Friday – Juneteenth
To honor Juneteenth, I have reconfigured a post originally written in June 2020 following the murder of George Floyd. The essay was originally set in motion after my wife received a note from a woman who was reassembling a women’s writing group that my then colleague Lucille Clifton gathered at St. Mary’s College of Maryland in the 1990s.
The woman wondered how Lucille would respond to the current state of affairs. The question sent me combing through Lucille’s Collected Poems (2012).
While Lucille didn’t write about all the racist killings we experienced in recent years–there have been far too many–the plight of Blacks in America was always on her mind. What stands out about Clifton’s poetry is her determined optimism.
It’s not a facile optimism, as is clear from her poem “jasper texas 1998,” in which she couldn’t do other than express her discouragement. But a poem about her father abusing her when she was a girl sums up her resilience. For years she had a special animus against the moon because she remembered it shining through her window and doing nothing. (In some ways it stood in for her mother.) At the time she identified her father with Wolf Man, changing into a monster when the moon waxed full. Although it took her years to process the abuse, after he died she revisited her prejudice and concluded,
only then did i remember how she
catches the sun and keeps most of him
for the evening that surely will come;
and it comes.
only then did i know that to live
in the world all that i needed was
some small light and know that indeed
i would rise again and rise again to dance.
(“the man who killed the bear”)
At multiple poetry readings I heard Lucille declare that her purpose in life was to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” and she never deviated, feeling free to afflict the formerly afflicted if they in turn become oppressors. She articulated her guiding principle in “whose side are you on?”
i am on the dark side always
the side of my daughters
the side of my tired sons.
Perhaps she would initially have written about George Floyd the way she wrote about James Byrd, the Texas man who in 1998 was tied to a truck by racists and dragged to his death. In her poem about him she spoke 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 wrote about what she was feeling at the moment, and in this instance people singing “We Shall Overcome” at Byrd’s funeral rang hollow. Feeling defeated, she concluded—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 is just so fed up–hope has bled out–that one wants to give up. “I am done.”
Such discouragement was only momentary with Lucille, however, as it would have been after Floyd’s killing. Down one day, she would be back up the next. I imagine her, following the ICE killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, recalling “after kent state,” which she wrote in 1970:
only to keep
his little fear
he kills his cities
and his trees
even his children
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 and an abuse survivor, she 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 made it clear that she didn’t owe her survival just to her own resilience, however. The black community always provided her with a bedrock of support. In “listen children” she invokes the oral tradition that kept hope alive:
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 have finally gotten a glimpse of the powerlessness African Americans know well. I suppose that’s a “small light” of sorts, making it clear that solidarity is the only way forward.
To end today’s post with a poem that, in the spirit of Juneteenth, is not just about survival, here’s “new bones.” It envisions creating a new and better future:
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.
