And what can I give you for the day when you realize you don’t know what you’re doing or where you’re going? A day that will come, as surely as the night follows the day. A day when you’ve lost your way, your light, your joy, and maybe even your self. A day, in fact, when all you have are questions, not one single answer, and these questions feel like a nest of snakes slithering back and forth through your brain.
I give you:
REASSURANCE
I must love the questions
themselves
as Rilke said
like locked rooms
full of treasure
to which my blind
and groping key
does not yet fit.
and await the answers
as unsealed
letters
mailed with dubious intent
and written in a very foreign
tongue.
and in the hourly making
of myself
no thought of Time
to force, to squeeze
the space
I grow into.
And what can I give you for that early morning hour when you come face-to-face with the realization that torture, in this world, is simply a fact of life? That if you look closely even in your own life, you can see its marks. Because, though your body may have been spared, one psyche is shared by the body of the world and it is the world’s soul that has suffered damage, and suffers it daily.
I give you:
TORTURE
When they torture your mother
plant a tree
When they torture your father
plant a tree
When they torture your brother
and your sister
plant a tree
When they assassinate
your leaders
and lovers
plant a tree
When they torture you
too bad
to talk
plant a tree.
When they begin to torture
the trees
and cut down the forest
they have made,
start another.
And what can I give you to meet the challenge of the great pain that is sometimes the result of telling one’s truth to a world unused to hearing it?
I give you:
CONFESSION
All winter long
I’ve borne the knife that presses
without ceasing
against my heart.
Despising lies
I have told everyone
the truth:
Truth is killing me.
I give you:
ON STRIPPING BARK FROM MYSELF
(for Jane, who said trees die from it)
Because women are expected to keep silent about
their close escapes I will not keep silent
and if I am destroyed (naked tree!) someone will
please
mark the spot
where I fall and know I could not live
silent in my own lies
hearing their “how nice she is!”
whose adoration of the retouched image
I so despise.
No. I am finished with living
for what my mother believes
for what my brother and father defend
for what my lover elevates
for what my sister, blushing, denies or rushes
to embrace.
I find my own
small person
against the world
an equality of wills
I have lived to understand.
Besides:
My struggle was always against
an inner darkness: I carry within myself
the only known keys
to my death—to unlock life, or close it shut
forever. A woman who loves wood grains, the color
yellow
and the sun, I am happy to fight
all outside murderers
as I see I must.
What can I give you to help you embrace the Black and the Red and the White in you? To help you know this fusion is a source not of disgrace but of lived presence in the history of our troubled country? A source of strength, and also of humor?
I offer you:
SOME THINGS I LIKE ABOUT MY TRIPLE BLOODS
(The African, the European, and the Cherokee)
Black relatives
you are always
putting yourselves
down
But you almost never
put down
Africa
You are the last
man
woman
and child
to stand up
for everybody’s
Mother
(though so much rampant motherfuckering in the language
makes one
blue)
And I like that
about you.
White relatives
I like your roads
of course you make
too many of them
and a lot of them
aren’t going anywhere
but you make them really well
nevertheless
as if you know where they go and how they’ll do
And I like that
about you.
Red relatives
you never start
anything
on time
Time itself
in your thought
not being about
timeliness
so much
as about
timelessness.
Powwows could
take forever
and probably do
in your view
and you could care
less.
And I like that
about you.
What can I give you to help you see the soul of our brother or sister stolen from us by too much childhood abuse, too much adulation, too much loneliness, too much money? Too little self reflected in the faces around the home?
The day will come again, as it has already, so many times, when you will see a “successful” person you love who has completely erased the very essence you thought so precious. This will send you into the depths of grief and loss. It is a tragedy that deeply wounds our common psyche. And yet, we must constantly struggle to understand, to be compassionate, to see how we ourselves may have contributed to our own abandonment. We must do this even as we mourn.
I give you:
NATURAL STAR
(Which I wrote for our little brother, Michael)
I am in mourning
for your face
The one I used to love
to see leaping, glowing
upon the stage
The mike
eager …
Thrusting in your fist.
I am in mourning
for your face
the shining eyes
the happy teeth
the look that said
I am the world
and aren’t you
glad
Not to mention
deeply
in luck.
I am in mourning
for the sweet brown innocence
of your skin
your perfect nose
the shy smile
that lit you
like a light.
I am in mourning
for a face
the Universe
in its goodness
makes but once
each
thousand years
and smiles
and sends it out
to spread great joy
itself well pleased.
I am in mourning
for your beloved face
so thoroughly and
undeservedly released.
Oh, my pretty little
brother. Genius. Child.
Sing to us. Dance.
Rest in peace.
And what can I give you to help you remember the necessity of forgiving? On that day when a great wrong has been done to you, and for which forgiveness seems impossible?
I give you:
GOOD NIGHT, WILLIE LEE, I’LL SEE YOU IN THE MORNING
(Thereby bringing the spirits of my parents, Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah Walker, into the ceremony of your special day)
Looking down into my father’s
dead face
for the last time
my mother said without
tears, without smiles
without regrets
but with civility
“Good night, Willie Lee, I’ll see you
in the morning.”
And it was then I knew that the healing
of all our wounds
is forgiveness
that permits a promise
of our return
at the end.
What can I give you, as women, to remind you of our Goddess-given autonomy, on that day when you realize you are trapped in a situation with another that permits you no more room to grow than a potted geranium on a windowsill?
I give you:
A WOMAN IS NOT A POTTED PLANT
A woman is not
a potted plant
her roots bound
to the confines
of her house
a woman is not
a potted plant
her leaves trimmed
to the contours
of her sex
a woman is not
a potted plant
her branches
espaliered
against the fences
of her race
her country
her mother
her man
her trained blossom
turning
this way
& that
to follow
the sun
of whoever feeds
and waters
her
a woman
is wilderness
unbounded
holding the future
between each breath
walking the earth
only because
she is free
and not creepervine
or tree.
Nor even honeysuckle
or bee.
What can I give you to help you bless the day when you fully understand that the most basic fact that all patriarchal religions try to deny and to make people forget is that the Earth is our Mother and that She must be honored, in order for our days to be long on this planet?
I give you:
WE HAVE A BEAUTIFUL MOTHER
We have a beautiful
mother
Her hills
are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
hills.
We have a beautiful
mother
Her oceans
are wombs
Her wombs
oceans.
We have a beautiful
mother
Her teeth
the white stones
at the edge
of the water
the summer grasses
her plentiful
hair.
We have a beautiful
mother
Her green lap
immense
Her brown embrace
eternal
Her blue body
everything
we know.
We are the daughters of Mother Earth: it is in our naturalness and joy in who and what we are that we offer our gratitude, our worship, and our praise.
Beyond this, I give you my word that I shall continue to struggle for and with you, to think of and work for your well-being as women of color, constantly. And to continue to find joy, and freedom, in this. To affirm your strength of character wherever I find myself. Your legendary loyalty and devotion. To honor your beauty and to believe in you without reservation.
I know, from experience, that you are good, and that the world is only made better by your presence.
I love you.
What That Day
Was Like for Me
THE MILLION MAN MARCH OCTOBER 16, 1995
The Flowering of Black Men
In order to watch the Million Man March I had my television repaired. It had been on the blink for six or seven months. Because I allow myself only two hours of television a week, and because I often forget to use those two hours, I hadn’t particularly missed it. However, the moment I learned there was to be a march, I knew I wanted to see it. I felt whatever happened would be exciting, instructive, hopeful, and different. Television worth watching. Black men have a tradition, after all, of being very interesting.
Lucky for me, a distant neighbor installs dishes (I needed a new one), and though he complained that it was a weekend and that he’d promised to take his son to play soccer, he managed to get everything installed—except for actually digging the trench in which the cable would be laid—within about five hours.
The morning of the march I made my usual bowl of oatmeal and prepared to camp out in front of the television. I don’t remember who was speaking when I sat down, but pretty soon there was a young man who reminded me of John Lewis (years ago, of SNCC),* who was exhorting his brothers to “go home” and take on the ills of violence and cocaine. It was a refrain that took me back to the March on Washington of 1963. At that march I sat in a tree listening to Martin Luther King, Jr., asking us to return to the South. I thought then, as I do now, that to ask anyone to go home and work on the problems there is the most revolutionary advice that can be given. Hearing King’s words, I packed up and went back to the South, from which I’d fled, like my brothers and sisters before me, and I remained there, writing books, teaching, and doing Movement-related work, for seven years. It was an invaluable time. But one I’m not sure I would have had the courage to give myself if Martin had not spoken so emphatically in favor of it.
Oatmeal finished, still cozy in my jammies, I realized I wanted to hear what every speaker had to say, even if it took the entire day. Which of course it did.
What stands out? The children, most of all. The articulate, poised, and impassioned young boy and the brave, thoughtful, and serious young girl who asked fervently to be seen as children, protected, respected, and affirmed by black men. Queen Mother Moore, too old and weary by now even to talk, but still reminding us that, for our suffering and the stolen centuries of our lives, we deserve reparations. Rosa Parks. Jesse Jackson, a major teacher for this period. Clear, courageous, brilliant in his ability to use words to illuminate rather than obfuscate. Making connections. Naming names. Radiating a compassionate wrathfulness. Then, disappearing. Which was its own magic. Louis Farrakhan. Who would have thought he’d try to teach us American history using numerology? I was intrigued. Who even suspected that his mother was West Indian, and that he could not only honor her by recalling her wry humor but share her spirit with us by uttering her Jamaican folk speech? This was the man nobody wanted black leaders to talk to? It seemed bizarre.
I can’t imagine becoming Muslim. Because it is a religion whose male Semitic God demands submission and whose spread, historically, has been primarily through conquest, I consider it unsafe. Anyone who is thinking about converting to Islam should first investigate its traditional application in the Middle East and Africa, and its negative impact on women and children in particular, and also on the environment. They should also read the work of Taslima Nasrin, recently threatened with death in Bangladesh for suggesting changes in Islamic law, and Why I Am Not a Muslim by Ibn Warraq.
However, I did not think Farrakhan was proselytizing. I thought he spoke as a black man with a following, and therefore some independence and power, and that the urge to do something in these grim and perilous times in which we ris
k being re-enslaved—by drugs, television, violence, and the seductive traffic on the super-information highway along which most of us will have only a footpath—propelled him. If he is homophobic, as many of my friends believe, this is a great pity, and I assume he was asking forgiveness for that, knowing how black-male-phobic society can be, and how wretched that feels. If he is anti-Semitic (and I thought his son quite beautiful denouncing this charge), he definitely needed to be forgiven, in front of the whole world, and that is what I felt he was asking for. I was moved by him, and underneath all the trappings of Islam, which I personally find frightening, I glimpsed a man of humor, a persuasive teacher, and someone unafraid to speak truth to power, a virtue that makes it easier to be patient as he struggles to subdue his flaws. His speech was a bit long, but I think this was a result of his having always been respectfully listened to by his Muslim congregation. As was clear from the presence of young women in the march, who had been asked to stay home, and of gay men, too, in the larger world, outside the Muslim community, it is only the part of his message that embraces us all that is likely to be heard.
In any event, as someone who has been thrown out of “the black community” several times in my life, and someone who blesses my flaws for all I’ve learned from them, I found it heartwarming to see Jesse, Ben (Chavis), and Louis assert their right to stand together on issues so large that every one of us will have to strain to keep the race’s raggedy boat afloat. I did not feel left out at all. I think it is absolutely necessary that black men regroup as black men; until they can talk to each other, cry with each other, hug and kiss each other, they will never know how to do those things with me. I know whole black men can exist, and I want to see and enjoy them.
I loved the flags! Each one a thrilling testament to our deep feeling of being people of many different nations, capable of coming together for the common good. The beauty of the men themselves was striking. This is the beauty of soul-searching, of spiritual seeking, and, yes, also of recognizing you are lost. It is the beauty all human beings have when they give up the act and settle down to work on the amazing and problematic stuff of life.
After the march ended, and while I was still thinking of the powerful pledge to change lives, directions, communities, that Farrakhan led a million (or two million) black men through, I knew I needed to take a walk, to put my feet on the earth, to see late-flowering shrubs, and to stand among tall trees. I have known black men in my life who are flexible like the grass and sheltering like the trees. But many black men have themselves forgotten they can be this way. It is their own nature that they miss. And they have tried to find it again in drugs, sex, information overload, oppression of women and children, and violence. As I see it, black men have a deep desire to relearn their own loveliness, as Galway Kinnell expresses it in these lines: