the mothers of the newly dead.
You sway to the music
but stick to the wall,
too shy and self-conscious,
alone in the hall.
You’re no smiling beauty,
your brown hair’s uncurled.
You’re thin and flat-chested—
an awkward young girl.
The couples walk past you
as if you’re not there.
A freshman in high school,
you think they don’t care
about what you’re feeling,
about what you see.
Will anyone listen?
You’re no prodigy.
I know what it feels like
to stand there all night.
I wish I could tell you
that you’ll be all right.
But I have no solace
for what life might hold,
won’t offer the knowledge
I know you’ve been told—
that your life will get better,
your skin will grow clear,
your shape will develop,
you’ll lose all the fears
that keep you from dancing
except in your room.
For now, keep your spine straight,
don’t slouch into gloom,
remember these moments
won’t matter so much
when you’ve learned your body
is worthy of touch.
How miserable you were,
unable or unwilling to do
comforting things expected
of grandmothers: making
pies or bedtime stories,
gardening on arthritic knees.
You had no friends that I
could see, attended no church,
loved no one but my father,
showed that love by whining
that you wanted to go back
to Grenada, only American insulin
keeping you in the States,
the diabetes he inherited
your only link. I never
saw you hug or kiss,
and you gave him a name
he could never live up to—
Everest—pinnacle of mountains,
highest of destinies. Did you
not touch my father because
his father left you, even though
you were the lightest-skinned
woman in the village?
Did you not touch my father
because his father had other
women, other sons? It’s hard
to picture you smiling—
in family photos your face
is stern, lips pressed together,
cat eye glasses hard around
suspicious eyes, tight curls
swept from your forehead.
I was too dark for you to love,
you who were proud to call yourself
“Grenada white.” So all
I carry of yours is a name—
Elaine—your first, my middle—
name of burden, of complaint.
Back before we all became “multicultural,”
when blacks were beautiful in dashikis
and righteous rage, my father sold books
in Toronto, books of pride, sorrow, anger,
an inventory that ended up
in our living room in the Bronx,
a reading room I’d sneak into
when I wasn’t supposed to,
my chore and duty there to dust
the coffee tables and knickknacks—
souvenir ashtrays from Caribbean isles,
ebony elephants and pelicans,
hand-carved, foreign-wrought.
Mixed in among my mother’s
nursing texts, her medical dictionary
and anatomical tomes, I found
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, a book too severe for my preteen brain, polysyllabic paragraphs sailing past my short-sighted mind, Cleaver’s
Soul On Ice, which I read fervently, loving every curse, every mention of sex, missing the revolution in his prose in pursuit of dirty words, staring
at the cover, captivated by Eldridge’s
prison-saddened face. Up From Slavery, Manchild in the Promised Land, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,
poems of Cèsaire and Senghor—those books
filled me with legacy, history, located me
with Jesse Owens, blazing his body
past fascism as he triumphed
at Hitler’s Olympics, with Jackie Robinson
through minor and major league hatreds,
with George Washington Carver as he
synthesized genius from peanuts.
Malcolm X spoke to me from the cover
of his autobiography, black-and-white
photo faded, but his face still sharply
turned upward, his finger up, out,
to signal the better world beyond us.
Could I join these men if I let words
dream in me, if I struggled, didn’t
settle, my gaze as bold and forthright
as Frederick Douglass’s, Booker T.’s?
Wiping each book clean, I kept that room’s
order, my torn rag mottled, spotted,
dark with that week’s dust.
Where have they gone, those girls who ran
the dusty urban streets I knew?
We