I

by Toi Derricotte

  cold as a turd.

  I can’t reach him anymore.

  I don’t have the strength to yank him out

  & blow on his breasts.

  She has to tuck her fingers between his thighs

  & warm him, slowly—

  first the shoulders & the tops of his arms.

  She has to coax the crying boy

  to come through the dead

  walking on tiptoe.

  Sometimes he can’t find his way

  feeling in the dark with his blunt

  fingers,

  & sometimes he stands there, dumb-

  struck, his body trembling between

  us like a little bird’s.

  Untitled

  Ten days after her death, i nap on my mother’s

  bed & for the first time it seems in years in

  front of the gentle eyes of the Blessed Virgin (my mother’s

  Palm Sunday palms folded behind the frame) i feel my

  clitoris throb aroused? in my mother’s bed?

  before the Virgin?

  i press my thighs together as if my hands must

  remain clean i touch the tip of my

  left breast until the nipple grows hard & lifts

  my thighs tighten embraced

  in this pleasure

  as in a prayer that goes up from my whole body

  i have gone beyond some dirtiness

  some act i cannot conceive my mother would have

  condoned yet here now

  i have touched some deeper female presence

  that her death gives me as a gift

  The night I stopped singing like Billie Holiday

  Coming to one’s voice is . . . not a linear process,

  not a matter of learning skills, forms, and laws

  of grammar and syntax. It is a dynamic process

  in which much of what is occurring and has

  occurred remains invisible.

  THE BLACK NOTEBOOKS

  I was playing a CD and enjoying her voice, taking Richard home and talking about the difference between Billie Holiday early and late, and I was thinking about which songs of hers I could learn and sing when I read with the drum player in DC. Just before Richard got out, I said, “You never heard me sing like Billie Holiday, did you?” “No,” he said, “but Ben Shannon said that on the first night of class, you closed your eyes and sung a cappella, and that there had never been anything like it.”

  Alone, driving home with the roof of the car open, feeling that wonderful softness and openness of the summer night, I was deciding whether I should turn down my street and into the gated parking lot or just turn up Billie and keep driving, driving over one or two of the beautiful yellow bridges of Pittsburgh, so architecturally perfect—like the large-scale bridges of New York, the Brooklyn and GW, but small-scale, doable, all of them nearly empty on a summer night, so that you could have the bridge all to yourself. Imagine a bridge all yours on such a night, like a beautiful woman. During the movie, for some reason, I had put my hands under my arms, and I had felt my own body, that beautiful, fat curve under a woman’s arm that is also an extended part of the breast, the soft, full crease, and I liked feeling that in myself, as I might like feeling it in another woman, and when I pulled my hand out I could smell myself on it. I was beginning again to have an odor, the juices, the sexual juices, were starting to come back, so that, once again, I would attract or repel like some flower.

  Then, right before I turned into my driveway, a terrible premonition came that, if I opened my mouth and started singing, I wouldn’t sound like Billie Holiday.

  For years that sound had exuded out of me, as if she were in there just waiting for me to open my mouth. Always, there was the strain. Some part of me clamped down on top of what was coming up, and it seemed that is what made Billie happen—I thought even Billie had had that slight squeeze—but something had changed and, when I started to sing, I didn’t sound like her.

  • • •

  I don’t remember ever hearing me sing—I think it must have been me singing—characterless. I sounded like any person with an OK voice, but nothing special. Before, even if I wasn’t as good as Billie, at least I sounded like her, and there was such an aching try—like the pain that made her turn a note into something sweet, short, and unforgettable—that people could feel it. They had been mesmerized. They said maybe I should stop writing poetry and go on the road as a Billie Holiday impersonator. Now my phrasing was off, like somebody trying to win a Billie Holiday contest; the twin-ness had broken, and I sounded like her stranger. My body had forgotten what was most natural for it to do, as if the only way I could be Billie was by not being me.

  • • •

  There is a story I heard from a South American Indian that, when someone dies, you have to cry for a year; your tears are the boat that carries that person across the waters, and, after a year, when they reach the other side, they are not the person you loved anymore, they are your ancestor.

  Every crossing is like that, the great loss of leaving one shore and heading out to nowhere. It is a frightening thing to give up something, even if it is an imitation—especially if you are famous for it. But what if I don’t have a real thing, you think to yourself. And, at that moment, all you know is that you have nothing, that you have lost the only thing you had.

  • • •

  Everyone in my family said I couldn’t sing. From the time I was a baby. “She can’t carry a tune in a bucket.” “Sing solo, so low we can’t hear you.” Though the teasing hurt and made me unsure of myself, it also made me feel loved, connected, and special. Maybe I sensed that they needed someone to look down on, that the teasing had done them good. Besides, my voice was so small; it didn’t weigh anything against their sureties. My voice would squeak out; but, already, I didn’t believe anything I said. I fought them good-naturedly, trying to sing to defend myself, but, usually, I ended up giving them the pleasure of covering up their ears and howling, “No, no, no more, please.” Being an object of their teasing was a way of hoping something worse wouldn’t happen.

  • • •

  This past week, I went to a concert by Sweet Honey in the Rock. The next day a friend called and said Ysaye Barnwell wants to meet you. She says she’s quoting The Black Notebooks in a piece she’s writing, and she wants to talk to you about it.

  I went down to the bookstore where she was signing her book, No Mirrors in My Nana’s House, and she put her arms around me in a big sister hug. “I’m going to quote that part where you say the development of the voice is not linear. I was writing about this very thing in the voices of singers. We’re saying exactly the same thing.”

  It strikes me as wonderful and terrifying—and obvious—that the voice of the poet is very much connected to the voice of the singer; perhaps, in the most basic way, voice equals voice.

  And suddenly I see my voice inside my chest, it’s a little child, perhaps the age of a toddler, I don’t know if it’s a boy or girl, but it’s hiding under a rock. Ysaye said that the voice is meant to fill all of space. It’s a powerful thing to fill up all of the space outside us with our voices, but, first, we have to be able to fill the space inside. And yet isn’t hiding a useful thing? Don’t we hide what we are afraid to lose or have taken away? And when it’s time, perhaps we see the thing hidden, and then we make a choice about what to do with it.

  • • •

  I began to listen to Billie Holiday when I was fourteen. I listened for hours every day. I learned every song, nuance, turn, I sang with the records. I sang with her for twenty years; she was always with me. I loved her, though I didn’t understand her life, and though I learned things that confused me: that when she spoke, she spoke in a harsh, coarse manner, cursing, with a bitter tongue, her words flat, broad-stroked; that eloquent voice that came when she started singing was from another universe in her throat.

  It reminded me of a story about a dentist my husband used to go to. He had palsy, and when his
patients saw him coming toward their mouths with the looming buzzsaw in his trembling hand, they were ready to jump out of their seats. However, as soon as he set the instrument on the ridge of one tooth, his hand became perfectly steady. Now I think, for Billie, one voice didn’t have anything to do with the other, or perhaps one voice had to be the opposite of the other, or perhaps they were controlled by different brains: the genius brain that put a billion bits of information in the turn of a grace note was not the same brain that said, “Put the god damn glass down mother fucker.” From where did that genius brain drink? What did it have access to? Did the one brain know about the other?

  • • •

  A friend brings me a present before I leave town. I had told her about my voice being like a child, hiding under a rock in my chest, and she hands me, gift-wrapped, a palm-sized, iridescent rock with streaming colors in it—as if it has a hurricane inside—taped to the top of a cassette of lullabies. Music to comfort the child and a rock that holds the power of wind and water: now I am both under it and holding it in my hand.

  • • •

  Days later, I decide to do a reading for no other reason but joy, no other reason than to have fun. My mother, son, and grandson are in the audience, and I decide to open with my favorite Billie Holiday song. I say, “This is a reading dedicated to love, love exquisite and love hard, and I’m going to begin by singing Billie Holiday’s ‘Deep Song.’”

  Lonely grief is hounding me,

  Like a lonely shadow hounding me . . .

  I realized something I had forgotten, that meaning is not in the words, but in the sounds; that if we just sing the sounds we put in, the listener will get all the complexity. For that is how we wrote the words, with our hearts singing, and we must not flatten out meaning, must not destroy or deaden, we must let out all the sounds, so that what we said and meant with our whole body can be heard. And in that spirit I sang my reading and, after, I received a standing ovation; never have I received applause like that. No one told me, “You sound like Billie Holiday,” but many said, “You have a beautiful voice.” My mother said that when I had said I was going to sing, she almost stood up and said, “No, please don’t”—she was very afraid she was going to be embarrassed—but when I opened my mouth, she couldn’t believe it. She thought I must have had voice lessons.

  • • •

  It wasn’t like Billie’s—though it did sound as if I was squeezing up something in me, and that did sound a bit like her—the way she asked men to beat her up before she went on stage so that she would remember the pain—but mine was more open at the throat, so that something came up that was me, and Billie didn’t interfere.

  When I touched her

  When I touched her for the first

  time I swooned with

  wonder, for the full lips swelled, a dark

  fruit bloomed under my

  fingers. I could not

  breathe with my hand there.

  She let me stroke the

  lips inside the

  lips, that double swelling beneath the

  clitoris like the violin’s under-

  tone, which lifts the whole body from its

  anal seat. She

  moaned without thought

  & spoke to guide me higher, so that my fingers could

  find the hill whereon the goddess looked out

  with equanimity & calm.

  A little prayer to Our Lady

  so all day i

  go by the

  xmas tree bulb (orange) in the

  little altar of

  shells

  that i set up &

  keep lit at the

  top of the stairs, so that rising now i

  rise

  to praise

  her, to

  remember the sacredness of my

  work.

  perhaps she likes orange light

  thrown softly against her for

  she looks divine.

  my house seems richer

  more alive

  less lonely

  with her here

  i am allowed

  to believe.

  Cherry blossoms

  I went down to

  mingle my breath

  with the breath

  of the cherry blossoms.

  There were photographers:

  Mothers arranging their

  children against

  gnarled old trees;

  a couple, hugging,

  asks a passerby

  to snap them

  like that,

  so that their love

  will always be caught

  between two friendships:

  ours & the friendship

  of the cherry trees.

  Oh Cherry,

  why can’t my poems

  be as beautiful?

  A young woman in a fur-trimmed

  coat sets a card table

  with linens, candles,

  a picnic basket & wine.

  A father tips

  a boy’s wheelchair back

  so he can gaze

  up at

  heaven.

  All around us

  the blossoms

  flurry down

  whispering.

  Be patient,

  you have an ancient beauty.

  Be patient,

  you have an ancient beauty.

  PART III

  The Undertaking

  The exigencies of form

  It is not the corpse, it is not the artifact, it is the soft thing with feathers. It is hope, it is what is said at the tenderest point; it is covered up with language and syntax, it is metered and measured, it has on its finest dress; it may look like a king going out on a fine horse, or a diplomat in a car with black windows; it may cover itself and hide, but it is reaching, it is alive.

  The undertaking

  My brother Jay, my half-brother, eighteen years younger than I am, brings our father’s ashes when he visits me in Pittsburgh. They have been on a shelf in his basement for twenty years, wrapped in the kind of plain brown wrapper universally understood to be hiding something “dirty.” We slash open the paper to uncover a drawer-shaped plastic box. Jay pulls a string and the top pops off as easily as the lid on a box of oatmeal and reveals, too quickly, the chalky issue, the pebbles of our father.

  We have walked to the neighborhood golf course—my father loved golf more than anything good for him—and decide to drop him off at the top of a little bridge over a spout of clear water. Jay pours most of the ash, I run down to dislodge the fallen plastic bag from a few prickly weeds and shake out a half-cup more. We hold each other around the waist and Jay says his prayer of the moment, “Rest here now safe near your daughter. Whatever you did, whatever you have done, God chose you to be our father for a good reason. We love you and will never forget you.” I feel a vacancy, a quiet that may signal an end. I court nothing, no drama, and yet I wait to see if it’s over, really over.

  • • •

  Many abused children never love again, never trust. Their hands pass it down to their children. The body holds memories; it will never be caught again. Talk isn’t enough. You can never comprehend. At some point something happens: a door closes, your boyfriend goes out for a smoke, and, in less than a second, your stomach tightens like a grill. Alarm bells ring in the amygdala: Daddy’s home.

  • • •

  Is it possible to change everything that has happened by looking at the past in a different way? Not denying anything but, perhaps, inserting some detail that pries open the heart so that more light floods out of it?

  • • •

  How do you end a book? How do you end a lifelong obsession? Writing itself is a triumph; it changes the past by changing the act of repression. It cries out against violence. It confronts the command to subjugate oneself. When you have been silent, dead for so long, encased and buried, the oppressor’s voice is the first one you hear. It is the way you speak to yours
elf. Then the most childish voice arises. It has to start from the same place it was buried.

  • • •

  I took my first poetry workshop when I was twenty-seven. The first time I heard “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath, I was shocked and profoundly awakened. I didn’t know there was any place, any way for such fury to be expressed, and I had no idea that such an expression could be made into something that had order and beauty, where the broken pieces could make sense. The poem could not only hold an unspeakable truth, it could also bring forth the very voice that had been put down, it could bring it to life.

  • • •

  You don’t just write a book, you live it. I know a book is finished when I’ve changed. The obsession lifts, it lets me go, a door to the outside world opens. Only the creation of a work of art can spring the trap; only the girl locked inside knows when the door slams open, when the power is enough.

  • • •

  My mother would look back from the door when she stood up from scrubbing (always the last thing to do was to scrub your way out) and assess the rightness of it. Perhaps she would go back to move an object, adjust a chair an inch, or wipe a spot on the blinds or lampshade; then she would go back and look again—the aesthetics of making something shine. I believe that image stayed in her mind, as a page of a finished poem stays in mine.

  • • •

  Seventy years ago, the year I was born, Richard Wright wrote of being beaten and abandoned, of his humiliations and tortures in childhood at the hands of his parents, of his lifelong mental suffering, and how these experiences fueled his writing. He describes the voices warring inside him: “In the main we are different from other folk in that, when an impulse moves us, when we are caught in the throes of inspiration, when we are moved to better our lot, we do not ask ourselves: ‘Can we do it?’ but: ‘Will they let us do it?’ Before we black folk can move, we must first look into the white man’s mind to see what is there, to see what he is thinking, and the white man’s mind is a mind that is always changing.” I think of the lessons my father taught me. He was born ten years after Wright’s birth, his violent and handsome mother brought up in the Colored Children’s Industrial Home; his grandmother, born shortly after slavery. How many generations does it take to undo history?