Shake Loose My Skin (6 page)

you can’t keep his dick in your purse

Preparation for the trip to Dallas. Los Angeles. New Orleans. Baltimore. Washington. Hartford. Brownsville. (Orlando. Miami. Late check-in. Rush. Limited liability.) That’s why you missed me at the airport. Hotel. Bus stop. Train station. Restaurant. (Late check-in. Rush. Limited liability.) I’m here at the justice in the eighties conference with lawyers and judges and other types advocating abbreviating orchestrating mouthing fucking spilling justice in the bars. Corridors. Bedrooms. Nothing you’d be interested in. (Luggage received damaged. Torn. Broken. Scratched. Dented. Lost.) Preparation for the trip to Chestnut Street. Market Street. Pine Street. Walnut Street. Locust Street. Lombard Street. (Early check-in. Slow and easy liability.) That’s why you missed me at the office. At the office. At the office. It’s a deposition. I’m deposing an entire office of women and other types needing my deposing. Nothing of interest to you. A lot of questions no answers. Long lunches. Laughter. Penises. Flirtings. Touches. Drinks. Cunts and Coke. Jazz and jacuzzis.
(Morning. Evening. Received. Damaged. Torn. Broken. Dented. Scratched. Lost.)

I shall become a collector of me.
ishallbecomeacollectorofme.
i Shall become a collector of me.
i shall BECOME a collector of me.
I shall Become A COLLECTOR of me.
I SHALL BECOME A COLLECTOR OF ME.
ISHALLBECOMEACOLLECTOROFME.
AND PUT MEAT ON MY SOUL.

i’ve been keeping company, with the layaway man.
i say, i’ve been keeping company, with the layaway man.
each time he come by, we do it on the installment plan.

every Friday night, he comes walking up to me do’
i say, every Friday night, he comes walking up to me do’
empty pockets hanging, right on down to the floor.

gonna get me a man, who pays for it up front
i say, gonna get me a man, who pays for it up front
cuz when i needs it, can’t wait til the middle of next month

i’ve been keeping company, with the layaway man
i say, i’ve been keeping company, with the layaway man
each time he come by, we do it on the installment plan
each time he come by, we do it on the installment plan

For Bill Cosby

(Sometimes I Wonder:

What to say to you now
in the soft afternoon air as you
hold us all in a single death?)

I say—

Where is your fire?

I say—

Where is your fire?

You got to find it and pass it on
You got to find it and pass it on
from you to me from me to her from her
to him from the son to the father from the
brother to the sister from the daughter to
the mother from the mother to the child.

Where is your fire? I say where is your fire?
Can’t you smell it coming out of our past?
The fire of living . . . . . . Not dying
The fire of loving . . . . . . Not killing
The fire of Blackness . . . Not gangster shadows.
Where is our beautiful fire that gave light to the world?

The fire of pyramids;
The fire that burned through the holes of
slaveships and made us breathe;
The fire that made guts into chitterlings;
The fire that took rhythms and made jazz;
The fire of sit-ins and marches that made
us jump boundaries and barriers;
The fire that took street talk and sounds
and made righteous imhotep raps.
Where is your fire, the torch of life
full of Nzingha and Nat Turner and Garvey
and Du Bois and Fannie Lou Hamer and
Martin and Malcolm and Mandela.

Sister/Sistah. Brother/Brotha. Come/Come.

CATCH YOUR FIRE . . . . . . . . . . DON’T KILL
  HOLD YOUR FIRE. . . . . . . . . . . DON’T KILL
  LEARN YOUR FIRE . . . . . . . . . DON’T KILL
  BE THE FIRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DON’T KILL

Catch the fire and burn with eyes
that see our souls:

WALKING.
SINGING.
BUILDING.
LAUGHING.
LEARNING.
LOVING.
TEACHING.
BEING.

Hey. Brother/Brotha. Sister/Sistah.
Here is my hand.
Catch the fire . . . and live.

live.
livelivelivelive.
livelivelivelive.
live.
live.

The news of his death reached me in Trinidad around midnight. I was lecturing in the country about African-American literature and liberation, longevity and love, commitment and courage. I could not sleep. I got up and walked out of my hotel room into a night filled with stars. And I sat down in the park and talked to him. About the world. About his work. How grateful we all are that he walked on the earth, that he breathed, that he preached, that he came toward us baptizing us with his holy words. And some of us were saved because of him. Harlem man. Genius. Piercing us with his eyes and pen.

How to write of this beautiful big-eyed man who took on the country with his words? How to make anyone understand his beauty in a country that hates Blacks? How to explain his unpublished urgency? I guess I’ll say that James Arthur Baldwin came out of Harlem sweating blood, counting kernel by kernel the years spent in storefront churches. I guess I’ll say he walked his young steps like my grandfather, counting fatigue at the end of each day. Starved with pain, he left, came back. He questioned and answered in gold. He wept in disbelief at himself and his country and pardoned us all.

When I first read James Baldwin’s
Go Tell It on the Mountain
I knew I was home: Saw my sisters and aunts and mothers and grandmothers holding up the children and churches and communities, turning their collective cheeks so that we could survive and be. And they settled down on his pages, some walking disorderly, others dressed in tunics that hid their nakedness. Ladies with no waists. Working double time with the week. Reporting daily to the Lord and their men. Saw his Black males walking sideways under an urban sky, heard their cornbread-and-sweet-potato laughter, tasted their tenement breaths as they shouted at the northern air, shouted at the hunger and bed bugs, shouted out the days with pain, and only the serum of the Lord (or liquor) could silence the anger invading their flesh.

When I first saw him on television in the early sixties, I felt immediately a kinship with this man whose anger and disappointment with America’s contradictions transformed his face into a warrior’s face, whose tongue transformed our massacres into triumphs. And he left behind a hundred TV deaths: scholars, writers, teachers, and journalists shipwrecked by his revivals and sermons. And the Black audiences watched and shouted amen and felt clean and conscious and chosen.

When I first met him in the late sixties, I was stricken by his smile smiling out at the New York City audience he had just attacked. I was transfixed by his hands and voice battling each other for space as they pierced, caressed, and challenged the crowded auditorium. I rushed toward the stage after the talking was done, I rushed toward the stage to touch his hands, for I knew those hands could heal me, could heal us all because his starting place had been the altar of the Lord. His starting place had been an America that had genuflected over Black bones. Now those bones were rattling discontent and pulling themselves upright in an unrighteous land. And Jimmy Baldwin’s mouth, traveling like a fire in the wind, gave us the songs, the marrow and the speech as we began our hesitant, turbulent and insistent walk against surrogates and sheriffs, governors and goons, patriarchs and patriots, missionaries and ’ministrators of the status quo.

I was too shy too scared too much a stutterer to say much of anything to him that night. I managed to say a hello and a few thank-you’s as I ran out of the auditorium back to a Riverside Drive apartment, as I carried his resident spirit through the coming nights, as I began to integrate his fire into my speech. No longer slavery-bound. No longer Negro-bound. No longer ugly or scared. But terrifyingly beautiful as I, we, began to celebrate the sixties and seventies. Opening and shutting with martyrs. A million bodies coming and going. Shaking off old fears. Laughing. Weeping. Hoping. Studying. Trying to make a colony finally into a country. Responsible to all its citizens. I knew finally as the Scriptures know that “the things that have been done in the dark will be known on the housetops.”

The last time I saw Jimmy Baldwin was at Cornell University. But it is not of that time that I want to speak, but of the next to the last time we spoke in Atlanta. An Atlanta coming out from under serial murders. An Atlanta that looked on him as an outsider attempting to stir up things better left unsaid.

A magazine editor motioned to me as I entered the hotel lobby at midnight, eyes heading straight for my room, head tired from a day of judging plays. He took me to the table where Jimmy was holding court. Elder statesman. Journeying toward himself. Testifying with his hand and mouth about his meeting with professors and politicians and preachers. He had listened to activists and soothsayers and students for days, and his hands shook from the colors of the night, and the sound of fear fell close to his ears each day.

We parted at five o’clock in the morning. I had seen Atlanta through his eyes, and I knew as he knew that the country had abandoned reason. But he stayed in Atlanta and continued to do his duty to the country. Raising the consciousness of a city. And the world.

I was out of town, traveling in the Midwest on flat lands with no curves, the last time he visited Philadelphia. He had come to speak with poet Gwendolyn Brooks at the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum. One of my twins, Mungu, walked up to Jimmy that night, shook his hand and heard his male laughter as he introduced himself. They hugged each other, then my son listened to his Baldwinian talk cast aside the commotion of the night. The next day Mungu greeted me with Jimmy’s sounds, and he and his brother Morani thanked me for insisting that they travel to the museum to hear Mr. Baldwin and Ms. Brooks.

Today, home from Trinidad, I thank James Arthur Baldwin for his legacy of fire. A fine rain of words when we had no tongues. He set fire to our eyes. Made a single look, gesture endure. Made a people meaningful and moral. Responsible finally for all our sweet and terrible lives.

For President Vaclav Havel

1.

It is essential that Summer be grafted to
bones marrow earth clouds blood the
eyes of our ancestors.
It is essential to smell the beginning
words where Washington, Madison, Hamilton,
Adams, Jefferson assembled amid cries of:

“The people lack of information”
“We grow more and more skeptical”
“This Constitution is a triple-headed monster”
“Blacks are property”

It is essential to remember how cold the sun
how warm the snow snapping
around the ragged feet of soldiers and slaves.
It is essential to string the sky
with the saliva of Slavs and
Germans and Anglos and French
and Italians and Scandinavians,
and Spaniards and Mexicans and Poles
and Africans and Native Americans.
It is essential that we always repeat:

we the people,
we the people,
we the people.

2.

“Let us go into the fields” one
brother told the other brother. And
the sound of exact death
raising tombs across the centuries.
Across the oceans. Across the land.

3.

It is essential that we finally understand:
this is the time for the creative
human being
the human being who decides
to walk upright in a human
fashion in order to save this
earth from extinction.

This is the time for the creative
Man. Woman. Who must decide
that She. He. Can live in peace.
Racial and sexual justice on
this earth.

This is the time for you and me.
African American. Whites. Latinos.
Gays. Asians. Jews. Native
Americans. Lesbians. Muslims.
All of us must finally bury
the elitism of race superiority
the elitism of sexual superiority
the elitism of economic superiority
the elitism of religious superiority.

So we welcome you on the celebration
of 218 years Philadelphia. America.

So we salute you and say:
Come, come, come, move out into this world
nourish your lives with a
spirituality that allows us to respect
each other’s birth.
come, come, come, nourish the world where
every 3 days 120,000 children die
of starvation or the effects of starvation;
come, come, come, nourish the world
where we will no longer hear the
screams and cries of women, girls,
and children in Bosnia, El Salvador,
Rwanda . . . AhAhAhAh AHAHAHHHHH

Ma-ma. Dada. Mamacita. Baba.
Mama. Papa. Momma. Poppi.
The soldiers are marching in the streets
near the hospital but the nurses say
we are safe and the soldiers are
laughing marching firing calling
out to us i don’t want to die i
am only 9 yrs old, i am only 10 yrs old
i am only 11 yrs old and i cannot
get out of the bed because they have cut
off one of my legs and i hear the soldiers
coming toward our rooms and i hear
the screams and the children are
running out of the room i can’t get out
of the bed i don’t want to die Don’t
let me die Rwanda. America. United
Nations. Don’t let me die . . . . . . . . . . . .

And if we nourish ourselves, our communities
our countries and say

no more hiroshima
no more auschwitz
no more wounded knee
no more middle passage
no more slavery
no more Bosnia
no more Rwanda

No more intoxicating ideas of
racial superiority
as we walk toward abundance
we will never forget

the earth
the sea
the children
the people

For
we the people
will always be arriving
a ceremony of thunder
waking up the earth
opening our eyes to human
monuments.

And it’ll get better
    it’ll get better
if
we the people
work, organize, resist,
come together for peace, racial, social
and sexual justice
    it’ll get better
    it’ll get better.

This is not a small voice

you hear      this is a large

voice coming out of these cities.

This is the voice of LaTanya.

Kadesha. Shaniqua. This