WORKING AT IT IN FIVE PARTS [ c. 1980]

I.

I vaguely remember the wall—red brick, two stories high, uninterrupted by windows. Perfect for handball. Perhaps the building was a church. But I think though that what kept my Spauldeen in my pocket was the sign. The sign said: God Is Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and Omniscient. I knew in a flash what I wanted to be when I grew up and right away. Omnipotent meant a powerful arm for knocking out of the way snarling dogs, nasty boys, flashers, do ugly cops and anything else that turned a stroll around the block into an ordeal. Omnipotent meant a powerful glance that could silence a teacher in a rousing sing of “Old Black Joe.” It meant tough. I wanted to be omnipotent tough. Not gun-moll tough-molls look swollen and creased in the movies with their streaked hair, ten-minutes-to-the-cemetery makeup, and a grapefruit shoved in their kisser. Also, they were sad. I didn’t want to be sad. I wanted to be omnipotent tough. Which was not Chapman/ Bishops/Jolly Stompers/Imperial Gent tough either, fine as they were in their eye-stinging satin jackets, knife blade pants, ass-kicking shoes, and ace deuce lids. They got hurt. I didn’t want to get hurt, I wanted to be able to give a potent tough sigh in answer to anybody’s “Ya mama,” and they’d melt to the pavement while I glided off with my jump rope and my handball, not even sweating through my Noxzema.

Omnipresent meant being a fly on the wall and seeing everything going on, and to be an ear grown-ups said some walls had. And it means taking trips all over. Solid. Riding down 5th Avenue on the double decker bus with the family on Sunday was quasi- omnipresent. I could see right into the trees and imagine myself atop the skyscrapers. Changing trains at White River Junction for summers with the Coles in Vermont was semi-O. I could fly along the tracks with the telephone poles and visit with the cows and imagine myself in the houses along the way eating cheddar cheese cut from a black-rind wheel. Walking with my mother along 7th Avenue while she pointed out the Old Lafayette, places where the Dark Tower poets used to meet, the bookstore-workshop of J.A. Rogers that was very close to O. For I would get a twitch of the vestigial wings as though any minute I could be on the rooves, in the buildings, listening to Countee Cullen and reading over Rogers’ shoulder, all at the same time.

Omniscient was why I tried devouring whole shelves of library books. Why I’d light up when they passed out in class those purple mimeo sheets designed to get students into the encyclopedias, almanacs, etc. Dull normal assignments really, but there were adventures to be had along the way to finding out the average snowfall in Fairbanks, Alaska and the height of mountain ranges in the far- flung regions of Outer Mongolia. I had an indiscriminate appetite for print: bubble gum wrappers, comic books, other people’s post cards. I’d eavesdrop on subways, in beauty parlors, and would linger recklessly in doorways sopping up overheards to transform into stories to keep my friends entertained on the long walks to and from school. I hung tough with my Daddy in the Apollo and learned how high the community standards were/are for musical, comic, and flamboyant rap performances. I hung tough with my mother on Speaker’s Corner listening to trade unionists, Pan-Africanists, Ida B. Wells Club organizers, Communists, the Temple People as Muslims were then called, Abyssinians as Rastafarian were known as. On the corner of 125th and 7th Avenue in front of Michaux’s Book Store, I learned the power of the word and the particularity of the Afro- centric perspective. And learned too to appreciate the continuity of the community’s wisdoms. So. When grown-ups got all in my face, as grown-ups are wont to do with little children and with midgets too, asking “And what do you want to be, etc.?” I would say, “God,” meaning the Three-O very tough, riding the rails, smart person mentioned on the no-playing- handball wall. Raised eyebrows and chirped teeth soon taught me to say, “I’ll be a doctor,” and to keep my real career plans to myself.

Other kids who passed that wall on 145th and St. Nick and began their Three-O apprenticeship probably became ministers, doctors, traveling salesmen, Colonels, or magicians. I became a writer. At what point one becomes a writer, I don’t know. As a small kid, I used to fiddle with the ketchup bottle in the Automat, that wonder place in the old days where you could shove nickels in a slot and spring from glass cages in the wall great food, and picture myself years later writing at one of the sunny tables, using the sugar bowl and shakers to hold down pages and pages of poems and stories and radio scripts. And then I actually began to do it—in restaurants, on the fire escape, in bed, at school.

In elementary school I scripted assembly programs for Negro History Week. In junior high I wrote poems and tried to overload English teachers with five-for-one writing assignments. In high school I hogged the lit journal. In Queens College, writing courses and the theatre club in need of plays lured me away from the H2S generator and the shelf of jarred-in-formaldehyde frogs. Ink and greasepaint smelled better. By 1967 I’d had a few things published, most importantly to me “Mississippi Ham Rider” in Massachusetts Review (64) and “The Hammer Man” in Negro Digest (66). I was the book reviewer for Dan Watts’ Liberator and was sandwiching writing in between street work in Brooklyn and hanging out, or teaching at CCNY and trying to hang in. In 1968, urged by colleagues at CCNY like Addison Gayle, and encouraged by students at SEEK like Francee Covington and Gayl Stokes, and coaxed by a few friends like Hattie Gossett, I began work on The Black Woman. As the book was coming out, I was assembling the next one, Tales and Short Stories for Black Folks. Toni Morrison reviewed it and next thing I knew I was putting old and new stories together for Random House which published Gorilla, My Love. That year, 1972, I was teaching at Livingston College of Rutgers University, the most stunningly profound period in my life thanks to the students and to a few colleagues who made a difference. Students for years had been and in upcoming years would continue to be the center of my days and nights; writing of the pre-dawn in-betweens. In preparation for an interview somewhere in the early ’70s, I observed that, since becoming a teacher rather than a youth-developer social worker or recreational therapist in hospitals, people around me, more often than not, were practicing writers. At CCNY, for examples, were Addison Gayle, David Henderson, Wilfred Cartey, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Lennox Raphael, Tom Poole, Larry Neal, John A. Williams, Raymond Patterson, and Adrienne Rich to mention a few.

At Livingston were Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Aijaz Ahmad, A.B. Spellman, Miguel Algarín and others. I lived on the Lower East Side in the Umbra days and moved back to Harlem at the tail end of Black Arts Theatre days. But it was not until I returned from Cuba in the summer of ’73 that I said, “Hey, Cade, guess what? Seems you’re a writer.” Sometime that summer I learned all over what Langston Hughes and so many others had taught all along—that writing is a perfectly legitimate way to participate in struggle. I’d thought it trifling, it was more like fun than “serious work.” A serious writer, after all, wore suede elbow patches and worked all day at a huge desk with sunlight perpetually shining in the windows. My windows were filthy. And a serious writer said bold and dangerous things, elicited hard headed feedback and graciously used criticism to grow and improve. I was chicken shit.

By 1974 I had promised myself once too often to “one day” sit down with elbow patches and clean windows and paper. I resigned from a tenured professorship at Rutgers, side stepped friends convinced by that act that I needed to be committed, packed up the kid and the household gods and moved to Atlanta. I sat down and I wrote. There seemed to be boxes and boxes of folders and drafts and scraps of scribblings and undecipherable notepads and gobs of stuff to plow through. In the summer of ’75, while waiting for a postponed trip to Vietnam to be on again, I put together The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, reserving space for one or two new things that might crystallize as a result of the trip. In going through the backlogue of very old, kinda old, fairly recent manuscripts, then looking over the published work I had on the shelves, I observed a definite progress as I listened to my comic routines and outrage, to my contradictions, to my duplicities of feeling. I read, probing beneath the smooth camouflage of words for tell-tale droppings. I read, and discovered how akin writing is to dreaming. To make use of either state of being, conjuring/dialoguing takes risks. Dreams confront you, push you up against the games you play, the self-deceptions, the false knowings and false awakenings too.

The story “The Organizer’s Wife” pushed me up against set “opinions” I’d held about quiet, southern students. I called up Virginia for that story in much the same way the subconscious calls up characters for the scenarios at night—to find out what you know that you’ve been side stepping and over layering with “opinions.” Men careless with their seed have sides, motives I didn’t need to know about because I knew, until the first draft of “Louis Among the Women” worked me toward the final version—“Baby’s Breath” (Essence, Sept 80).

In Atlanta in the ’70s, still sandwiching writing between other work—lecturing, consulting, teaching, conducting writers workshops, and keeping house for the ancient soul who travels under the guise of being a thumb-sucking daughter—I began to appreciate what I’d been teaching for years, that writing is a powerful way to confront the self, discover the self, share the self, and fortify the self. This latter, most crucial in a country so well organized to fundamentally alter one’s being to the point of total derangement. Writing is a powerful way of journeying toward a knowing of what the shaping impulse can do. One gets glimpses at times at the potter’s wheel, or in the rock garden arranging stones, or making quilts, or writing poetry, or otherwise engaged in the quiet, reflective process of shaping and ordering—that underlying pattern in nature, that all-encompassing design within which the perceivable world (we’re trained to stay put in) operates.

There is so much disorder, dissipation, and chaos around us, peddled as information, necessity, inevitability, that I understand now why poets were/are considered priests in so many cultures. Through the practice of meditative shaping, the basic design can come through, that lost design, that underlying design eclipsed if not buried amidst the hopeless clutter that results from building up “disciplines” and “bodies of knowledge” based on unchecked at best premises, invalid assumptions at most—as is the way in Western Civ. In my writings somewhere up the road, I aim for a narrator who neither poses as omniscient eye nor imposes order like a chess board arranger, but acts as a medium to let the design come through. The narrator of Salt is as close as I can get at this stage in my development. Closer than witness or participant, that narrator is not quite a medium. It was Eleanor Traylor who, in her devastatingly brilliant critique of Salt, which appeared in the Summer/Fall issue of First World, sharply delineated for me how close I came and far I’ve yet to go […] breadth, motive, and precisioned naming of the thing. The kind of reviewer that makes you want to work harder.

The Russell Review is singular in that so few reviewers are adept at reviewing a collection. But then the whole publishing industry as well as the academic industry generally overlook the short story form in favor of the novel. This is murder for the gene-deep loyal storyist like myself who often works as hard and as long on a 10 page story as some novelists do on a book. Economically and critically not shrewd, I’ve heard for years. Most magazines and certainly most lit journals of the small press community cannot afford to publish a 10 page story. And while I am intrigued with the stretch-out possibilities of the novel, quite candidly it is the pull of “commercially wise” and “career smart” that sat me down to try.

The Greek writer Harry Petrakis in a recent interview was saying what storyists have been lamenting for years—that to keep on with the story writing that he prefers, he cannot afford not to produce a novel now and then. I’d always suspected that storyists did not abandon their “first love” because they reached its or their own limits with the genre. Nothing of the kind. Economics. Critical attention. A pity. The short story suits my temperament. I’m a sprinter rather than a long-distance runner. I like the modest appeal for attention the short [story] makes that allows me to slip up on the reader’s blind side and grab’m. But because I am neither white, male, dead (Fitzgerald or Cheever or Updike), I will simply learn to master the novel and learn to write more “economical” stories. What the hell.

In conducting workshops, I try to emphasize both the options that a writer has in terms of markets (major pub, small press, magazines, university press, self-publishing) and the kinds of choices one needs to consider in “tailoring” pieces to slip through that intricately elaborate mechanism that exists between the practitioners and their readership (publishing, promotion, distribution). And I make an attempt to take my own advice as I ready up this year’s work calendar:

scripting for WGBH-TV’s 90 minute filmed bio of Zora Neale Hurston, in her own words
planning a production for a film I’ve been wanting to do since
Hollywood’s version of Harper’s Ferry—a movie about Mary Ellen
(‘Mammy P’) Pleasants and the Underground Railroad and John Brown
assembling a new collection of short stories, “The Faith of the Bather”
designing an anthology, “Organizing Women Beyond Constraints and Bread & Butter”
sharpening up my writers workshop notebooks to more effectively
contribute to the development of self and others
continuing organizational work with the regional service group the
Southern Collective of African American Writers
self-publishing a collection of poems and short prose pieces of my daughter’s and mine.

II.

In conducting 3-day marathon or week-long only writers workshops, I try to delay discussion of genre techniques, markets, resource organizations and the host of other important issues necessary to cover, in favor of exploring an all-important question—Under what conditions are you at your best? This quickly moves into three items that don’t often get nearly enough attention: Tools, Time and Space, Relationships.

What are your favorite writing tools?
Even non-writers have preferences in terms of pencils, pens, paper, pads, surfaces, lights, chairs, time of day for writing. Painters, musicians, sculptors, photographers, et al. spend a great deal of time experimenting with new materials that might lead them in new directions or sustain them in an effort already mapped but wobbly. Rice paper, acrylics, some new film emulsion, a cutting tool from abroad. Artists haunt the shops. Some writers can plot a particular breakthrough or chart their progress as they made shifts from rag- tailed notebooks to bound notebooks and calligraphy pens.

A poet came to a workshop because he’d been working on his dissertation and couldn’t find his way back to his “voice.” It had been his habit to use loose sheets on a clipboard and a blue ball point. Another participant handed him a stack of large index cards and a fountain pen. He reported a breakthrough the next day. Now he has a kente cloth covered, 6x11 ledger pad with light green sheets with faint beige lines. He uses a cartridge pen and is writing like a crazed loon.

While riding in the back of poet/editor/essayist Tom Dent’s car, coming from a reading in New Orleans, I rifled through his 14x17, perfect bound, black pebbled, sketchpad of smooth white sheets. He was writing a book in it. I hit the shops and I will never be the same. I can now “save up” six or more story ideas on one page and keep it all in one place. It’s so much better than sticking scraps of scribblings in the mirror corner or under the lamp base or in a folder. I so rarely do housecleaning and almost never look in folders unless I’m getting ready to move and looking for things to throw out. I’ve been teaching the notebook habit for years, lest others fall into the messy pit I’ve been in, but only just now taking my own advice. I can now save old germinal pieces. Warm-ups for Salt read:

Dr. T, in the grip of AMA arrogance watches his wounded dog
wallow in the marsh mud
and is humbled cured.

It’s not cause I’m kind
but cause I’m kin, Medusa
I’d’ve never topped off your head just cause you go about
with snakes in your hair what I care
you my sistuh

The mud mothers sit
instead of ranging about digging holes probing under rocks     smoking out wild game bringing down prey
       their feet on throbbing necks
with answers in their laps staring into the fire learning to focus

On a page by itself sits a 9 minute film about an old midwife who rounds up young women to train and then sets up shop in a church basement:

All over Marengo County are segregated waiting rooms where Black patients sit
waiting to be seen. Waiting to be seen.

It is surrounded by so much space, I can simply gaze away, composing the film.

On another page are notes from what started out to be an address about the missing/murdered children in Atlanta. After a visit from playwright Pat Smith who is doing a play about the missing children of Trenton, N. J., I began to match up the notes and run them side by side on the facing page. The speech was made some time ago and recruiting done for the week-end group that combs the woods. But a pair of pieces sit on a page ready to be put to work. Because the situation, as we all agree, is not random or isolated. It is a scarifying comment on how much we, as a community, will quietly allow to happen. So I know I am not through. A pair of pieces sit on the top page as a reminder that I/we are not through.

We are the light      There’s only one place fit We’re robbed of     for us to go
Each time       Cream rises to the top
one of us     But shit does too
is lost   Take care, then, who you travel with

The sketchbook also helps me to discern what pieces are notes and what are complete in themselves. Onto the page I often release shorts that exist solely for themselves. In getting them out of the way, I’m freed up to pursue more compelling pieces in the head being blocked by congestion. Standing alone in the middle of the page, scripted with a broad, flat, italic felt pen:

Over her shoulder she said, “With a man, you’re finished.” Then she heaved the bush tub onto one hip, cracked the door open with her toe, slid it wider with the side of her foot, and bammed it back against the wall with her behind so she could go out with the tub of shells. I waited. I sat watching her through the screen heap handfuls of bone white onto the ground, bash them into shards with a brick, crush them down into the walk. Then I realized that was the end of the sen- tence. I hollered through the screen door, “Finished complete or finished done for?” She kept on work- ing. I grabbed the doorknob, my fingers grumbling with the brass. The knob came off in my hand and just refused to mesh with whatever ratchet caused
it to function no matter how I fooled with it.
I started getting anxious. Felt locked in. She kept on breaking up shells with that battering brick.
I started hollering like a crazy woman, “Whacha mean?
Whacha mean?” as though if she didn’t stop and tell me, I could never learn it on my own.

I recall from years of teaching Freshman English that students did noticeably better work once they found tools that suited them. Spiral notebooks felt like braces on the teeth to some. Legal pads reminded others too much of probation officers. Soft, zippered loose-leafs too much the welfare investigator’s badge. Red margins annoying. Those small blue exam books even for non-exam use caused tremors. I never demanded uniformity of the use-only-this-paper-and-fold-this-way- with-your-name blah blah variety. I would accept assignments on unlined newsprint, on the back of somebody else’s stationary, on short hand pad paper, whatever. The issue was rarely one of economics— though all of us were broke—but of comfort and affinity. The thing I like most about all paper is that it is patient, it will wait for you. The thing I learned from the students was to pay attention to my relationship to materials, the feel of them.

Normally I use yellow or white legal pads and a fresh/moist black ball point for stories with that particular momentum that seems to be my monogram, fast-moving, vigorous “voice” pieces like “Medley,” “Wall of Respect,” “Sure-All Oil,” and “Luther on Sweet Auburn.”

For pieces whose setting and characters oblige me to wrench away from the usual be-bop pitch and pace—like “The Organizer’s Wife,” I set in a semi-rural southern district, “The Seabirds Are Still Alive,” set in Southeast Asia, and “Corcovado,” set in Brazil—I use a fountain pen and a pot of ink and fat lined, white paper or paper from the locale of the story. In my “Overseas” folder, I still have paper from a 1961 trip to Italy in case I ever get around to those notes/drafts. A number of writers who keep journals when they travel have mentioned that years later they get around to polishing the poem or drafting the story, they staple paper into the old notebooks. I suspect it’s a way of setting up an environment to recapture and work in.

Several stories come all at once, all of a piece, with a particular shape suggested by the news item or poem or photograph that provoked the story into being. I usually grab an 11x14 glossy sheet from my desk lean-on pad and work with a stick pen or some other tool that will slow me down, especially if I’m feeling more self-indulgent and blabber mouthed than disciplined and attentive to the piece’s demands. “Peachtree Killing” is a recent work of two pages (one sentence damn near, and I use to think the 17 line long opening of James’ Princess Casamassima was a bit much) based on an obit item; “Story,” a fable-like piece done in response to Karenga’s essay “Beyond Connections;” and “A Minor Incidence of Movement,” based on a news item found in a Rio paper. While reading with Haki Madhubuti last month (Conference on Black South Literature and the Arts, Nov 20th weekend, 1980), I noticed that he tapes the news item onto the page and writes his poem around it. I suspect June Jordan and David Henderson, poets whose works often seem to spring from headlines, do something like that.

The script I’m about to begin for the Zora Neale Hurston film will probably be drafted on a batch of butcher paper unrolled across a 4 foot by 8 foot piece of sheet rock mounted on saw horses.

I want to be able to see/work on the whole 90 minute opus at once. I’d prefer standing up, moving around to ensure that what goes on in scene 27 is prepared for in scene 12, or that motifs running through are visible to the eye in one color ink, and background visuals sketched with a bamboo drawing pen are clear. For example, I have a thick black ink for the golliwogs, Aunt Jemima-Cream of Wheat Rastus-Cold Cust Twins etc., coon song sheet music, pickaninny in the watermelon patch postcards, etc.—all the caricatures White America haunted itself with in its attempt to recapture the slaves in their minds, in their kitchens, on their pianos, on their bric-a-brac shelves, during Zora’s youth, so we can appreciate the bodaciousness of the woman doing Jonah’s Gourd Vine and the portrait of Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God. I have a box of old conti crayons I use to draw with—to mark off those sections of flashbacks to sepia tone childhood (though the film need not use sepia).

And fistfuls of pens with different ink cartridges to keep track of the auditory/visual shifts back and forth from homegirlsocialized Zora to trainedfolklorist Zora to creativewriter Zora. The felt tip pens of different thicknesses are excellent for notating fragments of music. Needless to say, I do not intend walking up to the director with a 200 mile long roll of paper. But I’ve found this to be a good way for me to score/write a film. Unfortunately, as I move further into film work, fewer butchers are going out of business, eager to unload those wonderful rolls of paper way below the cost at the mills.

At any rate, the main point is to find materials that please and provoke and to experiment with new ones. The last batch of sumi I bought was wrapped in a sheet of brown, not too absorbent paper with bits of colored wood fibers embedded in it. Very seductive. With an orange felt point italic pen, I wrote:

Orange lichen bright green mold the puddles of water a murky blue in the hollow of the stump
till I tip it over with my foot
and it catches the silver of the moon and completes the painting.
The ink spread like water color and it was perfect for wrapping a small Kwanzaa gift in.

Do you have a working environment that is ready whenever you are? Like sewing, you’re more likely to get at the writing if you don’t have to haul the machine out of the closet, clear off a table, and search around for the tool box. The nice thing about writing, unlike piano playing, is it’s portable. You can carry a notebook, haul around a writing case or a board. But it’s nice to have some space at home that’s yours alone. Some writers refashion a closet, station themselves on a chair at the threshold, their back to the household turbulence, and write away undisturbed. Others section off a part of a room with drapes attached to a ceiling track or with fold-put away screens. I’ve learned to set up my own space by assisting others. But like most writers and other artists, I’m phototropic. So sometimes I sit on the landing with a board, or work on the ironing board while the steam iron sweats up the walls and the balled and sprinkled laundry damn near mildews waiting in the basket for the light to shift.

I’m game to make house calls and columbo a place. A’s house is a thrown-open, see-all affair, so we set up the workroom accordingly. The kitchen looked like this: pots on hooks, spices in see-through jars, cereal boxes in see-through bags safe from mice and bugs, nothing much in the drawers, no door on the cabinets. The bathroom: empty medicine chest, all stuff on glass shelves, see-through shower curtain, towels hanging on hooks rather than folded away in linen closet. Bedroom: garments on hangers on back of the door, no action in chest of drawers, sheer curtains at windows. The workroom then was set up with open shelves and lucite desks and fold back shutters at the windows; idea cards tacked on cork boards, rough first drafts hanging on a peg board. Like that.

B’s house is totally different. Kitchen: silverware in box with slide- over lid in drawer, cabinet doors with knobs and catches, shades in the windows and curtains too. Bathroom: linen closet with no light, shades and opaque curtains at window, opaque shower curtain with a liner too. Bedroom: two sets of drawers, clothes in closet shoved toward dark back, shoe boxes with lids on, hat boxes with strings tied. The workroom, then, has heavy drapes, file cabinets, and a desk with drawers and cubby holes; drafts are in hard, heavy folios with tie strings, his notebook is dark colored and zippers shut.

C’s office and apartment is cluttered with tapes, books, newspapers, fish bowls, bird cages, balled up socks, overflowing ashtrays, pillows for the mobile cat, jewelry everywhere—bracelets tossed like shoe horses on lamp finials, necklaces hanging from book shelf brackets, lots of little rattan boxes and straw baskets. We cleared a corner in the garage, shoved a closet-door on cable spool up against a wall, employed little baskets for clips, erasers, stamps, etc. and a carved reed flute that doesn’t work anymore to hold pens and pencils, installed a little heater by her feet and a woolen blanket to wrap said feet in, and a pillow on the table for the cat, with a small radio to keep them both company in the garage. The rest of the garage is for pacing, flicking ashes, and for throwing socks around.

The hard question: How do you educate family and friends to respect your need/right to be unavailable at times? No novelist I’ve ever talked to about this is free from guilty feelings; most do a lot of gift giving when the manuscript finally gets out of the house. Also, I don’t know any writers who call their “way” an answer for anybody else’s situation.

I like company in spurts. Am intensely affectionate, sociable, gregarious, hospitable in fits. But there are times when any visitor—in person, by phone, mail, or message—is a total drag, an intruder, a burglar, a space up-taker, a chaos maker, a conflict inducer, a mood chaser, a guilt projector, a breath stealer, a low-flying vampire. A roach may presume, but a human being insists a presence on the consciousness that will not be ignored. A ceiling may cave in, it at least becomes a past tense affair. The visitor remains in the naggingly present progressive tense. Friends and kin come by to “rescue” the obsessive-compulsive, who must be “longing” for “a break.” They get antsy about the unplugged phone or the disconnected bell or the unanswered letter. “Suppose there was an emergency.” The only emergency oftimes is the work itself. How to get that across is usually the problem.

I have no answer either. On the average, I have one lay-over guest a season. And I live alone with my daughter who grew up knowing what I do and how I look when my jones comes down. She used to have a lot of godmothers to go to, she now spends a lot of time with her grandmother. She tries to understand that her mother is neither a school girl who’s through with her homework by 4:00 or a retired elder with a pension. I wrassle guilt and convention to the mat 2 falls out of three. For the most part, they wag their heads and slink away, can’t do a thing with me. But I don’t think my way is much of an “answer” for anybody. I don’t have what I’d call a balanced life.

There are all sorts of ploys writers resort to, especially women who’ve been systematically trained or who are temperamentally predisposed to meet everyone else’s needs and not acknowledge their own. What to do, then, about that writing compulsion? “I have an upset stomach,” some say, then hide out in the bathroom, propping their pads on their knees and flushing the toilet at regular intervals. “I’ve got to visit a friend in the hospital,” then check into a hotel or hideout in the library and write.

One sister, at a recent workshop, shared her tried-and-true method and we didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream. “I’m having a nervous breakdown,” she announces to her household of 7. Then she cooks four days’ worth of meals and jams them in the freezer. “I absolutely am on my last nerve and cannot go on,” then she does all the laundry and invites a friend in to fold and put away. “Take me away before I hurt somebody,” she sobs, having stashed a fistful of sharpened number 2 pencils and some notebooks in her nightgown and toothbrush sack. They take her off to the psych ward where she writes fairly undisturbed for a day or two, having convinced the nursing staff that voices are dictating to her and that the shrink will be interested in the scribblings for his diagnostic work-up. Her meals are brought to her in isolation and no one asks her to wash or comb her hair while she’s under initial observation. She “recovers” when the medication dosage is increased and threatens to send her under. I hope the reader is not waiting to hear if she’s a “good” writer. (Is that the question to raise?)

I was once going around with a playwright who also writes songs and scores for industrial films. Ahhhh, I thought, I will surely not have to reassure him every 5 minutes that closed door I work behind is not a comment on our relationship, or that my frequent and sometimes lengthy absences from all known postal zones on planet earth are not sure signs of infidelity. I’m just working. Fool, me. Fighting has its merits. But I like to leave’m laughing with my Bela Lugosi bit. Recall: Igor has managed to steer the Frankenstein monster back to the castle. But the mob is coming along hot on their heels with their angry torches. And they are thoroughly pissed about the windmill-swat routine of the Monster’s that’s laid a few townfolk low, namely at the bottom of the hill with their necks broken. Doc Bela is having a dinner party for the burgomeister and assorted burghers. He sees Igor and tall friend hobble past the drapes on their way to the laboratory. Doc Bela removes his napkin, rising for his quaint get away speech. “Excuse me, gentlemen. I have a bone stuck in my throat.” Exit.

We all may be excused from the table to perform tangible, practical, something-to-show-for-it work or to climb into the iron lung lest we expire and not be able to change the flat or take the clothes to the cleaners tomorrow. But to write a novel? Which is why a community of writers, even if they only slap five once a month or once a season, can be so supportive. A collective, a workshop, a guild, an on-going group is even more sustaining for support and permission. One has to have or just flat out take permission to be an artist in a society that marginalizes, trivializes, and commodityizes (wha?) creative effort. From the aptitude tests of grammar school (where daydreaming and wondering rarely get a play, so you feel like a weirdo) to the higher grades (where art and music are minors and dance and the other arts are rarely offered at all), to the personnel office psychological tests, by whatever name they go by these days (where right brain sensitivity is frowned upon in favor of left brain manipulation), the artist is a freak and not to be taken seriously. For a serious writer who notices things and wants to tell the truth, it’s even dodgier. This society has rewards for those who demonstrate skills in nimble avoidance of uncomfortable realities that threaten the bogus peace, but no mercy for those who dare penetrate the social garments and speak out on the emperor’s clothes.

Some of us are lucky and others make good luck. Myself, I have a mother who values the life of the mind and never said (when I was a kid), when coming upon me scribbling or staring, “Since you’re not doing anything, mop the bathroom and run to the store.” And my daughter, at whatever age it is kids appoint themselves Keeper of the Phone, was once heard saying as mommy gazed out of the window with a bunch of pens stuck in her bush—“Sorry, she can’t come to the phone. She’s out of it… Important? Important to you or important to her?... Sorry, she’s working.” An exquisite child. I think I’ll keep her.

Sarah Fabio rapped non-stop to some writers at my house one night about all of this. She said either be prepared for agony, battle, and loneliness; or draw folks into your orbit of work so they have both understanding and vested interest in what you’re doing; or hope that critical reception for your work will encourage others to get out of your face and let you alone; or forget the whole damn thing. Just work. Course, when Fab said it, it was sage-like and hilarious.

Marge Piercy wrote a poem some time ago that I’ve been hunting for. It says in three or four stanzas: talent and genius is what they say they always knew you had, that’s after the Pulitzer and the rave reviews. Before that what you had was a delusion or a hobby, you should’ve had a baby, gotten a job and quit being a bum. The last line is indelibly printed on the brain—“Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.” I dunno. I want it all.

III.

My favorite thing is laughing so hard I have to lower myself on the wall to the floor to keep from falling down. I come from a family of gifted laughers. My brother Walter has an explosive, knee bent, leaning backward with hand over the heart, blow the house down laugh. It’s a rumbling that comes up from below, ricochets off the rib cage, pole vaults into falsetto that lifts him up on his toes, opens the sluices. And it’s water works for days. My daughter Karma as a little kid would complain, her palms like ear muffs, “Uncle Walter hurts my ears.” With an interruption of that sort, Walt emits a ahhhh-that-was-funny sigh. Then remembering how funny, he’s off again. Walt had a great teacher, our father.

Non-laughing memories of my father are quick, clipped, piecemeal things: whistling when he hit the block, grabbing his baseball bat when a ring came odd in the night, chewing on his White Owl as he hitched up his pants and checked the shine on his shoes, running bases in Central Park amazing everyone with his girth and speed, screwing up his face to call us ‘nappy headed wombats,’ dancing with himself in the kitchenette with his eyes closed and his broke down slippers making shuffly noises over the linoleum, shifting to a weird octave when addressing white people, jumping up at the fights or in the Apollo or at the Palace when some stray gesture insulted his standards of showmanship, threatening us with the hairbrush with his jaws tight, inspecting the briny jar of pig feet for one truly worth a quarter.

It’s his laughter that I remember in long takes and full sound track. He had a particular 3 in his vast repertoire. An upper sinus, snuffly laugh accompanied by lifted, no neck, shoulders when he’d made a funny, which was usually corny, which made it funny because he was a major league funny man who could afford corn. A back throat cackle laugh that featured the teeth as a major attraction, accompanied by tears, followed by his Louis Armstrong handkerchief. Then the belly laugh and sighing that came out like pulled taffy when something crept up on him unawares.

Following a stroke and quasi recuperation, he was going to a dance with his wife, Janie, driving, and he told her to let him off at the place and to go park the car. She reminded him of the neighborhood, choke and grab muggers, etc. He turned to Walt and me and said, “What is she talking about, nature mugged me,” and cracked up. When they opened up his coffin at the funeral, he was wearing that put-on serious expression that was generally a prelude to a wise crack. I kept waiting. Then I figured I was to give him the cue, but I couldn’t think of it. Just as well. It was an odd enough funeral what with brother Walt at the piano singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Fatherless Child,” in that handsome, cabaret, balladeer way of his. It would have broke the old man up.

My mother is a reel-in laugher. When the spirit of laughter takes hold of her, she wants to tell you about what’s got her captured. You move in close to listen, in case you have to catch her as she dances about doing cute ballet things with her hands trying to tell you. You move in closer to what it is that comes straining through the marshmallows she seems to have stuffed in her mouth. Mostly you move close cause you want to hug her and join her there in that hilarious place she’s still talking to you from. Then she gets out what she wants to say and the balloons bounce and confetti showers and she’s wiping her tears and it’s a party. Then she glows with a high pink-bronze, very pleased with her capture and her release.

My daughter Karma has an elfin wit and a soothsayer wit both of which break her up into scatter-shot spraying laughter that does great things for her eyes. For a wind-up of the laugh she often selects from her Daddy Gene’s repertoire, a ha ha heh singsongy thing on a rising note at the end. Her Daddy uses that wind up to round out his field- holler-in-the-city yowl that she’s got a ten-year old girl version of. It’s very outdoorsy at first, then it oval shapes itself into a cozy Nat King Cole doing “They Tried to Tell Us We’re Too Young” indoors thing. Then the coda—the ha ha hehh inflection. Of course Karma, being a tall-like-her-Daddy person, also does the roll-around breakdown that kids learn in baby school before they get here: Destroy the Furniture 101, 2 credits. Cute at 3, at 10 a menace to anybody stupid enough to remain on the couch with her.

Laughter is very useable. It heals. It gives perspective. It creates breathing space when there seems to be nothing but soul-killing cramp and close-quartered suffocation. It signals the balance of that truism the elders palaver about—that nothing is so good it might not cause someone inconvenience, and nothing is so bad it might not yield a hopeful lesson. People with no capacity for laughter worry me. Like cops. I’ve wasted more good lines on FBI agents trying to pry them loose from moldy scripts of the “A former student of yours has applied for a job as probation officer and listed you as a reference”/“Your former husband wants to work for the justice department and we’d like to talk” order. And like tedious self-styled “revolutionaries” (neo- magic-marxists a sage at Atlanta U’s poli sci dept tags’m) who want to come in, drink up my wine, and categorically prove that Imamu is Lenin.

Despite the risks, I have great respect for my capacity for laughter and outrage. My heart is a laughing gland. But near the chamber of the heart is a blast furnace. And poking through the slats of the rib cage is a loaded gun. The combination makes for a peculiar sort of desperado writing some times. Desperado in the Webster sense of outlaw. In the Roget sense of gambler. In the Unamuno sense of deep despair and high hopes. I despair at our failure to wrest power from those who have it and abuse it, our reluctance to reclaim our old power lying dormant with neglect, our hesitancy to create new power in areas where it never before existed. Our capacity for compliance, group denial, and amnesia. But I continually observe our ability to keep on keeping on, transforming the chemistry of this place. And am heartened by our spirit, our gifts, our magnificence as we battle against invisibility and fractionalization, especially in our own eyes and in each others. We will not be domesticated. If convinced that the truth is in the people, one can afford to laugh.

When stories are provoked into being by observed injustices—as “Gorilla,” “The Lesson,” “Broken-Field Running,” “The War of the Wall” (called “Wall of Respect” in the original version published in Obsidian, Winter 80/81) and so many others—I edit for/with humor. It’s the laughing gland that tells me my polemical slip is showing, that encourages me to examine the limits of the story’s ideological grid, as it were. “Broken-Field Running,” for example, was sparked by architectural designs in and their socio-political designs on our community—schools built like prisons, housing projects with no front-walk benches or front-and-side apartment windows to maintain surveillance, kitchens a mere scratch on the blueprints all but eliminating the traditional headquarters—classroom of the elders— an assault on community sovereignty. The pitch, pace, tone, and posture of the original draft were furiously strident, confrontational. The main character, Lacey, a teacher in a community-based, independent Pan-African school, raged about like a crazed avenger. But the scenario, as I saw it, demanded the presence of children. Do I want to inflict children with a teeth-gnashing teacher who drags them through a screaming landscape? What kind of message would that be to convey? After several weeks of brewing in the dark of the desk drawer, the story struck me as baroque in its angry rhetoric, bizarre in its imperfect blend of essay and narrative. It was super-melodramatic. It was hilarious.

In subsequent revisions, I invented a snow storm to blanket the heat and rage. Invited Lacey to horse around, to act out the dragon- slayer role and the woe-ain’t-it-a-dirty-shame role instead of being them. Contrast the grim realities of the ghetto and the promising future of the community through trained children. Those shifts gave me space to have another story going on with the children right under Lacey’s nose. A real get off. Of course, some readers, reviewers, critics see only the ghetto in the works. Others see the community. Young readers, who write the greatest feedback letters, see both quite well and know the difference between walking through bombed-out terrain and sauntering through the community that names them. That, for me, is the ultimate get off. Laughing, though, has its risks. It can be a screen, a way to avoid putting a cold eye on an uncomfortable reality rather than confronting it unflinchingly and tackling it. Just as outrage at oppression can be a dodge, a way of avoiding calling a spade a spade and speaking directly to the fact that we participate wickedly and unforgivably in our own ambush every day of our lives. In editing, I frequently catch myself in the act of running for cover, hiding out in a good punch line, taking refuge in a bogus race pride, rather than stare unblinkingly at what seems unbearable, rather than pump up the heart and face horror. Our capacity for accommodation is a horror that defies finally any kind of analysis and any kind of humor.

Our children are being slaughtered, our men are being butchered, our women are being massacred, any sense of community sovereignty is being destroyed. With our consent. Malcolm cut down, King bumped off, mass murders at Jonestown. And still we do not move. Open recruitment on Black campuses by the CIA, open recruitment in our neighborhoods for cannon fodder and assassins. With our permission. White mercenaries on the payroll of U.S. corporations putting down insurrections on our turf domestic and foreign. Where are our armies and navies? Grand Wizards and other brazen demons beefing up the bank accounts of neo-fascist groups all over the world. Where are our filled coffers?

If we can stand still for all of this, if we can carry on business as usual while our children in Trenton and in Atlanta are kidnapped and brutalized—then what do we stand for? It all but stops the heart. What underlies my work as I read it—and I suspect it is what keeps my “children’s” stories from being insufferably coy, cute, and sentimental—are the basic givens from which I proceed. One, we are at war. Two, the natural response to oppression is resistance. Three, the natural response to stress and crisis is not breakdown and capitulation, but transformation and renewal. The question I’ve been continually raising from Gorilla to Seabirds and especially Salt is—is it natural (sane, healthy, and in our interest) to violate the contracts/ covenants we have with our ancestors, each other, our children and God? Where is our honor? Though there is much gaiety and horsing around in Salt, it strikes me as an unrelentingly serious work in its motive and design, raising as it does these questions in whole and in parts (implications) that speak to our decision whether or not we intend to have a future at all?

IV.

If the 60s were the dozens, the 80s will be the thirteens. We are moving again. Things are stirring all over Blackamerica. Something is definitely taking shape in Blacksouth. Last month, in the same week- end (November 20th—Gemini 0°, Sagittarius 0°) as the Philadelphia Convention to launch the long overdue independent Black political party, there was in Atlanta, thanks to Dr. Sondra O’Neale of Emory University, an historic gathering of writers and other cultural workers. The Conference on Black South Literature and the Arts was the result of 3 southern organizations, who normally hold separate annual conferences, coming together—The Southern Collective of African American Writers, a 3 year old Atlanta based regional group that services its constituency of writers, editors, and publishers with a newsletter, readings, receptions, how-to workshops and annual conferences that are characterized by practicum workshops and community-service panels; The Southern Black Cultural Alliance, spearheaded by The Free Southern Theatre in the 60s, a 10 year old association of some 40 member community theatre groups of the region; The Committee on Black South Literature, an organization of editors, critics, and scholars (and, as might be expected, most members are all 3) formed in May 1980 at a symposium convened by Sondra O’Neale.

I don’t think it is extravagant to say that what was ushered in was the next major stage of the Neo-Black Arts Movement launched initially in the 60s (centered in New York, Chicago, and the Bay Area) by workers involved as well in the Black Power Movement, the Black Aesthetic Movement, the Neo Ethnic Studies Movement (“neo” in the sense of, hey, I got a degree in Ethnic Studies in the 50s, Anglo-Saxon Studies, I was an English Lit/Theatre major), and who helped to revitalize and expand (along multi-cultural lines for a change) the Small Press Movement in the U.S. Unlike the previous cultural “breakouts” of the 20s, 40s, 60s—which recognized as John O. Killens likes to say that “We are a Southern People,” that used the south as content/motif (homeboy in awesome big city/messed over returns south to the regenerative source), that acknowledged as Quincy Troupe is fond of reminding us “All great art is derived from the folk base,” whose literary strivings were angled in the same direction as the arrows of migration and, as early as the 20s, tried to formulate a big city literature which culminated decades later in the works of Wright, Petry, Ellison, Baldwin, Paule Marshall et al.—this stage will emerge from and be based in our most fecundating matrix (as they say in the trade)—Blacksouth.

Because of groups like SCAAW, SBCA, CBSLA, the Congo Square Writers, the Pomoja Writers Guild, the Black Fire Poets, the African Eye, Phoenix, Jomandhi Productions (for examples), and book fair organizers like Joyce Mills and Ahmos Zu-Bolton, and presses like Ahidiana, Select and Energy Earth Communications, and editors of journals like Callaloo, First World, Bamboula, Pot Likker, Griot, Gumbo, Roots, Hoo Doo (to mention a few), and writers that have moved onto arts council boards, on review panels, into residencies—Blacksouth will become a major center for the production of useable works and for the development of a hard-head critical audience.

I am glad to be in the South, living in Atlanta, hanging out in Alabama and the Carolinas, eating my way through New Orleans, tipping through the streets of Galveston (with their anti-skirt high curbs and clubs with names like The Sweet Dream Cafe). The move south certainly impacts me as a writer and a reader. I have a nearly pitch perfect ear now for Julia Fields, Hurston, and a great many blues singers that used to make me mash my head against the speakers or against the bandstand to make the lyrics out. And I can hear/feel the distance I have traveled sounding out the folders as I ready for the garbage man—the more humming tune phrasings of the pieces stuffed in the clean, stiff manila folders, the bell horn blasting of things in the old, coffee-cup ringed, rain warped, musty folders. If I miss anything about New York, it’s living among Puerto Ricans and listening to Jewish mothers hollering out the window to their kids, and the music, ohh the music. I leaf through the dog eared scraps of scribblings and hear the old places: customers talking in Thomford’s Ice Cream Parlor, the lunchroom in P. S. 186, Apollo audiences, the icie man in Mount Morris Park; the center on Merrick Road, the fights on Union Hall Street, gang wars in Brooklyn, band concerts at Jones Beach; Pandora’s Box, The Open Door, Rienzi’s, San Remo Bar, Chumley’s, White Horse Tavern; Deux Magots, the Cinemateque, Le Chat Qui Peche, assorted bibliotecas and chamber music halls of Paris, Rome, Palermo; the Egyptian Gardens, Village Vanguard, Amsterdam Avenue near City College, Stanley’s, Slug’s, Pee Wee’s, St. Mark’s Place; Wells, The Baron, The Red Rooster, Liberation Book Store, the B’lyn parades and noisy bar b q’s on Marcus Garvey Day, the public library on Grand Army Plaza…

The impact of place on a writer’s work is sometimes subtle, oftimes gradual, occasionally stark and sudden. In Ernest J. Gaines’ work, the terrain is still Luzanna, but there is something else in the landscape now: the climate, atmosphere, weather of his newer works has an element vaguely suggestive of all that sky space that characterizes West Coast politics and art. Ishmael Reed, on the other hand, makes shrewd and interesting use of the history, lunacies, and ambience of his various “homes.” Toni Morrison’s move to the Hudson (she could not be more on the water had she a house boat) is clearly discernable from page one in Tar Baby. I was aware of my shift while writing “The Organizer’s Wife.” Unlike the piece “The Survivor” I did 20 years ago, a story that demanded merely a take-five session with southern terrain and idiom, the newer story “The Organizer’s Wife,” set in the semi-rural south, demanded I mute my ole 6/8 bebop urban voice and let the character Virginia come through with hers.

The story concerns a group of people in a district trying valiantly to maintain their hold on the land. It was written at a time when ELF [Earth Liberation Front] and other land groups were extremely active in places like the Sea Islands and in North Carolina. The notes for the story were initially made in 1975 on a visit to Penn Center in Frogmore, St. Helena’s Island, where I remembered an earlier visit in 1972 to Hilton Head, once a land based Black community, now an enormous golf course. The story would never have gotten past the notes stage had I not moved south and gotten involved, albeit a modest and minuscule way, with independent farmers in the rural sector trying to hook up with tenants councils in the urban sector.

The novel The Salt Eaters would not have been tried I think, if the story “The Organizer’s Wife” hadn’t been gotten out of the way. After Eleanor Traylor’s article “My Soul Looks Back in Wonder,” I sat down to read the book through again. I wince at linguistic clinkers, hold my head at off-key phrasing, mutter at the misuse of voice in various lines of dialogue, and wag my head at blown opportunities for the narrator to demonstrate an ear, as in the section on Old Tree (which I correct when doing readings and woe to the audience member attempting to follow along with the libretto). But the theme of synthesis and transformation came off better than I suspected. So I kept pushing. The development of a pitch perfect ear is one of the tasks I assign myself now as new demands of language fluency strike me with an urgency: to expand the voice repertoire so that I can a) bring in the overseas experience to a readership here, b) travel out to overseas readership by taking greater care about translation considerations, c) visit back and forth around the globe on the page for the reader the way we do and have been doing with our truly cosmopolitan selves. I don’t doubt for a minute that I can do it, for I love work, to be in that state of intense ignorance, curiosity, and awareness that something is about to happen.

Now that I’ve learned to recognize the turbulent restlessness as an oncoming writing fit and not a signal to wash walls, call the moving man, or get on a plane—I can hammer away on the keys for day and night long stretches with nothing between me and the machine but urgency and surprise.

I love to write, enjoy the sheer manual labor of it, the feel of ball points that have ridges, the click of the inner mechanism against the plastic sheath, the slight suction-drag as the point implants the ink along the line. I love the juiciness of fountain pens, the way the ink is absorbed on the page and gets fixed. Though my handwriting at best is a calamity of black on white, I enjoy its look as the body tension increases, the motor system clamps down lest the body begin to act out what’s being composed, a tension I can use to keep working (I think I’m Jimi Hendrix playing the feed-back). Then channels start closing down as others open up. Like being a new mother sleeping with one frequency absolutely clear for the slightest movement of the baby.

I’m excited by words, their attempts to misdirect, get belligerent, shield and guise, then surrender up their stuff. Lorenzo Thomas, the Panamanian-Arkansas word sorcering poet of Texas, once planted “enthusiasm” right in the middle of a startling enough review of [Ishmael] Reed’s Louisiana Red. I don’t know many people who use that word with any reverence for its mystic-hoo doo background, except maybe a Sufi poet or someone like Brother Ra (R. A. Straugh, Oracle of Maat, Oracle of Thoth, etc.). And then Brother T had the nerve to say to the reader, “look it up.” And I’m excited for words. When it comes to words, Toni Morrison, writing like Betty Carter singing, can hit no wrong note. (The teeth, that’s the key. Check the sisters out). The moment in Sula when Eva is thinking how the girl stood there, frozen in horror it had seemed, while her mother was burning. She stood there, Eva thinks, “not because she was paralyzed, but because she was interested.” That word hasn’t been called upon to do any glorious work since the ancient days of the Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times.” For eons, that word’s been knocking around getting raggedy and forgetful, drinking cheap wine in travel agencies, taking up with n’er do wells who read the financial page, hanging out in guidance counselors’ mouths, shacking up with Nelly Nice and knocking up Sweet Sue Sweet, and generally being a bad smelling, irresponsible good for nothing bound for hell in a handbasket. Then Lady M crooked her finger and said with her poke teeth self, “You. C’mere. Got some work for yuh.” Well he had sense enough to go, I’ll give him that. And you can see him now on page 78 in the hard back edition, resplendent. He owes that Morrison woman his life.

I love stories—to hear them, tell them, read them, write them. Stories are important. They keep us alive. Richard Long holding forth with no less than 8 voices, keeping Atlanta University history vibrant. Sterling Brown telling tales, giving our past and present a mainline blood fix. Janet Short waxing rhapsodic about Sweet Auburn Avenue, pumping the bellows of its lung till it breathes again. Wendell Whalum blowing three chorus on what the chroniclers keep missing about Black Atlanta, and then really warming up. Elizabeth Catlett talking into the tape recorder about the Carver School artists of the 40s, and Sandy, Crystal and I gazing at the tape machine as though what’s been preserved were viewable. Albert Murray’s rapping bringing him right out of the chair so he can show you how it was and is with the musicians. John Henrik Clarke putting the ridin-the-rails hobo days together, giving texture to the Depression. Clayton Riley with an endless supply of stories from Mantan Moreland and fifty other folks remembering Hollywood and Willie Best, Lincoln Perry, the Dandridge sisters, Lena Horne, Moms Mable. Stories keep us alive. In the ships, in the camps, in the prisons, on the run, underground, undersiege, in the throes, on the verge—they snatch us back from the edge and replay the past and present in which we are the heroes of the tales. They whet our appetite for the future, the next chapter, the next generation of listeners to pass the document on. How it was. How it be. Preserved. That’s what I want to do. To write stories that save our lives.

V.

It has been pointed out quite often that I do not cater to or even seem to be particularly cognizant of white readers. In Salt, several reviewers have said, I make no effort at all to provide a white readership with a point of entry into the work. Generally this observation is offered as a simple observation. Oftimes it has been presented as a feature of my politics. Occasionally, though, it has been couched in the language of warning or threat—“Don’t you realize that the white readership of The New York Times can make or break a writer?” or “Don’t you understand who it is that buys books in this country?” I realize that the “who” that can make or break this writer with a “Amen, daughter,” or a “Hold on, Mama,” or a “Forget you, sister,” is the community that calls my name. And I understand that the world is big, that the actual and potential audience for Black writings is wide. People in Cuba, Iran, Vietnam, Brazil, the Caribbean, New Hebrides, the Continent, all over are interested in knowing how we in the belly of the beast are faring, what we are doing, how we see things. Just this week a letter arrived announcing an entire issue of Pacific Quarterly Moana devoted to Afro-American writers because of the vast interest on the part of Maori, Fijian, Papuan and other Oceania readers. My concern then—having had some works translated into Dutch, Swedish, and Japanese and others slated for translations abroad—is to pay more studious attention to language, rather than the abandonment of African-American experience particularity in favor of some fraudulent “universality.”

The Afro-American experience has always been cosmopolitan, in the strict sense of that word. We are everywhere on the globe. It would not be at all peculiar then—in an effort to bring in the overseas experience to the readership here and to send out the domestic experience to readers over there, and to generally cross-border-talk so folks can slough on the “minority” training and understand that our kings and allies are legion—to set a character down in Tunis, Yemen, Nebraska, Brazil, Wyoming, East Timor, Peking, Sweden, Quebec, or Utah, or Alaska. The challenge is language. How to avoid lapsing into translationese, parataxis, faux naïf utterances, or any other kind of artificial syntax that so many writers adopt when moving outside of their immediate, native culture. (I’m thinking of the self-styled coyote writers Cherokee critic Gerald Hobson served notice on in his now classic essay “The Rise of the White Shaman as a New Version of Cultural Imperialism.”) “The Sea Birds Are Still Alive,” the only story from my “overseas” folder to be published to date, sidestepped the linguistic problems inherent in setting a story in Southeast Asia on a boat containing passengers from the rural and urban districts of that country, as well as passengers from the U.S., the Pacific Ocean, South America, and France, by having less than four lines of actual dialogue, and those are overheards interrupted by the wind.

“Corcovado,” a current work being prepared for The Faith of the Bather collection, is a more ambitious work in terms of language. Set in Rio, the story is angled from the point of view of a U.S. sister riding the train up Mount Corcovado to see the Christ statue at the peak. Getting off at an unscheduled stop, she is lost/found in the wood when she “re-lives” the hills experiences of insurrectionists of Brazil, Jamaica, Haiti, Algeria, Cuba, etc. (recall the poem “All men eventually come to the hills”). To coax the narrative voice away from my characteristic pitch, pace, and shape, I bombard my ear while writing, playing a tape a friend put together for me. On it are Carlos Puella singing a guajara for Lolita Lebron, the Puerto Rican independista, an Angolan chorus singing freedom songs in Kimbindi, a Haitian singer lamenting “Haiti, What’s To Be Done?” in patois, a re-play of a solidarity with Brazil concert I taped in Havana years ago, etc. I compose in that environment.

Having lived now in Atlanta for nearly 7 years, I’ve come to appreciate the training available to a New Yorker, growing up hearing Yiddish, Spanish, Chinese, Greek, Italian and at least 3 variants of Black English on a fairly daily basis. Despite Atlanta’s PR as an international metropolis, its communities of Greeks, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Cubans, et al. are discrete, distinct, and aloof. Several groups have no knowledge whatever of the other’s existence. It is not often, even, that Nigerians, Ethiopians, Jamaicans, and US Africans break bread together. But as the city’s mass transit system develops, an internationalism will be effected. In the meantime, I work toward building on my college German, menu Italian, passport Spanish, Berlitz Portuguese, phonetic Bambara, flashcard Kiswahili, and salutation Arabic in an effort to do justice to the cosmopolitan nature of the Afro-American experience—and especially to counter the isolation and numbers game peddled by the downpressing mythmakers. I am necessarily preoccupied with language tasks.

In the very fine interview, “In Search of the Mother Tongue,” poet/editor Kalamu Ya Salaam conducted (First World, Summer 80), I failed to be distinct about the separate but interdependent aspects of the language quest I (and a host of others) are embarked upon. It is not only to refine the written equivalent of the oral expression of Afro-centric behavior and outlook, or to refine the literary version of community eloquence in oral, visual, and musical stylistics. It is also to duplicate on the page what ritual, magic, incantation, and getting happy do to the “normal” state of consciousness. Finally, it is to discover that language we seem to be in the process of recognizing as crucial for moving into the new age.

In this last quarter of the 20th Century, on the threshold of an age predicted by ancients and moderns alike as a period of radical transformation, we are already experiencing massive paradigm shifts, are already having basic assumptions about the human potential, the nature of reality, the make-up of the universe profoundly challenged. As material scientists discover (and are utterly confounded by the discovery) that the unifying principle of the universe is not physical, we undergo a severe alteration in perspective and consciousness. As the power configurations around the world change up, long-suppressed wisdoms of the ancients are revived that call into question all the fundamental “givens” that keep Western hegemony well oiled. The language is beginning to reflect these shifts.

It’s not news that English is better equipped for merchandising enterprises than it is for explorations of being, that the reification of spiritually charged words and terms that have survived from the mysteries is accepted by its materialist-warped language community. An 8 page discussion of states of consciousness in Hindi or Amharic would yield, I imagine, an hundred page English translation. There are modes of intelligence and ways of being for which there is no precisioned vocabulary or available structures in English, since the languages of the West were being put together as the West was engaged in ransacking and destroying the ancient cultures. The grammar of the Western mind in general (fragmentation/analysis/hierarchal as opposed to holistic, logical/rational/control as opposed to bicameral/ understand/harmony) is predominately causal (and material). That is to say, of the dozen or so ways to link terms to fashion an idea in order to formulate a subject-predicate unit for the purpose of making a statement to communicate said idea, most are causal in structure (cause-effect, conditional, evidence, purpose), motive (concession, manner) or occasion (aforementioned plus definition, illustration, and comparison/contrast). Growing up in this language/mind-set, then, we are predisposed to look for concrete, arguable, provable causes for every happenstance, and to assume that any and every event produces consequences that are knowable and nailable within the parameters of the knowledge established by the language we think in and put the “world” together in.

I do not know yet what the grammar of the Chinese worldview is that, say, allows them to practice and, I assume, understand acupuncture, but two things are clear: one, cause-effect is not the relationship we are observing with those needles, though that is the structure the West is forced to use to describe it and capture the phenomenon in words; two, whatever the relationship is, the English language does not have that structure. All this to say what? That the language is deficient in a lot of things that exist in the world and elude those of us inhibited by the language’s limits; hence, we either do not bother to verify experience the language will not accommodate or, if we persist, we have to resist, we have to resort to surrogate phrasings when we are being comprehensive about our experiences. In discussing mystic experiences, psychic awareness, profound spiritual states, for example, we, of course, sound like loons. It is difficult to validate an experience sounding like a loon. No accident. A civilization whose agenda has always been world domination can certainly not afford to have its subjects formulating a technology for living that cannot be State controlled, cannot have subjects calling upon any power that supersedes the state’s. It was the job of the “high priests” to see that the language was stripped of anything that encouraged people to have loyalties to a sovereignty greater than the state (I assume there’s consensus that Christianity is not a religion so much as it is a political institution—Christendom, Christidolatry). What new language habits, then, do we need to develop as in the Last Quarter? What exists in the language already that can encourage its users to rise above its limits, freeing us up to perceive in new, and I’m certain, more valid, balanced, harmonizing ways?

The language is constantly undergoing metamorphoses, as its community tests its productivity to accommodate to new findings, new demands. Currently, for example, feminists, in the attempt to dismantle patriarchal reality/hegemony and to design a vocabulary of language habits that can reflect and refine women’s ways in the world and encourage women’s empowerment, are making pressing demands on the language’s strictures to yield. In much the same way as we as a total community and other communities as well have been refashioning it and developing code systems out of it for generations in an effort to validate and further define our way in the world. The demand made now, in the birth track of the Aquarian Age, is to formulate a canal language, a language of the caul, an interface language, a bridge language that will document and hasten the entry into the Twenty-First Century age (mind). There are some fundamental bridges already built.

Astrology is, for adept practitioners, a language of intuition. So is prayer. So is some poetry. And millions of people have specialized at the interface of, say, the artistic worldview and the political worldview; it is an aesthetic feature of our and other communities’ literary traditions, for example. Certainly thousands have been jamming at the juncture of the organic and inorganic worlds for years; molecular biologists, to name one obvious group. And there are many who sense no contradiction whatever bridging the material/objective scientific perspective and the spiritual/“subjective” metaphysical perspective— there are, after all, Marxist mystics and truly dialectical physicists (note how the quantum folks borrow heavily from mystics and poets to get their work done). The once impenetrable borders that separated the medical arts from the mystic arts resemble these days a swinging door. What kind of language will hasten the removal of all those artificially erected barriers so that we may become available to all the forces afoot in the universe? So that we may re-yoke, (as in “yoga”), re-join (as in “religion”) and realign ourselves (spiritual chiropractic) with the natural order again? What is the sound and operations of the language that will reflect this new technology of living?

Poet/broadcaster Pepsi Charles says, “Motherhood is a state of altered consciousness.” I’d say so. You are invited to live in the world in a new way. Billions of people on the planet, thousands at least in this country, are beginning to accept the invitation in the Last Quarter to live in the world in a new way. But lest our numbers get caught up in the fad-fetishistic nuttery of those who mount quack spiritual movements out of the hollowness of their own traditions, this new language that signals the birth into a new age, ought to be designed in the Afro-centric mode. The language of the caul, if you will, ought to make use of those symbols, phrasings, etc. that hallmark our mystic heritage, our bicameral consciousness, our way, or we will become available to “occult” magic and lose our numbers to covens and the like. Salt, a work obvious in its preoccupations with synthesis, transformation, and the future, was motivated by this sense of urgency. (See Adrienne Rich’s superb essay in two parts “Wholeness Is No Trifling Matter: Some Fiction by Black Women” in New Women’s Times Feminist Review Dec 80/Jan 81). I argue in that work dense with circles and bridges (the mediation and synthesizing of cultural healants) that immunity to “the serpent’s sting” can be found in our own traditions. Critic Andrea Benton Rushing wrote in a letter: “When I read it, I was gathering courage to come back from 2 years of a debilitating illness. The Yellow Wallpaper told me I had to come back. Salt showed me how.” Increasingly, the issue is salvation. I want to create works that save our lives.