Last week on TV, a gruesome face, eyes bloated shut.
No one will say, “She looks like she’s sleeping,” ropes
of blue-black slashes at the mouth. Does anybody
know this woman? Will anyone come forth? Silence
like a backwave rushes into that field
where, just the week before, four other black girls
had been found. The gritty image hangs in the air
just a few seconds, but it strikes me,
a black woman, there is a question being asked
about my life. How can I
protect myself? Even if I lock my doors,
walk only in the light, someone wants me dead.
Am I wrong to think
if five white women had been stripped,
broken, the sirens would wail until
someone was named?
Is it any wonder I walk over these bodies
pretending they are not mine, that I do not know
the killer, that I am just like any woman—
if not wanted, at least tolerated.
Part of me wants to disappear, to pull
the earth on top of me. Then there is this part
that digs me up with this pen
and turns my sad black face to the light.
A Note on My Son’s Face
I.
Tonight, I look, thunderstruck
at the gold head of my grandchild.
Almost asleep, he buries his feet
between my thighs;
his little straw eyes
close in the near dark.
I smell the warmth of his raw
slightly foul breath, the new death
waiting to rot inside him.
Our breaths equalize our heartbeats;
every muscle of the chest uncoils,
the arm bones loosen in the nest
of nerves. I think of the peace
of walking through the house,
pointing to the name of this, the name of that,
an educator of a new man.
Mother. Grandmother. Wise
Snake-woman who will show the way;
Spider-woman whose black tentacles
hold him precious. Or will tear off his head,
her teeth over the little husband,
the small fist clotted in trust at her breast.
This morning, looking at the face of his father,
I remembered how, an infant, his face was too dark,
nose too broad, mouth too wide.
I did not look in that mirror
and see the face that could save me
from my own darkness.
Did he, looking in my eye, see
what I turned from:
my own dark grandmother
bending over gladioli in the field,
her shaking black hand defenseless
at the shining cock of flower?
I wanted that face to die,
to be reborn in the face of a white child.
I wanted the soul to stay the same,
for I loved to death,
to damnation and God-death,
the soul that broke out of me.
I crowed: My Son! My Beautiful!
But when I peeked in the basket,
I saw the face of a black man.
Did I bend over his nose
and straighten it with my fingers
like a vine growing the wrong way?
Did he feel my hand in malice?
Generations we prayed and fucked
for this light child,
the shining god of the second coming;
we bow down in shame
and carry the children of the past
in our wallets, begging forgiveness.
II.
A picture in a book,
a lynching.
The bland faces of men who watch
a Christ go up in flames, smiling,
as if he were a hooked
fish, a felled antelope, some
wild thing tied to boards and burned.
His charring body
gives off light—a halo
burns out of him.
His face scorched featureless;
the hair matted to the scalp
like feathers.
One man stands with his hand on his hip,
another with his arm
slung over the shoulder of a friend,
as if this moment were large enough
to hold affection.
III.
How can we wake
from a dream
we are born into,
that shines around us,
the terrible bright air?
Having awakened,
having seen our own bloody hands,
how can we ask forgiveness,
bring before our children the real
monster of their nightmares?
The worst is true.
Everything you did not want to know.
Tender
• • •
They were all branded, like sheep, with the owners’
marks, of different forms. These were impressed under
their breasts, or on their arms, and, as the mate informed
me, with perfect indifference, “Queimados pelo ferror
quento,—burnt with red-hot iron.”
MR. WALSH, “Notices of Brazil” (1860), in Rufus W. Clark, The African Slave Trade
He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather
the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom,
and shall gently lead those that are with young.
ISAIAH 40:11
Preface
Tender is not to be read in linear fashion. Rather, it is a seven-spoked wheel, with the poem “Tender” as the hub, each “spoke” or subdivision radiating out from that center.
Violence is central in our lives, a constant and unavoidable reality. Experience is not a linear construct moving from one point to another—childhood to maturity, “bad” to “good,” beginning to end—but a wheel turning around a point that shifts between hope and despair.
“At the still point of the turning world,” the job of the artist is not to resolve or beautify, but to hold complexities, to see and make clear.
Tender
The tenderest meat
comes from the houses
where you hear the least
squealing. The secret
is to give a little
wine before killing.
Elmina Castle is one of the fortresses in which the slaves were held
captive before they were transported across the ocean. Because ships
came infrequently and there had to be sufficient numbers of people
transported to make a voyage profitable, thousands were often held
for months waiting. It is estimated that somewhere between twenty
and sixty million Africans were captured, enslaved, and brought to the
Americas. The Dutch and Portuguese took slaves from Elmina Castle,
a structure built by the Portuguese in 1482, and sent them to Brazil,
Surinam, and other colonies. Slaves from Cape Coast, another fortress,
were brought to the Caribbean and the United States. Elmina was in
operation for more than three centuries.
Exits from Elmina Castle: Cape Coast, Ghana
Gotta make a way out of no way.
TRADITIONAL BLACK FOLK SAYING
The Journey
There is no perfect
past to go back to. Each time I look
into your eyes, I see the long hesitation
of ten thousand years, our mothers’ mothers
sitting under the shade trees on boxes, waiting.
There is some great question in your eye that no
longer needs asking: the ball
glistening, wet; the black iris
intense. We know the same t
hings.
What you wait for, I wait for.
The Tour
The castle, always on an
outcrop of indifference;
human shells,
the discards on the way.
Where our mothers were held, we walk now
as tourists, looking for cokes, film, the bathroom.
A few steps beyond the brutalization, we
stand in the sun:
This area for tourists only.
Our very presence an ironic
point of interest to our guide.
Tourists’ Lunch
On a rise, overlooking
the past, we eat
jolaf with pepper sauce and chicken,
laugh, drink beer, fold our dresses
up under us and bathe thigh-
deep in the weary Atlantic.
Beneath Elmina
Down the long, stone ramp,
chained together, unchained finally from the dead,
from months of lightlessness and the imprisoned stink
(a foot-square breech,
the cell’s only opening for air—air
which had entered sulfurous, having passed over
the stocks of ammunition),
they pressed and fell against each other.
The only other way (besides death) had been for the few
women who were hauled up into the sun
to be scrutinized by the officers,
the chosen pulled up to apartments
through a trap door:
If they got pregnant, they were set free—
their children becoming the bastard
go-betweens who could speak both tongues.
• • •
At the bottom of the dark stone ramp,
a slit in cement six (?) inches wide,
through which our ancestors were pushed—
the “point of no return,”
so narrow because the Dutch feared
two going together to the anchored ship
might cause rebellion,
and because, starved for so many months,
that opening
was their bodies’ perfect fit.
Above Elmina
At the top of the castle,
orderly pews.
We enter under a lintel
carved with news:
This is the house of God.
Slavery
It had struck some of the African Americans
in those dungeons beneath the earth—
though we had come to Africa to heal—there was a huge rip
between us: those were rooms through which our ancestors
had passed, while the Africans’ had not.
“Another way to look at it,” a Nigerian poet answered levelly,
“is that perhaps your ancestors escaped.”
Power
The palace of an African king:
two courtyards (a public and a private) in a complex
of bone white stucco edged with a crimson stripe;
the king, in a huge carved chair,
gold-painted and lioned, wearing an understated robe
of grays and browns, his face a structured pleasantness—
the bones of one who has become
slightly more than human;
his ministers smile from faded velvet sofas—
old men with remarkably intact teeth.
A few of us standing in the courtyard
are surprised by a thin man, boyish, though middle-aged,
who comes toward us signaling he is begging—
one hand outstretched, the other nearly touching his lips—
his robe of subtle greens, his feet bare, his naked shoulder
well defined as an aging athlete’s. “‘The Imbecile Prince,’” our guide explains.
“The only remaining member of the last king’s family.
We take care of him as if the present king were his father.”
Market
Those huge platters on their heads on which everything
is placed accurately, each small red pepper,
prawn, each orange—arranged in piles so tall they defy gravity—
avocados, crabs, dried fish of silverish brown,
or one great yam, thirty pounds, dirt brushed,
counterbalanced in a kind of aquarium.
A woman approves me with a fluent grin
and offers her light basket for my head;
I walk a yard, tottering awkwardly.
The unremarkable commonness—
a beauty shaped by women’s hands.
When My Father Was Beating Me
I’d hear my mother in the kitchen preparing dinner. I’d hear the spoons hitting the mixing bowl, the clatter of silver falling into the drawer. I’d hear the pot lids clink and rattle. The normality of the sound was startling; it seemed louder than usual, as if she weren’t ashamed, as if she were making a point. Perhaps the house was cut in two by a membrane, and, though her sounds could come to my ears, my screams and cries and whimpers, his demands and humiliations, the sounds of his hands hitting my body, couldn’t pierce back the other way. I learned to stretch time and space so I could think what she was thinking. I learned to hear things far away, to live in a thought that could expand itself even until now: What Einstein said is true—everything slows down the farther you get from your mother.
It seemed as if she wanted it, that either I was taking her place, or maybe she thought I deserved it. Maybe there was an overload of violence in the universe, a short in a wire that had to spill its electricity, and she was glad, this time, she hadn’t felt it.
Maybe there was some arcane connection between her and my father’s hand, his arm let loose and flying, maybe she was in command, making him hit, telling her side of the story—that I was evil, that I had to be beaten, not just for the crime I had committed, but for the crime of who I was: hungry, trying, in every way, to get through barriers set up for my own good. “You’re tearing me apart, you’re driving me crazy,” my mother would scream.
Sometimes I saw the world from her perspective: she was beautiful and pitiful and overwhelmed, she was also some blood-sucking witch—not a whole being—able to stretch and contort herself like a cry, something that hated and was flexible. She wanted to beat me in the same way my father did, but she knew she couldn’t, because I’d fight back, I’d cry that cry that made her go crazy. “You can’t manipulate your father the way you can manipulate me.” She meant it as a compliment for herself, as if she loved me more.
They wanted a stillness, a lack of person, place, agony swallowed. They wanted me to die, or, not to die, to exist with a terrible pain, but have it sewn up—as if they could reach into my ribs, crack them open, put a handful of suffering in there and stitch it back, as if my body had a pocket, a black pocket they could stick a thought in that they couldn’t stand.
I would fold, collapse like a marionette. (I beat my dolls for years, pounded and pounded and nobody seemed to notice.) “Just keep trying,” my father’d say just before he’d strike me. And I did. I kept trying to be beaten.
• • •
Serving the dinner plates with her face bland, as if it were virtuous not to take sides, serving the beautiful food that she had cooked all day—her great gift—to say, I’ve given everything I could, I’ve got nothing left. Often when my father would hit me she’d say, as if he and I were man and wife, “I’m not going to come between the two of you. You two have to work this out for yourselves.” He’d give me a warning. “Wipe that look off your face or I’ll knock it off. Dry up,” he’d scream, “and eat.”
Black Boys Play the Classics
The most popular “act” in
Penn Station
is the three black kids in ratty
sneakers & T-shirts playing
two violins and a cello—Brahms.
White men in business suits
have already dug into their pockets
>
as they pass and they toss in
a dollar or two without stopping.
Brown men in work-soiled khakis
stand with their mouths open,
arms crossed on their bellies
as if they themselves have always
wanted to attempt those bars.
One white boy, three, sits
cross-legged in front of his
idols—in ecstasy—
their slick, dark faces,
their thin, wiry arms,
who must begin to look
like angels!
Why does this trembling
pull us?
A: Beneath the surface we are one.
B: Amazing! I did not think that they could speak this tongue.
Brother
Jay’s mother is brown, mine is white-
looking, as I am, as is our father.
He says sometimes when he’d go
to fill the vending machines
with our father, the white bartenders
would say, “Is that your helper?”
My father would say, “No, he’s my
son.” Jay says you can always tell
the person changes by something
in the eyes, it may be small—
the eyes open wider or the brow
creases down. He says that once,
our father sent him to get something
from the truck. When he came back,
the bartender had set him up
with a soda, “Have some pop,”
he said in a friendly way. Another time,
when I was doing a reading in New Jersey,
Jay was with me. “A yuppie place,”
he remembers. After the applause
I thanked them and said, “I’d like to
introduce my brother.” When he stood
up, people were still looking around
for somebody, looking
right through him. Finally, when they realized
he was it, he heard a woman say, “Oh no!”
as if she had been hit in the solar plexus.
Maybe that’s why he didn’t marry
somebody like us. He married a girl
black as God—and brags to family, strangers,
to anyone about that
blackness—so easily recognized, his.
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