by Glory Edim
The book’s illustrations and words were a familiar mirror of my former life in my mostly black kindergarten in South Carolina, where I was not singled out for being different by white expat boys from New Zealand who didn’t want a brown “cotton-candy haired” square-dance partner in gym class. In Nikki’s world, just like before I moved to an international school with very few black people, I was just me, nothing exceptional, abject, or different, only one of a powerful tribe.
Spin a Soft Black Song showed me that I wasn’t alone. Whenever I felt homesick during our first years away from home, I asked my parents to read to me from Nikki’s book. And as the years went on, I began to recite the poems myself, copy them into my Hello Kitty diary, and perform them like a teeny orator for my parents and their friends from the U.S. embassy during dinner parties.
Through her storytelling, I knew that everyday black children like myself were living lives of both simplicity and courageous complexity across time zones. Her witty yet sobering poems unearthed the complexity of the most seemingly simple experiences, from connecting learning about stars in science class to developing compassion in “stars,” to a five-line poem about the power of being yourself and trusting your own heartbeat called “the drum”:
daddy says the world is
a drum tight and hard
and I told him
i’m gonna beat
out my own rhythm
After we’d been in Saudi Arabia for about five years, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. We watched CNN incessantly and practiced putting on our gas masks in case the worst happened. Before we evacuated, I followed the adults’ lead by attempting to achieve a sense of normalcy while navigating a state of crisis. To soothe my anxiety without alarming my parents, I returned to my trusted book and found solace in Nikki’s poem “fear.” To alleviate my sleeplessness, I read under the covers with my flashlight:
early evening fear
comes I turn
on the television for company
and see
the news.
Feeling isolated and afraid during a tumultuous time, it seemed she was talking to me, even though she wrote the book about my homeland, which now felt like a world away.
Later, when I moved to a boarding school founded by bluestocking feminists in Maryland, I carried Spin a Soft Black Song with me as a textual North Star, a compass that could always help me find my way back to center and back to myself. Nikki gave me a sense of place that was grounded in my experience as a black child during a time when it felt like most of the books in my school library represented everyone else but me.
Although I was much older, the poems maintained their resonance. They tied me to memories of my family, who still resided in Saudi Arabia but reflected the essence of black American culture wherever their work and travels took them. Through this book, and my experience of needing to take it to my new home-away-from-home at school, I realized that I possessed a shared history and future with the writer and her characters. My mini tome now had a tattered cover, but it maintained its magical powers by transporting me back to myself whenever I felt far away from my loved ones, or even worse—lost.
That’s why I’ll never forget the day I first read about Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own during British Literature class. It was there where my white forty-something teacher gushed about how Woolf revolutionized her thinking about identity, independence, and writing. Although I appreciated Woolf, I realized at that moment that Woolf was not the catalyst for me, nor was she my longtime literary companion, influence, or foremother. Instead, it was Nikki who guided me, like a literary mama, into understanding that I can be my black girl self and write new worlds into creation, all while staying tightly connected to familial bonds and collective liberation. She taught me that there would always be somewhere to return to when I felt alienated or afraid, by showing me that home, and the road my ancestors paved for me to get there, ultimately resides within me.
WELL-READ BLACK GIRL RECOMMENDS:
POETRY BY BLACK WOMEN
Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010 by Elizabeth Alexander
Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks
Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969–1980 by Lucille Clifton
On the Bus with Rosa Parks by Rita Dove
Black Feeling, Black Talk by Nikki Giovanni
Naming Our Destiny by June Jordan
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé by Morgan Parker
Homegirls and Handgrenades by Sonia Sanchez
Ordinary Beast by Nicole Sealey
Wild Beauty by Ntozake Shange
Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire
Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith
Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith
Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning by Alice Walker
From a bird’s-eye view, I played the part of outgoing child with aplomb. Weekend afternoons spent posing beneath blinding flashes, dressed to the nines in starched dresses with crinoline comprised my strange, short spell as a catalog model. I donned peach leotards, tights, and laced my feet into stretchy ballet shoes, then switched to the shiny black patent leather for tap classes at five years old. I workshopped my elocution and physical presence at acting workshops at seven. I practiced scales, clapped, stomped, and swayed on beat in church and school choirs from kindergarten to twelfth grade. I laced up my red Converse sneakers for every performance with my church’s hip-hop dance group as a teenager. I babysat, tutored, volunteered, and served on leadership committees. With each new endeavor, I felt a distant sort of pride in my supposed bravery at the same time that I felt myself settling into a rather wearied introversion. I never felt sure of what I craved more: solitude or attention. So I sought both, ever at odds between instinct and performance.
I knew shyness wasn’t ideal. Closed mouths don’t get fed was a sentiment I implicitly understood as a child, though I didn’t hear it articulated until much later. Still, I often couldn’t summon the strength, or desire, to make my thoughts heard. I much preferred to observe, to twirl around in the fascinating constellation of my own mind, where I could entertain myself by creating stories about the people around me, their fears and obsessions, wondering what faces they made at themselves in the mirror, if they were anything like mine. I memorized song lyrics, constructed elaborate fantasies, and filled diaries and journals with the rambling minutiae of my day, personal mythologies, and sometimes, prayers. When people asked me why I was so quiet, I’d shrug. If I felt like humoring them with a response, I’d add, “I don’t have anything to say.” I tried to find virtue in my silence, yet often failed.
I discovered the book Amazing Grace by Mary Hoffman when I was around eight years old. I can’t remember where I found it, but as with all the books that have stayed with me, when I opened it, it felt like a piece of home. Even so, a large part of me struggled to identify with the titular character, which saddened me, because I adored her, and adoration preceded imitation in those days. Grace was who I aspired to be: brash, confident, a risk-taker. When her teacher asked who wanted to play the lead role in the class production of Peter Pan, she not only raised her hand first, she kept it up, despite her classmates’ discouragement. You can’t be Peter; you’re a girl. You can’t be Peter; you’re black. Reading this as a child, I knew that Grace was right to ignore these naysayers, the same way I knew it was right to resist peer pressure, to just say no to drugs, to refuse to talk to candy-wielding strangers. It was my responsibility to stand up for myself, to take ownership of my rights as a human in this world, to never betray my own dignity by succumbing to someone else’s ill will. I also knew, deep down, that if I were in Grace’s position, sitting cross-legged on that rug and listening to my classmates discount my race and sex at eight years old, I probably would have believed them. At least, I would have believed them for the time
it would take to put my hand down.
Grace and I may have had our differences, but there was one crucial thing we had in common: our love of stories. Like me, Grace reveled in the mystery and adventure that awaited her in each new tale. I always found myself reflected the most clearly in Grace when she inhabited new worlds, dressed up as iconic characters, making the stories her own: She was the wooden horse in the battle of Troy, Hiawatha, Anansi the Spider. I also spent countless afternoons playing make-believe, floating on the buoyant winds of my own imagination. I was David, small but mighty, throwing a stone to fell the beastly Goliath; Princess Jasmine, hooded and cloaked far beyond the palace walls with beloved Rajah by my side; Harriet Tubman, stealthy and cunning, bravely shepherding slaves to freedom. There was an exhilarating liberation in shedding my everyday persona to inhabit these new characters, in no longer feeling bound to the interminable present. The ease with which I moved through the world, laughed, hollered, sang—especially when I was alone—felt so profoundly at odds with my actual personality that I felt certain I would perish without it. I found Grace in those moments: I was finally brash, confident, a risk-taker. I was amazing.
Back in the real world, my parents, teachers, and church leaders, like Grace’s family, wouldn’t allow me to diminish into the background, no matter how much I wanted to. In the face of my certainty that I was of little use to anyone, they encouraged me to recognize, time and again, how untrue my self-talk really was. I felt sure that at any moment they would realize their error in thinking I was capable of being whoever they thought I was. I said my lines, made my speeches, and accepted their accolades, wondering if the acute dysphoria I was experiencing was testament to my humility or some sort of fundamental dysfunction recognizable only to myself. It was not my natural inclination to stand up in front of a group of people and sing; I did it anyway, one Sunday out of every month, because I was in the choir. I was embarrassed each time my parents shared something I’d written with our friends and family, but despite my discomfort, I believed the praise I received, at least to the extent that I dared to enter writing competitions in high school.
It was when I began to hear that younger students and some church members’ children were looking up to me that I wondered if my self-doubt could be a dysfunction of its own. What if I was someone else’s Grace? What if I could carve out a space of my own, rather than inch down a prescribed path I felt loath to follow?
The turning point of the story occurs when Grace’s grandmother, who is from Trinidad, takes Grace to the ballet to watch a young black dancer perform in the starring role. Reading this at eight years old, I thought of this outing as a happy coincidence, since Grace’s classmates had been so mean to her and she clearly needed some cheering up. While I couldn’t yet articulate a concept like representation, I identified with Grace’s compulsion to emulate “little Rosalie Wilkins from back home,” so graceful and poised, so resplendent in her dark skin, larger than life on the theater marquee. It was the same yearning I felt to emulate Tyra Banks and Scary Spice, Oprah Winfrey, my mom, my sister. They showed me how I could expand when I didn’t feel like enough. I didn’t have to be just like them, but their quiet guidance and encouragement afforded me space. In simply being themselves, they widened the room.
As an adult who wants nothing more than for my daughter to believe that she can do anything, be anything, it saddens me that I imposed these limits on myself as a child. But the advantage of age is that I can look back and recast my actions in a much different light; I’m no longer beholden to the tyranny of a single perspective. While it was true that I did often suffer from a lack of confidence in myself, for myriad reasons—my body image, petty jealousies, academic anxiety, plain old preteen, then teenage angst—I have no doubt that being prodded a little bit outside of my comfort zone did me a world of good.
I always felt, from childhood to adolescence to early adulthood, that I should feel more comfortable in my own skin, that I should be more forthcoming and bold, that I should be this mythical young woman that I could never quite bring myself to be. Attempting to be her, even though I frequently fell short, was not a sustained exercise in failure, as I believed for so long. It was endurance training: I learned how to try, and stumble, and persist anyway, over and over again. The folly of youth is believing that the road to success is a straight one. It is believing that self-improvement functions as holding a version of yourself forever just out of arm’s reach, presuming her to be better, prettier, freer.
The truth is that I needed the missteps, the sharp turns, the quiet moments of self-doubt that led to my own pep talks in the kitchen. I wasn’t Grace; not really, not in the way I originally wanted to be. Nor was I supposed to be. Eventually, I realized, and continue to realize anew, that I, Carla, am quite enough. I’m damn amazing.
When I was six or seven years old, I came across a book called Little Match Girl. It was about a girl who was really poor, and she was trying to sell matches to make some money to buy food and clothing. In my head, our lives were similar even though I’d never been that poor. But my mom was a single mom, and we struggled financially. Still, even though I came from this underserved family, there was a sense that my life was not as bad as the life of the Little Match Girl. The devastation of her life was heartbreaking and I had this deep empathy for her.
My teacher had first read the book to us in class, but I wasn’t satisfied with the narrative. I wanted to change the world that girl had to live in—see if I could dream up a new ending so it would be different for her this time. My siblings and I went to the library after school every day. My mom worked full time and the library was our “after school program.” We waited there five days a week until 5:45 when my mom picked us up. So every day I would go to the library, find that book, and reread it. I just wanted to see if I could get the Little Match Girl back to a happily ever after. After all, when that story entered my life, most of the other books I read ended with everything being all right. I used to make up stories all the time as a kid and read them to my best friends, Maria and Diana—both of whom I’m still very close to. “You know, you’re really good,” they’d say. “You should definitely be a writer.” My mom, on the other hand, didn’t want me to be a writer. She often told me that it was not a lucrative career. My mom had come through the Jim Crow South and then through the Great Migration. What she wanted most for us were economic and academic safety nets. To her, a freelance career couldn’t possibly offer the former. She wanted me to be a reader, though, and she pushed me hard to read. Even though I read slower than anyone I knew and had to read sentences again and again sometimes before I finally got to meaning, I slowly plowed through Toni Morrison and Mildred Taylor and Carson McCullers and Eloise Greenfield. These women writers showed me how to be a human being in the world—the importance of kindness and care. They taught me–along with my mom and grandmother—to think before I spoke, and to stay quiet if I didn’t have anything nice to say. These writers also taught me how to write, just by reading their words. It’s difficult to be a reader, and not be a writer. And I knew as soon as I started that writing was the thing that brought me the greatest joy.
I watched my mom grow old in a job that brought her at least some joy. Working for Con Edison, she was happy to be able to feed her family, I think; she was happy to have a paycheck and to eventually own a house. She was happy to get out of the South. Those were all small joys to me, but they were huge for someone coming out of a history of not having a lot of money. At the same time, I knew that my resistance would have to come with remembering what brought me joy and not losing sight of that. And so, regardless of what my mother said, I wasn’t really trying to listen to her about not becoming a writer.
When I got to high school I started writing for my school’s literary journal, and by the time I was in my junior year I became the editor. Then, in college, I majored in English and took a lot of creative writing classes. During one summer, I took a ch
ildren’s writing workshop at the New School, and I found out it was the same one that all these writers I had read as a young person had gone through. People like E. L. Konigsburg and Judy Blume—this was the place they went to write and workshop their work, and to listen to new writers.
I had started writing Last Summer with Maizon in college, and we dissected the manuscript in that workshop. There was an editor in the class from Bantam Doubleday Dell who pulled me aside one day and said, “I want to buy that book.” I can’t even explain the amount of excitement I felt when she said those words. I was thrilled. It was surreal. But at the same time, I had never doubted that this day would come. I had first seen my name in print in fifth grade when a poem I wrote won a contest. Then in middle school, in poems that were mimeographed. Then in high school and college in the schools’ journals and literary magazines. I had published stories in other journals while still in college. Publishing my book felt like the obvious next step. And I think that eagle-eyed gaze on the prize (or maybe a deep stubbornness) was extremely helpful in my early days. It kept coming back to joy—how could I live a life filled with it? And always, the answer that came back to me was “Write.”
So, before I was even out of school my first book was sold. It took a long time for it to get published—endless revisions, a change in editors—but by then I was already on my trajectory. I knew this was what I was going to do. From that point on, even though in the beginning I had other jobs to pay the rent or buy clothes or feed myself, everything I did went toward writing. I had a job to be able to write at night. I was able to put a roof over my head so that I could have a place to write. Being a writer became the endgame.