I

by Toi Derricotte

  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.