Funeral Diva

by Pamela Sneed

  through hurricanes and earthquakes

  saw pillars, foundations, and platforms they’d built washed away

  but in our generation it was young Black men who like babies

  or children had just begun to articulate, voice thoughts, ideas and desires

  that never in the world’s history been spoken,

  dying as soon as, moments of, or seconds after

  pressing pen to paper.

  These were early days, AIDS in its infancy,

  before the medical establishment invented drug cocktails

  providing life support and badly needed medicine

  without which men could and did die within weeks, months of, or

  shortly after diagnosis.

  At this time, as in the ’40s during World War II

  when men enlisted, went abroad to become soldiers,

  while women at home were drafted into the work force and professional realm,

  took on untraditional roles as welders and electricians

  like banks but instead lent limbs, additional hands, and

  the occasional missing shoulder.

  Because of my stature, writing, outlandish outfits, and flair for the

  dramatic

  I became a known and requested presence operating throughout the crisis

  as an unofficially titled, “funeral diva,” called for

  at memorials, readings, wakes and funerals to speak

  give testimony and credence to men’s lives

  even if they were not family members or close friends

  like a job which requires at such sudden, rapid and rising death tolls

  quick thinking

  like wordsmiths who can articulate at mathematic speed,

  capture within hair’s breath, bottle the essence,

  execute like marksmen small and mundane details,

  all the while like members of the clergy or great actors having the ability

  to accurately portray and pay homage to the spirit of someone

  who’d lived only for a short time on this planet.

  Armed with only a few pre-requisite experiences:

  As an adopted and only child, weathering my parents’ divorce

  Later, a beloved grandmother, my shelter and protector

  devoured by cancer

  turned from a robust brown woman to a small gray thing

  who could not recognize me

  At the funeral, in tribute each of my cousins wore the feathered and veiled hats

  of her favorite church collection.

  At the memorial for Craig Harris poet, activist, and soldier

  I was prepared.

  Craig worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the AIDS epidemic at GMHC,

  Gay Men’s Health Crisis,

  But in off hours between battling KS and pneumonia

  and trips to the hospital,

  he drank champagne and smoked long Virginia Slim cigarettes,

  famous for the slogan aimed at women and their transition from skirts to pants

  announcing on billboards “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

  A true rebel and pioneer Craig vowed in one of his poems about AIDS

  Not to succumb gently, but defiantly, insisted, like a generational star

  “I will go out like a fucking meteor.”

  For his work at GMHC, Craig talked passionately about AIDS work

  in Harlem at a time when illness and gayness was taboo.

  To those who would oppose and refute him, he said humorously

  “Honey, I’ve got a few bricks in my pocketbook which I’m not afraid

  to throw.”

  Later at a memorial and tribute to Black lesbian poet Pat Parker

  who died of cancer

  Craig asked in vigilance, way ahead of his time,

  acknowledging women in a voice resounding over the auditorium

  at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center on 13th Street, in a poem about

  the massive casualties of AIDS and those left behind,

  “Who will care for our caretakers?”

  a question that still resonates today as I think of Black women poets

  whose words like hands, shoulders, arms were used to uplift

  whose eyes like stars in darkness provided vision

  led us like runaways to freedom

  whose poems, songs, and spirits were used to eulogize,

  bury dead,

  make sense of senseless tragedy.

  They were teachers, nurses, soldiers, working long hours

  mostly without vacation or pension plans, retirement or a leave of absence

  like Harriet Tubman who provided years of service

  to Union soldiers and received little pay, walked away empty

  like soldiers returning now from Afghanistan and Iraq without services or beds

  to sleep on.

  Many died silent invisible deaths from cancer with no one to care.

  These were the women Craig spoke of when he asked,

  “Who will care for our caretakers?”

  After a long ferocious battle with AIDS, like a gladiator

  or Viking warrior made famous by Kirk Douglas, Craig did succumb.

  At the memorial as tribute similar to when my grandmother died

  I wore a large circular hat with swirling orange and blue circles

  reminiscent of a ’40s, ’50s style movie star diva

  Craig loved and emulated.

  For Rory Buchannan, a poet and activist, who juggled many roles,

  as a father to a teenage son while holding down a full-time job,

  was also a member of Other Countries and GMAD, Gay Men of African Descent,

  at the wake, I had no words to express my love and gratitude towards him

  for hours we spent like musicians and secretaries at keyboards typing

  my first poems, then his own and organizing them into respective chapbooks.

  We sat in his living room one afternoon making up famous quotes for

  our book covers, comparing ourselves humorously with stars of the time

  like Audre Lorde.

  Rory was spiritual and when first diagnosed with HIV, he believed herbs

  could heal him.

  In the kitchen, there was a crockpot with warm smells emanating

  all day through the house.

  Death’s swiftness caused in all of us, such accelerated

  insight and poetic gems

  lines from Rory’s poem still play over and over in my head

  like an old 45

  “I stopped looking for Mr. Right when I found out I was him.”

  At his memorial, like bottles of fine wine broken open to celebrate

  between friends, I read a poem of mine that he loved when

  I rewrote the story of Rapunzel and portrayed her not

  as a blond woman pining for Prince Charming

  but as a liberated Black woman with dreadlocks.

  “That castle,” I said, “was the love she and the wicked witch built,

  and she did not need any rescuing.”

  In closure, I imitated the way I’d seen my grandfather and grandmother

  and church elders use bible quotes, but instead I used the refrain

  of an old R&B classic and vowed like a younger sister gazing up

  at a protective older brother in reverence I sang

  imitating the voice of the great baritone of the late soul singer Barry White

  “No matter how I high I get, I’ll still be looking up to you.”

  Months later when David Frechette, one of Other Countries

  first members, died, I was not able to attend the funeral

  but like a legacy between the business of wakes and funeral as comfort

  I often repeated to myself lines of his famous poem, titled

  after the song by French chanteuse and diva Edith Piaf, “Je Ne Regrette Rien,”

  a song in which David adopted the lyr
ics into his own language and

  Black gay experience which states in English, I have no regrets

  lyrics which seemed to articulate not just my feelings, but the mood

  of a generation.

  He wrote: Sister Chitlin and Brother Neckbone

  gather around my deathbed asking me to repent

  The wicked ways which brought me here

  But I don’t regret hours spent in arms of world-class insatiables

  Or the hunk I made love to prior to a Washington March

  Though my body be racked with fevers and pains “Non, je ne regrette rien.”

  And it was these simple lines like lyrics that challenged the sadness and shame

  accompanying AIDS, stigmas, and misconceptions that said

  gays caused their own illness

  these lyrics which challenged the fear and temptation to wallow

  in self-pity by spitting back, “Non, je ne regrette, rien.”

  I’m not sure where it belongs, but I must insert:

  there were times when I, the Funeral Diva, was not always noble,

  I was traveling while my dear friend the visual artist Don Reid was dying

  and I ran away.

  We worked together at the Hetrick-Martin Institute for Gay and Lesbian Youth.

  He was an art therapist and at twenty-three years old I ran the afterschool program.

  I met him on a panel first at Harlem Hospital.

  He was part of the group that existed in the ’80s called

  Black and White Men Together.

  At that panel, Don carried on his back the baby son he’d adopted

  with his white partner.

  This is long before gay people adopting children was common.

  His son’s name was Max, and he was a tiny brown baby Don adored.

  Later, working at the Institute, Don and I would have many adventures

  and escapades with Baby Max in tow.

  There was a time a year or two after Max started walking, he wanted

  to be a peacock for Halloween.

  Don being a gay man, a visual artist, and sudden costume designer

  searched day and night for real feathers.

  He spent all night sewing together Max’s costume.

  There was also a time we took Baby Max to church and because

  Don raised him to be free, Max wandered down the aisle at three years old,

  stood next to the preacher and did an interpretive interpretation of the preacher’s

  words.

  The preacher seemed annoyed, but Don, a proud parent smiled

  the whole time.

  I remember our offices at the Institute

  located on the Westside Highway, across from Hudson River

  and infamous Piers.

  There was lots of sunlight.

  We were in formation.

  We were making ourselves.

  While others were dying around us, Don was in denial about HIV/AIDS

  We never talked about it.

  Even when he got the tell-tale pneumonia, the rapid weight loss,

  and the terrible fear.

  We never said AIDS.

  By then, I had left the agency, I was traveling as an actor and

  leaving the next day when I heard Don was in the hospital.

  I understand he asked for me.

  I heard his voice in my head asking a friend, “How’s Pam?”

  But my feet were leaden, I couldn’t go.

  I didn’t want my last image to be of a man shrunken down

  to a skeleton.

  Like the recent survivors of Hurricane Katrina and Maria in Puerto Rico,

  I was grief-stricken and waterlogged.

  Maybe this is like scenes from the Holocaust or World War II

  admissions you won’t find in any history book

  but like in concentration camps when stripped to bare essentials.

  Like in a novel popular during the ’70s

  when survivors of a plane crash devoured human flesh.

  Or Margaret Garner, the slave who ran away

  and murdered her own child rather than to see it become a slave,

  in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, she is haunted

  by the child’s ghost.

  Like in Chimamanda Adichie’s novel, Half of a Yellow Sun

  about the Nigerian/Biafra war, a beloved boy character

  whom we believed in is so corrupted and dehumanized by war

  he participates in a gang rape.

  There’s a story I heard in South Africa after

  the end of apartheid

  A boy and his friend rape a girl on the road, they kill her.

  The boy eventually turns her over and discovers the girl he raped

  and killed was actually his own sister.

  A teacher hears this story and screams out to her classroom appalled

  asking after all Black people have fought and died for

  “Tell me, is this the new South Africa?”

  Like that South African boy, Margaret Garner, the subjects of Victor Frankl’s essays

  about the Holocaust and others, some of us in the AIDS crisis

  did terrible things to survive.

  Never made it down aisles of the hospital wards

  of Bellevue and St. Vincent’s.

  Couldn’t bear brown shit-stained walls and

  terrible wretched smells of death.

  Some of us couldn’t bear the hatred and scornful eyes

  as we passed the nurses station

  saw doctors and family members who blamed us.

  Some of us were so grief soaked and waterlogged

  we couldn’t take one more step

  having seen and experienced things in our young lifetimes that

  no human being or citizen should.

  During Hurricane Katrina, I was in Ghana.

  On television, I saw a tidal wave sweep downstairs and trap

  a young Black girl.

  Firefighters yelled through a basement window

  “Hold on, Baby Girl. Just hold on. We’re coming. “

  But despite hers and their desperate efforts, she drowned.

  Some of us were noble, we tried but we just couldn’t carry anymore

  and were forced to let go

  watched bodies devoured,

  the very breath and essence stolen

  limbs, life support-cut off

  some of us went MIA

  AWOL

  were forced

  into black-market drugs and operations like women in the ’60s,

  using cord, wire hangers, and glass

  to abort in back alleys.

  Some like Sammy, lover of Michael Brody, father of The Paradise Garage,

  a beautiful Latino boy with pure soul ravaged by AIDS

  shot himself in the head at point blank range

  couldn’t stand what the virus did to him

  the shame he felt

  like something out of Kafka’s Metamorphosis

  when a human being is transformed into a bug

  we became pariahs, the despised, choosing to wear

  in defiance badges, gays in the Holocaust wore pink triangles

  like something out of Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart

  Like in The Diary of Anne Frank, we hid beneath floorboards

  transforming into monsters or messiahs because

  as Audre Lorde declared in her battle with cancer

  once coming face to face with death, who might ever

  have power over us again

  Some of us who were witnesses had blinders and

  bandages ripped off

  developed an x-ray vision

  some of us like survivors of the Japanese internment camps

  and WWII having lost everything

  developed new appreciation for life

  For some of us snowfall, rain, water, flowers, a book,

  apple, paint brushes, papers, pen took on new mea
ning

  Some of us when we were touched or someone was actually kind

  we cried.

  The only words I have to describe this time were

  The words written by poet Michael Lassell

  “How to watch your brother die,” and Essex Hemphill’s

  “When My Brother Fell,”

  The only thing that kept us all going were words of Audre,

  Essex, Pat Parker, and Joe Beam.

  The only thing that freed me from the guilt of

  not seeing Don in the hospital was a story I read years

  later by bell hooks when she talked about not going

  to see a grandmother who was dying, because she said,

  “I was the person who loved her most.”

  When Don died, I was on a hilltop outside of Paris,

  like a cord cut

  I felt the exact moment breath left his body.

  When I returned home from Paris, I saw Max who

  was about four years old. We went to a museum together.

  The next day I called and Don’s surviving lover Steve reported

  Max had awakened the day after we went to the museum

  and said aloud, after I just begun to believe my friend

  Don was dead and gone forever,

  “Pamela laughs like Daddy.”

  Don Reid, Rory Buchanan, Craig Harris, David Frechette, Essex Hemphill

  are just a few, there are countless others,

  So many wakes and funerals I attended paying tribute

  to strangers, as if each were a family member of my own

  or close friend, but the basis of this story could never be

  for thousands, hundreds of thousands who’ve died,

  about massive grief remaining unprocessed, blows endured

  to every industry, fashion, literature, business, performance.

  It’s not about the mysteries, invisible hands, minds, legs,

  Behind things I still think, wear, do.

  It’s not about martyrs who gave and lost lives

  so that we now can enjoy freedoms of marriage and

  protection under laws.

  It’s not about men and women I will never forget, faces

  publicly streaked with tears, empty caskets carried openly

  through streets in protest.

  It’s not about those like Alan Williams who worked with me

  at The Gay and Lesbian Institute, a volunteer who would say

  every time I saw him, “You’re so beautiful.”

  He loved to hear the story of how I as a little girl, a little Black girl

  would go to the hairdresser as a child and ask the hairdresser

  to make my hair whirl and twirl like the figure skater Dorothy Hamill.

  “Write that story,” he’d say.

  This story is not about Tim Boyd, the sign language interpreter