Ceremonies by Essex Hemphill

Each morning as I wipe the sleep from my eyes, don the costume that alleges safety, and propel myself onto the stoop, I know with surety of the laws of gravity that my footsteps fall in a world not created in my image. It is not in the newspapers, in store windows, nor is it on the television screen, Too often, it is not in the eyes of my sisters who fear my crack, nor is it present in the countenance of my brothers who fear the face that mirrors our anger. At day’s end, having done their bidding, I rush home to do my own: creating myself from scratch as a Black gay man.

My desk and typing table anchor the northeast corner of my one-room apartment. There are days that I cling to both objects as if for sanity. On the walls surrounding me are pictures of powerful people, mentors if you will. Among them are: Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, John Edgar Wideman, Essex Hemphill, Lamont Steptoe, Judy Grahn, Tommi Avicolli, Charles Fuller, Toni Morrison, and Barbara Smith. These writers, of local and international fame, are connected by their desire to create images by which they could survive as gays and lesbians, as blacks, and as poor people. Their presence in my writing space bespeaks what another writer, Samuel Delany, calls “the possibility of possibilities”.

But it has not always been this way> I have not always known of the possibilites. In the winter of ‘79, in grad school, in the hinterlands of Iowa, I thought I was the first black gay man to have ever lived. I knew not how to live my life as a man who desired emotional, physical, and spiritual fulfillment from other men. I lived a guarded existence: I watched hyow I crossed my legs, held my cigarettes, the brightness of the colors I wore. I was sure that some effeminate action would alert the world to my homosexuality. I spent so much energy in self-observation that little was left for classwork and still less to challenge the institutionalized racism I found there.  I needed heroes, men and women I could emulate. I left without a degree; the closet door tightly shut. 

Several years passed before I realized that my burden of shame could be a source of strength. It was imperative for my survival that I did not attend to or believe the images that were presented about black people or gay people. Perhaps that was the beginning of my passage from passivism to activism, that I needed to create my reality, that I needed to create images by which I, and other Black men to follow, could live this life. 

The gay life is about affectation, but style is not imagemaking. Style, at best, is an attitude, a reaction to oppression, a way of being perceived as less oppressed, a way of feeling attractive when we are deemed unattractive. The most beleagured groups-women, people of color, gays, and the poor- attend most intently to style and fashion. But is it important to know who tailored the suit Malcolm X wore when he was killed? For a people who fashioned beautiful gowns and topcoats from gunnysack, it’s nothing, nothing at all, that we can work some leather, fur, or gold. The lives we lead are richer than Gucci or Waterford; our bodies more fit than Fila or Adidas; our survival more real than Coca-Cola.. 

I never heard a single command from you, yet the demands you made on me, the challenges you issued on me were nevertheless unmistakable if unenforced: that I work and think at the top of my form; that I stand on moral ground but know that ground must be shored up by mercy; that “the world is before [me] and [I] need not take it or leave it ad it was when [I] came in.”

Well, the season was always Christmas with you there, and like one aspect of your scenario, you did not neglect to bring at least three gifts. You gave me a language to dwell in—a gift so perfect, it seems my own invention. I have been thinking your spoken and written thoughts so long, I believed they were mine. I have been seeing the world through your eyes so long, I believed that clear, clear view was my own. Even now, even here, I need you to tell me what I am feeling and how to articulate it. So I have pored (again) through the 6,895 pages of your published work to acknowkedge the debt and thank you for the credit.

No one possessed or inhabited language for me the way you did. You made American English honest—genuinely international. You exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern, dialogic, representative, humane. You stripped it of ease and false comfort and fake innocence and evasion and hypocrisy. And in place of deviousness was clarity; in place of soft, plump lies was a lean, targeted power. In place of intellectual disingenousness and what you called “exasperating egocentricity,” you gave us undecorated truth. You replaced lumbering platitudes with an upright elegance. You went into the forbidden territory and decolonized it, “robbed it of the jewel of its naïveté,” and ungated it for black people, so that in your wake we could enter it, occupy it, restructure it in order to accomodate our complicated passion. Not our vanities, but our intricate, difficult, demanding beauty; our tragic, insistent knowledge; our lived reality; our sleek classical imagination. All the while refusing “to be defined by a language was handsome again. In your hands we saw how it was meant to be— neither bloodless nor bloody, and yet alive.

It infuriated some people. Those who saw the paucity of their own imagination in the two-way mirror you held up to them attacked the mirror, tried to reduce it to fragments that they could then rank and grade; tried to dismiss the shards where your image and theirs remained—locked but ready to soar. You are an artist, after all, and an artist is forbidden a career in this place; an artist is permitted only the commercial “hit”. But for thousands and thousands of those who embrace your text, and who gave themselves permission to hear your language, by that very gesture they ennobled themselves, became unshrouded—civilized.

The second gift was your courage, which you let us share. The courage of one who could go as a stranger in the village and transform the distances between people into intimacy with the whole world; courage to understand that experience in ways that made it a personal revelation for each of us. It was you who gave us the courage to appropriate an alien, hostile, all-white geography because you had discovered that “this world [meaning history] is white no longer, and it will never be white again.” Yours was the courage to live life in and from its belly as well beyond its edges. To see and say what it was; to recognize and identify evil but never fear or stand in awe of it. It is a courage that came from a ruthless intelligence married to a pity so profound it could convince anyone who cared to know that those who despised us “need the moral authority of their formal slaves, who are the only people in the world who know anything about them and who nay be, indeed, the only people in the world who really care anything about them.” When that unasailable combination of mind and heart, of intellect and passiob was on display, it guided us through treacherous landscape, as it did when you wrote these words—words every rebel, every dissident, revolutionary, every practicing artist from Cape Town to Poland, from Waycross to Dublin, memorized: “A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one’s compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of the people, even their hatred, is moving because it is so blind: it is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.”

The third gift was hard to fathom amd even harder to accept. It was your tenderness. A tenderness so delicate I thought it could not last, but last it did and envelop me it did. In the midst of anger it tapped me, lightly, like the child in Tish’s womb: “Something almost as hard to catch as a whisper in a crowded place, as light and as definite as a spider’s web, strikes below my ribs, stunning and astonishing my heart... The baby, turning for the last time in its incredible veil of water, announces its presence and claims me; tells me, in that instant, that what can get worse can get better... In the meantime—forever— it is entirely up to me.” Yours was a tenderness, a vulnerability, that asked everything, expected everything, and, like the world’s own Merlin, provided us with the ways and means to deliver. I suppose that is why I was always a bit better behaved around you, smarter, more capable, wanting to be worth the love you lavished, and wanting to be steady enough to witness the pain you had witnessed and were tough enough to bear while it broke your heart; wanting to be generous enough to join your smile with one of my own, and reckless enough to jump on in that laugh you laughed. Because our joy and our laughter were not only all right; they were necessary.

You knew, didn’t you? How I needed your language and the mind that formed it? How I relied on your fierce courage to tame wildernesses for me? How strengthened I was by the certainty that came from knowing you would never hurt me? You knew, didn’t you, how I loved your love? You knew. This then is no calamity. No. This is jubilee. “Our crown,” you said, “has already been brought and paid for. All we have to do,” you said, “is wear it.”

And we do, Jimmy. You crowned us.

You are not to touch yourself

in any way

or be familiar with ecstasy.

You are not to touch

anyone of your own sex

or outside of your race

then talk about it,

photograph it, write it down

in explicit details, or paint it

red, orange, blue, or dance

in honor of its power, dance

for its beauty, dance

because its yours.

You are not to touch other flesh

without a police permit.

You have no privacy--

the State wants to seize your bed

and sleep with you.

The State wants to control

your sexuality, your birth rate,

your passion.

The message is clear:

your penis, your vagina,

your testicles, your womb,

your anus, your orgasm

these belong to the State. 

You are not allowed to touch yourself

or be familiar with ecstasy.

The S2 is the so-called Avenue of the Presidents bus because its route is the handsome and seductive 16th Street corridor. The S2 travels from downtown Pennsylvania Avenue to Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburban town that borders D.C. at its northern edge.

     The ridership of the S2 is black, white, and variously ethnic. Hispanics, West Africans, and Caribbean passengers, as well as other nationals, diversify the sophisticated commuter ambiance. Newspapers, books, and quiet conversations are standard as the S2 speeds its way to Adams Morgan, Mt. Pleasant, the gold Coast, the end of the line, and back again. 

    Sixteenth Street-- lined with embassies, churches, respectable homes, and majestic trees swaying overhead from Lafayette Park to Silver Spring--this undulating, rolling hill climbs and descends with deceptive grace. At its side, in the middle of a Black gay ghetto called Homo heights, sits the once glorious, mystical park called Malcolm X by Black cultural nationalists, although its official name is Meridian Hill. At dusk it becomes a Black gay cruising ground, while during the day it serves as one of th city’s open air drug markets.

     Vandalism and graffiti now mar its classic beauty like brutal knife wounds that have become keloids. The shrubbery has been hacked down in an effort to prevent crimes that still occur. The once green grounds are bald and littered with used condoms and assorted trash. Decay and decline exist here. Gloom and danger are ever present in the piss-stained air, air that is often thick with marijuana smoke and always filled with the hawker’s cry of drug dealers. And although children romp and wrestle on these grounds, and soccer players kick the game ball back and forth, the men appear who cannot contain their loneliness till dusk. They are not zombies. Their eyes are luminous with enormous, living hungers, but no one seems to notice except those of their kind. FOr Black gay men, this park, elegantly appointed with gushing fountains, grand stairways, moonlit plazas, and statues of Dante and Joan of Arc--for Black men seeking the kisses of one another, Malcolm X/Meridian Hill Park is now nothing more than a tomb of sorrow.

    I remember taking the S2 home one evening, a Sunday, in fact. I had taken the X2 from H Street, N.E. to 14th and H downtown, where I transferred and waited for the S. From the corner of 14th and H you can view the warscape of AIDS and the remains of the casual sex zones reduced to rubble by the aggressive development of downtown. It is interesting to observe now, postmodern office buildings rise on soil where the seed of gay men was once spilled with reckless abandon.

     Ten years ago this corner was a sexual crossroads. On either side of 14th Street, from H to I, there once stood thriving porn shops, movie galleries, and nude dance clubs. A block east of 14th, on 13th Street, the raunchy Black gay club, the Brass Rail, was bulging out of its jockstrap. Drag queens ruled, B-boys chased giddy government workers, fast-talking hustlers worked the floor, while sugar daddies panted for attention in the shadows, offering free drinks and money to any friendly trade. Everybody was seeking a sex machine. White folks were sneaking in for their “Black-dick-fix.” Sometimes the dose was fatal:Robbery. Murder. The pulsing music always throbbed like an insatiate erection. 

     A block north of the Brass Rail, Franklin Park was a soft cruise spot primarily because it borders K Street, 14th and 13th Streets offering too much visibility for most. But east of its lower end, bordering I Street, on the 13th Street corner, stood the notorious Curiosity Bookshop, complete the back room, movie booths, garish red lights, gusts of heavy breathing, and the popping noise of greased dicks pumping in and out of tight holes. The creaking floorboards were aging with semen and sighs. Every now and then you’d hear a man hiss, “Work that pussy, bitch,” as clusters of panting men gathered to watch an ass being fucked. 

     At the most historic spot downtown, where, on the corner of 14th and H, one could watch the parade of flesh all summer long, the quest for the perfect abuse was keen. Now the area is almost desolate of nightlife, the players scattered, the seekers scared to venture out. 

  I wait for my bus. Shortly before it arrives, two Black men cruise by. They appear to be in their thirties-forties. The shorter, stockier, fair-skinned, clean-shaven Homeboy has his arm thrown around the shoulders of the slightly taller, slender, darker daddy. The tall man is obviously older, mustached, and somewhat attractive. Homeboy carries a hustler’s air about him. They swagger by, slightly drunk and horny. I am surprised when a few stops later they board the bus and sit at the back.

      The bus crosses K Street and continues up 16th without incident. The seats fill quickly. By the time we cross P Street standing room is all that’s available. A murmur begins to rise from the back of the bus. It explodes into a startling confrontation.

     “You my bitch!”

     “No! Uh Uh. We are bitches!”

    “No! You listen here. I ain’t wearing lipstick, you are! I ain’t no bitch! I fucked you! You my bitch!”

    This argument continues without resolution until we arrive at 16th and U Streets. The bus is packed with passengers, and as we approach the stop, I see ten more waiting to board. Just as the first person at the stop steps aboard, a strident, hysterical voice cuts loose from the back:

      “I’m a 45-year-old-Black-gay-man who en-joys taking dick in his rectum!” SNAP! “I’[m not your bitch!” SNAP! “Your bitch is at home with your kids!” SNAP! SNAP!

     We are entering the fifth dimension of our sexual consciousness. THe ride is rough. There is no jelly for this. The driver is trying to call the police on the bus phone. No one has said anything. No one else attempts to board. 

    The air is charged with tensions unleashed from an ancient box of sexual secrets. The older man abruptly leaves by the back door. Homeboy follows. They have violent words outside. The children sitting at the front are wide-eyed and speechless. All the homosexuals on the bus have frozen. So have I. The driver is frantically calling the police. The older man suddenly pushes aborad wielding a Flash Pass with Homeboy in hot pursuit. The driver drops the phone and jumps between them. Homeboy pulls out a knife and waves it toward his companion. 

     “You gonna pay for this dick!” he sneers.

     “I ain’t paying for that tame shit!”

     The children’s heads snap back and forth during the ensuing shouting match as though they are watching a Ping Pong tournament and not two grown Black men giving high drama. In a stern voice the driver orders Homeboy to leave the bus. He backs down the steps, waving his blade, threatening to catch the Black gay man on the street and make him pay dearly for the dick he got. Homeboy is last seen stalking east on U Street with his glinting knife clenched in hand. 

his hair

almost touches

his shoulders.

He dreams

og long braids,

ladders,

vines of hair.

He stands

like Rapunzel,

waiting on his balcony

to be rescued

from the fire-breathing

dragons of loneliness.

They breathe

at his hips and thighs

the years soften

as they turn.

How long must he dream

ladders no one climbs?

HE stands like Rapunzel,

growing deaf,

waiting

I live in a town

where pretense and bone structure

prevail as credentials

of status and beauty--

a town bewitched

by mirrors, horoscopes

and corruption.

I intrude on this nightmare, 

arm outstretched from curbside.

I’m not pointing to Zimbabwe.

I want a cab to take me to Southeast

so I can visit my mother.

I’m not ashamed to cross

the bridge that takes me there.

No matter where I live

or what I wear

the cabs speed by.

Or they suddenly brake

a few feet away

spewing fumes in my face

to serve a fair-skinned fare.

I live in a town

where everyone is afraid

of the dark.

I stand my ground unarmed

facing a mounting disrespect

a diminishing patience,

a need for defense.

IN passing headlights

I appear to be a criminal.

I’m a weird-looking 

muthafucka.

Shaggy green hair sprouts all over me.

My shoulders hunch and bulge. I growl

as blood drips from my glinting fangs.

My mother’s flowers are wilting

while I wait.

Our dinner

is cold by now.

I live in a town

where pretense and structure

are devices of cruelty--

a town bewitched

by mirrors, horoscopes,

I have never been a slave to fashion, so it was simply rash of me to think i could boldly wear my fireball-red FAG CLUB T-shirt in public and not be confronted. I had purchased the T-shirt in San Francisco without any hesitation whatsoever. In fact, I purchased two T-shirts: the red athletic T and the black crewneck, both bearing FAG CLUB prominently displayed in bold white letters stacked across the front. Mind you, the day I wore that T-shirt all over Washington D.C., I was truly voguing. I was featuring heavy transgressions in a town of government secrets, political intrigue, and kinky sex. 

    The confrontation did not occur downtown or on the bus or subway as I thought it might. I was in my neighborhood, Mt. Pleasant, when it happened. people I had encountered on the buses and downtown sidewalks didn’t challenge me. They were surprised by the T-shirt, as indicated by the number of double takes it received.

     The red was tinted with a little orange and was very eye-catching in the summer sun. By the time I returned to Mt. Pleasant later that afternoon, I had completely forgotten I was wearing it. I had never flaunted my sexuality so immediately to so many. I had never communicated my sexual identity so intentionally as I did by choosing to wear that FAG CLUB T-shirt in public.

     I needed to get a few things for dinner before going home, so I stopped at the supermarket a few blocks from my apartment. As the market doors swooshed behind me and I passed through the entrance turnstile, a young boy screamed out, “Look, everybody, there’s a faggot in the store!” You would have thought people were supposed to start diving to the floor. 

      I stopped only for an instant to look over my shoulder to see whom he was calling out. Seeing no one behind me, when I looked ahead again I realized everyone was looking at me. I then remembered I was wearing FAG CLUB emblazoned on my chest like the name of a superhero. 

       I immediately stepped forward in full control of my location and my presence of mind. I knew this scene must have looked very funny, but I was determined to keep my composure. There were little bursts of laughter here and there but nothing too serious. I glided down the aisles completing my short grocery list and avoiding direct eye contact until I reached the checkout line. There, the clerk looked at my T-shirt and smiled. I smiled back at her, then she turned and began ringing up my groceries.

      Just then, the young boy who had shouted, “There’s a faggot in the store!” came up to me from the exit of the checkout line. He was a curly-haired, ten-year-old Black boy.

    “Hey Mister, I have a cousin like you. He’s gay, too.” He continued approaching until he was standing beside me. I looked into his face and saw no fear, no hatred, no disgust. 

    “Did you get that in Washington?” he asked, pointing to my T-shirt. “My cousin would like one of those.”

     He was not the least bit shy in telling me this. He looked me directly in the eye. waiting for my response.

     “No, I didn’t get this in Washington,” I told him. “I got it in San Francisco. You can get them there.”

     “I thought so,”he said. “I didn’t think you could get a T-shirt like that in D.C. I like it. See you!” Then he turned, and left.

He was arrested and detained

for nailing Barbie doll heads

to telephone poles.

He was beaten

while in custody, accused

of defacing public property.

After healing, he resumed

his irreverent campaign,

this outlawed spook terrorist

continued hammering horse nails

through Barbie heads

and setting them aflame.

Barbie never told Black girls

they are beautiful.

She never acknowledged

their breathtaking Negritude.

She never told them

to possess their own souls.

They were merely shadows

clutching the edges of her mirror.

*  *  *

Barbie never told Black girls

they are beautiful.

not in the ghetto evenings

after double dutch.

nor in the integrated suburbs,

I drink champagne early in the morning

instead of leaving my house

with an M16 and nowhere to go.

I die twice as fast

as any other American

between eighteen and thirty-five.

This disturbs me,

but I try not to show it in public.

Each morning I open my eyes is a miracle

The blessing of opening them

is temporary on any given day.

I could be taken out,

I could go off,

I could forget to be careful.

Even my brothers, hunted, hunt me. 

I’m the only one who values my life

and sometimes I don’t give a damn.

My love life can kill me.

I’m faced daily with choosing violence

or a demeanor that saves every other life

but my own.

I won’t cross over.

It’s time someone came to me

not to patronize me physically,

sexually or humorously.

I could leave with no intention

of coming home tonight,

go crazy downtown and raise hell

on a rooftop with my rifle.

I could live for a brief moment

on the six o’clock news,

or masquerade another day

through the corridors of commerce

and American dreams.

I’m dying twice as fast

as any other American

SO I pour myself a glass of champagne,

I cut it with a drop or orange juice.

After I swallow my liquid Valium,

my private celebration

for being alive this morning,

I leave my shelter,

I guard my life with no apologies.

My concerns are small

On a recent afternoon in Philadelphia, I walked to the corner of 63rd and Malvern Streets to catch a number 10 trolley, my imaginary streetcar named Desire. Waiting, when I arrived at the stop was another Black man, sipping a bottle of beer and smoking a cigarette. He wore sunshades and was built three sizes larger than my compact frame. I guessed him to be in his thirties though his pot-belly suggested an older age or the consumption of too much beer and soul food. A blue hand towel was tossed over his right shoulder. A baseball jacket was draped across his left thigh. He was sitting on the wall I sit on when I wait here.

     Since there was no trolley in sight. I guardedly walked over and sat at the far end of the wall. He continued to drink his beer as I observed him from the corner of my eye. I pretended to occupy myself with looking for an approaching trolley. He abruptly ended our brief interlude of silence. For no apparent reason he blurted out, “ Man, the woman’s movement is ruling the world. It’s turning our sons into faggots and our men into punks.”

     “What do you mean?” I asked, raising my voice loudly as he had raised his. Indigenous and defensiveness tinged my vocal chords. I thought his remarks were directed specifically at me.

     “You see all the cars going by?” he asked, gesturing at the minor traffic.

     “Yeah, so what about it?”

    “Well can’t you see that all the drivers in the cars are women--”

    “Which only means more women are driving,” I interjected. 

     “So women are ruling more things now. That’s why I don’t want my son to spend all his time with his mother, his grandmother, and those aunts of his. His mother and I don’t live together, but I go visit him and take him downtown or to the movies or to the Boy’s Club. I think that’s important, so he’ll know the difference.”

    “The difference in what?”

     “The difference between a woman and a man. You know...”

     “Which is supposed to be determined by what--how they use their sex organs? What I do know, brother, is that 13 and 14 year old Black children are breeding babies they can’t care for-- crack babies, AIDS babies, accidental babies, babies that will grow up and inherit their parents’ poverty and powerlessness. The truth is young people are fucking because they want to fuck. They’re encouraged to fuck. Yet we don’t talk to them frankly and honestly about sex, sexuality, or their responsibility.”

     “Okay brother, hold that thought. You’re moving too fast. See, this is what I mean. Supposed you grow up in a home with your father being a minister and your mother is there all the time taking care of the house and kids. You grow up, go off to college and get a good education, then---”

     “Yeah--”

     “--then you decide you gonna be gay. You like men. I say you learned that. Education did that. Your folks didn’t teach you that.”

      “THat’s bullshit, and you know it. It’s stupid to suggest that women or education can make a man gay. What you fail to understand is that this is the natural diversity of human sexuality no matter what we call it. Also, my father is a minister, my mother was at home raising us before they divorced, and I went to college. And you know what?”

      “What?”

      “I’m a faggot.”

       “No you ain’t!”

       “Yes I am. In fact, I’m becoming a well-known faggot.”

       “I don’t believe you.”

       “Why not?”

        “Because you ain’t switching and stuff.”

       “Yeah, all you think being gay is about is men switching--but you’re wrong. I’m a faggot because I love me enough to be who I am. If your son becomes a faggot it won’t be because of the way you or his mother raise him. It won’t be because of television, movies, books, and education. It will be because he learns to trust the natural expression of his sexuality without fear or shame. If he learns anything about courage from you or his mother, then he’ll grow up to be himself. You can’t blame being straight or gay on a woman or education. The education that’s needed should be for the purpose of bringing us all out of sexual ignorance. Our diverse sexuality is determined by the will of nature, and nature is the will of God.”

       He sat there for a moment staring at me, sipping his beer. He lit another cigarette. I realized then that he could beat me to a pulp if he chose to impose his bigger size on me, but I wasn’t afraid for what I had said and revealed. On too many occasions I have sat silently as men like him mouthed off about gays and women and I said nother because I was afraid. But not today. Not this afternoon. The longer I sit silently in my own community, my own home, and say nothing, I condone the ignorance and its by-products, of violence and discrimination. I prolong my existence in a realm of invisibility and complicity. I prolong our mutual suffering by saying nothing. 

      In this tense interlude a bus and trolley approached. I was angry with having to encounter him on such a glorious spring day, but this is the kind of work social change requires. I consoled myself believing this.

     When he rose I immediately rose too -- a defensive strategy, a precaution. 

    “It’s been good talking to you, brother. I’ll think about what you’ve said.” He extended his hand to me just as the bus and the trolley neared. I looked at his hand, known and unknown to me, offered tenuously, waiting to clasp my hand.

Metaphorically speaking

his black dick is so big

when it stands up erect

it silences

the sound of his voice.

It obscures his view

of the territory, his history,

the cosmology of his identity

is rendered invisible.

When his big black dick

is not erect

it drags behind him,

a heavy, obtuse thing,

his balls and chains

clattering, making

so much noise

I cannot hear him

You judge a woman

by the length of her skirt,

by the way she walks,

talks, looks, and acts;

by the color of her skin you judge

and will call her “Bitch!”

“Black bitch!”

if she doesn’t answer your:

“Hey baby, whatcha gonna say

to a man.”

You judge a woman

by the job she holds,

by the number of children she’s had,

by the number of digits on her check,

by the many men she may have lain with

and wonder what jive murphy

you’ll run on her this time.

You tell a woman

every poetic love line

you can think of,

then like the desperate needle

of a strung out junkie

you plunge into her veins,

travel wildly through her blood,

confuse her mind, make her hate,

and be cold to the men to come,

destroying the thread of calm

she held.

You judge a woman

by what she can do for you alone

but there’s no need

for slaves to have slaves.

You judge a woman

by impressions you think you’ve made,

Ask and she gives,

take without asking,

beat on her and she’ll obey,

throw her name up and down the streets

like some loose whistle–

knowing her neighbors will talk.

Her friends will chew her name.

Her family’s blood will run loose

like a broken creek.

And when you’re gone

a woman is left

healing her wounds alone.

But we so-called men,

we so-called brothers

wonder why it’s so hard

to love our women

when we’re about loving them

the way america

Another station, a new town.

the same COLORED and

WHITE ONLY signs.

By now I shouldn’t really care

but it amazes me still.

Every town since St. Louis

has been mean and nasty.

Signs everywhere,

and in some places

whorehouses

for COLORED ONLY

but no proper places

where a lady can pee.

Tonight, once again

I tie my hair up

with gardenias.

I blacken my face

and set myself afire

singing for my man.

Where O where

can he be, can he be?

Out looking, for a place

without signs,

somewhere better

than New York

to hang this hat

or to just watch me

unbraid gardenias

Wizards. All of them. Wizards.

Gravel in their throats.

Worrying the line.

Horn to bleeding lips.

Fingers thrashing white keys

cascading black.

Wizards of impulse and verve,

blizzard blowing wizards blowing

blue0red0bright0black0blow-ing

a capella saxophones.

Scat wizards trans-

muting anguish

into bird songs.

Soul boys who found freedom

in the pedals and sticks

of their instruments,

who took freedom,

putting out in jook joints

and dance halls,

putting up on

chicken-bone buses

‘cross country

that kept on going

through cracker towns,

‘cause there was no place

for a busload

of Colored musicians

to stop.

*    *    *

This was before Martin dreamed,

before panthers stalked,

before fire spoke eloquently

like our trumpeters.

Gardenias, trains, cannonballs,

anything we needed

they became.

They were wizards.

We were in love and trouble.

We wanted salt peanuts,

pennies from heaven,

a love supreme,

You wanna sleep on my chest?

You wanna listen to my heart beat

all through the night?

It’s the only jazz station

with a twenty-four-house signal,

if you wanna listen.

If you answer yes

I expect you to be able

to sleep in a pit of cobras.

You should be willing

to destroy your enemy

if it comes to that.

If you have a weapon.

If you know how to use your hands.

You should be able to distinguish

oppression from pleasure.

Some pleasure is oppression

but then, that isn’t pleasure, is it?

Some drugs induce pleasure

but isn’t that oppression?

If you’re immobilized you’re oppressed.

If you’re killing yourself you’re oppressed.

If you don’t know who you are

you’re pressed.

* * *

A prayer candle won’t always solve the confusion.

The go-go won’t always take the mind off things.

Our lives don’t get better with coke

they just - get away from us.

There doesn’t have to be a bomb

if we make up our minds

we don’t want to die that way.

We’re told there is good and evil,

laws and punishment,

but no one speaks of the good in evil

or the evil in good.

You wanna sleep on my chest?

You wanna listen to my heart beat

all through the night?

It’s the only jazz station

with a twenty-four hour signal

if you wanna listen,