Thursday
The other day I received a note, to be forwarded to my wife, from a woman who is reassembling the Women’s Writing Group that Lucille Clifton gathered at St. Mary’s College of Maryland in the 1990s.
How would Lucille respond to the current state of affairs, Susan Pigman wondered. The question sent me combing through Lucille’s Collected Poems (2012).
While Lucille wouldn’t have written about all the racist killings we have seen in recent years–there have been far too many–the plight of blacks in America was always on her mind. In “whose side are you on?” she writes,
i am on the dark side always
the side of my daughters
the side of my tired sons.
Perhaps she would have written about George Floyd the way she wrote about James Byrd, the Jasper, Texas man who in 1998 was tied to a truck by racists and dragged to his death.
In “jasper texas 1998” she speaks as though from Byrd’s dismembered head before calling out in anguish, “why and why and why/should i call a white man brother?”
Lucille always writes about what she’s feeling at the moment and, in this instance, singing “We Shall Overcome” at Byrd’s funeral rings hollow. Feeling defeated, she concludes—as though from Byrd’s perspective but also from her own–“i am done with this dust. i am done.”
i am a man’s head hunched in the road. i was chosen to speak by the members of my body. the arm as it pulled away pointed toward me, the hand opened once and was gone. why and why and why should i call a white man brother? who is the human in this place, the thing that is dragged or the dragger? what does my daughter say? the sun is a blister overhead. if i were alive i could not bear it. the townsfolk sing we shall overcome while hope bleeds slowly from my mouth into the dirt that covers us all. i am done with this dust. i am done.
Sometimes one feels just so fed up–hope has bled out–that one wants to give up. “I am done.”
But of course, such discouragement is only momentary with Lucille. Down one day, she’ll be back up the next. I imagine her looking at Trump, who now has called in the military, and recalling a poem she wrote following the Kent State killings:
only to keep
his little fear
he kills his cities
and his trees
even his children. (“after kent state”)
Lucille is beloved because she taps into our strength as well as into our pain. Her own life was hard: in addition to being a black woman in America, she was sexually abused by her father, lost children and a husband, and underwent multiple illnesses, including cancer and kidney failure. That’s why “won’t you celebrate with me” has such power:
won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model,
born nonwhite and a woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
Clifton often makes it clear that she doesn’t owe her survival just to her own resilience, however. The black community has always provided her with a bedrock of support:
listen children keep this in the place you have for keeping always keep it all ways we have never hated black listen we have been ashamed hopeless tired mad but always all ways we loved us we have always loved each other children all ways pass it on
Under Trump’s rule, privileged whites are finally getting a small glimpse of what African Americans have had to endure for centuries. I suppose that’s a silver lining of sorts, making it clear that solidarity is the only way forward.
To end today’s post with a poem that is not just about survival but about creating a new and better future, here’s “new bones”:
we will wear
new bones again.
we will leave
these rainy days,
break out through
another mouth
into sun and honey time.
worlds buzz over us like bees,
we be splendid in new bones.
other people think they know
how long life is
how strong life is.
we know
When Lucille assures us that life is long and strong, I take heart. Pass it on.