saw a reflection of myself.

 

On the back of one of his early Columbia albums, I believe it was Miles Ahead although it could have been Porgy&Bess, Miles had his sweater thrown over his back with the arms of the sweater tied around his neck. Cool ass miles. I liked that. (You can understand how that iconic figure danced in the stunted style consciousness of the southern butterball that was me.) So, on my own for the first time, with no parent to correct me when I made whatever I considered to be hip sartorial decisions; no questioning why you wearing “that” whatever color or cut that particular clothing happened to be; no one to tell me what to put on or what to take off; in my mis-shaped budding self-development, I had my sweater thrown casually (or so I hoped the thing appeared casual)—you know I never could wear a sweater loosely around my middle with the arms tied dangling from my waist, my waist was too big and my arms too short for that—and, of course, I had the cotton sleeves tied around my neck, and sort of half-hoped, half-thought of myself as Miles without a horn.

 

Which was when I saw the reflection. I wasn’t Miles. But more importantly, I also recognized that the reflection wasn’t “me” either. My reflection showed me a fake, a not very good imposter, failing to be both me and failing to be Miles.

 

And in one of my most lucid and unforgettable moments over this sixty-some lifetime, I let the handle go, yanked the sweater arms from around my neck, gathered up the sweater into my left hand, reached out and opened the door with my right. I had said to myself: that’s not me.

 

6.

Me trying to be what I am not, is not me. I wanted to be an authentic me more than I wanted to be a look-like someone else, even someone else whom, for whatever reason, I admired.

 

7.

the first actual life-step in becoming ourselves (i.e. the first doing as opposed to the first thinking about doing) is to recognize what we are not and consciously step away from whatever that is, whatever behavior, affectations, gestures, way of talking, whatever.

 

A baby has to learn that the self is not someone else, not the mother whom you love to snuggle up to; not the blanket, the red-stripped ball, the stuffed animal, the bottle, none of that is you.

 

Not all the pictures that are presented to us of what we ought to be or what we desire to be; not the movie actors with whom we are smitten, or of whom we are jealous or envious, or whatever; not the entertainment stars, the musicians and athletes. Moreover, if you are not actually them, they are not you. That social equation is axiomatic, you are not someone else and someone else is not you.

 

And here, of course is where it gets tricky, because here is where desire enters the equation and the capitalist manipulation of our minds in America. In America we are taught we can be anyone we want to be.

 

And that is just not true.

 

Sure, we can be/come a lot of things but not “anything” we desire, especially given how our desires are so easily manipulated, or as George Clinton in one of his more perceptive moments (he has had more than a few moments of enormous clarity mated to an ability to pithily verbalize the insights gained from clarity), anyway, what uncle George said was: mind your wants because someone wants your mind.

 

Someone wants your mind. Why?

 

Why do we want to control the minds of others?

 

The Last Poets said, the white man’s got a god complex. Is there an innate human desire to control others? I don’t think so. Instead I think there is an innate human desire to control, how that desire is manifested is the crucial question. Some people want to control others. Some people work really, really hard at self control. Other people focus on controlling things: a juggler practicing at keeping thirteen navel oranges or brown chicken eggs rotating through the air without dropping any of them. Artists honing their craft so they can manipulate their mediums and their instruments in order to produce artistic work that is a striking creation.

 

Which all, I guess, brings us back to the god complex: the human desire for control can also find outlet as the human desire to create. With our people, this desire tends to morph into spontaneous, artistic expression regardless of what we’re doing. Creating beauty and goodness on the fly, in the moment, with whatever is available. Like Stevie said: you gots to work with what you got.

 

What did I want to control, want to create? My question, and at one level or another, the question for everyone is: who do I need to become in order to do what I want to do?

 

8.

The only exception to my overweight years on earth was for about three years during the mid-seventies when my diet and exercise regime was so fierce I looked like a shrunkened me. I remember my mother telling me I had lost enough weight, to stop. I was running five miles a day, a strict vegetarian (including no milk or milk products), routinely working 15 or 16 hours in every 24, plus listening to music and engaging in all kinds of political activity literally all over the world.

 

My passport picture from then makes me look like a refugee from the Congo who had been a guerilla soldier upcountry in the bush.

 

My clothes looked like they were hand-me downs from an elder uncle several sizes larger than me.

 

I had the gawky, elongated stature of a giraffe.

 

9.

Those of us born on the margins of society, whatever may define our marginality, it could be weight, it could be race, it could be religious beliefs, it could be gender, sexuality, whatever, those of us born on the margins of our society have both a challenge and an opportunity.

 

For us, the outsiders, the question of self-identity (which is always simultaneously a question of recognizing who we are and deciding who we want to become), for us identity is invariably a choice between assimilation and iconoclasm, either conform to the norm, which by nature we are not, or resist our society’s normative and create our own personal norm. Or as Charlie Mingus accurately called the state of desired existence: myself when I am real.

 

Like Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Pops, Trane, so forth and so on. To be ourselves invariably for those of us lucky enough to be both born on the margins but reared in a society of plenty, a society that can support its citizens both materially and spiritually (whether the society does or does not do so is another question, I’m saying instead that the society has enough water, enough food, enough open space and green space in both the raw material sense as well as in the intellectual and spiritual sense) plus enough so-called weird people so that there can be a community of weirdoes, a society within which one can strike out on one’s own but at the same time find like-minded individuals, i.e. forge a sub-culture, a movement, a self-identifying group or organization or club or social society.

 

In New Orleans we have bands of musicians; Mardi Gras Indians; social, aid & pleasure clubs.

 

My mother belonged to a bridge club (most of the members were school teachers) called the OGG’s. They took to the grave with them the meaning of the initials.

 

When I was in junior high school we had “the fun club,” a grouping of us who would pool our money and throw a Sunday afternoon party each month rotating like a full moon rising at the houses of our different members.

 

And, of course, from high school on I had political organizations, beginning in 10^th grade with the NAACP Youth Council and reaching its apogee in the seventies and early eighties with our pan-afrikan nationalist organization Ahidiana, which ran an independent school (pre-school thru 4^th grade), a book store, a printing press, a performance group (the Essence of LIfe), and over-arching political formations (ranging from an annual black woman’s conference to day-to-day community organizing around social issues, particularly police brutality and related social equality struggles against the status quo).

 

Later my social activity was a writers workshop, the last and most successful of which was the Nommo Literary Society.

 

The current and perhaps final of these social formations is Students at the Center, a writing program that functions in the New Orleans public high schools.

 

Which is where in 2011, well over a decade after I started in the fall of 1997, I daily teach young people on the cusp of adulthood, the time when they are most rebellious, least likely to take directions from an adult elder, and at the same time they are in a position to tremendously benefit from adults honestly sharing life experiences with them as these young people set out on their own self-determined paths.

 

10.

The trick is to guide by inference, by sharing learned life lessons and experiences, but staying out of the way, a long way out of the way. Not to befriend as much as push and boost. Push them out of their mental nests, pick them up when they fall, and throw them back up in the air, with but one simple instruction: fly.

 

I once admiringly wrote of the elders who preceded me: they made me strong enough and taught me how to run, but they never told me where to run to.

 

11.

For we elders, especially we male elders, we must always, always resist the urge to become sharks feeding on our youth, whether it’s basking in their easy applause and adulation, or more sinisterly physically consuming their youth in our own vain effort to hold on to youthful energy, intelligence, beauty.

 

We adults should be a sanctuary for youth, a safe place where the young can both explore and be themselves, seek and search for the selves they desire to become; experiment; fail and succeed; discover and get reinforcement; we should be foundation, but we can not be them, and we should love them at a distance.

 

I was lucky to have elder teachers who understood how to love me without seeking to be a peer friend, especially not a friend with benefits. But of course the beauty and innocence of youth is a hard temptation for old people to resist.

 

It’s hard not to be a shark when there is so much lovely flesh swimming nearby. Even harder not to set up aquariums for personal enjoyment. Not to collect favorite students within the prison of our personal delights.

 

Seems like life is a constant battle to socially do the right thing, to set a moral example of what a good person is: a human being who respects all other life forms and strives to leave the world better and more beautiful than when we were born.

 

12.

I am constantly learning, literally. I hear people say the cliché: learn something new every day. But in order to learn we must study, have a hunger to know what we don’t know, and teach what we do. I believe learning is not complete until we teach, either directly or by example.

 

13.

The walrus reads, studies life. A shark stalks, eats life. We can choose.

 

14.

I have decided to spend the last years of my life working with young people. That’s how I became a walrus.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Cfreedom

 

 

 

TOUCH

(for Asinjae Monae Jackson)

 

we can live together / and still some crazy way

 

there be a certain wall of silence surrounding personal matters / usually

 

only a few intimacies and renegade thoughts, embarrassing ideas

 

too risque or too taboo / to share with others, even blood

 

close others, or friends who’ve known us since before we could read, not to mention also with intimate others with whom we share physical nakedness

 

there is an us that we decline to let others see

 

except when we honestly write

 

& even then we try to keep most of our deep interiors / under

the wraps of acceptable thoughts

 

but

 

still sometimes

 

we peek out / something serious escapes

 

and like a jolt of electricity, say from a toaster when we've stuck a butter knife inside trying to retrieve a small crust of bread / or even the static on a winter day when our woolen slippers on the carpet causes a little spark and we flinch, like that

 

we touch others and they are surprised / by the force of who we are / and we in turn are surreptitiously delighted

 

when they say to us: i never knew

you felt like that

 

we should consider all of our writing is a kiss, a caress, or even a fist, but in any case, all cases, if we are true to

 

our selves our writing is us touching another

 

—kalamu ya salaam