Friday
It’s been less than a month since I shared Maya Angelou’s soaring poem “Still I Rise,” but I turn to it again because I can think of no better lyric to celebrate the nomination of Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s 2024 nominee for president. In my earlier post, I applied it Simone Biles, who has “And still I rise” tattooed on her chest and who used the poem as inspiration to win multiple medals in the Paris Olympics, including overall gold.
I can find an indirect connection between Biles and Harris. After the event, Biles trolled Donald Trump’s racist remark about immigrants taking “Black jobs” by tweeting out, “I love my Black job.” In Michelle Obama’s powerful convention speech Tuesday night, meanwhile, the former first lady dished out more of the same. Her zinger came after her observation that “Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us” and that “his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happened to be Black.” Then came the punchline. “I want to know,” she added. “who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might be one of those ‘Black jobs’?”
While I don’t think that Harris has an Angelou tattoo, I have no doubt that she is well familiar with the poem, which takes on special resonance when applied to her.
For instance, the first stanza mentions African Americans being written down in history with “bitter, twisted lies.” Angelou, of course, is partly talking about racist attempts to erase slavery and Jim Crow from American history books, which we see happening in school districts throughout the south (and not only the south). But Angelou is also writing about her personal experience, as anyone who has read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings knows.
In Harris’s case, meanwhile, Trump’s lies are coming thick and fast, including that she’s “stupid” and “crazy” and that she only recently became Black and that she met with Vladimir Putin and begged him not to invade Ukraine shortly before he did. (Fact check: she has never met with Putin.) Despite it all, however, she keeps going:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
One thing that particularly grates upon Trump’s nerves is Harris’s laugh, which is full and unapologetic. It infuriates him that she assumes she has full rights to a place at the table. I suspect there’s a pun when Angelou says she walks as though “I’ve got oil wells/ Pumping in my living room.” Striding across the stage with the assurance of a “Bradford millionaire” (to borrow from T.S. Eliot), her legs pumping in high-heeled pumps, Harris confounds those who believe that a Black woman should know her place. In fact, she enters as naturally as, and with the force of, moons and suns and tides:
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.
One line of attack that has been directed at Harris is a relationship she once had with San Francisco mayor Willie Brown (both were single at the time), leading Trump supporters to label the Biden-Harris pair as “Joe and the Ho.” Rather than get defensive, however, Harris—like Angelou—is comfortable in her body:
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
You can check out Harris’s dance moves here.
And so we come to a moment in history where this descendant of Jamaican slaves rises up “from a past that’s rooted in pain” to vie for the most powerful position on earth. She is indeed “the dream and the hope of the slave,” and their gift to her is resilience in the face of adversity:
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
Harris had her own version of this confident self-assertion in last night’s acceptance speech. “My mother had another lesson she used to teach,” she told the assembled delegates. “Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are.”
May Kamala Harris, and may we all, rise into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear.
