PATRICIA SPEARS JONES
EDUCATOR LESSON PLANS
TIM SEIBLES
AMIRI BARAKA
Spring 2014 $6.00 MosaicMagazine.org
1
“Go on this timely and poignant journey with Emily Raboteau and you will never think of home in the same way again.” —EDWIDGE DANTICAT
“Vivid and fascinating . . . . Raboteau’s voice is as complex as her journey.” —SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“A brilliant illustration of the ways in which race is an artificial construct that, like beauty, is often a matter of perspective.” —WALL ST REET JOURNAL
“Thoughtful, well-researched, and deeply fascinating.” —WASHINGT ON POST
“[Raboteau’s] detailed depictions flash with insight and beauty.” —LOS ANGELES TIMES
“Vivid . . . Ambitious . . . Frank and expansive.”—CHIC AGO TRIBUNE “‘[Raboteau] finds the ground she wants to make her own, and she sinks her roots there.” —BOST ON GLOBE
“As reaching as it is intimate, as original as its old soul. I didn’t want to put this beautiful book down.” —CHERYL STRAYED
“I doubt there will be a more important work of nonfiction this year.”—DAVE EGGERS 2
MosaicMagazine.org
GROVE PRESS an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
Photo credit: Marcia E. Wilson
content
32
Interviews Tim Seibles by Remica L. Bingham-Risher .................................................... 10 Patricia Spears Jones by Rochelle Spencer .................................................... 20 Edward Kelsey Moore by Linda A. Duggins and Clarence V. Reynolds .......... 32 Poems The Last Poem About Race by Tim Seibles .................................................. 14 Dancing Villanelle by Tim Seibles ................................................................ 17 Life Lessons by Patricia Spears Jones ............................................................ 23 Living in the Love Economy by Patricia Spears Jones .................................... 25 pull up pants by Patricia Spears Jones .......................................................... 27 Ode to My Hands by Tim Seibles ................................................................ 46 Review ............................................................................................................. 30 The Good Lord Bird by James McBride The Fall of Saints by Wanjiku wa Ngugi Excerpt The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat by Edward Kelsey Moore ................. 35 Mosaic Lesson Plans .......................................................................................... 36 Walter Dean Meyers: The Basketball Study Lesson plan for high-school educators Designed by Eisa Nefertari Ulen
photo credit: Marcia E. Wilson
Mosaic’s lesson plans give high-school educators ways to connect literature to history and social studies while also serving to increase the importance of books and reading. Essay Amiri Baraka: Rest In Perpetual Power by Conor Tomas Reed ..................... 44 Around Town by photographer Marcia E. Wilson ............................... 3, 4, 7, & 44
Abiodun Oyewole of the Last Poets pays tribute to Jayne Cortez and Amiri Baraka MosaicMagazine.org
3
photo credit: Marcia E. Wilson
Rashidah Ismaili hosted the tribute to Jayne Cortez and Amiri Baraka 4
MosaicMagazine.org
contributors
Remica L. Bingham-Risher earned an MFA from Bennington College, is a Cave Canem fellow, and a member of the Affrilachian Poets. Her first book, Conversion (Lotus Press, 2006), won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award and was published by Lotus Press. Her second book, What We Ask of Flesh, was published by Etruscan Press in 2013. She is the Director of Writing and Faculty Development at Old Dominion University and resides in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children. She is currently finalizing a book of interviews entitled Blood on the Page—African-American Poets from the Black Arts Movement to the Neo-Urban Modernist Movement: Interviews, Essays and Poems. For more information on her work and upcoming events visit www.remicalbingham. com. Colleen Lutz Clemens, Ph.D., assistant professor of Non-Western Literatures at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, earned her Ph.D. in Post-Colonial Literature at Lehigh University. Her academic work has been published in Feminist Formations. She is the editor of several books of non-fiction including Philadelphia Reflections: Stories from the Delaware to the Schuylkill and has published short essays in various collections including Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists. She lives in Bucks County with her partner, two dogs, and daughter. She blogs at kupoco.wordpress.com. Linda A. Duggins is a lifelong booklover, creator of literary events, and director of publicity at Grand Central Publishing. Sidik Fofana has written several publication including the Source, Vibe, and allhiphop.com. His work appears in the recently released The Black Male Handbook: Blueprint for Life edited by Kevin Powell.
Conor Tomás Reed has been a student, educator, and activist at the City University of New York since 2006. Conor's work focuses on 20th and 21st century Africana social movement literatures and freedom schools. Clarence V. Reynolds, an independent journalist, is director at the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, CUNY, and a copyeditor and writer for The Network Journal. Rochelle Spencer is co-editor, along with Jina Ortiz, of All About Skin: An Anthology of Award-Winning Fiction by Women Writers of Color. A co-founder of the Harlem Works Collective, she has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. Eisa Nefertari Ulen is the author of Crystelle Mourning. She has contributed to numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Ms., Health, Heart & Soul, Vibe, Black Issues Book Review, Quarterly Black Review of Books, and CreativeNonfiction.org. Ulen graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and earned a master’s degree from Columbia University. A founding member of Ringshout: A Place for Black Literature, she teaches English at Hunter College in New York City. www.EisaUlen. com. Born in London, England; Marcia Wilson’s photography has documented many writers of the African Diaspora. Her photos have appeared in Vibe, Publishers Weekly, Black Issues Book Review, LA Weekly, and QBR. She has exhibited at The National Black Writers Conference, Medgar Evers College, New Haven Public Library, New York Public Library (Flatbush branch), and Air Gallery. She currently resides in Brooklyn. Visit www.WideVisionPhotography.com for additional information.
MosaicMagazine.org
5
Subscribe to
Name Address City/ST/Zip ❑ One-Year Subscription: $15.00 ★ MAKE CHECK OR MONEY ORDER PAYABLE TO Literary Freedom Project 314 W 231 St. #470 Bronx, NY 10463 www.MosaicMagazine.org
Subscribe to
Name Address City/ST/Zip ❑ One-Year Subscription: $15.00 ★ MAKE CHECK OR MONEY ORDER PAYABLE TO Literary Freedom Project 314 W 231 St. #470 Bronx, NY 10463 www.MosaicMagazine.org
Subscribe to
Name Address City/ST/Zip ❑ One-Year Subscription: $15.00
6
★ MAKE CHECK OR MONEY ORDER PAYABLE TO Literary Freedom Project 314 W 231 St. #470 Bronx, NY 10463
MosaicMagazine.org
www.MosaicMagazine.org
The Ancestors Don’t Care About Your Plans On February 4, at New York University, poetry, love, and hundreds of black arts devotees filled two rooms to honor activists Jayne Cortez (1934-2012) and Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) for their key roles as artists, teachers, and their influential participation in the Black Arts Movement. Baraka’s death on January 4 was still fresh in the minds of many attendees, of which included Sandra Maria Esteves, Rashidah Ismaili (event host), Linton Kwesi Johnson, Felipe Luciano, Haki Madhubuti, Arthur Pfister, Askia Toure, Quincy Troupe, Ted Wilson, and Marvin X. All of whom took the stage to play the blues. Ironically, the event was organized by Baraka to pay tribute to his friend poet Jayne Cortez. Sadly, after his death, Baraka became one of the event’s honored ancestors. During his life he never seemed to suffer fools well. His response to a question or issue was always refracted through a spared-down honesty. In 2010, at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Baraka (in conversation with writer Norman Kelly) challenged the audience to stop criticizing white-media control and start contributing to the discourse by creating our own publications. Mosaic was already in its twelfth year but I needed to hear this. I needed to hear from someone who understood the selflessness of belief – making a way out of no way is important. Baraka’s death, which was preceded by a hospital stay, was not the abrupt cleave of a traumatic end. There was time to think about a world with less fire. His words will continue to burn. The voice will strengthen, edges smoothed as his literary heirs steer his legacy towards the center –as the academy deems worthiness. This is to be expected. What cannot be filtered was his commitment to courageous thought. His legacy of Black Music, Blues People: Negro Music in White America, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music, Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing and many other works of poetry, plays, and fiction will make Amiri Baraka’s place in history an eclectic thing of beauty. Ron Kavanaugh Publisher
MosaicMagazine.org
Linton Kwesi Johnson pays tribute to Jayne Cortez and Amiri Baraka
7
8
MosaicMagazine.org
Join our Publisher’s Circle Mosaic Literary Magazine thanks the following Publisher’s Circle members for believing. William Aguado Crystal Bobb-Semple Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center Justin Collins Linda Duggins Grace Edwards Kim Coleman Foote Pearl Gill Rigoberto Gonzalez Rachel Eliza Griffiths Troy Johnson Sandra Kitt Lutishia Lovely Ron McKenzie Elizabeth Nunez Meows Osse The Page-Turner Network Lorraine Patrick J. Everett Prewitt Charles Rice-Gonzalez Brooke M. Stephens Karen McLane Torian Marcia E. Wilson Anonymous
We rely on the generosity of our supporters, subscribers, and readers. Join our cause. Your support will help maintain the quality editorial and education programs you’ve come to expect. Donate $100, become a Publisher’s Circle member and strengthen our ability to present the literary arts.
Yes, you can make a difference. Visit www.MosaicMagazine.org Ron Kavanaugh Mosaic Literary Magazine MosaicMagazine.org
9
tim seibles words bound for revelation an interview with
by Remica L. Bingham-Risher
10
MosaicMagazine.org
m s
In October 2012, Tim Seibles finally got a bit of his due. His latest book of poems, Fast Animal, was nominated for the National Book Award, putting his work in the spotlight for the national audience many agree it deserves. When Tim Seibles fell headlong into poetry as an undergraduate student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas more than thirty years ago, he was a Philly son burning to play football, but beginning to believe words could be the saving grace in a rapidly maddening world. Tim Seibles has published seven collections of poetry, Body Moves, 1988; Hurdy-Gurdy, 1992; two chapbooks—Kerosene and Ten Miles An Hour, 1995; Hammerlock, 1999; Buffalo Head Solos, 2004; and Fast Animal (Etruscan, 2012). In 2012, Body Moves was re-printed as part of Carnegie Mellon’s Classic Contemporary Poetry Series. His work can be found in numerous anthologies including: Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Outsiders: Poems about
MosaicMagazine.org
11
12
MosaicMagazine.org
Rebels, Exiles and Renegades and Verse & Universe: Poems about Science and Mathematics. His poems, “Allison Wolff” and “Othello, Unplugged” were included in the 2010 and 2013 Best American Poetry anthologies. His honors include an Open Voice Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.
photo credit: John-Henry Doucette
Upon hearing that Tim Seibles was nominated for the National Book Award (NBA), I wrote the following on my blog: “When I was 16…I found Tim Seibles. His book, Hurdy-Gurdy, fell into my heart and hands and I was hammered by its deft music. I remember, so clearly, reading the poem “Trying for Fire” sitting up in my bed and feeling a little faint, a little dizzy. My head was blaring, heart banging, I couldn’t breathe. I’d never had that kind of reaction to anything…certainly no book, and I’d read plenty by then—many that I loved beyond telling—but none moved me like the work of Tim Seibles in that moment. Years later, after I sought him out and followed him (and a boy) to Old Dominion then weaseled my way onto his advisees list so I could sit in his office and marvel once each term, he told me I was a poet, and that this poet’s life was possible, even in a stark and dire world. He sent me to Cave Canem then to Bennington, then eventually back to Etruscan Press. He has colored so much of the timeline in my life and I am so grateful to know him this morning and know that now (finally) a great many others will love his fire, too. He is, indeed, a Fast Animal, a brilliant mind, an open eye and heart.”
Remica Bingham-Risher: Many of us felt you were long overdue for an NBA nomination. More than a year has passed now and I’m assuming you’re moving back into the poet’s regular obscurity. How does the influx and then the return to normalcy change you or your writing life? Tim Seibles: I’m wouldn’t say I’ve been changed in any significant way by being a finalist for the National Book Award. I’m so glad to have had a bit of that big spotlight for awhile—truly astonished really—but you write what you’re driven to write forever and ever amen. I don’t think the effort and neurotic worry ever changes. Bingham-Risher: Publishers Weekly called Fast Animal, “[c]risply comic, disarmingly frank, and aurally bold…” It is all that and more. In it, you write in the voice of a black vampire, pen sweeping odes to the ordinary and deify the ghosts of your past. One poem I’ve been revisiting a little too often recently is “Donna James.” I’m really fascinated by it and its subtle but clear erotica. You are a poet who certainly praises the body and all its uses. Writing about desire and specifically about sex is so hard for young poets, it all seems overwrought and underdeveloped. How do you craft this kind of work? Seibles: Believe me, my early efforts at articulating the erotic were not readily embraced by those who read them. Given the puritanical underpinnings of this culture, it is very hard to walk the tightrope between the erotic and the pornographic. (Of course, I think there’s room for both in poetry, but I am determined not to be careless with either.) I want to rescue sexuality and restore it to a celebrated place. It is an expression of the spiritual in us as well as a feature of the raw animal in us. I make no apology for either of those aspects of our
MosaicMagazine.org
13
THE LAST POEM ABOUT RACE
Just whistling at white legs once upon a time, could get a black man torn apart by some giddy mob tipsy with their fair skin and cold beer— and there’d be picnics while he swung and some singing in the round. But back then is not now, and the future is a ditty I hum to myself the way a child might whistle Dixie just to keep from hearing what teethes in the dark, and for most of my life, I have lived there: belonging and not belonging to America— this fat animal shape on the globe where white people have done so much to so many and get “pretty tired of hearing about it.” I’m not trying to be mean. I’ve got some white blood in my veins— and really, whiteness is just a shadow of its former self, but still, I’m kinda scared, confused about what to do with History while I’m sitting in a park in Virginia holding a white woman’s hand. I never want to think being American is impossible, but the truth is some silly mothafuckas still fly Confederate flags and maybe it’s all too much for any one man. I would like to say she smiles a smile that locks the door on grief, that her legs could make a new priest pause, that what is unsaid—in the meeting of our complicated skins—is itself a word: felt but never defined exactly like Time, the way it shoves everybody forward, then leaves all of us way behind.
14
MosaicMagazine.org
I remember kissing Karen Stickney in kidneygarden, her hair vaselined and wavy, her buttery brown cheek damp against my lips how, for the rest of the day, my little brain whistled like a whiffle ball, though the teacher did make me stay after school. I told Karen I would save her if she fell down a hill—and I meant it, as much as a five-year-old can. Now, fifty years deep into this, that’s mostly what I’m looking for: a touch of daylight with someone who can turn me away from the tilt of my own nervous humming. But what can I say to the black woman who gives me that hard stare, who cannot hear my heart crooning, Of course, I love sistas, but isn’t everybody beautiful? In so many ways, the blood is still wet on the lash and I see black bodies everyday pressed into capital—army, navy, NBA, NFL—and who gets to live inside them lovely new prisons? It must be a riddle being white, knowing and not knowing what’s what: afraid of the dark citizens but so in love with that funky music. Even this slyly freckled woman who squeezes my hand, whose white skin hides her own hard story, breathes an air I can’t quite fit into my lungs, though we groove to Parliament and she throws her hips hard enough to shake the centuries loose. I want to believe love can be big enough to beat back all the bad news, and today, I don’t think I do, but maybe I think too much, and a touch of lips is bigger than History, and where I am, this present tense, is just a song that’s really over by the time it begins.
MosaicMagazine.org
15
humanity. For me, the erotic realm is one place where those apparent opposites are beautifully reconciled. In sex, we share companionship—a mutual interest in each other’s deepest longings—and physical pleasure becomes a sort of text, a manifestation of another language perhaps a prayer to the body for the body. I’m sure some would say I’ve crossed the line into offensive territories—even in the poem you cite above, which I believe is an honest and tender rendering of early sexual discovery. With regard to crafting such work, it’s a matter of patience and sweat—like with all poems. There are plenty of half-ass poems on safe subjects. For me, the work is in finding a specific tone and a particular set of images and insights that can do justice to real sexuality. I mean, there’s what one does intentionally as a poet and what one stumbles into that works, intuitions that seem to instruct us as we write. Bingham-Risher: You often write in formal verse in Fast Animal and throughout your repertoire. What does working in form give you as a writer? Does it free you in a way? Seibles: I love ballads and, more recently, I’ve found myself consumed with villanelles. I don’t find form freeing. I find it more like trying to do a new dance in clothes that are just a little too tight, so I feel obliged to elbow around and high-kick, to stretch the garments to make certain moves happen. There’s a tension in that—not unlike the tension between a guitar solo and the rhythm/ melody that give a tune its shape. The soloist presses against the edges, almost breaking out, to make something dramatic and moving and good to the ear. I like the way the lines of a villanelle can bump against or slide
16
MosaicMagazine.org
beyond its rhyme scheme and metrical demands to create a kind of almost untethered singing, a daring romp, a late-night bar song, an elaborate cry, both playful and sad. Think Hendrix and Coltrane or Wayne Shorter and Carlos Santana. Bingham-Risher: Can you talk about your life in publishing (i.e. with Cleveland State for some time, then in limbo for a while until Etruscan)? How does that search for different poetry homes influence your morale? What advice can you offer to other poets who go through the same type of thing? Seibles: I feel very grateful for my years with Cleveland State University Press. Of course, things change. After almost twenty years the editor of the press changed and he was unimpressed by my work, so I left. I wasn’t happy about the departure, but I understand things like that happen. There are better writers than me who’ve had far worse luck. My morale wasn’t damaged. I love to write and I believe in poetry; it would take something far more traumatic to change that feeling. Certainly, you worry about how long it’ll be before you find another press, but I was willing to self-publish Fast Animal if the search didn’t go well. My advice to other poets in a similar situation is to not give absolute power to presses (or anyone) regarding how and when your work is published. That could be head-warping in a lot of ways. Bingham-Risher: I found this revelation of yours very interesting from an interview with Bomb Magazine. You said, “When I was a young poet—dreaming of being published, dreaming of getting invited to do readings— of course, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to win this award or that award. But truthfully, they seemed rela-
DANCING VILLANELLE
I guess nobody ever really stands a chance Man, even the good guys wind up dead But shouldn’t we dance, shouldn’t we dance? I caught the cold truth in a mid-life glance The friendliest innocence is finally bled Parents must know kids don’t stand a chance These long-legged women got me looking askance: Is monogamy honestly better instead? Let’s all of us dance! Couldn’t we dance? I wish mom had warned me a bit in advance For the rest of my life, I’ll be face-down in bed You learn to accept that a man’s got no chance I’d like to receive a nice blow-job in France, a touch of detente to help beat back the dread If you ask real nice won’t they stand you a chance? Suppose I show up and just take off my pants? There’s a good chance I’d get kicked in the breads But couldn’t we dance? Shouldn’t we dance? Let’s work like zombies, walk malls in a trance, and buy all the bullshit they shine in our heads Why even wake up if they won’t let you dance? I’m gripping the wheel with both of my hands Wherever you go the clocks wring out the dead I guess nobody ever really stood a chance But didn’t we dance, didn’t we?
MosaicMagazine.org
17
18
MosaicMagazine.org
tively unreal to me. So I did submit manuscripts to a few contests, when I was starting out. I just wasn’t a good enough writer to win any of those contests.” NBA nomination aside, are you a good enough writer to win now? How would you gauge your personal progress? Seibles: Writing is like playing an instrument. My instrument is English. The longer I play, the better I understand what words might do—how meaning and sound operate within a poem—or how a line works within the larger body of the poem. Also, my own sense of things has deepened and sharpened over the years, which adds fuel to my imagination. It’s impossible for me to say how good I am or to gauge my progress in any precise way. I feel that I know more now than I used to, and living this long has made me more desperate, more daring with respect to want from my poems. I also take courage and inspiration from other artists—poets, painters, musicians, dancers.
photo credit: John-Henry Doucette
Bingham-Risher: What would you tell those, especially students and the like, who are sometimes taught to put much stock into contests, etc. Are contests all about the skill of the poets? Does losing them say more about your skill, or lack thereof, than about other parts of the writing life or larger professional landscape? Seibles: Every contest is different—and it’s impossible to have a clear sense of who is reading manuscripts in the early stages. I’m sure a good number of fine books have been passed over by readers who may have been too hurried as they plowed through the stacks. I was lucky enough to place my second book, Hurdy-Gurdy, through Cleveland State’s contest. (Four books were chosen that year and I believe mine was the fourth.) Of course, skill has some part in who’s picked, but who gets picked is
also a reflection of who’s picking. To win a contest there must be a convergence of three things: good writing, alert readers-judges who find your particular sensibility appealing, and the lucky timing that has your work in those particular hands. That year, I could’ve easily submitted my work to several other contests and been ignored. I think it’s potentially destructive to place a lot of stake in being a “contest winner.” You write steadily, you write what compels you, you grow as you work; this has to be the main source of sustenance for a writer. How many now famous writers had their work rejected many times before attracting a publisher? James Joyce’s Dubliners, I believe, was cast aside by 27 different presses before hitting print. Contests can be just as mysterious as publishing houses with regard to their choices. Bingham-Risher: You teach in two MFA programs at Old Dominion and Stonecoast. Do you think the influx of these programs changed the writing world over the last decade? One criticism is that we’re giving students a false hope about being the next great writer. What are your thoughts about that? Seibles: Clearly, the proliferation of MFA programs reflects a felt need in this culture. I think the number of MFA programs is a response to what appears to be a tidal wave of superficial nonsense coming from the zillion screens surrounding us. People want meanings, visions, voices that reflect their actual lives. The Geico Gekko can’t offer this; neither can a bunch of Law & Orders or movies that feature demonic possessions and/or vicious gun-loving lunacy. People don’t suddenly want to be writers because of MFA marketing. The passion is there and students come to such programs to hone their skill. continued on page 45
MosaicMagazine.org
19
20
MosaicMagazine.org
About a month after 9/11, National Book Award recipient Lucille Clifton, in a reading at the New School with the poet Sonia Sanchez, shared a personal work-in-progress about the attacks –the powerful “a september song: a poem in 7 days.” Clifton ended up being far from the only poet to write about 9/11; in the years after many anthologies were published: Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, and September Morning: Ten Years of Poems and Readings from the 9/11 Ceremonies New York City, among others. Despite all that poets did to commemorate the national trauma of 9/11, we have yet to witness the same for the Great Recession—the worst economic crisis since the Depression of the early twentieth century. It’s true that no lives were lost, but lives were changed. And just as the Towers symbolized New York, the collapse of Lehman Brothers jolted the Big Apple into the center of the financial crisis. Yet, despite a small online presence and a scattering of individually published poems, poets haven’t mounted a John Steinbeck-like effort to make sense of the
photo credit: Thomas Sayers Ellis
by Rochelle Spencer MosaicMagazine.org
21
current financial crisis. This is as strange as it is terrifying: though New York is about as capitalistic and ambitious as any city can get, the poetry community has been lax about dissecting the pain and loss of identity that comes with prolonged joblessness. Is there a need for a Great Recession poet? Which poet will finally write about the homelessness and the hunger, and worst of all, the unceasing fear that, from now on, this existence of pain and scarcity will become the new normal? Perhaps the poet who will help us unpack and heal won’t be a native New Yorker, but one who was born and raised in the heartland, later traveled the world and so possesses the music of a southerner, the cosmopolitan experience of an international traveler, and the eye for detail of a transplant. Perhaps the poet who will chide us to laugh at our pain and rediscover our resiliency will be one who has received both a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Distinguished Alumni Award from Rhodes College, has been featured in the new Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and The Best American Anthology for Poetry. Perhaps the poet who will rescue us is Patricia Spears Jones. “Patricia is a New York-based writer,” says Cornelius Eady, Pulitzer-Prize nominee and co-founder of the African-American poetry group Cave Canem. “She lives in an international city and that’s the point of view that informs her. Patricia is so unique because she is a person that has membership in so many different artistic groups in New York. It isn’t just writing—it’s art. In addition to
22
MosaicMagazine.org
her work as a poet, Spears Jones is a well-known arts administrator who served as the Director of Planning and Development of New York City’s New Museum of Contemporary Art. She has an aesthetic, and really has this idea of language and art and culture. And that, I think, is unique to a New Yorker. I think she wouldn’t have accomplished it –this one-of-a-kind aesthetic–had she not have moved from Arkansas to New York.” Spears Jones’ travels allow a kind of effortless knowledge seeps though in her poetry. Her first collection, The Weather That Kills, contains the much anthologized poem “The Perfect Lipstick,” a startling poem about the birth and history of America, and how it became a place where the “most dangerous of dreams/come true.” In her second collection Femme du Monde, Spears Jones clearly establishes herself, as not only a woman of the world, but also as one who celebrates every aspect of life. And, with Femme du Monde, Spears Jones creates a “book almost in love with the whole world,” as poet/ photographer Thomas Sayers Ellis has put it. Poems such as “Female Trouble” showcase Spears Jones’ metaphoric wit. The day before an operation for “female trouble,” a woman sees a pig—“pink and fat and stubborn”—on a New Jersey highway. While others, such as “Sapphire,” display her knowledge of painting (Franz Marc, Gabriele Munter), poetry (Baraka and Yeats) and old television sitcoms (Amos ‘N Andy). But readers who fell in love with Spears Jones’ ability to reveal entire worlds through the scraps of people’s lives, and women’s lives in particular, as Spears Jones’ critically acclaimed Painkiller contains lipsticks, earrings, feathers juxtaposed alongside meaty themes such as iso-
Life Lessons
There are many lessons learned in life But few come from tragedy—I know, I know What makes you stronger and all that. Rot I say You learn more from what makes you laugh How much pleasure the tongue can bring and where it was placed The sweet look on your lover’s face. Or how loud P FUNK Could be on stage and off NOT JUST KNEEDEEP The towers falling; a man shot in the back All terrible, but: What can you do about that? What can you make of a world so wedded to injustice? How dare you name the oppressor and demand his head, His badge, his ranch or those secret accounts in the Maldives? It is not as if the struggle is useless, it is that it continues. But joy, where is it? What does it look like, smell like—bergamot Lemons, honey, roses, musk? To find it, is to explore a path where the stumbles are many The curses frequent, but the rewards
MosaicMagazine.org
23
lation and death, will find that her new work Living in the Love Economy (Overpass Books, 2014) uses these details to tell stories about perhaps an even more forgotten segment of society: New York’s working poor. Patricia Spears Jones was one of the acclaimed poets featured in Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, but the poems in Love Economy describe a different kind of collective grief than that which followed 9/11. The pain feels more sharply personal, as poems such as “Family Ties” and “Indian Summer” evoke the shame people have been made to experience simply because they are poor. “It is hard as hell to be a poor person on in America,” says Spears Jones as she sits on a bench inside the Midtown-based bookstore Chartwell Booksellers. ”The levels of contempt and humiliation and the daily manipulation of your time and body. We live in a city where people say there is only 6 or 7 percent unemployment, but 80% of the jobs are cleaning the toilet or serving someone at Starbucks or being a waitress. They’re all service jobs. And if you make more than $10 an hour you’re lucky. There’s nothing wrong with service jobs, but there is something wrong with a society that says this is the best we can do.” Ironically, the idea of working-class hardship comes through in Spears Jones’ gritty, New York-based humor. “Second Person Hurting” a slapstick poem about a series of hurried New Yorkers walking smack into a pane of glass, takes place “a few blocks” Spears Jones claims, from Chartwell. Another poem, “The Fringe of Town (après Jeanne Larsen)” occurs in the supposed heat of a
24
MosaicMagazine.org
Brooklyn laundromat. Spears Jones, who worked on The Poetry Project, the popular reading series started in 1966 at St. Mark’s Church, is well-acquainted with New York City’s artists and literary tradition, explains Kristen Gallagher, author of We Are Here and an Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, New York, where Spears Jones also teaches. “I met Patricia through my mentor, poet Charles Bernstein,” recalls Gallagher. “I see her history at St. Mark’s in her work and that New York School influence, which can’t be helped when you live in a city like this and you’re a poet. She has the awareness of her surroundings and the ability to juxtapose observation, memory, speech and other inputs and move pretty fluidly between them, like a good New Yorker!” This New York sensibility is also what initially attracted Joey Infante, Spears Jones’ editor at Overpass Books, to her manuscript. “I was born and raised in Brooklyn and saw Brooklyn on a personal level in these poems,” Infante reveals. “There’s wisdom behind these poems. It’s right there on the page. These aren’t poems that are hiding things. They contain life lessons, ideas about the minds of humanity,” Infante explains. He also notes that part of this wisdom is the unexpected “lightheartedness” he sees in Spears Jones’ work. Infante isn’t the only one to notice the humor in Spears Jones’ work; Spears Jones says she finds “humor very
Living in the Love Economy
I watch my daily intake of cheerios, peanut butter, salad greens I can do two major job applications per day I can lick my wounds useful” and cites Moms Mabley, Richard Pryor, and John Stewart—“on a good night”—as influences. Humor is part of her heritage, and though many of the poems in Love Economy are geographically based in New York, Spears Jones’ ability to find moments of lightheartedness in tragic circumstances, stems from a working-class southern tradition: the blues. The late Lorenzo Thomas, who served as editor of Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth Century American Poetry, praised Spears Jones’ work for having the “same deceptively casual tone” of a blues lyric. Indeed, like the blues, some of the best poems in Love Economy blur hope, humor, pain, and irony until they become madness. The title poem, for example, incorporates the language of a failing economy (“Jealously traded as a penny stock and pleasure calculated/on past accounts, overdue”) to describe a soured love affair. In this poem, as with others in the collection, the tragicomic nature of Spears Jones’ language evokes the blues’ thoughtfulness without replicating the lyrics, a fact that she acknowledges.
What I can’t do is parse the future Or glow in the dark Or lick the salt from your back, But that was a while ago and how sad to want Your back right now or the back up or an embrace That lasts longer than it should. The Love Economy is complicated: affection is scarce Jealously traded as a penny stock and pleasure calculated On past accounts, overdue.
“I always think of myself as evoking the blues in my poetry, and the blues are never ‘happy’ even when they’re ecstatic,” Spears Jones explains. “There’s a sense of temporality of life. We’re only here for a brief time. There is only so much we can do. People have enemies and there are difficulties. And sometimes there’s great music and great sex to lighten the load.” But just as society often discounts the intelligence of working-class black people, people should not ignore the intellectualism of the blues nor of Spears Jones’ poetry.
MosaicMagazine.org
25
She has a reputation as an intelligent and distinguished teacher, says Juliet Howard, founder of the Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon in Brooklyn, New York, where several people have participated in Spears Jones’ master poetry classes. Spears Jones’ master classes are known for being “intensive” and intellectually rigorous. Howard adds, “the people I know who’ve taken the master class have talked about how much they’ve learned. She’s tough but we want that—we don’t want someone who is going to go easy on us.” Spears Jones’ membership in the literary community started early. In the late 80s, Spears Jones read at the Cambridge-based Dark Room Collective Reading Series, an organization of black poets whose energy and passion for books, Spears Jones says, “reminded her of The Poetry Project.” Spears also found the Collective remarkable for its “level of intellectual heft” and its “openness to all kinds of writing and poets. It wasn’t as though they decided that only one voice was possible. They had Ntozake [Shange], Yusef Komunyakaa, recipient of 1994 Pulitzer Prize for poetry as readers. The Dark Room presented the matrix of work that comes from being of African descent.” Gregory Pardlo, author of Totem believes that Spears Jones’ poetry presents a broader version of black womanhood than what people often see in popular culture. Pardlo, who assisted Spears Jones with editing Femme du Monde, says that “the overarching statement the book is making is that the lives of women--and black women in particular--are not at all as circumscribed as popular culture often assumes. My sense is that the argument that Patricia is making is that black womanhood
26
MosaicMagazine.org
is not regulated to domestic spheres.” Indeed, the title poem of Femme du Monde describes a woman who walks in several worlds: she is able to speak both “shattered Spanish with Argentinean intellectuals” and “outmoded American slang with the Moroccan” and remains weary, if amused, by how Americans’ knowledge of French music is limited to Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose.” Spears Jones’ wide base of knowledge, Pardlo continues, “is rebelling against stereotypes of not only conventional notions of black womanhood but also what constitutes feminism. Woman of the world means not only someone who travels, but also someone who is conscious of the world in her objective life. Her sense of femaleness and her sense of blackness go beyond southern agrarian folk stereotypes and tropes. It’s not so much the idea of physical travel but how Patricia doesn’t limit the territory where she allows her imagination to go.” Tony Medina, Professor of Creative Writing at Howard University, also believes Spears Jones’ poetry as womancentered, and he sees Spears Jones’ poetry as unique in its use of eroticism and its depiction of “the pain and the pleasure of passion.” Yet, he also finds that Spears Jones has an “aesthetic daring” that she shares with women writers such as Thulani Davis, Audre Lorde, and Ntozake Shange. As a black woman writer who came of age post-Black Arts Movement, Spears Jones “shares the political outlook of the times in which she comes and the commitment to the struggle,” explains Medina. “She shares the sense of womanism as defined Alice Walker. And that plays right into Spears Jones’ ‘woman of the world’ mindset. It reminds me of one of the characters in For Colored Girls, who says
pull up pants
Sun light lingers past five, past five thirty. As if night was a new and delicious meal Soon the white and yellows flowers will push up Push out in open air screaming spring And only the grandmothers will wish for winter Apartments overheated, children indoors, mostly safe Except the babies grabbed by many hungry fires that show up on television news every other week. The only thing missing is bird song. Chilly and yet, the harbingers are on the street Neighbors hanging outside the brownstone With the huge Ankh symbol in the window My skinny neighbor upbraids me when I joke about the belt not holding up his pants. “I ain’t no hoodlum” he declares as he pulls up his pants. “I got a hernia.”
MosaicMagazine.org
27
she comes from a place where she’s rich with so much stuff but her whole reality is based on eight blocks in Harlem.” And this is where Spears Jones’ Arkansas heritage comes in. As a transplanted southerner who now makes her home in New York City, her poetry has always embodied the feeling of the outsider looking in at larger culture. But newer poems, such as Love Economy, allow the outsider to loom larger than ever before. Most of the speakers in Love Economy are the ultimate outsiders, and their lives often represent uncomfortable questions: What does it mean to be a poor woman? What is life like for an older person with a less-than-comfortable savings account? Her newest poems are those of an African-American poet exploring the dangerous life of the outsider. And, ultimately, this outsider status may be exactly why the transplant has so much to say about race, gender, and most especially, class. ★
28
MosaicMagazine.org
Your book doesn’t have to be a mystery.
Finally, a place for popular fiction & nonfiction that reflects the African-American book market.
The Power List gives publishers the marketing muscle to help reach a diverse readership.
MosaicMagazine.org
29
Brought to you by AALBC.com, Cushcity.com, & MosaicBooks.com/powerlist.info
reviews The Good Lord Bird by James McBride Riverhead Hardcover Reviewed by Sidik Fofana In the tradition of The Confessions of Nat Turner and other works that co-opt history for the fictional imagination, James McBride rejiggers John Brown, off-the-rocker militia captain whose Bible is the revitalizing spinach behind his maniacal abolitionist crusades. The Good Lord Bird is told by Henry “Onion” Shackleford, a gender mistaken, freed slave, who witnesses Brown's tumultuous clashes to bring freedom for all below the Mason Dixon line. Onion, who was freed by Brown, is left with little choice but to travel the country with Brown's army as it revs up for his poorly executed raid on Harpers Ferry. McBride, who was recently awarded the National Book Award, stays true to historical markers in crucial ways. In 1856, Brown launched a series of raids that included the Pottawatomie Massacre in Franklin County, Kansas, which resulted in the deaths of five pro-slavers; and an attack on neighboring Osawatomie where he fought pro-slavery rebels. Brown would eventually head north to raise money for his Virginia campaign where he also met with Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman –celebrated black leaders of the day. It is the fictional dialogue between them where the real gold lies: a world of imagined conversations, poetic Southern twang, and thoughtprovoking what ifs. One of novel’s most prevalent thematic currents is what American History scholar Thaddeus Russell calls "the slavery of freedom.” The idea is straightforward: freedom can feel like a burden if one is not used to the rigors of independence. Onion faces this acerbic irony the moment Brown frees him. "I was starving fooling with him," he says of his first few days in
30
MosaicMagazine.org
the abolitionist’s camp. "I was never hungry when I was a slave. Only when I got free was I eating out of garbage barrels." Yet, failure to grasp this concept, according to McBride and his cross-dressing narrator, is what ultimately does Brown in. He underestimates the "comforts" of slavery and assumes that slaves will come running to his army to fight for their freedom. It doesn’t cross his mind that most slaves would hesitate to leave their relative state of security for the uncertain spirit of rebellion. The Good Lord Bird is at its most profound when it plays with these antebellum contradictions, shifting the lines between independence and enslavement. John Brown, the emancipator sometimes becomes John Brown, the involuntary master. Biblical truth is claimed by both abolitionists and slavers alike. The free and prosperous Negroes in the North are sometimes as complicit in the evil institution as the plantation owners of the South. Being declared free doesn’t always feel the same as being free. At once obedient to history and irreverent, The Good Lord Bird brings our heroes down to Earth to live, interact, and make mistakes again. Frederick Douglass can, for a moment, be the showy "man of parlor talk, of silk shirts, and fine hats” and Harriet Tubman can fuss about being on schedule, both orbiting John Brown’s psychotic zealotry. Unlike Huckleberry Finn, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, The Good Lord Bird is also the rare story of a white man told by a black protagonist. It is an imaginative account that keeps the grave soil of one of America’s most beguiling figures warm with folklore.
The Fall of Saints by Wanjiku Wa Ngugi Atria Colleen Lutz Clemens Wanjiku Wa Ngugi's debut novel The Fall of Saints deals with the important issue of human trafficking enabled by globalization. The main character, Mugure, has settled in New York City after growing up the child of a wealthy man’s mistress in Kenya —a status that leave her with neither position or money. After studying in the United States, she marries a mysterious lawyer named Zack. Mugure disconnects from her past and wants to create a future and family in the States, but infertility issues force her and Zack to adopt a child named Kobi. After finding a discrepancy in his immunization records, Mugure begins to question the validity of her son's adoption process. This begins Mugure’s puzzling quest for the truth. Unfortunately Ngugi’s novel sacrifices character development to the subject matter. Once Mugure begins to investigate her son’s adoption, the characters become underdeveloped and confused in their motivation. The most difficult character to believe is Mugure. In the beginning, Mugure is a kept woman, committed to maintaining her family’s stake in the American Dream. She admits, “Everything I had made me grateful to Zack. Yesterday I was an illegal immigrant. My mother was dead. My father had denied me. My womb would not carry a life. Zack had given me a home, a country, and a child. In return, I inwardly assured him of my devotion.” The novel offers no indication that she is looking for any kind of disruption to her affluence. The reader is left to wonder why she would venture out to find the truth about the lineage of her cherished son. There is nothing in the expository drawing of Mugure that would lead the reader to believe that her discovery of a scrap of paper with the word “Alaska” on it would be enough to begin a poorly drawn journey that includes too many car chases, too much luck, and too many coincidences. Even at the prodding of her friend and journalist Wainaina and
his offhand remarks that arouse doubt in her mind, Mugure is so committed to her American life that the reader may ask, why would Mugure do this when watching the character risk her life and the life of her son. Mugure's search leads to Kenya, where she encounters people from her past who show her the dark side of human trafficking. With Wainaina help, they chase the story. Perhaps Mugure’s actions make more sense in this second half of the book because she is more comfortable at home. Upon landing, she notes that she “stopped, closed my eyes, and took in the sweet smell of home. The breeze. The freshness.” However, the focus on driving the forced plot forward with car chases, clandestine meetings, masked men with guns, and breathy phone calls leaves the reader tired by time Mugure starts to connect the dots and realize that her son’s adoption story is false. Dodging obstacles straight out of a mobster movie, when push comes to shove, Mugure doesn’t really have to do any work. There’s always someone to help her, a credit card to use to buy a plane ticket, a housemaid ready to drop her life in New York City to care for her charge. All of this convenience gives the reader no reason to root for Mugure. When she turns to Rosie, the Ghanaian woman she has hired to take care of the house (and be her friend in a turn so bourgeois it adds to the distaste one has for Mugure), Mugure says, “She had few objections to coming to Ohio. It was not a bad move for her financially.” Such a line is telling about Mugure: financial reasons are primary. In Mugure’s mind, Kobi and his family are all Rosie has. This denial of Rosie’s other needs rings false in a novel that wants to focus on the exploitation of the poor at the hands of the wealthy seeking babies for nefarious ends. The poor serving Mugure well comes to a head by the novel’s climax when she learns the truth about her son’s adoption and realizes that she has been betrayed by those she believed to be closest to her. By the end of the novel, the reader is happy to say goodbye to tiresome Mugure and her family. ★
MosaicMagazine.org
31
EDWARD edward Kkelsey ELSEY m Oo Oo Rr Ee M 32
MosaicMagazine.org
Reflected in the best writing is a resonance of humanity—which resides in all of us—that eventually transpires and stays with the reader long after the last page has been turned and the book has been placed on a bookshelf of favorites. This is the case with Edward Kelsey Moore’s The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat. Recently, publicist Linda A. Duggins and I were sitting around with a group of friends and, as usual, the conversation turned to favorite books and the state of contemporary literature. Within moments, we were talking about a recent book we were enjoying: an entertaining and poignant story about three women friends who, after 45 years, still meet at the local restaurant where they had formed their friendship to discuss, as they have always done, the joys and troubles in their lives. “The honesty in the story just jumped off the pages in the voices of these women,” Duggins commented. After a few laughs, we wanted to find out more about Moore’s Supremes. Since its publication, The Supremes at Earl’s AllYou-Can-Eat has ranked on The New York Times’s
by Clarence V. Reynolds with Linda A. Duggins
MosaicMagazine.org
33
best-seller list and The Power List, Spring 2013 (Powerlist.info). Duggins and I caught up with Edward Kelsey Moore after his European book tour. Linda Duggins: What a way to honor women with this uplifting and hilarious story about three friends who grow up in a small town and together face all kinds of ups and downs. Are any of your characters drawn from or inspired by women in your life or that you knew when you were growing up? Edward Kelsey Moore: I didn’t fashion any of the characters in The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat after specific women, but I definitely drew inspiration from the women in my life. I had the good fortune of hearing great female storytellers when I was young and I’ve never forgotten how exciting it was to hear them talk to each other. I loved the way they could amuse, console, and advise all at the same time. Duggins: Mother Dora is an amazing character. Her tough, hilarious, and deep love was the nucleus of Odette’s world. Who is Dora, really? Moore: The Supremes is a book about enduring love and friendship. Dora’s continued presence in her daughter’s life serves as a reminder that the past is always with us. I’m okay with readers just seeing her as a good time, but I think of Dora and the other ghosts as symbolic of the way time evaporates when we are with loved ones and old friends. Because of the power of the connection with someone we have loved for a long time, the moments we share are often as much about twenty years ago as they are about today. Reynolds: The beauty of the many family members,
34
MosaicMagazine.org
blood relation and not, in the story was the multifaceted and big lives of the women and the men in the community of Plainview. What was it like for you, a male, to get inside the mindset of women with such a plausible voice? Moore: I told the story from the perspectives of Odette, Barbara Jean, and Clarice because their voices were the ones that came to me and demanded to be heard. Like any writer, my goal was to be as true to the voices of my characters as I could be. The fact that they are women was not something I thought a great deal about. I just wanted them to have their say. Still, when it came to writing from women’s points of view, I do think that I might have had a couple of advantages over some other male authors, though. First, I learned to tell stories from some real experts, who happened to be funny, charming women. Also, even though I’m a first-time novelist, I’m a man in midlife. Writing across the gender divide doesn’t constitute the same threat to my sense of myself as a man as it might for a younger male writer. If you reach your fifties and haven’t sorted that stuff out, you’re in real trouble. Duggins: At times, the novel reads like a coming-of-age story, what would you describe as one of the dominant themes that connect the characters with the narrative? Moore: In a way, the characters are continually comingof-age. This is partly because a major theme of the novel is how the parenting the characters received affects them as adults. Whether it’s the self-confidence Odette got from Dora, the repression Clarice learned from Beatrice, or the unconditional love and support Big Earl gave to Barbara Jean and Chick, the nurturing the characters received in their youth shapes their adult actions.
excerpt
Reynolds: Of all the historic figures to play a role in your book, and in such a comedic way, how did you come about choosing former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and why portray her as a seer of death? Moore: The truth is that Eleanor Roosevelt was just pure fun to write. Once I imagined her as a ghost whose reward for being so kind and charitable in life was the freedom to get into all the afterlife mischief she desired; she was free to do as she wanted. It made sense that she might want to foresee deaths and turn somersaults. Duggins: There are certain chapters in the book, such as Chapter 11, that are written in the first person, when most of the book is written in the third person, what moved you to alternate in the chapters in which you did? Moore: I wrote the chapters that are narrated by Odette in first person because her view of the world is unique. She sees things and knows things that the other characters do not. I wanted Odette to be able to communicate her special perspective directly to the reader. Duggins: Did you have a particular reader in mind when you where writing about the Supremes, the men in their lives, and their families? Moore: When I write, I only think about the characters. For me, envisioning a reader while I’m writing makes the already difficult process even more intimidating. If I succeed in making my characters as real as I possibly can, then I feel that I’ve succeeded. If I’m lucky enough that readers respond to the characters as well, then I’ve been doubly blessed. ★
The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat by Edward Kelsey Moore I woke up hot that morning. Came out of a sound sleep with my face tingling and my nightgown stuck to my body. Third time that week. The clock on the dresser on the other side of the bedroom glowed 4:45, and I could hear the hiss of the air conditioner and feel its breeze across my face. I had set the temperature to sixty before going to sleep. So common sense said that it had to be chilly in the room. Well, common sense and the fact that my husband, James, who lay snoring beside me, was outfitted for winter even though it was mid-July. He slept like a child—a six-foot, bald-headed, middle-aged child—wrapped in a cocoon he had fashioned for himself out of the sheet and blanket I had kicked off during the night. Just the top of his brown head was visible above the floral pattern of the linens. Still, every inch of me was screaming that the room was a hundred degrees. I lifted my nightgown and let it fall, trying to fan cool air onto my skin. That accomplished nothing. My friend Clarice claimed that meditation and positive thinking eased her path through menopause, and she was forever after me to try it. So I lay still in the predawn darkness and thought cool thoughts. I summoned up an old summer memory of hopping with the kids through the cold water jetting from the clicking yellow sprinkler in our backyard. I pictured the ice that formed every winter on the creek that ran behind Mama and Daddy’s house in continued on page 49
MosaicMagazine.org
35
L ITERARY
MAGAZINE
Spring 2014 MosaicMagazine.org Mosaic’s lesson plans give high-school educators ways to connect literature to history and social studies while also serving to increase the importance of books and reading. Designed by Eisa Nefertari Ulen
36
MosaicMagazine.org
Lesson Plan
Walter Dean Meyers is widely recognized as one of the most important young adult fiction writers of our time. Winner of several prestigious literary awards and Library of Congress National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature from 2012 - 2014, Meyers has touched countless readers with his striking YA novels. A significant body of his work centers around the sport of basketball. The following lesson plans will aid educators in guiding close student readings of two of Meyers’ basketball-themed books. Pre-reading study of the author, of basketball terminology, and of the Harlem community Meyers writes about will help guide students into the narratives. Topics for discussion, essay ideas, and additional activities will help students understand the important motifs in Meyers’ basketball novels. In addition, other book titles are provided for educators and young readers to pursue an even closer, independent study of Meyers’ basketball novels. Walter Dean Meyers: The Basketball Study
MosaicMagazine.org
37
I. Getting Started A. Research Walter Dean Meyers 1. Early Life a. Where was he born? b. Who were his parents and what happened to them? c. Where did he grow up and who raised him? d. Where did he go to school and how far did he get in his schooling? e. What was his professional life like before he became a writer? 2. Writing Career a. How did he start writing when he was a child? b. What place in Harlem became very important to him when he was a child and discovered a love of books? c. How did Meyers start writing professionally? d. What are the major themes in his work? e. Who does he write about and where do his characters live? f. What is a YA author? g. What are his awards and accolades? B. Research Basketball 1. Make a list of common basketball terms that players use on neighborhood courts. Define these colloquial terms and create a glossary readers can refer to in the class. 2. Make a list of common basketball terms that journalists use when covering professional basketball games.
38
MosaicMagazine.org
Define these terms and create a glossary readers can refer to in the class. C. Research Harlem 1. Early Harlem a. Where is Harlem and who were the original inhabitants before the arrival of Europeans? b. Who were the first non-Native people to settle upper Manhattan? c. Why was the area called Harlem? What is the origination of this name? 2. The Harlem Renaissance a. When was the Harlem Renaissance? b. Who were the major artists, poets, writers, dancers, sculptures, and culture workers associated with this era? 3. Diversity of Harlem Residents a. Where did the Black residents of Harlem come from? Think about the elements of culture, including food, clothing, music, even hairstyles, that people retain when they migrate from one country to another. b. Research the names of Harlem businesses, including restaurants, bodegas, hair salons, and stores, by going online. What does the diversity of the kinds of foods, goods, and services available to Harlem residents tell us about this vibrant community? 4. Harlem Today a. Research census figures to determine the average age, income level, and race of Harlem residents. b. Define gentrification and discuss the impact gentrification and displacement due to rising rents might
be having on Harlem today. c. Find pictures and videos of Harlem online. What do these images suggest to you about Harlem today?
II. Close Study: Slam! A. Topics for Discussion 1. Read the first paragraph of Slam! out loud. How does this paragraph make you feel? Does it make you want to keep reading? Why? 2. On page 69, Slam wants to “go on back to where Ice and Bianca were.” How could he have done just that, “without looking lame” in front of his friends? 3. On page 74, Slam regrets not talking to Ice about his concerns, but he concludes that “you don’t have to teach fish to deal with water.” What do you think Slam means? Is he right? 4. On page 78, Slam says that his friend “had it in his head that he wasn’t going to make it.” Do you think it’s possible to be successful if you don’t believe you can be successful? What is the first step in any successful endeavor? 5. Slam says Coach Nipper can’t see “where the real game is” on page 85. What does Slam mean? Have adults or even peers ever made you feel this way? What did they see on the outside? What did they miss on the inside?
6. On page 100, Slam says “sometimes any way you go is wrong.” Is he right in this particular case? Is there a way Slam could have gone right? 7. Reread the paragraphs on pages 105-106 where Slam thinks about the math test he struggled to take. Even though the test is over, he still has to deal with the consequences. Do you think his feelings about the test could be a metaphor for life? 8. Goldy tells Slam that no one can “argue with what you accomplish” on page 112. Look for other sections of the novel where Goldy offers Slam important words of wisdom. Do you think this character’s name is significant? What kind of friendship does Goldy offer Slam? 9. Do you think Ice’s name is significant? What is happening to Slam and Ice’s friendship throughout the novel? Why do you think Slam has so many excuses for not confronting Ice? Why can’t Slam talk to Ice? 10. What do you think about the buzzards Slam’s father describes on page 173? What are the buzzards a metaphor for? Who or what are the buzzards in your life? What will you do to keep them from circling over you? 11. Om page 250, Coach Nipper says “Here we are!” Is this line significant? Why? B. Essay Idea On page 199, Mr. Tate describes the real meaning behind the students’ PSAT scores. Reread those paragraphs. Have you ever considered your test scores or any other aspects of your school record this way? Do you agree or disagree that your school record offers a way for strang-
MosaicMagazine.org
39
ers to measure your character? Write an essay describing your school record, what you think it says about you, and how you feel about what your record communicates. As you conclude your essay, consider what aspects of your record you would like to improve or enhance before you graduate. C. Additional Activities 1. Browse through articles featuring the real-life experiences of professional athletes. How many reports that you find offer positive or favorable portrayals of athletes? How many articles are negative? Does reading Slam! make you think differently about the real-life professional athletes in this country? Do you feel more or less critical of athletes now that you’ve read the Meyers book? Create a chart that displays the ratio of positive to negative articles featuring athletes. In your chart, include comments about the ways these articles made you feel about the public figures they portray. 2. How was Slam perceived by teachers? How was his community described by the white students who saw the first version of his videography project? Were their perceptions accurate or biased? Now, look at the media’s response to Justin Bieber’s 1/23/2014 arrest for drunken driving. Look through Twitter and on blogs to see people’s responses to Bieber’s crime and the language they used to describe him. Next, look at the media’s response to Seattle Seahawks player Richard Sherman’s 1/19/2014 FOX Sports interview after he made the game-winning play that would send his team to the Super Bowl. (http:// www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/01/ richard-shermans-best-behavior/283198/) How did people respond to his exuberance? Sherman did not
40
MosaicMagazine.org
commit a crime, yet certain terms related to criminality were used to describe him. Think about Sherman’s family background and his school record. Is there a racial line in terms of the language used to describe celebrities? Write your own op-ed article that expresses the way you feel about the way the media describes public figures who are often considered role models. Are people biased against Black athletes like Sherman and too forgiving of white celebrities like Bieber? 3. Slam spends a lot of time fantasizing about his future. His different visions of the future vary depending on who he’s just been with. Come up with a firm plan for your own future. What is your action plan? What are the steps you should take to make your fantasy future a reality? Make a vision board by cutting out images from magazines that express the kind of future you want for yourself. On the other side of your vision board, write out your action plan for making the vision real. 4. Using a video camera, create a documentary style short film that features your community.
III. Close Study: All The Right Stuff
yet “almost nobody who I knew was down with it.” Answer his question. Why are so many average people unaware that a social contract even exists? Do you think not knowing that a social contract is in place is dangerous?
A. Topics for Discussion 1. Reread Elijah’s definition of the social contract on page 14. Define social contract in your own words. What is the social contract in your school? How well is the social contract working? What can adults and young people in your school community do to make the social contract work for everyone in the building?
7. On pages 103-104, Elijah describes his friend, John Sunday. Is this the way you thought of John Sunday when you first heard his personal story in the fish market scene? Is Elijah’s description of his friend accurate?
2. Reread the passages in Slam! that express the title character’s growing awareness of the game of life (pages 209 – 210, 213, 218, 223-224, and 247-248). How do these sections help inform your understanding of All the Right Stuff? Is the game of life as described in Slam! the same as the social contract as defined in All the Right Stuff?
9. After having a difficult discussion with Paul about her own life, Keisha shoots “a high arcing shot that fell cleanly through the net” on page 139. What do you think her shot symbolizes?
3. On page 29 Elijah asks Paul if most people really do “get along just fine.” Now that you’ve read the book, answer Elijah’s question. 4. Look up the word sly in the dictionary. Would you describe the character Sly using those terms? 5. Look at Sly’s definition of the social contract on pages 59-61. Is Sly’s definition of the social contract in any way related to this character’s name? 6. On page 71 Slam wonders how so many people are “discussing the social contract all over the internet” and
8. Do you agree or disagree with Sly’s definition of crime on pages 121-122?
10. Reread the last paragraph on page 201. Is Meyer’s use of basketball as a metaphor for the game of life / the social contract effective? What is the real meaning of “that outside shot”? 11. On page 203, Elijah describes people who will want to use Keisha or prevent her from getting “ahead in the world.” Who might some of these people be? What can Keisha do to succeed despite them? B. Essay Idea Choose one of the philosophers Elijah names on pages 129 – 130. Go to your library for reliable information and research him. Write an essay examining this philosopher’s work, particularly his work regarding the social contract.
MosaicMagazine.org
41
C. Additional Activities 1. Go to a game or watch one on TV. Allow your study of Meyers to influence the way you see the game. Write your own article describing the specific game you watched. In your article, describe the game as a metaphor for the game of life / the social contract. 2. Read the Bible as literature. Look up the names Elijah and Paul. Who were these Biblical figures? What were their attributes? Think about the name John Sunday. Post each of the three character’s names on the top of a poster board. Under each name, provide words, Bible verses, or images that describe the character and his role in All the Right Stuff. 3. Reread Chapter 4. How does Elijah’s version of US History differ from the one you learned in school? Now that you’ve read All the Right Stuff, form a small group of students and work together to write your own version of the founding of our nation. 4. Draw, collage, or paint your own cover art for All the Right Stuff.
42
MosaicMagazine.org
IV. Additional Books to Read The Outside Shot, Game, Hoops Research the awards and accolades Meyers has received for these books and others. What awards would you give this author? Come up with your own awards for Meyers’ work.
Editor & Publisher Ron Kavanaugh ron@mosaicmagazine.org Facebook: mosaicmagazine Mosaic Literary Magazine (ISSN 15310388) is published by the Literary Freedom Project. Content copyright © 2014. No portion of this magazine can be reprinted or reproduced in any form without prior permission from the publisher.
Advertise
Retail Distribution Publisher’s Distribution Group info@pdgmags.com
AD RATES: B&W/Color Full Page: $150/$200 Cover 2 or 3: $175/$250 Back Cover: $175/$250 Spread: $200/$350 Center Spread: $250/$400
Subscribe online: MosaicMagazine.org 3 Issues: $16.00 Institution Subscriptions EBSCO 1.205.991.6600 WT Cox 1.800.571.9554 Contact the editor We welcome comments. Send e-mail to info@mosaicmagazine.org Please visit MosaicMagazine.org for submission guidelines. Colophon Layout Software: Adobe InDesign CS5 Graphic Software: Paint Shop Pro 12 Mast Typeface: Whomp Editorial Typeface: Zapf Humanist
Feature your ad in the next print edition. Email info@mosaicmagazine. org to reserve your placement.
Ad-design service available: $50
Ad Deadline: January 1, May 1, and September 1
PRINT SPECS Average Print Run: 1,500 Paid Subscriptions: 300 (13% are libraries) Total Circulation: 950 Frequency: Tri-annual 8 1/2 X 11” Distributors: PDG Group
Mosaic is made possible with the support of members and subscribers. POSTMASTER Please send address corrections to: Mosaic 314 W. 231 St #470 Bronx, NY 10463
MosaicMagazine.org
43
Abiodun Oyewole of the Last Poets pays tribute to Jayne Cortez and Amiri Baraka
photo credit: Marcia E. Wilson
Amiri Baraka: Rest In Perpetual Power by Conor Tomas Reed Yesterday, in the center of the Studio Museum exhibition on Afrofuturism (“The Shadows Took Shape”), my friend Maryam told me that Amiri Baraka had passed on. This seemed like a perfect place to hear such profound news. Amiri—poet, playwright, essayist, fiction writer, revolutionary, diasporatician— consistently nurtured our link to generations past and ahead through a vast web of creative intersections in his writing and actions. Amiri’s 1958 story “Suppose Sorrow Was a Time Machine” envisioned his own family’s history as an emotional timeloop knotted by racial violence. His 1963 work Blues People re-positioned Africana music in the U.S. as a technology of cultural evolution and secret resistance. In 1965, upon hearing of Malcolm X’s assassination, Bakara left Greenwich Village for a new life in Harlem, and then moved to Newark in 1966 to join a long collective process of organizing the entire city through the Spirit House and beyond. His 1968 poetry anthology Black Fire!, co-edited with Larry Neal, and The 44 MosaicMagazine.org Cricket collaborations with leading jazz
musicians, wielded public art as both a weapon and a salve. Always unassimilable, Amiri held respected positions as urban intellectual, college educator, and poet laureate of New Jersey, while also being feared by the FBI, police, and neoliberal cultural gatekeepers. His transformations as a Beat, Pan-Africanist, revolutionary Marxist-Leninist, and Movement Elder crafted a long memory of myriad vantage points to encourage radical struggle through community arts, while critiquing willful acts of cultural amnesia (see http://www. poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/ article/245846). I first saw Amiri speak in 2012 as a eulogist for the funeral of Louis Reyes Rivera, an Afro-Puerto Rican poet and member of the long CUNY movement for Open Admissions and Third World Studies. Amiri spoke with jubilant praise about Rivera’s legacy, and welcomed us to celebrate that moment of passage among family, community, and jazz music that vibrated the church walls. It felt more like a birthday than a day of mourning.
In mid-2013, I finally met Amiri at a CUNY Graduate Center event celebrating his friend the poet Ed Dorn. Amiri was stooped, lean, and measured, a compact man who seemed his age… until he took the podium. His loud melodic voice had the room rolling with bawdy jokes, then murmuring at how he and Dorn tried to fuse poetry and historiography in a time of enforced forgetting, and then stone-silent as he described how Dorn’s time-loop kinship to white insurgent John Brown needed to be woven again by people in that room. And with a final blued note of mischievous gratitude, he stepped down and took his seat. As ruling-class eulogies now choose to excoriate and obscure Amiri Baraka— some having been written before he even died—I urge us all to share his work widely, and listen to the reflections of those who directly encountered his fiercely inspiring, radically loving presence. Amiri Baraka, rest in perpetual power. ★
Virtually everyone has dreams of doing something wonderful. It’s the job of parents, teachers, coaches—everyone—to encourage such dreaming. It’s understood that not all dreams come true, but what’s the alternative? Telling young people that it’s better to aim low would be poison. Every writer that we’ve come to love was once a young bubblehead with delusions of greatness. Bingham-Risher: I was happy to see that you’ll be heading back to teach at Cave Canem’s summer retreat in 2014. It’s such an important institution. In fact, you told me as an undergrad, that I had to go to Cave Canem, so I bit the bullet and started applying until they would have me. How has it changed you? What effect do you think it’s had on the American literary landscape? Seibles: When I was a poet in college and in my twenties, I knew very few black writers personally. That sense of isolation can be paralyzing, especially insofar as imagining an audience for your work is concerned. I was just too hardheaded to stop writing—the idealist hippie in me believed everybody would read my poems. Cave Canem (CC) has created a crucible in which black writers can feel part of a community of serious poets and readers of poetry. You feel like less of a freak when you can walk and talk with people who know some of the strain you’ve lived with, who know the codes particular to the experience of black people in America. In such a setting, there is wonderful cross-pollination, a feeding of the shared flames. I think it created a kind of latter day Harlem Renaissance for black poets. It’s impossible to overstate the size of the ripple in the American literary pond caused by Cave Canem. Just look at the winners of the National Book Award in poetry over the last four years. At least two of them have CC connections as either faculty or student participant (Nikky Finney, Terrance Hayes). And, let me tell you, that place is as nourishing for faculty as it is for students. Bingham-Risher: I’m finishing a book, Blood on the Page—African-American Poets from the Black Arts Movement to the Neo-Urban Modernist Movement: Interviews, Essays and Poems, wherein I posit that the
emergence of Cave Caenm in 1996 spawned a new literary current, the Neo-Urban Modernist Movement. So black poets have moved beyond the Modernist, Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement into a new era where the collective “I” is still apparent, but individuality transcends the expectation that we carry community. Where do you see yourself and other African-American contemporaries fitting into this era? Seibles: I think black poets still carry some significant expectation that we speak of and for the larger AfricanAmerican community. The difference between now and earlier times is the great variety of voices, which reveals how wonderfully various and complex the black community is. I think, at various stages, black American authors have faced some pretty narrow ideas—both from without and within black society—concerning who we were supposed to be and what we might write. That is much less the case now. The doors been blown off the hinges! We are everywhere doing all kinds of things. This has been importantly facilitated by Cave Canem over the last two decades. It’s strange for me to try to imagine ‘where I see myself fitting into this era.’ That’s probably for someone else to say. I hope my efforts have inspired a few younger poets to step out in unpredictable ways, to claim new turf for poets—black and otherwise. The thing I value most is being a part of the conversation about what being human means, what being conscious means, what the heart says, and what kind of world we want to inhabit. Bingham-Risher: Your parents were part of the black upper middle-class in 1960s America. What parts of those experiences bled over into your life beyond that space and what parts stick with you tangibly now? Seibles: I can’t say I grew up as part of the upper middle class; my neighborhood was mostly middle class, but the big apartment complex across the street from our house was filled with people “just getting by.” I lived in what was known as Dogtown, ruled by the Dogtown gang who battled Haines Street, Summersville, and The Clang among others. The folks doing pretty well in my neigh-
MosaicMagazine.org
45
borhood lived in row houses; the “high society” brothers and sisters lived in single houses (with swimming pools in some cases). Their parents might have driven Benzes or serious Caddies. That was somewhere else—the high sidididy scene. My father drove a Pontiac. What my parents did for me and my brother was a reflection of their upbringings and aspirations. They wanted more from life. They’d met at Fisk University. They believed they were equal to anyone in this society. With this in mind, they made sure we were educated and unafraid to carry ourselves like we deserved respect. If my writing has seemed boldly out of bounds at times it is, at least in part, due to the fearlessness my parents instilled in me. That remains a part of me and, surely, affects my approach to poetry. Bingham-Risher: You sent me a beautiful, difficult poem about your parents recently, and you’ve become a caregiver of sorts for them over the last few years. How does the shift in your relationship with your parents affect your poetry? Seibles: It doesn’t really affect my approach to poetry except insofar as it gives me a new subject to wrestle with. Mostly, it affects the way I see life and the brevity of it, the fragility of all we think can’t be taken away. However, watching my parents in the last stage of their lives does make me enter each day more fiercely, more hungrily. When you watch the two people who raised you, people who once lived with such intensity, begin to lose themselves, it gives you irrefutable evidence that your clock is running too. Watching my parents at this point in their lives has added focus to my living and writing. Bingham-Risher: Over the last few years you’ve been writing incredibly long poems, sometimes in persona. All those poems are 150-400 lines long. What signaled this shift in craft? What is the use of the long poem? How do you sustain tension in a poem like this? Seibles: I’ve always admired long poems because of the wide expanse of territory they can cover. Think
46
MosaicMagazine.org
ODE TO MY HANDS
Five-legged pocket spiders, knuckled starfish, grabbers of forks, why do I forget that you love me: your willingness to button my shirts, tie my shoes—even scratch my head! which throbs like a traffic jam, each thought leaning on its horn. I see you waiting anyplace always at the ends of my arms—for the doctor, for the movie to begin, for freedom—so silent, such patience! testing the world with your bold myopia: faithful, ready to reach out at my softest suggestion, to fly up like two birds when I speak, two brown thrashers brandishing verbs like twigs in your beaks, lifting my speech the way pepper springs the tongue from slumber. O! If only they knew the unrestrained innocence of your intentions, each finger a cappella, singing a song that rings like rain before it falls—that never falls! Such harmony: the bass thumb, the pinkie’s soprano, the three tenors in between: kind quintet x 2 rowing my heart like a little boat upon whose wooden seat I sit strummed by Sorrow. Or maybe
I misread you completely and you are dreaming a tangerine, one particular hot tamale, a fabulous banana! to peel suggestively, like thigh-high stockings: grinning as only hands can grin down the legs—caramel, cocoa, black-bean black, vanilla—such lubricious dimensions, such public secrets! Women sailing the streets with God’s breath at their backs. Think of it! No! Yes: let my brain sweat, make my veins whimper: without you, my five-hearted fiends, my five-headed hydras, what of my mischievous history? The possibilities suddenly impossible—feelings not felt, rememberings unremembered—all the touches untouched: the gallant strain of a pilfered ant, tiny muscles flexed with fight, the gritty sidewalk slapped after a slip, the pulled weed, the plucked flower—a buttercup! held beneath Dawn’s chin—the purest kiss, the caught grasshopper’s kick, honey, chalk, charcoal, the solos teased from guitar. Once, I played viola for a year and never stopped to thank you—my two angry sisters, my two hungry men—but you knew I just wanted to know what the strings would say concerning my soul, my whelming solipsism: this perpetual solstice where one + one = everything and two hands teach a dawdler the palpable alchemy of an unreasonable world.
about Octavio Paz’s “Piedra del Sol” (Sunstone) or Audre Lorde’s “Dragonfish” or Ginsberg’s “Howl” or Whitman’s “I Sing The Body Electric” or Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, a book-length poem! The long form allows you the flexibility of story and essay, while featuring the moment-by-moment emotive intensity we ask of poetry. Being human is wildly complicated if one is attentive. For me the longer poems allow time to wander, to take surprising detours—and also, there’s this momentum that builds as you go further and deeper, and that extra speed occasionally helps me to break through some of the walls I hide behind. Sustaining tension in a long poem is similar to sustaining it in a shorter poem. You have to make good choices about what stays and what goes, what compels and what’s just “filling space” while you’re chasing down the next essential thing. Writing a long poem doesn’t give a poet permission to be any more careless than a sonnet does. It may be easier to hide the weak, flabby stuff in a long poem, but the idea is to not have anything that doesn’t shake and shimmy. It may be harder—on the author—to spot filler, but that’s where integrity and work ethic come in. You claw and scratch and re-think until everything rings like it has to be there. At least, that’s the goal. Bingham-Risher: You’ve created a pretty impressive body of work: Body Moves, Hurdy-Gurdy, Kerosene, Ten Miles An Hour, Hammerlock, Buffalo Head Solos and Fast Animal. What are the five most important/necessary pieces that would have to be included in a book of your selected poems and why? Seibles: Of course, this is a very difficult question. I might come up with five different poems tomorrow, but I’ll give it a go: “Jose,” (from Body Moves) “Slow Dance,” (from Hurdy-Gurdy) “Midnight, the Coyote Down in the Mouth,” (from Hammerlock) “Late Shift,” (from Buffalo Head Solos) and “The Last Poem about Race” (from Fast Animal). Altogether these poems mark the main territories I’ve tried to explore over the years: sexuality, race, selfhood, mystical understanding, love, and loneliness.
Tim Seibles MosaicMagazine.org
47
Some of these poems address two or three of these subjects at once. The only dimension that is under-represented here is my use of humor in poems. Let me add two more poems? How about “First Kiss” (from Buffalo Head Solos) and “Ode to My Hands” (from Fast Animal)? Those seven poems give a reasonably thorough look at the parameters of my stuff. Each poem you finish represents a period of intense emotive thinking. If I don’t find something to love in a poem it dies away in the drafting stage. That’s why it’s hard to pick favorites. I feel some pretty strong attachment to all my pieces. Take “Someone Else” (from Buffalo Head Solos). I worked with that poem on and off for about 10 years before I thought it was right. And “Sorrow” (from Fast Animal) took me about 6 weeks to finish. Which one I dig most on a given day depends on my mood. Bingham-Risher: I love this quote from Veer Magazine about you: “He’s the sort of person who writes because he believes in the power of poetry, pure and simple, whether it touches one soul or one million. He casts his poetry into the air, with unshakeable faith.” Why have you made poetry your life’s work? What’s the value of poetry today? How do we make that value matter to our students and to could-be readers, to anyone? Seibles: I suppose I’ve made poetry my life’s work because I love how it feels to be in that secret place one enters when pursuing the words that hold the thing you really mean. I don’t know why I find such pleasure in that search; it’s just the way I’m made. We’re born and, if we’re fortunate, we have a chance to find out what compels us. It’s trial and error—like discovering what foods you like. I love strawberries, not raspberries; for other people it’s the reverse. Why? Because my taste buds smiled when I ate strawberries and for no other reason. I believe it is the same with poetry. Why is the big mystery behind just about everything. Poetry matters because it allows us to deal in crucial speech: words bound for revelation—no bullshit, no
48
MosaicMagazine.org
half-hearted almost maybes. A poem wants the truth— whether we can handle it or not—while so much of the speech we hear or read through mass media holds something behind its back. The speech of politicians is so clearly calculated to give a particular impression. We are tricked every day by what we read, see, and hear. What we want, I think, is to be untricked, to have aspects of life clarified and given back to us with an honest sense of how much things weigh, how much this or that thing wounds or heals. Poetry can be this kind of speech. Poetry can ask or assert what would never come from talk show, pulpit or newspaper. Good Morning America is virtually required to play to the middle, to make nice, but poetry doesn’t have to. It can kiss or smack us with precision—clarity, which we’re starved for. Of course, there are poets who add tricks to the trickery, who subvert the power of language and strip words of their original energy. Words evolved to help us communicate what matters and when, why, how and how much. I believe the only way we can pass on the value of poetry to students or anyone is by writing and offering poems that speak to their lives in various ways. This might involve wildly imagined, iconoclastic works or something as simple and short as a haiku, but to the extent that the words are anchored in the realities we hold in common, to that same extent we will find a growing interest in poetry. Part of a poet’s job, of course, is to stretch our sense of what matters and what can be shared. ★
Leaning Tree, making it look like it was wrapped up in cellophane. I thought of my father, Wilbur Jackson. My earliest recollection of him is the delicious chill I got as a little girl whenever Daddy scooped me up in his arms after walking home on winter evenings from the carpentry shop he owned. I recalled how cold radiated from Daddy’s coveralls and the way it felt to run my hands over the frost--coated hair of his beard. But Daddy’s shop had been gone for ages. The Leaning Tree property, creek and all, had been the domain of various renters for half a decade. And my children were each at least twenty years beyond dancing in the spray of a sprinkler. No thoughts, at least not the ones I came up with, proved capable of icing down my burning skin. So I cussed Clarice for her bad advice and for making me think of the old days—a certain recipe for sleeplessness—and I decided to head for the kitchen. There was a pitcher of water in the Frigidaire and butter pecan ice cream in the freezer. I figured a treat would set me right.
Winter 2014 Non-Fiction 1. The Butler: A Witness to History by Wil Haygood 2. Shred: The Revolutionary Diet: 6 Weeks 4 Inches 2 Sizes by Ian K. Smith 3. Forgiveness: 21 Days to Forgive Everyone for Everything by Iyanla Vanzant 4. The Rejected Stone by Al Sharpton
I sat up in the bed, careful not to wake James. Normally, he was as easygoing a man as you’d ever meet. But if I woke him before dawn on a Sunday, he would look at me sideways all through morning service and right up until dinner. So, in order not to disturb him, I moved in slow motion as I stood, slipped my feet into my house shoes, and made my way to the bedroom door in the dark. Even though I had made the trip from our bed to the kitchen thousands of times in pitch blackness, what with sick children and countless other nighttime emergencies during the decades of our marriage, and even though not a stick of furniture in our bedroom had been moved in twenty years, I rammed the little toe of my right foot into the corner of our old mahogany
with Nick Chiles 5. Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward 6. Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson 7. Letters to an Incarcerated Brother: Encouragement, Hope, and Healing for Inmates and Their Loved Ones by Hill Harper 8. High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society by Carl Hart 9. Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove by Ahmir Thompson 10. Mom & Me and MomMosaicMagazine.org by Maya Angelou 49
dresser not five steps into my journey. I cussed again, out loud this time. I looked over my shoulder to see if I had awakened James, but he was still snoring away in his linen wrappings. Hot and tired, my toe throbbing in my green terrycloth slip-ons, I had to fight the urge to run and wake James and insist that he sit up and suffer along with me. But I was good and continued to creep out of the room.
Now that Jimmy, Eric, and Denise were all grown and out of the house, the early hours of the day were no longer linked to slow-passing minutes listening for coughs or cries or, later, teenage feet sneaking in or out of the house. I was free to appreciate the quiet and the way the yellowish-gray light of the rising sun entered the room, turning everything from black and white to color. The journey from Kansas to Oz right in my own kitchen.
Other than the faint growl of James snoring three rooms away, the only sound in the kitchen was the bass whoosh made by the lopsided ceiling fan churning above my head. I turned on the kitchen light and looked up at that fan wobbling on its axis. With my toe smarting, and still longing to distribute my bad humor, I decided that even if I couldn’t justify snapping at James about my hot flash or my sore toe, I could surely rationalize letting off some steam by yelling at him for improperly installing that fan eighteen years earlier. But, like my desire to wake him and demand empathy, I successfully fought off this temptation.
That morning, when the daylight came it brought along a visitor, Dora Jackson. I clapped my hand over my mouth to stifle a squeak of surprise when I first caught sight of my mother strolling into the room. She came from the direction of the back door, her short, wide body waddling with an uneven stride from having her left leg badly set by a country doctor when she was a girl.
I opened the refrigerator door to get the water pitcher and decided to stick my head inside. I was in almost to my shoulders, enjoying the frosty temperature, when I got the giggles thinking how someone coming upon me, head stuffed into the refrigerator instead of the oven, would say, “Now there’s a fat woman who is completely clueless about how a proper kitchen suicide works.” I grabbed the water pitcher and saw a bowl of grapes sitting next to it looking cool and delicious. I pulled the bowl out with the pitcher and set them on the kitchen table. Then I fetched a glass from the dish drainer and brought it to the table, kicking my house shoes off along the way in order to enjoy the feel of cold linoleum against the soles of my bare feet. I sat down at what had been my place at the table for three decades and poured a glass of water. Then I popped a handful of grapes into my mouth and started to feel better. I loved that time of day, that time just before sunrise.
50
MosaicMagazine.org
People used to call us “the twins,” Mama and me. The two of us are round women—big in the chest, thick around the waist, and wide across the hips. We share what has often been charitably called an “interesting” face—narrow eyes, jowly cheeks, broad forehead, big but perfect teeth. I grew to be a few inches taller, five foot three. But if you were to look at pictures of us, you’d swear we were the same woman at different ages. My mother loved the way she looked. She would strut through town on her uneven legs with her big breasts pointing the way forward, and you knew from looking at her that she figured she was just about the hottest thing going. I never came to love my tube-shaped body the way Mama loved hers, but learning to imitate that confident stride of hers was probably the single smartest thing I ever did. ★
Excerpted from The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat by Edward Kelsey Moore. Copyright © 2013 by Edward Kelsey Moore. Excerpted by permission of Vintage, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
MosaicMagazine.org
51
FREE ADMISSION EVERYDAY
Paulo Bruscky: Art Is Our Last Hope September 19, 2013 - April 13, 2014 Born in Recife, Brazil, Paulo Bruscky began his career in the late 1960s, becoming involved with the international mail-art movement and participating in Fluxus exhibitions around the world. In the following decades, he experimented with new media and performance. Bruscky’s work reflects a continuous engagement with Recife and its culture, filtered and documented in the artist’s books, photographs, and other media. Also on view through February 16, 2014
Tony Feher Orchard Beach: The Bronx Riviera
52
MosaicMagazine.org
MosaicMagazine.org
1040 Grand Concourse at 165th St Bronx NY 10463 | BronxMuseum.org
FREE ADMISSION to The Bronx Museum of the Arts is sponsored by Shelley and Donald Rubin
9