From Steel Inside Cotton

“ at which shrinks Must rst expand…” —Laozi 36

Baltimore sits at the top of the Chesapeake Bay, a quiet jewel the Confederacy desperately wanted, and tried to get with the support of a broad base of southern sympathizers in the city, so many that Ft. McHenry became a detention center during the Civil War, with Union cannons on Federal Hill, and Union encampments all over the city. e Mason-Dixon line is the northern boundary of Maryland, and the state song is an homage to plantation culture. After the War, Baltimore became a mecca for supremacists from the Old South, including faculty at Hopkins and Peabody. When I was born, Black folk had their own world inside this white world, and I looked out at the white world from the safety of Blackness. We understood white folk as other, but we never discussed them in derogatory terms in our home. I knew, without asking, why my father stretched across his bed on Saturday afternoons and listened to the Orioles on the radio, and never mentioned going to Memorial Stadium. On the way home from the junior high school, I watched from the bus as a white man tried to attack us with a garden rake, until his wife pulled him down from the fence. Segregation in Baltimore was more southern than northern, rooted in the unful lled promises to Blacks that were the city’s history, with the e ect of overcrowded neighborhoods and schools, and police brutality.

So being di erent meant rising above in a culture where conformity was so adhered to that it felt oppressive. e proliferation of industrial jobs that lured people like my parents to the city with its sameness seemed to support this conformity in the way industry succeeds when machines obey, ironically, the necessities of a machinist’s tolerance, of measurements. Now I was the only Black person I knew of in Baltimore who was studying Taiji. Like a baby eagle pecking at the last pieces of the egg that had held him, I was looking to be free. Eagles, when ying, can be free, but the egg that held me would only let me think I was free, lled as my egg was with fears arising from hurt I buried so deeply I did not know it was there.

When my grandmother advised me to go out and play under the lamplight behind the house, the lamplight that would shine on a myriad of misdoings, some more criminal than mischievous as Baltimore changed over the years, she did not know I was learning how to y. I started in junior high school, pressing the normal three years of seventh, eighth, and ninth into two years. It was in the room that was my rst room of my own since I was an only child and we lived in a two-family house in West Baltimore. Now, on the East Side, we were in another house built for two families, but my parents were buyers this time. When our last tenants, a lovely young couple with no children, moved out of the house, I was waiting to move into the room that would be my rst cave. It had been designed as a small kitchen, so there was a space for a small gas range and a refrigerator. ere was a sink with a cabinet, and in the small space opposite the sink, my parents put in a twin size bed with the head pointing to the window looking out over the gigantic eld behind us, a eld of the dead waiting for life, Baltimore Cemetery, the gates to which stood at the eastern endpoint of North Avenue. In the light of a full moon I could look out and see the granite headstones glistening, or even when the moon was less than full I could still see the sparkles. Imagining Judgement Day, I thought of the ground opening and the rotted bodies taking on new esh, and this vision was driven by my deepest fears of breaking any of the commandments, especially the Baptist explanation of adultery as sex outside of marriage, and second to that was telling lies. I had so much to be afraid of, and when my fears collected enough to make me feel very anxious as I lay in bed trying to sleep, my mind would leave my body, the force of it pushing me open until my mind was in the ceiling, and it was the strangest thing to see, as my mind had no body. But there it was, and it was seeing itself with its own self. I had no idea of me, but I could still concentrate, and with that I left the room sometimes at night, soaring up to the stars, looking down at the earth until it was just a bunch of glistening specks on a blanket, and when I was tired, I came back to the room. Or I stayed in the room, frozen in terror until, with the force of prayer and concentration, my mind came back to my body. at was not freedom. I could y only in what felt like a prison, where I was the only captive. Still I valued my own space, this room above

the bedroom on the rst oor, just below mine, where my mother had these wooden stairways to the moon tacked to the wall, some kitsch she bought at one of the local stores, like Epstein’s, her favorite. ey were tiny stairs for a tiny gure, some little ghost maybe, to walk to the stars. Above the room, I ew, and in class I looked to the ceiling and said the 23rd Psalm in my mind, asking God for protection.

My faith in Taiji was building on what appeared to be the fruit of my faith in the Dao De Jing, the courage to dream the possibilities of developing my poetry in this life of production lines, tow motors, forklifts, and tractor trailers. I saw beyond the pounding of production lines in the main part of the plant, the spiraling smoke from the tower where powdered laundry detergent was made, the seemingly in nite number of ball bearings whistling in the conveyor systems bringing product to the warehouse where men called out for more soap from the doorways to their trucks, the great empty silence of the truck yard in early morning. In all of this I found a faith in a philosophy that said my environment was not a eld of contradictions prohibiting my life as a poet. Instead, it was the fertile eld of possibilities that turned the yellow steel guard rails into signs signaling corners where I could meditate on a stanza, or think on the substance of books that laid knowledge of the literary landscape of Black folk in front of me, a living map that emerged to guide me on the way to ful lling the prophecy Langston Hughes wrote of the rst great poet to emerge from the less privileged sections of the Black world, a poet who believed in the Black world and was not afraid to be himself.

Four years before jogging in the snowstorm, in my spring semester at Morgan, Valerie told me to read Langston Hughes more intently, especially that signi cant essay of his, “ e Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” published in e Nation magazine in 1926, when he was barely in his mid-20s. Many readers had interpreted it as Hughes speaking to Black poets who want to be white, as opposed to Black poets who want to be Black, and I understood that even as when growing up I was not given lessons in the living room at the feet of my parents as they read from this giant leather-bound book called e Oracle of All Blackness. ere was no such thing, but what Hughes spoke to was a poet who would arise one day

from the “lowdown folks” and be the rst great artist. I read that essay over and over, wondering if my family was “lowdown” enough for me to be the great artist he said would arise, the one. I wondered what he meant by an artist knowing themselves, and I thought there were many souls moving in my one soul, like clusters of Qi broken o from a oneness to be multiple engines inside of me. e most important factor was the sense of having failed in all things. I felt this way when my mother took me to the park with my son and the twins, not long after the rst crashing in the rst marriage, a crashing everyone seemed to know about, a crashing that made me feel as if I was always naked, that I had failed in every sense of it. It was 1976, three years before jogging in the falling snow. I was hospitalized twice that year, once voluntarily in the spring for depression, and again late that summer for a panic attack that morphed into a full-blown breakdown, after Ronnie and I had to abort a pregnancy when doctors said she was not healthy enough to carry the child.

My mother had taken me to Clifton Park with Kala, and my youngest siblings, the twins, Martin and Margaret, who were born in the spring of 1969, my freshman year at College Park. We were sitting there, while the kids played in the sandlot next to us with its swings and small jungle gym.

“I want to be a famous poet,” I said to my mother, as she played with the kids. She answered without looking up to meet my eyes.

“You already famous.”

In her inimitable way, she was referring to the fact that my mental health challenges were public knowledge.

All of this I let swirl inside me, even as I had not spent time poring over the possibilities of de ning and being one’s self, and how it was complicated by the imposition of race and racial oppression, the strategies that fed a continuous stream of prompts to Black folk. is rst great poet had to know there was much more than race and racism to who we were, as I believed the greater part of our humanity resisted being de ned by racism or our responses to it. ere were greater aspects of us that this poet had to show by embracing this wholeness, and writing out of it. First, I had to become whole, a journey that lay ahead of me, veiled by time and distance.

For now, Taiji promised what God had failed to give me, a method for developing and using my gift, to be the poet. I stopped the jogging and poured myself into learning the six sections of the solo form of Yang style Taiji. Poetry had agreed that it lived in me, and its rst major lesson was not trips to a library but a dashing against the rocks where the ocean slapped me until it grew tired and waited for the next storm. e solo form would be a safe space where my mind and heart, my whole self, could feel free.

Working the cycle of three shifts, I avoided what most people wanted, the daylight shift, when the bosses, the white shirts, were all around us. e reward was being in ow with the schedules of most people, or at least thinking it was that way. It was a time to get home to your family in time for dinner, and have the evening to spend with them, at least ideally. e second shift was my preference, as it gave me the better part of the day to read and write, and now even more importantly, to go to my Taiji classes on Howard Street, just two blocks above the old Greyhound bus station, where a few years earlier I caught the bus to and from College Park. Now with my beaten-up Gran Torino, I parked at a meter near Tony’s studio, and walked into it, sometimes imagining myself in the maze of the Tien Shan Mountain range, where the snow glistened in the afternoon sun, and I absorbed the teaching of adept monks, me the one Black face, settled back in the place my spirit knew before I was born.

“Shifu” is the word for teacher that is used in Chinese martial arts. ere are several words for teacher, but Shifu is most often used. However, Tony was rather informal. His studio was an old storefront, one of several in that area. He had installed mirrors along the length of the wall where he stood while teaching so that we could see ourselves and begin the process of self-study that is traditional Chinese martial arts pedagogy. In that tradition, the student must understand the teacher, and asking questions is taboo. You take what you are shown, go home and practice it, and in your next class show how well you have learned the form. When Taiji was still private knowledge inside families and schools, Taiji was studied one technique at a time, but when it was introduced to the public those techniques were put together in what is sometimes called a linking form.