Carolyn Rodgers: Loving on Black People

1975

I still wear dresses on my mother’s command but would much rather reach for a boy’s jacket with deepest pockets. Afros, dark cabbages of wooly melanin, matchsticks of mid-century Black culture the size of Pluto, grow on the tops of thousands of Black heads, including mine. Dashikis are Sun-Ra-drying on at least two hundred thousand American clotheslines. The Black Panther newspaper, camouflaged in pink wrapping paper, arrives at our deeply southern house, unbeknownst to my father. I am teaching myself Kiswahili at night, under the covers. The Black poets of the Black Arts Movement have begun to dot the map of my life. Madhubuti. Giovanni. Evans. Sanchez. Baraka. They are capitalizing the word “Black” and using the word “Mutherfucka” in their new Black poetry in order to draw a line in the sand. Their collective truth slowly breaks the glass in the old mirrors hanging on my grandmother’s walls. I am an eighteen-year-old woman-child about to step away from my mother’s primly-set southern table. I have been taught the words and phrases that will open doors to the gentilly world: Sir and Ma’am lead the way behind the colorless  Please and Thank You. I cannot say Muthafucka in my mother’s house. I feel its power but stow it away in jacket pocket number four. At dinner sometimes there is one fork on the table but sometimes there are two. Two feels unnecessary but Dr. Du Bois has already wrapped my mother around his finger. They are of one accord; I will need to know what to do with both. I am in search of the words that will throw the doors open to my epochal self. The fraternal shiny twins,  Jet and Ebony, arrive every month with the more widely celebrated Black writers: Brooks. Walker. Wright. Baldwin. Morrison. I am deeply self-aware. Dutiful, quiet, polite. I know there is unexplored territory shift-shaping inside of me. Territory that involves the word I feel but cannot say in my mother’s house.

1976

My uncle Yemi and his wife Olabisi invite me to Los Angeles for my first Kwanzaa celebration. Each time I leave South Carolina there are new word-worlds waiting. I have decided not to simply pass for Black. I want to dig down into its rock and excavate just like they did for the dinosaurs. I find myself in Eso Won Books, Leimert Park; How I Got Ovah by Carolyn Rodgers is cupped in the palms of my hands. There are no awards listed on the cover to assure me that what I am holding has been baptized by the great white literary establishment and therefore worth my time. Immediately I find cymbals, snares, and tapping-stick words:

i am lonely.
all the people i know
i know too well

there was comfort in that
at first but now
we know each others miseries
        too well.
—From “Poem for Some Black Women”

The girl poet feels the earth move.

Although my brain is not yet fully formed, I am already wondering how to be a Black artist and, if that miracle is possible, how to be a Black artist of the streets and the trees, the all-of-me, small town land and the wide peridot sea. Carolyn Rodgers, poet, assures me I can be all that:

seasons/changes moods
the things of this earth
are the things that give us pleasure.
the sunset and glow, the rise ... 
the grass blue or green, thin or tall
yet growing
the common flowers or special
the sky blue or gray smiling or sad
the air warm or wet, cold wind and wild
or sweet and careful to the feel,
a loving
touch.
these seasons are the things we love.
—From “A Common Poem”

I have never heard the name Carolyn Rodgers before this moment. But what she is doing on the page is my new visual meditation. Her words and poem-worlds bring me into a new galaxy. A remarkable poet is teaching me remarkable things about the reach a poet can have with her words. I do not know the full impact of her music, or not then, that what she is giving will never leave me. I only know that she says, I can signify if  I want, love up high in new registers if I want, shout and say muthafucka (even though still under my breath) if I want. I have found a poet who is loving on Black people like the strings of a kora, while also taking them to task about the status of their revolution:

just like a balloon thats been flying high the revolution’s
gone and lost its air and fell on the ground
Folks done stomped      it so its almost buried in the dirt
—From “The Revolution Is Resting”

A poet is bebopping and breaking the rules of poetry and writing as authentically as Black people pray, shout, wear red, and spit when they speak. Mercy. I have found a Black poet from the heart of  Chicago who also seems to know her way to the quiet path behind my grandmother’s milking barn where I like to sit and think things through:

you see so many
     graveyards around
these little towns—
     out in the open
         spaces & places.

                 I guess big cities
         have not enough space for the
            living,
                   let alone the dead.
—From “East of New Haven”

1978

At Talladega College, Dr. Gloria Gayles requires all seven English majors in the class of 1979 to purchase Understanding the New Black Poetry by Dr. Stephen Henderson. It is my first Black scholarly book on Black poetry filled with his designated “mascon” words, the sweet spot where NASA meets Black words. In his monumental introduction Henderson states:

Literature, accordingly, is the verbal organization of experience into beautiful forms, but what is meant by “beautiful” and by “forms” is to a significant degree dependent upon a people’s way of life, their needs, their aspirations, their history—in short, their culture. Ultimately the “beautiful” is bound up with the truth of a people’s history, as they perceive it themselves.

I am pulled into the beautiful “themselves” of Carolyn Rodgers. I am watching her double Dutch from mutherfucka to the heart as ever green. There are new galaxies to be found if you are standing in the light and looking with the right kind of glass. I see Rodgers tapping herself out of polite society entrapments and making her way down to the original sea of herself. I feel her creating new linguistic modes of thinking. She is recording and reporting an original map of visual and sound poetics. I know the beauty she sees in the faces and sour breath of Black people. She is not afraid to not pretty it up. Her quest is to hold on to herself, her Blackness, as she knows and feels it: “I will write about Black people re-po-sses-sing this earth, a-men.”

Aché and amen. To repossess means to take back. South Carolina taught me there were things called Black Codes that mauled and stole, and Carolyn Rodgers taught me the art of repossession: the repossession of our sensual and spiritual quarries, of every word that helps and heals; all the things we were not allowed to say, else be banished to the back room; the art of inhabiting a spirit-filled-world where our ancestors urged us to call their names, and even cuss, if necessary.

The use of obscenity is frequently brilliant, at times inspired, whether it occurs in literature or in real life. However, convention forbids us to treat it seriously until the inventor has either achieved “universal fame” (in which case no one challenges his prerogative to dirty words) or has been dead for two hundred years (in which case he is unable to defend himself either way anyway).
—From “Understanding the New Black Poetry”

When fully languishing inside the arms of a Rodgers literary repossession, I felt her inhale the cosmos of her Black church while also reaching into intimate alcoves of human life beyond the walls and doors of any structure:

           mama’s God never was no white man.
     her My Jesus, Sweet Jesus never was neither.
             the color they had was the color of
her aches and trials, the tribulations of her heart
         mama never had no saviour that would turn
              his back on her because she was black.
—From “mama’s God”

1990

I am looking everywhere for Carolyn Rodgers. She has never been timid about creating poetry or writing literary criticism. She has never waited for the Republic to stamp her authority with any degree or any endowed chair. I begin teaching her great essay “Black Poetry, Where It’s At,” hailed by Darwin T. Turner as “the best essay on the work of new black poets.”

We speak of the vibrations, positive and negative, and we believe again in what we have never truly denied; the power of NOMMO, JU-JU and the collective force of the positive spirits, moving in time with the universe. In our poetry, we sing of Sun-Ra and Coltrane, and their life-motion which is sound. The new Black poets believe that we are the seventh dimension (as the seventh sun/son).
—From “Black Poetry, Where It’s At”

Rodgers is one of my earliest womanist touchstones in the schoolyard of Black life. Before Clifton there is Rodgers: Two billowing smokestacks with curly undying love for Black people. Rodgers teaches me to recognize the flexibility of Black writing and never fear help from the Black beyond. I set my neophyte poetry to her octaves and blue notes, steer my life more deeply into a love and tenderness for Black people and our ancient fight to keep our sights and senses on the repossession of this earth, with the knowledge that has kept our hearts nautically heavy with the ghosts of two-ton slave ships, but our eyes intergalactically, Dogon wise.

1995

I meet Carolyn Rodgers at a writers’ conference. She signs my ratty copy of Black Spirits, an anthology of new Black poets in America. She looks tired as she wonders what the fuss is about. She writes above her poem page, “Keep pushing and keep the faith.” The fuss is about how she taught me to trust the compass of my belly over the applause of the crowd, how she gave me the tools to deconstruct the brilliance of the obscenity while syntactically and unmercifully daring the world to ever try and silence what must be said in the way it must be said:

they say,
that i should not use the word
muthafucka anymo
in my poetry or in any speech i give.
they say,
that i must and can only say it to myself
as the new Black Womanhood suggests
a softer self
a more reserved speaking self. they say,
that respect is hard won by a woman
who throws a word like muthafucka around
and so they say because we love you
throw that word away, Black woman ... 
i say,
           that i only call muthafuckas, muthafuckas
 ................................................................
this is the last poem i will write calling
 ...................................................
                                                     ...  sweet
muthafuckas, crazy muthafuckas, lowdown muthafuckas
cool muthafuckas, mad and revolutionary muthafuckas.
But anyhow you all know just like i do (whether i say
it or not), there’s plenty of MEAN muthafuckas out
here trying to do the struggle in and we all know
that none of us can relax until the last m. f.’s
been done in.
—From “The Last M.F.”