African Voices Summer Digital Issue 2016

A Soulful Collection of Art and Literature

Summer 2016 $6.00 ($9.00 outside of USA)

Publisher’s Note

VOLUME NO. 14, ISSUE 32

The Gospel According to James and his Apostles Founded in 1992, published since 1993

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“You write in order to change the world…if you alter even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality then you change it,” — James Baldwin.

In May, I joined a historic global community of writers, scholars, and artists for the International James Baldwin Conference presented by the American University of Paris (AUP).

Being in the presence of “apostles” who interpreted Baldwin’s scripture in literature, song, and verse was a transformative experience. Walking in his footsteps in Paris made Baldwin’s spiritual journey palpable to most of us attending the conference. As the grand daughter of a southern Baptist preacher, my connection to Baldwin, the boy preacher, was affirmed.

My vow to use words and images to empower, uplift, and enlighten were renewed by being in the presence of great minds committed towards the same goals.

Barely a month after returning from the Paris conference, the world was hit with the killings in Orlando, Florida where 49 queer and same gender loving people were violently slaughtered in a dance club. This horrifying tragedy demonstrates the need to teach James Baldwin’s work in our schools. His literature is as relevant today as it was in the 1960s during the civil rights movement.

His love, honesty, and ability to challenge the way people think and act are critical elements in fighting compassionately against all forms of intolerance and hate.

African Voices’ first digital issue is dedicated to the victims of the Orlando tragedy.

You will find excerpts from papers by scholars attending the conference on Black joy, The Implication of Giovanni’s Room on Black Boy Queer Identity (an interactive presentation on our website), and poems celebrating our individuality as human beings.

Yesenia Montilla’s poem “It’s A Miracle,” succinctly addresses our concerns: “how someone’s second amendment right seems to only leave a trail of children’s bodies & brown bodies. & how some days I am afraid of stepping out of the house or of whether my lover brown & beautiful will make it home.”

Our front cover artist Leroy Campbell offers comfort and inspiration in his upcoming art exhibition “Fighting Spirit: Tribute to the Life and Times of Muhammad Ali.” The exhibition, which opens in October, honors the power each individual has in fighting for justice. Let’s embrace the strength in declaring — I Am Deliberate And Afraid of Nothing.

Front Cover: L eroy Campbell, I Am Strong, Courtesy: Richard Beavers Gallery Back Cover: Jocelyn Goode

Churches[1] Once my roof housed a century of music I shone with stained glass beautiful things pulled from fire Father forgive me my collapse heavy lies the head wearing a crown of ashes Thirteen churches the fire a raucous song Now I’m a casket of smoke now my windows weep My pews a row of blackened teeth charred gospels a flock of ravens They sent fire for a sin uncommitted These men already dressed as ghosts who burned me before pleaded guilty with smiles my cinders still in their teeth A halo of caution tape When the floods relinquished their grip God said the fire next time But their hands have left nothing up to interpretation Ashes to ashes Dust to dust Š 2016 Julian Randall

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Contents FICTION AND BOOKS 24 Olio Offers A Compelling Tribute to Reshape Our Musical Narratives by Shani Jamila

26 Peach Cobbler

by Aimiende Negbenebor Sela

POETRY 4

Churches[1] by Julian Randall

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ALWAYS, THERE IS MUSIC by Ariana Brown

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Undressing In The Rain by Yesenia Montilla

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It’s A Miracle by Yesenia Montilla

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Ode to James Baldwin by Zoe Smith-Holladay

30 on the E express a boy asks his mama a few things by Amber Atiya

19 My Father Tells Me He and My Mother Got Married the Year Purple Rain was Released

by Julian Randall

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SHUFFLE MACHINE by Joel Dias-Porter

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on’t Let me Be Misunderstood: D The Relationship Between James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry & Nina Simone

by Lynnée Denise Bonner

IN THIS ISSUE Contributors Bios

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8 Bearing Witness to The International

James Baldwin Conference in Paris

by Charles Reese 10 The Subversive Potential of Black Joy: Reimagining Protest In the Work of James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry

by Sarita Cannon, Ph.D.

GALLERY 32

The Gallery — Jocelyn Goode: Healing Community Through Art

IN PASSING 22

Malik Taylor (Phife Dawg) by Mirlande Jean-Gilles

African Voices print editions can be purchased at the following locations: MANHATTAN Studio Museum in Harlem 144 W. 125 Street New York, NY 10027

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If you would like to sell African Voices magazine, please contact Ubiquity Distributors at 718-875-8047 or e-mail info@ubiquitymags.com.

Contributors Bios Amber Atiya is a poet, performer, and self-taught artist-in-training. Her work has appeared in Boston Review, Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, PEN America, and elsewhere. A proud native Brooklynite, she is a member of a women’s writing group and author of the fierce bums of doo-wop published by Argos Book in 2014.

Ariana Brown is an Afromexicana poet from San Antonio, Texas, with a B.A. in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies from UT Austin. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion, and is currently working on her first manuscript. Her work is published in Huizache, Rattle, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and is forthcoming in ¡Manteca!: An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets from Arte Público Press.

Sarita Nyasha Cannon is Associate Professor of English at San Francisco State University where she teaches 20th-century American Literature. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with an A.B. in Literature, earned a Ph.D. in English from University of California, Berkeley, and held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in American Indian Studies at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Cannon’s scholarship has appeared in Interdisciplinary Humanities, The Black Scholar, Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies, Callaloo, and MELUS. She is also a classically trained soprano who sings with various groups throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

Kieyan Chauhan is a 17 year old, self-taught artist from the South East of England. He specialises in portraiture and also creates music under the name ‘Kayncee’. He is currently a full time student studying music and art and is an avid Hip-Hop fan.

Find him on Facebook under ‘Kieyan’s Drawings’ and on Instagram @kieyanchauhan.

DJ Lynnée Denise, an artist and scholar, incorporates self-directed project based research into interactive workshops, music events and public lectures that provide the opportunity to develop an intimate relationship with under-explored topics related to the cultural history of marginalized communities. She is inspired by underground cultural movements, the 1980s, migration studies, theories of escape, and electronic music of the African Diaspora.

With support from the Jerome Foundation, The Astrae Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Idea Capital, The BiljmAIR artist residency (Netherlands) and The Rauschenberg Artists as Activists Grant, she has been able to resource her performative research on a local, national and global level.

Joel Dias-Porter (aka DJ Renegade) was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, and a former professional DJ. From 1994- 1999 he competed in the National Poetry Slam, 6

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and was the 1998 and 99 Haiku Slam Champion. His poems have been published in; Time Magazine, The Washington Post, POETRY, Mead, The Offending Adam, Best American Poets 2014, Callalloo, Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Red Brick Review, Asheville Review, Beltway Quarterly and several anthologies.

Jocelyn Goode: See The Gallery.

Jonathan Guy-Gladding (JAG): “The best thing that ever happened to me was being sent to the Caribbean in 1999…I applied to be a volunteer in the Peace Corps and had the great fortune to be sent to the island of St. Lucia in July of 1999. Serving as a woodwork instructor in the beautiful southern coastal village of Laborie, I found there an unending supply of rich subject matter in the faces and postures of the uniformed schoolchildren, the people going about their daily lives, and the traditional cultural aspects that make St. Lucia such a wonderful and distinctive place.

Shani Jamila is an artist and cultural worker whose travels to more than forty countries deeply inform her collage, text and documentary photography practice. Her work, which addresses themes of identity, political imagination and witness, has been exhibited at institutions including the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Smack Mellon ­Gallery, SCOPE Art Fair, Corridor Gallery, the City College of New York and Princeton University. The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture filmed an interview about her life and work for their inaugural exhibit “A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond.” A Fulbright scholar with over a decade of leadership in designing and executing programs that use the arts to catalyze social change, Jamila currently serves as a managing director of the Urban Justice Center in New York City.

Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina from New York City. She is a graduate of Drew University’s Poetry & Poetry in Translation MFA program & a Canto Mundo Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in The Wide Shore, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast and among other publications. Her first collection of poetry The Pink Box is published by Willow Books and was long-listed for the PEN America Open Book Award.

Aimiende Negbenebor: Creator of the award-winning short film Asa, A Beautiful Girl, Aimiende Negbenebor Sela hails from Benin City, Nigeria. After moving to New York in the late ‘90s, she went on to earn a degree in Computer Engineering and Literature from Stevens Institute of Technology. After a number of years of trudging along in the I.T. world, she made a life-altering decision to leave and pursue her true passion — the arts.

Julian Randall is a performance poet, educator, and arts education advocate.

A Chicago native, Randall has pursued a career in poetry since 2011. A two-time national college slam competitor Randall also

Undressing In The Rain placed 3rd in Young Chicago Author’s Louder Than A Bomb University, a national individual college slam event. His work documents his journey through the world exploring concepts of social justice, Blackness, Latinidad, masculinity, love and the search for home. His first collection of poems On The Way Here, is available from 2Rise Press.

Charles Reese received a B.A. Degree in Mass Communications & Theatre Arts from Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA. The multi-faceted thespian is a long standing member of SAG/ AFTRA and AEA (the professional film and stage unions). Reese has numerous performing credits in theatre, television, independent film, voiceovers and web series. Reese is the editor and original actor for the Off-Broadway playbook, James Baldwin: A Soul On Fire by the late playwright, Howard B. Simon.

Zoe Smith-Holladay is a rising 7th grade creative writing major at the Denver School of the Arts. She is founder & author of kidsanimalstation.com, an animal blog that she started when she was eight. In Spring 2016, Smith-Holladay’s first fictional piece of prose “No Man’s Land” was published in literary magazine Calling Upon Calliope.

Her favorite genres to read and write in are historical fiction, comedy, and fantasy. When she grows up, she wants to be a geneticist and would like to find a way to combine her passion for creative writing and science.

Published on africanvoices.com Khalil Anthony Peebles is a polymath, a multi-disciplinary artist working within varying mediums and media. His work investigates the relationships between the spirit and space, the black body, sexuality, society, and the urban experience. Weaving together these artistic intentions through writing, dance and movement, acting, painting, arts-admin, education, and song, his work speaks to a diverse audience and varying communities.

Jawanza Phoenix is a lawyer and the author of two books of poems, I Need an Assignment and The Intersection of Beauty and Crime.

Nelly Rosario is author of Song of the Water Saints: A Novel (Pantheon, 2002), winner of a PEN/Open Book Award. Her fiction, nonfiction and poetry appear in various anthologies and journals, including Callaloo, Meridians, Review, Chess Life, and el diario/La Prensa. Rosario holds an MFA from Columbia University and was formerly on faculty in the MFA Program at Texas State University. She was a recent Visiting Scholar at MIT, her alma mater, and presently serves as writer/researcher for the Blacks at MIT History Project. Rosario lives in Brooklyn, where she’s at work on a speculative novel on community medicine.

Even though there are things

I can’t let go of — your smile at high noon, or the way you

would stare into my body, as though I housed a whole country there. & what’s

a country in a body except a colony? & colonization can happen to a heart as well

as a whole people. & people

seem to overlook that love is not a freight truck that runs over the worst parts of us; it is a bird watcher, face

stretched out towards heaven

waiting to spot wings. & what do I know about heaven? The

same thing I know about wings, I can’t have it. & so let me be

a pilgrim, searching for forgetting your smile at high noon, which

I already mentioned & which every passing day grows fainter. & this is the point: when love is gone dress yourself up in the things

you can’t let go of, like armor or like blossoms. Dress yourself up so pretty that even the blind

catcall the seams of your silhouette.

Seams round & soft as pillows.

The weather man says chance of rain & I leave home without my umbrella.

This is living & loving & attempting

to forget — when you stand in torrential

rain during a cold spring & let a memory wash off like a silk dress — © 2016 Yesenia Montilla african Voices

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Bearing Witness to The International James Baldwin Conference in Paris

By Charles Reese

Photo: Carolyn A. Butts

“ No one can possibly know what is about to happen. It is happening each time, for the first time, for the only time.” — James Baldwin (1924–1987) Journalogue One: The James Baldwin International Conference at the American University of Paris (AUP), France Celebrating 50 years of academic and cultural engagement, The AUP presented the International James Baldwin Conference “A Language to Dwell In: James Baldwin, Paris, and International Visions” from May 26-28, 2016.

The conference was organized by the AUP along with co-directors, Alice Craven and William Dow, in association with the Department of Comparative Literature and English.

The conference represented a broad array of global interdisciplinary explorations of Baldwin’s life and work, with a special emphasis on Paris and his experiences throughout Europe and Africa. Each day of the conference featured exciting lectures, forums, and dialogues exploring the fiery spirit of this 20th century icon. It was an engaging, educational and entertaining intersection for students and global enthusiasts around Baldwin’s work. Literary and cultural critics, historians, scholars of gender and same gender loving theorists to activists, filmmakers, musicians, and other artists gathered in Paris to share in a transforming experience.

As an actor, author, educator and one of the selected presenters from the United States, I was very excited to bear witness to the legacy of James Baldwin, an American writer, civil rights activist, and expatriate in his beloved second home in France.

AUP was the perfect venue to re-ignite and re-discover what Baldwin’s seminal work means for today’s tech savvy and diverse global audiences. Baldwin enthusiasts have been pushing for a long overdue film about this great writer.

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Poets and artists Jessica Care Moore, Charles Reese, Ashleigh M. Barice, Sabrina Nelson and Rowan Edwards enjoy a moment together.

Journalogue Two: James Baldwin: Public Policies and Sociopolitical Visions (Panel #25) On Saturday, May 28, 2016, I along with my fellow panelists: Catherine Smith, an attorney who was presenting with her 12-year-old daughter, Zoe Smith-Holladay (the youngest presenter in the room and the conference) – University of Denver; Catherine Taylor, Ithaca College, New York; and Sarita Cannon, San Francisco State University gathered in this literary sacred space. Each panelist did not know each other prior to meeting in this room for a presentation but our presentations perfectly intertwined as if it were divinely planned. This unique panel was curated by AUP based on our individually submitted abstracts in the fall of 2015. We were vessels placed in a room with a specific subject matter to share as it relates to our muse, James Baldwin.

I was the first one in the room, to bear witness as Baldwin would say, and my journey began with a lively introduction from our panel chair, Catherine Taylor. I rose from my seat joyously singing a call and response song, “Keep Your Eye On The Prize,” in the tradition of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s and paying homage to Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. I engaged the audience to participate in this interactive moment, while I was preparing my way to the podium to deliver my Baldwin inspired presentation, “James Baldwin: Artist as Activist and the Baldwin/Kennedy Secret Summit of 1963.” This scarcely known secret meeting was attended by Lorraine Hansberry, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Dr. Kenneth Clarke and young freedom fighter Jerome Smith. It was a surreal moment of history that I will remember for a lifetime. The meeting inspired the premise for an off-Broadway play, “James Baldwin: A Soul on Fire,” by the late playwright, Howard B. Simon. My complete essay is published in the book volume, “James Baldwin: Challenging Authors” Chapter #8. Sense Publishers. (www.sensepublishers.com) and the full play book version of James Baldwin: A Soul On Fire is available on Amazon.

I was graciously followed by the magical mother/daughter literary duet Catherine Smith and Zoe Smith-Holladay who passionately spoke on the subject of “Baldwin and Generational Perspectives on Civil Rights Advocacy”, coupled with Catherine Taylor’s insightful and critical analysis on “Race Politics and Hybrid Genres in James Baldwin and Claudia Rankine: From Epic to Lyric Essays”; and Sarita Cannon’s lyrical essay on “The Subversive Potential of Black Joy: Re-imagining Protest in the Work of James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry.”

The highlight of this eclectic Baldwin Panel #25 was the youngest presenter in the room, Zoe Smith-Holladay who delivered a heart felt poem she wrote in response to her mother’s presentation on Civil Rights advocacy. It was a priceless moment where I believe the spirit of James Baldwin as an ancestor entered our room with joy and appreciation.

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The Subversive Potential of Black Joy: Reimagining Protest In the Work of James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry

by Sarita Cannon, Ph.D. In “Sweet Lorraine,” James Baldwin recalls time spent with his dear friend Lorraine Hansberry: “I would often stagger down her stairs as the sun came up, usually in the middle of a paragraph and always in the middle of a laugh. That marvelous laugh. That marvelous face. I loved her, she was my sister and my comrade” (Baldwin xi-xii). In this moving eulogy to the brilliant black playwright who died at age 34 in 1965, Baldwin captures their shared commitment to bearing witness to the injustices of their time as well as their delight in each other and the world around them. For these two writers, protest and pleasure were not mutually exclusive.

In this piece, I examine Baldwin’s 1963 jeremiad The Fire Next Time alongside Hansberry’s award-winning 1959 drama A Raisin in the Sun, paying close attention to the ways in which protest manifests not simply as a critique of systematic racial oppression, but also as an expression of love for self and community. Both writers demonstrate the ways in which black pleasure is a necessary and surprisingly subversive element of the revolutionary spirit.

Protest lies at the heart of African-American literature.

As Black people in the United States have long expressed their experiences of living in a country that depended on their labor for its very existence but refused to acknowledge their humanity, creativity, and agency, critics too often view Black literature as solely political.

As Toni Morrison puts it: “The discussion of black literature in critical terms is unfailingly sociology and almost never art criticism” (cited in Conner ix). Certainly, there are works of propaganda that masquerade as art; but I would argue that for many Black writers, the social and the aesthetic can never be separated. Toni Morrison’s statement about her own work, that “a novel has to be 10

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Ruby Dee and Sidney Poitier in A Raisin in the Sun.

socially responsible as well as very beautiful,” resonates with my reading of James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, two people who were deeply engaged with the issues of their time and serious artists who toiled over their craft, striving to marry truth and beauty. (Jones and Vinson 183). The Fire Next Time and A Raisin in the Sun are two examples of this marriage.

Published to great acclaim in 1963, The Fire Next Time is part-meditation, part-sermon, part-prophecy, embodying the elements of the American jeremiad that David HowardPitney identifies. This genre “cit[es] the promise” for the community; “critic[izes] . . . the retrogression from the

LaTanya Richardson, Denzel Washington and Anika Noni Rose in Lorraine Hansberry’s classic Broadway play A Raisin in the Sun (2014).

promise”; and prophesies that the community will “redeem the promise.” (Howard-Pitney 8). Instead of predicting redemption, however, in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin warns what will happen to Black and White America alike if we do not heed the signs of racial apocalypse. His title refers to a Negro spiritual that contrasts the mercy of flood with the punishment of fire, fire that would become literal in urban centers just a few years following the text’s publication: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No water but the fire next time.”

As incendiary as Baldwin’s work is, it also contains a sophisticated redefinition of love. One of these moments occurs early in The Fire Next Time when he tells his 15-year-old nephew that on the day of his birth, he was there “to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that: I know how black it looks today, for you. It looked bad that day, too, yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived.” (Baldwin 7). Here Baldwin affirms the power of love for self, family, and community as a bulwark against a hostile society. In a world where Black lives did not matter, nurturing the promise of the next generation was a courageous act. Just as Baldwin

reevaluates the definition and purpose of love, so does he redefine pleasure and its transformative potential.

A few pages later, Baldwin critiques White Americans who misunderstand the “sensuality” of Black musical forms such as jazz and the blues. (Baldwin 42).

Baldwin asserts: “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous, now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here and become as joyless as they have become.” (Baldwin 43).

Baldwin’s call to embrace the sensual beyond White fantasies of “quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs” brings to mind Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic as the life force that is the source of every creative act, “whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, [or] examining an idea.” (Baldwin 43; Lorde african Voices

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57-8). Baldwin’s definition of joy is framed by his lament of our collective separation from our bodies, our desires, our senses. The image of Americans consuming tasteless bread evokes both our loss of pleasure in something as fundamental and nourishing as breaking bread together as well as the bland, lifeless communion both within and beyond the church walls.

Written four years earlier in 1959, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun prefigures much of the turmoil of the 1960s to which The Fire Next Time refers. Hansberry’s drama demonstrates both her revolutionary spirit that stemmed from her personal experience and her gift as a playwright to animate a wide range of Black characters never before seen on stage. I read the play’s most powerful expressions of protest not in the moments of anguish, but in moments of family connection and delight.

One such moment occurs at the beginning of Act II, when Walter and Beneatha, whose tense sibling relationship has already been established, “play African.” Beneatha is wearing Nigerian robes that her African suitor Asagai has brought from his homeland, dancing to Nigerian music, and chanting. (Hansberry 76). Moved by his sister’s performance, Walter enters and participates in the celebration of a royal African past: WALTER. Me and Jomo. . . . (Intently, in his sister’s face. She has stopped dancing to watch him in this unknown mood) That’s my man, Kenyatta. (Shouting and thumping his chest) FLAMING SPEAR! HOT DAMN! (He is suddenly in possession of an imaginary spear and actively spearing enemies all over the room) OCOMOGOSIAY. . . .

BENEATHA. (To encourage Walter, thoroughly caught up in this side of him) OCOMOGOSIAY, FLAMING SPEAR! WALTER. THE LION IS WAKING. . . .

OWIMOWEH! (He pulls his shirt open and leaps up on the table and gestures with his spear) BENEATHA. OWIMOWEH! WALTER. (on the table, very far gone, his eyes pure glass sheets. He sees what we cannot, that he is a leader of his people, a great chief, a descendant 12

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of Chaka, and that the hour to march has come) Listen, my black brothers— BENEATHA. OCOMOGOSIAY! (Hansberry 78-9).

Part of the humor of this scene lies in their ignorance: Walter and Beneatha, like most African-Americans at the time, knew little of African people, history, or culture.

As bombastic as the scene is, Hansberry also underscores the deep pleasure that Walter and Beneatha experience, validating the release through dance, song, and gesture that both characters experience in this moment of playacting. The family tensions are temporarily put aside, and the communion between the siblings underscores their fundamental bond. Towards the end of the scene, Hansberry indicates that “the mood shifts from pure comedy. It is the inner Walter speaking: The Southside chauffeur has assumed an unexpected majesty.”

(Hansberry 79). Here Walter imagines himself as a noble and respected warrior, not a Black man in 1950s America eking out a living for his wife and son in the service industry. However delusional his vision may seem, it is an important manifestation of Walter’s desire to live with dignity.

Another scene of connection, albeit a much more subdued and tender one, occurs when the family gathers to present their gifts to Mama: WALTER. (sweetly) Open it, Mama, It’s for you.

(Mama looks in his eyes. It is the first present in her life without its being Christmas. Slowly she opens her package and lifts out, one by one, a brand-new sparkling set of gardening tools.

WALTER continues, prodding) Ruth made up the note – read it. . .

MAMA. “To Our own Mrs. Miniver – Love from Brother, Ruth and Beneatha.” Ain’t that lovely . . .

Now I don’t have to use my knives and forks no more. . . (Hansberry 123).

Following this moment of celebration, Mama’s ten-yearold grandson Travis presents her with a “very elaborate wide gardening hat,” the sight of which drives the adults into fits of laughter. (Hansberry 124). Yet Mama hugs

A scene from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raising In the Sun (1961).

Travis tightly and tells him, “Bless your heart –this is the prettiest hat I ever owned” (Hansberry 124). She nurtures the spirit in which the gift was given. Moreover, the gifts of gardening tools and hat symbolize the family’s recognition of Mama’s dreams, which include having a home with a garden. The family’s collective acknowledgment of her desires represents the fierce love and respect for others that are essential to survival, especially for the Youngers who face an uncertain future when they move into Clybourne Park at the end of the play.

Although Hansberry “wrote [A Raisin in the Sun] in response to a racist performance” of a play about Blacks, protest in her own work manifests not in expressions of despair or anger but in moments of pleasure, love, and communion. (Bernstein 20). As Mama reminds Beneatha after she expresses her disdain for Walter and his apparent decision to take Mr. Lindner’s money in exchange for not moving into a White neighborhood: “There is always something left to love.” (Hansberry 145). Mama speaks here of the “hard love” that Baldwin refers to in The Fire Next Time: “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot

live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” (Baldwin 95). As both Baldwin and Hansberry express, love requires a fierce spirit and a commitment to embracing the full range of humanity: ours and that of others.

Though both Baldwin and Hansberry demonstrate a politics of love in these two works, neither was a naïve idealist.

Their own experiences with poverty, racism, sexism, and homophobia would not allow it. Yet, their belief in the transformative power of love as a weapon against dehumanization united them. It is not the “turn the other cheek” love of Dr. King but rather a hard, tough, and daring love that is rooted in a deep esteem for one’s right to be fully human. Their spirit reminds me not to give into the temptation of despair and encourages me to embrace joy as a mode of protest in a world that fears not only Black anger, but also Black pleasure.

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WORKS CITED Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. 1963. Reprint.

New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Print.

Baldwin, James. “Sweet Lorraine.” 1969. To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words.

Ed. Robert Nemiroff. Reprint. New York: Signet Classics, 2011. xi-xv. Print.

Bernstein, Robin. “Inventing a Fishbowl: White Supremacy and the Critical Reception of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.” Modern Drama 42.1 (Spring 1999): 16-27. Project Muse. Web. 4 June 2016.

Jones, Bessie W., and Audrey Vinson. “An Interview with Toni Morrison.” Conversations with Toni Morrison. Ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994. 171-187. Print.

Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”

Sister Outsider. Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984.

53-9. Print.

Vintage Black Glamour. “The good folks at Lorraine Hansberry Documentary Project have put to rest. . . .”

18 May 2016, 10.12 a.m. Facebook.

Conner, Marc C. “Introduction: Aesthetics and the African American Novel.” The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000. ix-xxvii. Print.

One of the most famous photos of these two Black writers is

Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. 1959. Reprint. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Print.

as Lorraine Hansberry, she is actually Doris Jean Castle, a

Howard-Pitney, David. The African-American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. ProQuest ebrary.

Web. 4 June 2016.

Glamour). Nonetheless, the photo is a powerful representation

not a photo of them at all. Although Baldwin’s dance partner in an undated black and white picture has long been identified civil rights activist who worked for CORE (Vintage Black of Black joy. I am grateful to Carolyn Butts for calling my attention to this misidentification.

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Zoe Smith Holladay, a 7th grade creative writing major from Denver, joined her mom Catherine Smith in sharing her work at the James Baldwin Conference.

Ode to James Baldwin You questioned the deeds of humanity, with such intensity that you must have been suffering from them from the moment you were born.

You wondered if change was worth anything because, to most people, it was so much easier to become an innocent and accept the truth that White America wanted you to believe in.

Perhaps your words were your gift, or your apology to White America, Maybe your words were some sort of guidance, for the innocents, who really believe that our problems have been solved, and that they have been cleansed once more, as if they ever have been.

It is a belief, a state of mind, that they suffer from.

As you know so well, not a single thing is or ever was innocent about the innocents: those who run, run, run away from White America’s truth, because they tire of the answers, and look for questions instead. Š 2016 Zoe Smith-Holladay african Voices

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Don’t Let me Be Misunderstood: The Relationship Between James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry & Nina Simone

by Lynnée Denise Bonner

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This excerpt focuses on the relationship between Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin.

dominant social movement narratives by privileged southern, Christian, and heterosexual voices over the social networks of cultural production, led by artists, women and queer activists.

When Alice Walker coined the phrase “ancestors in my line of work” she did so to describe the motivation behind her quest to restore the legacy of writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. In her 1975 essay, “Looking for Zora,” Walker recalls posing as Ms. Hurston’s niece in order to find traces of the writer’s existence in her childhood town of, the all-Black Eatonville, Florida.

Most of what we know about the cultural work of Zora Neale Hurston today is due in part to the efforts of Alice Walker and her relentless search to reverse what she pronounced to be “the symbolic fate of far too many Black writers in America — to die alone, impoverished, and in an unmarked grave.” Hurston’s absence from the discussion of notable artists from the Harlem Renaissance was impetus for Walker’s self-directed, investigative, and archival practice.

This is an examination of the personal relationships between Baldwin, Hansberry, and Simone who created work that was often seen as oppositional to popular movement strategies. By focusing on their interconnectedness, I hope to move away from the black exceptionalism trope that denies how the comradeship between these artists and their communities are indeed key elements in the creation of their most celebrated works. From Jimmy’s queering of American literature through Giovanni’s Room, to Lorraine’s second wave Black feminist thread in A Raisin in the Sun, to Nina’s unapologetic civil rights soul song “Mississippi Goddam,” the elevation of the charismatic male leader turns our attention away from political art works that were produced or inspired by communal-spirited spaces that I hope will garner more attention by academics and scholars.

Impressed by her literal and figurative excavation work, I began to think about who I could name as the “ancestors in my line of work.” I had questions about the silenced histories of women and queer artists in the black radical tradition whose legacies got lost in the male centered recalling of most political and arts movements. Those ancestors in my line of work are James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry and Nina Simone. And similarly to Walker’s restorative work with Hurston, my research for the International James Baldwin Conference, A Language to Dwell In, hosted by the American University of Paris, was a historical recovery project that sought to interrupt

Prior to falling in love with James Baldwin’s bibliography, I entered my relationship with him through the 1989 documentary The Price of the Ticket. It was from this place that I began to critically engage his position on what place an artist must occupy to ensure an honest reckoning with the moral cost of American life. Baldwin describes that this role is a witness to the truth. “[The artist],” he says, “must rob us of our myths and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back our personalities.” Throughout multiple essays, Notes of a Native Son and The Creative Process being two of the highly referenced, Baldwin designates the role of the

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artists as people whose sole purpose should be to uncover the illusion of America. He insists that “the artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.”

In the 1940s, a decade before Baldwin would meet Hansberry, he was in a community with Harlem Renaissance writers and soon to be expatriates Richard Wright and Countee Cullen, and shared a unique and transformative relationship with visual artist Beaufort Delaney. Baldwin biographer David Leeming tells us that “Delaney was to reconcile for his protégé the music of the Harlem streets with the music of the Harlem churches, and this helped Baldwin reconcile his sexual awakening with his artistic awakening.”

Baldwin’s politicization in Harlem, the Village, and Paris functioned like a rites of passage and offers insight into where he was at the first point of connection with Lorraine.

By the time they formally met, he was an openly queer public intellectual expatriate and an established novelist, playwright, and essayist. Baldwin had become, as he would say, “The artist here to disturb the peace.”

Lorraine Hansberry was twenty-nine to Jimmy Baldwin’s thirty-four when she walked into the Actor’s Studio in the winter of 1958, where Giovanni’s Room was being workshopped for stage production. She had heard of Baldwin’s work and he was aware of her organizing and journalistic grind. At this production, in the face of unfavorable responses to the play by Broadway executives, Hansberry publicly defended Baldwin’s willingness to introduce theater audiences to homosexual content, which spoke to her own developing feminist and queer politics. This fearless representation of sexual diversity, Hansberry felt, was consistent with the voice an artist must have if they are to be agents of social change.

She saw Baldwin as an ally to which he responded, “I was enormously grateful to her, she seemed to speak for me; and afterward she talked to me with a gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten.” (Baldwin:1969).

Hansberry’s clarity about the role of an artist developed long before meeting Baldwin in 1958. She was a highly visible activist and public intellectual, politicized by her family’s social justice work in Chicago. When she moved to New York in 1951, she was immediately employed as a

writer for Paul Robeson’s Pan Africanist and communist inspired newspaper called Freedom, a publication edited

by Louis E. Burnman whom she also identified as a mentor. Like Baldwin, but from a different proximity, Hansberry too was shaped by the Harlem Renaissance and cited Langston Hughes as being one of the most influential writers on her work. A one-time student enrolled in a W.E.B. DuBois African studies course, and a person drawn to the work of fellow journalist for Freedom and Black woman playwright Alice Childress, she learned early that in the achievement of Black rights, artists didn’t have the luxury to surrender their platforms to merely entertain, nor did she prescribe to one particular political strategy in the pursuit of social justice. In a 1962 speech titled “A Challenge to Artist,” Hansberry speaks candidly about her impatience with apolitical artists, saying: “Finally, I think that all of us who are thinking such things [as civil rights], who wish to exercise these rights that we are here defending tonight, must really exercise them. Speaking to my fellow artists in particular, I think that we must paint them, sing them, write about them—all these matters which are not currently fashionable. Otherwise…we are indulging in a luxurious complicity—and no other thing.”

Perhaps one of the most compelling occurrences that affirm the intimate relationship between Baldwin and Hansberry was expressed in a letter he had written to his brother David from the South of France. In the 1965 letter he writes, “The night of January 12, when my fever reached its rather alarming peak, was the night Lorraine Hansberry died.” He described his condition that evening as a psychosomatic one. Two years leading up to Hansberry’s passing, Baldwin was devastated by the season of death that reached across transnational borders to engulf his life. He returned to America to address the 16th Street Baptist church bombing that killed four little girls, the abduction and murder of civil rights workers (James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner) in Mississippi, and the murder of Medgar Evers on his porch in front of his family. Just one month after Hansberry’s passing would be the assassination of Malcolm X, who attended Hansberry’s funeral and who Baldwin was scheduled to meet with, along with Martin L. King Jr. on February 23, two days after Malcolm was killed. It was in the spirit of grief and gratitude that

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Baldwin penned the essay Sweet Lorraine for Esquire in 1969, four years following Hansberry’s death, and one year after Dr. Martin Luther King had been killed.

The affection between Lorraine and Jimmy is clear starting with the title of the essay Sweet Lorraine from which he jumps right into the text with the opening sentence, “That’s the way I always felt about her and so I won’t apologize for calling her that now.” Baldwin’s tender defiance reflects that of a journal entry or maybe even a conversation with Lorraine’s lingering spirit. It’s unclear who the audience is, or whether or not this is a cathartic piece written to fellow disillusioned movement members mourning the loss of their assassinated friends.

In Sweet Lorraine, he describes an average evening with Hansberry, which includes lots of whiskey, chain smoking and debates about history, politics, gender and movement activities. He names these moments they share as “down home sessions” and highlights the fact that for these conversations Lorraine would always be wearing slacks.

(Baldwin; 1969). I am especially moved by the use of the words “down home,” which is a phrase typically reserved for migrants from the Black south referring to the homes they fled, but given the fact that Baldwin and Hansberry are first generation people born in the Northeast and Midwest, it’s an interesting choice of words that evoke the sense of home he found in their friendship.

“ I am especially moved by the use of the words down home...the sense of home he found in their friendship.”

In this case home is being used a metaphor to express the joy one feels when they find an ally, a person whom can bear witness and offer with-ness. Jimmy considered Lorraine to be a safe place to grow, to be uncomfortable, and to be vulnerable when his eloquent rage against the machine seemed to be the most viable form of selfpreservation. What I’m getting at here is how our love for Baldwin’s fire sometimes encourages us to forget to remember the necessity of his pleasure, connection, and joy in the struggle. In Sweet Lorraine, Baldwin describes the closing of an evening of debate and debauchery sharing:

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“…I would often stagger down her stairs as the sun came up, usually in the middle of a paragraph and always in the middle of a laugh. That marvelous laugh. That marvelous face. I loved her, she was my sister and my comrade. Her going did not so much make me lonely as make me realize how lonely we were. We had that respect for each other which perhaps is only felt by people on the same side of the barricades, listening to the accumulating thunder of the hooves of horses and the heads of tanks.”

The sentiment in Baldwin’s writing in Sweet Lorraine is telling of a debilitating loneliness; the loneliness of being both radical and queer within movements driven by conservative values and ideas. In Sweet Lorraine, he offers a vivid description of his respect for Lorraine’s eye as a witness, which he believes is epitomized in her play “A Raisin in the Sun.” Baldwin speaks to the impact of Hansberry’s play and the use of theater to humanize Black life. “…What is relevant here is that I had never in my life seen so many black people in the theater.

And the reason was that never in the history of the American theater had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage. Black people ignored the theater because the theater had always ignored them.”

Lorraine Hansberry was diagnosed with cancer in 1963 and died in 1965, just six years after the Broadway premiere of “A Raisin the Sun.” She was 35. Her work on multiple front lines, as a multidisciplinary artist and political activist is, more often than not, removed from the sound bite civil rights history that we learn to memorize.

Lorraine’s relevance is one of many casualties of the sinister and American framing of Martin Luther King’s benign and non-threatening dream. We now know that King’s dream was more about an undeniable articulation of the American nightmare. But the cost, or as Baldwin would say, “The price of the ticket,” to this particular kind of framing is happening at the expense of our understanding of the role of radical queer women and artists in the movement.

My Father Tells Me He and My Mother Got Married the Year Purple Rain was Released And that was the year I learned how much a piano make me look like my mother or my father it depends on the hour there we were caught in the middle of a morning in America that promised only that the fire was remembering its name and we didn’t have very much back then but the promise of a marriage of smoldering flags I never liked it here birthright or not I’ve always been a captive of my own blood I stayed because nobody else wanted your grandmother that and the promise of some electric grief I heard Prince for the first time on a pirate radio station like every other beautiful thing I know I had to steal the air that surrounded it he played all his own instruments wrote all his own lyrics and I never found another Black boy with that many hands he must be some kind of holy for me to turn the volume high enough to make it look like your grandfather’s ghost hadn’t been visiting for a week straight the sound pierced the smoke and I had hands again

Your mother saw the movie with me once I must have seen it eleven more times and I ain’t prayed for rain that hard since your grandfather passed and I spent years trying to exhale his ghost Let me tell you something about grief it’s only Black insofar as it’s a mirror I look into the sky all the time and see his favorite song you and I are alike that way that’s partially my fault I was the one who played his songs onto your womb I just wanted you to know there was music amidst the drowning Now he’s gone and you know what he meant when he say that doves cry sometimes it hurts to remember how to go home I don’t wish for the sky anymore just a chance to know you’re safe and to say hello to my dad one last time and to say a goodbye to you while I still know my name I never wanted to be a burden but when I am fading If no fire is available drape me in purple dress me like something that might never set © 2016 Julian Randall

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ALWAYS, THERE IS MUSIC i own two of my father’s things: his favorite pink sweater & an R&B classics cd. on its front, a black man in sweatpants hovers, his hand touching cardboard, his body suspended. when i am in the music, i become the empty space. i dance with my father. i become untouchable, burn rubber, celebration, real. //

once, i was sitting in a car and everyone (not black) around me heard the beat drop and howled like a pack of infants learning their most bestial cry. i left my skin to rot there, let them plunge a shovel in the dirt & lift a hundred pine boxes. go ahead. you have my permission. move with reckless abandon. call it breakdancing. it’s lit. call it something you don’t understand. //

once, someone (not black) asked for my opinion on drake. i don’t think about drake. i’m somewhere trying to remember the story my uncle told, the one about young tyrone & his brothers breaking a sweat at a club, tracksuits soaking, legs a pile of hurricanes. in the story, my father is the youngest. he busts through the lineup. invokes james brown (the godfather). & every pair of hands throws together a beat & tyrone, 13 or whatever age my uncle remembers, is a star. // to be quite honest, i don’t trust anyone (not black) with hip-hop. i don’t care how it moves you or fills you with strength or is the perfect release from your confounding stress. i swear, i’m just trying to honor myself. i swear, i’m just trying to find my father. did you know that dead black fathers have their own music? did you know that nothing of mine belongs to you? // if you want to take the music, take the grief, too. © 2016 Ariana Brown 20

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It’s A Miracle how my city dies each winter the trees as bare & raw as a damn heartbreak & in the news my president tired of crying talking about gun control on the same day that Matthew’s poem showed up in my mailbox. & how I couldn’t imagine the words Kevlar & children in back to back stanzas. & how this just reminds me of ’93 when I saw my first dead body outside the bodega. It sported blue kicks that looked iridescent like those fish that camouflage themselves against the dark ocean. & how her face looked only eight years old, maybe ten. & how

someone’s second amendment right seems to only leave a trail of children’s bodies & brown bodies. & how some days I am afraid of stepping out of the house or of whether my lover brown & beautiful will make it home. & I can’t write anymore about death yet it’s all I know. & how tonight the sky will be all kinds of colors against the iciness of humanity. & isn’t it a miracle that we haven’t killed every last one of us yet? A miracle that there are still those among us who sit & wait hoping for Spring — © 2016 Yesenia Montilla

Artist: Jonathan Guy-Gladding (JAG). african Voices

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In Passing Malik Taylor (Phife Dawg)

by Mirlande Jean-Gilles

When A Tribe Called Quest released their debut album, “People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm,” I was 16 going on 17-years-old and trying to figure out my place in the world. I loved the music instantly. It changed my life. I had never heard anything like it. I loved their beats, rhymes, music videos, politics, Afro-centric aesthetic, intelligence and their fun. They were saying many things that I was feeling but they made it funky. They were brilliant!

And they were from Queens? I was from Queens!

In my mind I was a “Native Tongue.” They didn’t know who I was but they gave me the courage to be myself. When I saw them, I saw my own reflection. I found somewhere I fit in. I didn’t feel so weird. When I saw Tribe, I saw my crew.

When I finally purchased the full album on cassette I played it all the time. I’d plead with my dad to let me play the tape in the car. He’d acquiesce but shake his head and laugh at the music. I remember trying to explain the song “Ham and Eggs” to him, but he just didn’t get it! How could he not understand the genius that was A Tribe Called Quest?

Artist: Kieyan Chauhan On March 22, 2016, I logged on to Facebook and found out that Malik Taylor aka Phife Dawg passed away from complications from diabetes. He was only 45 years old. Though I didn’t know Malik personally, I cried as if I had lost an old friend. I blasted A Tribe Called Quest’s music. I checked in on my people who I knew loved Tribe as much as I did. A part our childhood was gone. Malik Taylor was gone. I couldn’t believe it. There wouldn’t be any more rumors of a possible Tribe reunion or new music from the group. I was glad my kids had already gone to school because I was a mess.

Eventually, I had to go out but I stayed on the verge of crying. On the bus I kept listening to Tribe. I was in shock. I couldn’t believe the world was just continuing to operate like things were normal.

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A year later they released, “The Low End Theory.”

Phife rapped more on that album. He dropped lyrical gems that left me laughing and gasping in disbelief.

Yo, microphone check one, two what is this?

The five foot assassin with the roughneck business I float like gravity, never had a cavity Got more rhymes than the Winans got family Phife comes at you so hard it’s like he’s making up for lost time. One of the reasons that “The Low End Theory” is such an amazing album is that Phife gets free reign on it. Q-Tip and Phife were perfectly balanced. Phife was straight up, no holds barred with his style and lyrics. His message was loud and clear. Q-Tip’s rhyme style was chill, poetic and ethereal. Phife was grounding. He pulled the duo back to reality. They were so different but it worked.

In 1993, A Tribe Called Quest dropped “Midnight Marauders.” In “Oh My God,” Phife delivers this

incredible line, “When was the last time you heard a funky diabetic?”

When folks first heard this, we were shocked. It was a deeply personal thing for him to share. That kind of sharing was part of his brilliance.

In “Electric Relaxation,” Phife says, I like them brown, yellow Puerto Rican and Haitian/Name is Phife Dawg from Zulu Nation.” As a young Haitian girl it meant a lot for Haiti to be acknowledged in a way that wasn’t negative or embarrassing. His simple lyrics meant so much to me.

Malik Taylor touched and inspired thousands of people across the globe with his gift. He was an elaborate storyteller in the tradition of his Trinidadian heritage.

He was boastful and brash and he drew you in with his incredible humor. He was genuine. He was real. He was himself through and through. This is what we loved so much about Malik.

Kahlil-Koromantee.com african Voices

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BOOK REVIEW

Offers A Compelling Tribute to Reshape Our Musical Narratives

By Shani Jamila

“ Jangle up its teeth until it can tell our story the way you would tell your own” Tyehimba Jess is known for giving flesh to stories

“straight from America’s barbwired heart” that have been marginalized over the course of history. His trademark virtuosity and genius are on full display in his recently released second collection of poetry, Olio.

On a recent train ride into Manhattan, I ran into a

colleague who remarked on his well- worn book that sat dog-eared in my lap. I held it up so that she could take a picture of the cover as I enthusiastically explained

the mastery of form that Jess demonstrates in this latest publication. It’s been more than ten years since his

National Poetry Series winning debut collection Leadbelly was published, but as viewers of his 2011 TED talk know, Jess has been working in that interim period on further cultivating his already notable poetic aesthetic.

His signature syncopated sonnets have numerous

possibilities for interpretation—they can be read column by column, crosswise, backwards or as a whole. As

he describes in the appendix, they are simultaneously

“interstitial, anti-gravitational and diagonal.” And that

is one of the most remarkable features of this book —not only is it over 200 pages long, an exceptionally thick

volume for a poet, but many pieces contain multitudes.

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Indeed, some pages are designed to be torn out and

reshaped into rolls, banners and folds to create something newer still. The end result is a deeply layered manuscript that one can get lost in, inspired by, and stand in awe of.

Olio, which Jess dedicates to our community’s long

trajectory of musicians who’ve devoted their whole selves to their art form but never had their work recorded, takes

its name from the variety of performances that comprised the second half of a minstrel show. It is a meticulously researched book that gives voice to a cast of fourteen

characters, including figures such as the conjoined twins Millie and Christine McKoy, Henry “Box” Brown who

made history with his daring escape from enslavement,

and artists like the renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers,

As I stated to my colleague on the train, once I closed

Dunbar. The timeline that contextualizes the stories

Langston — not necessarily in terms of style or lyrical

sculptor Edmonia Lewis, and poet Paul Laurence

extends from 1816-2012, beginning with the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and concluding with the second election of President Obama.

A standout piece is “McKoy Twins Syncopated Star,” wherein Jess revels in his ability to deftly interweave

a compelling visual narrative with lines like “—we’re fused in blood and body — from one thrummed stem/ budding twin blooms of song.” Allusions to the work

of poems like Ntozake Shange’s “Sorry” come through in excerpts such as “Fear. I got no use for it. Fear

these pages I came to the conclusion that Tyehimba is our sensibility, but in terms of proficiency and historical

impact. It is the rigor with which this book archives history, offers new narratives and context for the “characters”

it contains that leads me to the conclusion that readers

a century from now will count this among the treasures that are emblematic of this era. This stunning work of reclamation is a book for the ages.

Olio

by Tyehimba Jess

never paid one bill nor put one morsel in my mouth,”

Wave Books, 224 pages

illustrations by Jessica Lynne Browne that adeptly

www.wavepoetry.com/products/olio

in his “Lottie Joplin, Part 2.” He also incorporates punctuate the poems and offer a powerful visual

ISBN # 9781940696201 (paperback) — $25

complement to the work.

Memoir Writing Workshop Starts Oct. 12, 2016!

Bring a Writing Buddy!

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FICTION

Peach Cobbler

By Aimiende Negbenebor Sela

A butterfly flutters its wings.

It’s spring.

It hovers in place for a fraction of a second, then swan dives, wistfully, from the grey-blue skies toward the tree-lined Pearsall Avenue, suburbia in the Bronx.

Peppered with its Boricuas in business casual waving hello to Bangladeshi mothers walking their newborns in strollers, hoping to finally get a wink of sleep, Pearsall Avenue casually whispers — welcome home. The lush green panorama, speckled with tarred streets, neatly rowed houses, quiet alleyways, and parallel-parked automobiles is serene, luring, familial. A dog barks. A child squeals in delight. A lawn mower putters nearby.

Peaches of varied sizes hang like ornaments on the tree. Some confidently green, others less so. Anaisa returns her attention to the windowsill. The butterfly’s gone. She spoons down the remainder of her cereal, washes the one bowl, and the one spoon, and sets them down in an empty dish rack. She smoothes her wet hands along the sides of her dress, smoothes down her perfect ponytail, and turns again to the window. She shuts it, grabs her bag off the kitchen table set for two, pats Orlando on his head, and off she goes to face the world outside.

The butterfly makes its way toward a shingled roof caked in dirt, down past a set of bay windows plastered with cobwebs, hovers over an over grown lawn, swoops up and over a rusty wired fence, and lands delicately on Anaisa Hill’s spotlessly clean kitchen window.

Alas, she was right; it’s a beautiful day to begin anew.

Her heels bid the concrete sidewalk good day, the palm of her hand caresses the stretch of massive tree trunks outlining the block — they caress back. Unfamiliar faces smile politely at her; her plum lips return the kind gesture. The meow of an Egyptian Mau perched on the edge of a couch, wedged beneath the bay window of the house at the corner, reminds her that she can make any place home that wants to be called home.

Outfitted in a smart dress reminiscent of spring, Anaisa leans against her kitchen sink, and spoons coco puffs drenched in almond milk into her mouth. Her plum lipstick leaves its mark on the spoon’s drop. She notices it, smiles and wonders why that part of the spoon is called a drop. Ah, the anatomy of a spoon.

Her charming golden retriever, Orlando, is at her feet.

His eyes are glued to the tiny window above the sink, draped partially with a feather-light curtain. A breeze disturbs the curtain. Orlando barks. Anaisa looks up from her spoon, and smiles at the butterfly dotting about her windowsill. It’s going to be a beautiful day, she says. Her gaze drifts past the butterfly into her neighbor’s yard — from whence the colorful creature came, and lands on her neighbor’s unusually large peach tree.

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Growing up in an orphanage in Kampala, Anaisa dreamed of one day calling a family hers, a home hers.

It didn’t matter where. Right there in Uganda, or as far East as Papua New Guinea, as long as it was hers. She dreamed and dreamed until twenty years later, when she found herself in a place called Calgary. Then she stopped; but I digress.

It’s nighttime.

Anaisa pulls a plate of rotisserie chicken breast out of the microwave oven that sits on the counter table beneath the window facing her peach tree neighbor’s house. It’s dark. There’s no sign of life from within or

Artist: Jonathan Guy-Gladding (JAG).

around the house. She turns away from the window, leans against the sink, and chows down — a familiar routine. She stares at the unopened boxes that line her kitchen walls and thinks, “I have to get to those soon.”

Orlando plays “good dog” at her feet. His puppy dog eyes looks playfully into hers. She “accidentally” drops a piece of chicken and he of course, rushes for it — life’s small pleasures. She returns her gaze to the window, and her smile wanes. She’s never been a fan of the dark, but she’s learned to live with it. She washes the one dish, sets it down in the dish rack next to the one bowl and the one spoon from breakfast, and turns the lights off. She may have to live with the dark, but she doesn’t have to listen to its secrets. Someone told her that not so long ago. She can’t remember whom.

In her comfy pajama bottoms and t-shirt, Anaisa cozies up in bed. Orlando hops on next to her and takes his place guarding the foot of the bed. She reaches for the book on her nightstand, and flips to a bookmarked page.

The trees outside her window rustle. “Why does the dark

turn you into giant monsters?” She asks. They don’t answer, they simply sway. Through the shadows of swaying trees, Anaisa spies a dim light piercing through her neighbor’s dusty windows. Inside the house, a shadow paces. It stops, and waltzes back to the window facing Anaisa’s bedroom. It stands there, perfectly still.

Morning comes.

Anaisa’s at the kitchen sink dressed sharply; bowl of cereal in hand, and staring into her neighbor’s yard. The peaches are ripening! She spies the butterfly perched on one of them. A smile creeps up her face. There’s something so innocent about butterflies. Bowl to her mouth, she gulps her milk and wipes off the mustache it leaves behind. She washes the one bowl, the one spoon, smoothes her wet hands down her skirt and ponytail, grabs her purse off the kitchen table set for two, pats Orlando on his head, and pulls the door shut behind her.

Her day goes by as usual, uneventfully, and nighttime finds her again in her PJs, comfortably tucked under

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her sheets, reading a book. Outside her window, the dark settles in. The lights inside her neighbor’s house dim. Behind the neighbor’s dusty windows, a shadow paces, stops, stands perfectly still. Where did he learn to do that? Why would he have needed to learn to do that? Or is he mimicking her standing perfectly still by her window, watching him watching her. It made her wonder if that man knew she was there — the night a band of thieves broke into the home of the Nigerian family that had taken her and another orphan girl in.

There was so much screaming pouring out of one small mouth. Not hers. She lay perfectly still in a corner behind Momma’s big couch, as it was called, and almost held her breath. He stood there for a while.

Again, I digress.

It’s summer.

The door opens, and Orlando practically crawls in, panting. Anaisa’s sweaty hand tosses keys into a glass bowl on her windowsill. She stares out the window, mouth agape, as blue jays nonchalantly chow down beautiful ripe peaches! Infuriated, Anaisa marches to the side of her house and yells at the little dinosaurs devouring her succulent peaches. Well, not hers, but close enough. “If I can’t have a family, I can at least have peaches!” she yells at the birds. They seem to smile at her as they peck into one juicy ripe peach after another. Their happy songs fill the air. She looks further up the tree and spies a lone, unharmed, ripe peach at the very top. She glances down at the base of the tree. It’s covered in rotten peaches with ants and flies playing vultures. She shakes her head and walks away as the slightly lifted curtain, from inside her neighbor’s dusty window, falls back in place.

Many mornings pass and Anaisa’s routine remains constant. The kitchen sink and small window frame her world inside her home. She watches, as the one last peach standing, slowly withers. Summer turns to winter, leaves turn from orange to brown, bare branches are blanketed in snow, and holiday music fills the air.

Boxes line Anaisa’s kitchen walls. Who’s to say that a home can’t have boxes lining its walls? She was almost married once. Young, naive and eager to have a home, to make a home, she fell in love with a traveling salesman 28

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from Calgary. Need I say more? Well, maybe a little more. They met while she was in college in London. Full of life, and oh so innocent, she believed every word he said. She loves books, you know. They’ve always kept her company, so she had no fear dreaming the dreams she dreamt in books. They were to marry as soon as she graduated, so they bought a house, in Calgary, to call home. It was lined with boxes; some his, but mostly hers. I’ve strayed. Where was I? The Bronx. Ah, yes!

Spring has sprung!

Green trees, flowers in bloom, birds chirping, sunlight fills the room.

And the butterfly dots about her windowsill. Anaisa, at her kitchen sink, lowers her bowl from her face. She grins from ear to ear. The lush green peach tree is full again with unripe fruit — a second chance. She twirls her ponytail into a bun, and dashes off to face the world.

With each passing day, she watches. As the tree’s fruits grow and ripen, she grows and ripens. She unpacks her boxes one day, excited to see the next. She keeps company with the tree in the mornings while enjoying her coco puffs, and shares how her day went with it at night over rotisserie chicken breast. Do not fret! Orlando suffered no neglect. They’ve become a family of three, sharing a window and a kitchen sink.

Summer arrives, and it’s a scorcher.

Anaisa, at her sink, fills a glass with water and downs it in rhythm with Orlando’s gulps. She turns to the window and freezes. Blue jays sing their happy song as they chow down sweet ripe peaches. Anaisa slams her glass down and marches over to the side of her house. She grabs the short step ladder propped against her outside wall, and yells “not again!” as she leans it against her neighbor’s wire fence precariously. She hops on, reaches for a fruit, but she’s a few inches short.

Up the second step she goes. The ladder gives a little, but she finds her balance and reaches. She’s still a few inches short. Up step three, she and the ladder are at an angle. She reaches up and leans over the fence. The tips of her fingers graze that ripe peach ever so slightly.

There’s a wicked glint in her eyes. She’s almost there!

Up on the tip of her toes, she reaches further still and grabs that pinkish gold ripe peach in the palm of her hand — nirvana. She pulls down, hard. Bad move. She topples over the fence and into her neighbor’s yard.

Golden ripe peach secure in her hand, she takes a calming breath with her eyes closed.

A giant shadow falls across her face. She opens her eyes and is met by the stern gaze of a pair of bluish gray eyes, shrouded by a set of bushy eyebrows that belong to the giant of a man poised at the crown of her head.

In a flash, she’s on her backside, her back against the tree. He glances down at her hand; she follows his gaze.

The peach! She shoves it into her mouth, bites hard, swallows, gags, and shoves some more, until there’s nothing of the peach left. She spits out the pit, and “sits” her ground. The neighbor turns on his heels and walks into his house. Almost immediately, he returns with a bowl and places it on Anaisa’s outstretched legs. He reaches up above her seated self, plucks peach after peach, and drops them into the bowl ‘til it overflows. He helps Anaisa up without a word, places the few peaches that missed the bowl on top of the heap, and walks back into his house. Anaisa stands frozen to her spot. For a moment, she eyes the wire fence, but thinks better about it and opts for the front gate instead.

Back inside her kitchen, she sets the overflowing bowl of peaches down on the table set for two, sits on her floor, and wraps her arms around her knees. Orlando lies next to her. His face on his paws, he reflects her somber mood. The butterfly, watching from its usual place on her windowsill, flutters into the kitchen, and perches softly on the crest rail of one of the chairs at the table set for two. Anaisa stares harder at the bowl of peaches and in a flash, she’s on her feet. Startled, Orlando does the same. He prances around in circles, tail wagging.

Anaisa’s a woman on a mission. One after another, cabinets fly open; ingredients land on the kitchen counter; bowls, tin foils, rolling pins, fly out of cabinets beneath the counter, above the counter, the fridge, the pantry; and a few minutes later, the oven door shuts.

Anaisa is covered from head to toe in flour. Orlando’s coat is a whiter shade of gold. His face, buried in a bowl licked almost clean of pie batter. The kitchen looks like a

tornado went through it. An hour later, a mouthwatering, golden brown, peach cobbler finds its way out of the oven. Anaisa is a vision in her yellow dress. She turns to her window and smoothes down her locks. It cascades down her neck in neat large waves. She picks up the pie, and finds herself in front of her neighbor’s door. His eyes land on the pie Anaisa holds up to his face. What man can resist a pie that good looking? He ushers her in.

His house is like something out of C.S. Lewis’ imagination. Books and antiques line the walls, shelves, and coffee tables from the narrow hallway to that of the living room. He clears a space on a table littered with even more books, sets the pie down, and rushes out of the room. Anaisa runs her fingers over the spine of one book after another, all wrapped in brown construction paper, with obscure hand written words and Roman numerals on them. The neighbor returns with paper plates and utensils. Anaisa joins him. He clears a seat for her, hands her a set of plastic utensils, and sets about the business of eating pie. He serves her first, then himself, and settles into a chair.

Anaisa takes a bite of hers. He does the same. She quietly takes another. He does the same. She gently slides one of the brown paper covered books over to him and points to the spine. He puts down his fork and writes on its top cover: This Side of Paradise. She flips open the book cover and sure enough, it’s F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. She slides over another. He pencils in Of Human Bondage. She opens it, correct again! Her excitement overtakes her. She digs into disordered heaps of brown paper covers, running back and forth from shelves on walls with book after book. The Pearl, Exodus, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Love in the Time of Cholera, Things Fall Apart. He’s half way through the pie when Anaisa dashes off for another book, on the topmost shelf. She hops on the ladder propped against the shelves and reaches for two rather large volumes. He looks up from his pie just in time to see her teeter and fall backwards off the ladder. Books scatter, he breaks her fall. He’s a quick one, this man. She looks up at him and chuckles, he shakes his head; she turns the spine of the volume in her hand to him. With eyes fixed on her beautiful face, he responds On Love and Loneliness. african Voices

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on the E express a boy asks his mama a few things (boy hums) (boy thoughtful) why didn’t the slaves fight back? what slaves? why we ain’t fight back? who said we ain’t fight back? but we was slaves. not before we was slaves. why they ain’t just shoot the white people? no guns. what about knives or scissors? no knives or scissors. what about poison like on detective shows? where they was gettin poison from, boy? the drug store. (suck-teeth) why they ain’t use they hands? who said they didn’t? how they become slaves then? (silence) would you let someone slave you? can you eat your banana? how would you stop

someone from slaverin you—like what if they helda gun to your head? or my head? that’s not gonna happen. we should learn karate just in case. (eye-roll) (suck-teeth) what chops and kicks gonna do against bullets? (takes boy’s banana peel) (boy wipes mouth) what if banana peels was a weapon? (suck-teeth) how? booby trap the apartment with peels and the bad guy slips

Artist: Aziza 30

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and breaks his neck. can’t you talk about somethin pleasant, why you thinkin bout this? cause save the peel i’ma collect more. (suck-teeth) you better have on clean socks don’t be embarrassin me at the doctor’s office. (boy laughs) (boy thoughtful) did slaves laugh while they was slaves?

(exasperated) how should i know? you laugh. (exasperated) am i a slave? but when do you start to laugh when you a slave? what is there to be happy for? family. (kisses top of boy’s head) (playfully taps back of boy’s head) what if they ain’t have family when did they first laugh and what they think was funny? maybe they saw a picture of you (places arm around boy) how? we both was here before. (boy gets loud) so you was a slave? (suck-teeth) no, i was a fairy. then why you ain’t free the slaves? (suck-teeth) i freed as many as i could. why can’t you say somethin nice or fun? i like your make-up and your purse. (boy plays with zipper) (side-eyes boy)

when i die i’ma come back as a walrus. (exasperated) why can’t you just be a boy? walruses are tough and eat lots of fish— can we go fishing? one thing at a time. where are the slave families? (exasperated) boy, they everywhere. we slaves family too? i guess. can we bring flowers? (exasperated) boy where? i dunno. the slaves dead and happy now. i wanna buy roses. (side-eyes boy) wit who money? and take them where? to a funeral. so you gon just roll up on somebody funeral uninvited? where our slave family buried? (sigh) i. don’t. know. (boy sneezes) (boy thoughtful) we should become

zombies. then no one could hurt us cause we’d already be dead. (exasperated) (side-eye) (eye-roll) (suck-teeth) (silence)

© Amber Atiya

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The Gallery Jocelyn Goode: Healing Community Through Art

Jocelyn “Extraordinare1” Goode is a painter and muralist whose portraits have garnered community support. One of her most noted series includes intimate portraits of men and women who survived the crack era.

“Concerning The Crack” explores the growing “crack” between the younger and older generations of the AfricanAmerican community caused by many factors including the Crack-Cocaine Epidemic of the late 1980s and the Technological Phenomenon of the new millennium.

One of the consequences of crack is a generation of young people who have little knowledge of the struggle and progress of previous generations. Many AfricanAmerican elders are confused by the younger generation’s attitudes, culture and self-destructive tendencies.

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By using photography, recorded interviews and portrait painting, artist Jocelyn “Extraordinarie1” Goode began a visual dialogue and put a spotlight on a growing issue that deserves more attention. Beginning in March 2010, she interviewed and photographed African-American men and women 40 and over and the now grown-up “crackbabies” and young people 21 and under. The participants had the opportunity to share their perspectives on the aftermath of the epidemic and the way technology affects their life as well as their solutions for healing the Black community. From the data, she created painted portraits that merge the faces of young and old and incorporate quotes into each piece.

Artwork by Jocelyn Goode

Artist’s Statement “My artistic voice has matured over the 20 years from when I formally began studying fine art at the age of 14. Today my art functions as a tool that allows me to build a platform to amplify my voice as an agent of social progress. Painting, drawing, mixed media, graphic design, apparel design and installation are instruments I utilize to express ideas about the state of a collective reality I share with other people of African heritage living in America.

My art lends me the ability to highlight narratives of pioneers and heroes whose lives offer valuable lessons that we need to keep alive. I aspire to provoke thought by visually representing familiar images in a different light. And on a fundamental human level, I make art to share complex emotions in a way that others can relate to.

“I am inspired by artists like Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Alice Neel, Lois Mailou Jones, Kehinde Wiley along with writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Aesop,

Ray Bradbury, Ralph Ellison, Jean-Paul Satre, James Baldwin and George Orwell. Ultimately, I want my art to help people to heal neglected wounds, to see beauty in overlooked places, to stimulate imaginations, and to increase consciousness.”

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SHUFFLE MACHINE What ruffles between her fingers like a thing with feathers, two faces riffling, glossy finished breaths, each a volume of vortex arrested and booked under the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a coffle of cardboard chaos dovetailing a desire that cannot be boxed or cut by sharpest image edges or Victoria’s secrets interlaced into a deck’s sexy designs.

What’s held in your table-side tank of bated breath?

Necks pulse in vain, throb like traffic lights on a Saturday night, hands clean as gloves on a bourgeois burglar, cuffed and cupped, trembling, riffling the clay chips lining the edge of a bet that begs anarchy.

She is your Miss Fortune, running fountain of infinity.

Everybody misses the river except you.

Always the kissed banks swishing the same.

The pot wants to be right, maybe raised.

What it gets is to be splashed.

More and more under

each undealt door through which “next” echoes, there is a rising, like the suddenness of an unseen Aegean.

Now her practiced hands pitch tomorrow’s fate across an oblong table.

The waitress brings something you crave as a daffodil doth of the dew, (no napkin, please) says sip this, her lips are full, her wrists fragrant, her heart too is barred.

I heard a bee buzz, honey when I tried.

And if you tip her over? Face up.

This ain’t origami, (you are not allowed to fold.)

And how would that change the credit of the cards?

She would of course simply re-deal to your empty seat.

Maybe she was only the Queen of Hearts peeled like a tamarind by randomized hands and you were never her suited King. © 2016 Joel Dias-Porter

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Far more common threads bind us than differences that divide us.

“

From start to finish this was a great collection of well-written short stories all connected together, depicting the life-story of a Vietnam Vet who struggles with PTSD. The first chapter really breaks your heart and compels you to read on. With only 160 pages, you’ll finish this book in a day. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to reading more from this author!

”

– Wanda, Goodreads

“

Emancipation opens with the story of a tragic event.

The author cleverly draws the dark thread of this tragedy through the lives of all characters in the story collection.

All the stories are beautifully written and the characters keenly observed. I thoroughly enjoyed Emancipation and recommend it.

”

– Mary, Goodreads

Available in print and EBook online.

To order your copy go to

www.michaelrlane.com.