The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni

by Nikki Giovanni

  The day comes and Debbie is on time. We go downstairs and Thomas hails the taxi. Out to the airport. On to the plane. A beautiful, sunny day in Paris. Out to the airport. On to Liberia. The plane lands and I ask my darling, precocious son “Where are we?” “Monrovia, Liberia named for President Monroe and founded by slaves!” I am telling myself what a great job I have done. People around us are smiling, so pleased are they at the young mother and her wonderfully informed son. The plane takes off and we are watching the green of Africa. We land in Ghana. Deplane. Head off for the hotel. Get checked in. Shower. And go down to have afternoon tea. We are sitting there on the terrace relaxing. Thomas is looking a bit puzzled. Then he pops the question: “Mommy, why are these people speaking Spanish?” My goodness! After all we have been through my son thinks he’s somewhere in Spanish Harlem. Nevermind all the lessons. Nevermind all the recitations. He hasn’t got a clue in the world where we are. My spirits fall. Debbie tries to reassure me. But I know. I have failed. All the people who said he is too young to go to Africa are right. All the people who said it was a waste of time and money, that he would never remember anything are right. All those people who told me I was wrong are right. My shoulders were down on my knees and my spirit was even lower. I recovered though. I told myself we are here and there’s nothing else to be done. I explained they were not speaking Spanish but Twi. Thomas looked at me like I was playing a joke. We went on to my readings and our touring. We flew to Lagos, Nigeria where we had a wonderful visit. Everyone was very nice and everyone was especially nice to Thomas. There was an especial appreciation that I had brought my son with me because it seemed to indicate some level of trust.

  We were on our way to the BLS countries, Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. The plane we were suppose to be on got commandeered by the military which happened a lot in those days so instead of our non-stop to Johannesburg we had to take what amounted to a local. The plane made a couple of stops then we took off for Zaire. As we were landing Thomas asked: “Where are we, now?” It had been a long day and we still had some hours flying before we reached the place where we would change planes. “We’re landing in Zaire, Thomas,” I answered rather absentmindedly. “Where is that, Mommy? Where are we?” he demanded. It dawned on me that there was no way he could know Zaire which had recently changed its name. “Thomas, we’re landing in the Congo,” I explained. “The Congo!” he said excitedly. “Mommy you were born here! We must be in Africa.” He was beaming. And so was I. I was never so happy that I had written a poem than I was at that very moment. “Yes, Thomas. We’re in Africa. I was born in the Congo…”

  NIKKI GIOVANNI

  July 2003

  Notes to the Poems

  Black Feeling Black Talk

  Black Feeling Black Talk was privately printed in 1968 and distributed by Giovanni herself. Because she feared rejection, as she stated in an interview published in Ingenue in February 1973, Giovanni did not submit the collection to a publisher; instead, with money borrowed from family and friends, she had it printed and distributed it herself: “I decided to take my poetry to the people, and if they rejected it, that would be that.” In fact, some 2,000 copies of this volume were sold during its first year, an extraordinary figure for a privately printed and privately distributed book of poetry.

  “Detroit Conference of Unity and Art (For HRB)”

  The Detroit Conference of Unity and Art was held in late May 1967.

  HRB:H. Rap Brown, now Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (1943–). Civil Rights activist who became the chairman of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) after Stokely Carmichael left to join the Black Panthers. Al-Amin was recently convicted of killing a Fulton County (Georgia) sheriff’s deputy and sentenced to life in prison. Giovanni considers the charges absurd. See the title poem of Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea.

  L. 15: “Malcolm”: Malcolm X, later Al Hajj Malik Al-Shabazz (1925–65).

  “On Hearing ‘The Girl with the Flaxen Hair’”

  “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair” (La Fille aux cheveux de lin) is a piano composition by Claude Debussy (1862–1918), published in 1910 in Book 1 of his Préludes.

  This is a very early poem, dating to 1965; the second or third poem Giovanni wrote, it was rejected by The Atlantic Monthly.

  “Poem (For TW)”

  TW: Thelma Watson, Giovanni’s French teacher at Fisk University. The teacher and her student often speculated about the possibility that they were kinswomen because Ms. Watson had the same family name as Giovanni’s maternal grandparents.

  “Poem (For BMC No. 1)”

  BMC: Blanche McConnell Cowan was the dean of women at Fisk University when Giovanni returned there in 1964. Cowan purged the file on Giovanni that had been generated by the former dean, Ann Cheatam, and became an important friend and mentor both during Giovanni’s years at Fisk and after. Cowan died in 1986.

  L. 6: “no sun from Venice”: No Sun in Venice is a 1957 album released by the Modern Jazz Quartet.

  L. 7: “green cricket with a pink umbrella”: Blanche Cowan was a member of the African American sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, whose colors are green and pink.

  “Our Detroit Conference (For Don L. Lee)”

  Don L. Lee, now Haki R. Madhabuti (1942–), is a Chicago poet and founder of Third World Press who was an important leader in the Black Arts movement. Giovanni met him at the Detroit Conference of Unity and Art in May 1967.

  L. 2: “Digest”: The Negro Digest, which was relaunched in the 1960s by Johnson Publications. Under the editorship of Hoyt Fuller (1923–81), Negro Digest (renamed Black World in 1970) played a central role in helping shape the Black Arts movement. Both Giovanni and Lee were regular contributors.

  “Poem (For Dudley Randall)”

  Dudley Randall (1914–2000) was a poet and the founder of Broadside Press (1963), which published the work of many young poets of the Black Arts movement. Broadside distributed Giovanni’s Black Judgement and published her Re: Creation.

  “Poem (For BMC No. 2)”

  BMC: Blanche McConnell Cowan; see note to “Poem (For BMC No. 1).”

  L. 7: “barefoot boy”: An allusion to “Barefoot Boy with Cheeks of Tan” by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–92).

  L. 8: “John Henry”: John Henry was born a slave in the 1840s or 1850s. The legend that grew up around his work as a steel driver for the railroads during Reconstruction is expressed in the many versions of the song “John Henry, Steel Driving Man.”

  L. 9: “camel with a cold nose”: A reference to the folk story about a man whose camel begged to be allowed to stick just his cold nose in the tent at night; the next morning, of course, the entire camel was in the tent and the man was outside in the cold.

  “Personae Poem (For Sylvia Henderson)”

  Sylvia Henderson: In the summer of 1967, Giovanni organized Cincinnati’s first Black Arts Festival, held in the West End, where she did volunteer social work. As a part of the festival, she adapted Virginia Hamilton’s novel Zeely to the stage. Sylvia Henderson had the title role in the play, directed by Giovanni and performed at a synagogue in Avondale, a Cincinnati neighborhood. Giovanni selected the West End as the location for the three-day festival because she volunteered there, her mother was a social worker there, and her father had grown up and was widely respected there; Giovanni knew, in other words, that she could get widespread participation and support in the West End, at that time a neighborhood of project housing. The conservative director of the neighborhood YWCA was unwilling to let Giovanni and her colleagues use the Y’s stage for the production. Many of the people with whom Giovanni worked also worked for or with a social work agency in Avondale called Seven Hills, and one of them offered the use of the synagogue’s stage.

  “Poem (For PCH)”

  PCH: Perri Harper. The response to the Black Arts Festival and to Giovanni’s production of Zeely (see preceding note) was overwhelmingly positive. The success of the play demonstrated the potential for an ongoing black theater in Cincinnati. Giovanni
suggested to Charles Sells, the director of Seven Hills (see preceding note), that he hire a director for the theater group she had organized. He agreed to do so if she could find someone. She contacted John Oliver Killens, with whom she had studied at Fisk, and he eventually recommended Perri Harper. Harper had worked for a number of years with small theaters in Greenwich Village, where she lived with the jazz pianist Bill Evans. Possibly because of problems in her relationship with Evans, Harper accepted the position in Cincinnati. Charles Holman, another social worker involved in the theater group, helped win grant money and donations, and Harper directed a series of plays; within three or four years, this group was incorporated into the Cincinnati Playhouse, which had previously had an all-white board of directors, all white actors, and all-white play selections.

  Ll. 7 ff.: Perhaps an allusion to the fact that Harper, who had been hired through Giovanni’s efforts, later refused to provide a letter of recommendation for her application to graduate school.

  “Poem (For BMC No. 3)”

  BMC: Blanche McConnell Cowan; see note to “Poem (For BMC No. 1),”.

  “A Historical Footnote to Consider Only When All Else Fails (For Barbara Crosby)”

  Barbara Crosby: Several years older than Giovanni, Crosby was originally a friend of Gary Giovanni, the poet’s sister. Crosby graduated from Cincinnati’s prestigious Walnut Hills High School and Fisk University. She was active in the Civil Rights movement and was a member of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). As a participant in the International Village Movement, she had also spent a good deal of time in Europe. She was a social worker with Seven Hills (see note to “Personae Poem,”, and she and Giovanni shared an apartment in Cincinnati during the summer of 1967.

  “The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro (For Peppe, Who Will Ultimately Judge Our Efforts)”

  “Black vs. Negro”: Naming has always had enormous importance to Black Americans because of its connection to identity and power. Africans brought to this country and sold into slavery were stripped of their names and forced to take the names given them by their new masters. In the 1960s special attention was focused on this issue. Those involved in the Black Power and Black Arts movements drew significant distinctions between the terms “Negro,” “nigger,” and “Black.” Sarah Webster Fabio wrote a definitive essay on this topic for Negro Digest, in which she offered the following analysis:

  Scratch a Negro and you will find a nigger and a potential black man; scratch a black man and you may find a nigger and the remnants of a Negro. Negro is a psychological, sociological, and economical fabrication to justify the status quo in America. Nigger is the tension created by a black man’s attempt to accommodate himself to become a Negro in order to survive in a racist country. Black is the selfhood and soul of anyone with one drop of black blood, in America, who does not deny himself.

  The black community has always known—and it is becoming apparent to the world—that America wants Negroes and niggers but not black people.

  James Baldwin makes reference to the observation that “the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men.” The Negro is a pathology: Baldwin has also said that there is “no Negro, finally, who has not had to make his own precarious adjustment to the ‘nigger’ who surrounds him and to the ‘nigger’ in himself.” Being black, then, is a reaffirmation of selfhood; it is a meaningful antidote to white racism; it is a move toward deniggerizing the world population of non-white people and of humanizing the white people. (“Who Speaks Negro? What Is Black?” Negro Digest, Sept.–Oct. 1968.)

  Peppe: Family nickname for Giovanni’s nephew, Christopher Black (1959–).

  L. 2: “Can you kill”: Giovanni stated that she wrote this poem because “it bugged me to always hear talk of going out to die for our rights…. That’s not the hardest thing to do. It’s harder to goout and kill for your rights. I wrote the poem as a protest against that attitude” (Peter Bailey, “Nikki Giovanni: ‘I Am Black, Female, Polite…’” Ebony, February 1972, p. 50).

  “A Short Essay of Affirmation Explaining Why (With Apologies to the Federal Bureau of Investigation)”

  This poem was written in July 1967, when Giovanni was living in Cincinnati. Often referred to as a “hot summer,” the summer of 1967 witnessed race riots and racial disturbances across the country. The most serious occurred in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit, Michigan, but there were outbreaks in dozens of other cities, including Cincinnati. Giovanni shared an apartment with Barbara Crosby (see note to “A Historical Footnote,”, who was as well-known to left-wingers in Cincinnati as Giovanni was to Black nationalists; as a consequence, their telephone was wiretapped. Giovanni herself was at her parents’ home in Lincoln Heights when the riot broke out in Cincinnati.

  L. 1: “Honkies”: white people.

  L. 48: “Miss Hoover”: A reference to the then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972), whose abuse of his powers, especially in matters regarding Black people, has been widely documented.

  “Poem (No Name No. 3)”

  L. 3: “Anne Frank”: Anne Frank (1929–45) gained international attention when her diaries were published after her death. Between 1942 and 1944, during World War II, when Jews were being rounded up and sent to “work camps,” Anne Frank and her family hid in a secret annex of the building housing her father’s business in Amsterdam. Anne wrote in her diary during these two years. In 1944 the family was arrested and deported; Anne eventually was sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died the following year.

  L. 11: “Malcolm”: Malcolm X, later Al Hajj Malik Al-Shabazz (1925–65).

  L. 12: “LeRoi”: LeRoi Jones, now Amiri Baraka (1934–), poet, playwright, and social activist. He was arrested during the 1967 Newark riots and charged with illegal possession of weapons and resisting arrest. Although he was later convicted and sentenced to a three-year jail term, the conviction was reversed on appeal.

  L. 13: “Rap”: H. Rap Brown (1943–), now Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. “Strapped a harness” probably refers to the fact that Brown was on probation and thereby rendered relatively powerless. See note to “Detroit Conference of Unity and Art,”.

  L. 14: “Stokely’s teeth”: Stokely Carmichael, later Kwame Ture (1941–1998). Carmichael became the chairperson of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) in May 1966 and took the organization in a more radical direction just a month later, when he announced the advent of Black Power. In 1967 he left SNCC to join the Black Panther Party. Giovanni’s figure (a toothless panther) suggests that Carmichael has been made harmless.

  “Wilmington Delaware”

  When Giovanni entered the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Work, she lived in Wilmington, where housing was cheaper than in Philadelphia. Part of her graduate study entailed working at the People’s Settlement House in Wilmington, where she continued even after she had dropped out of graduate school. This poem, written during the eight or nine months she lived in Wilmington, is a scathing satire on both the city and its personification, the man who directed the People’s Settlement.

  L. 16: “Due-pontee”: A reference to the du Pont family, whose money helped fund the settlements and much else in the state of Delaware. Founded in 1802 as an explosives company, Du Pont subsequently focused on chemicals and energy, and it is the corporation behind well-known brands such as Teflon, Lycra, and Dacron. Today it is ranked the seventieth largest U.S. industrial-service corporation, with revenues in 2002 of $24 billion.

  L. 26: “nourishment at the ‘Y’”: When Giovanni lived in Wilmington, the YMCA was a networking hub for Black businessmen and professionals. The double entendre, like the many orthographic jokes, marks the poem as a youthful composition.

  L. 30: “East side of town”: In the late 1960s the east side of Wilmington, which had originally been populated by white people, had become predominantly Black; the same was true of the People’s Settlement and Christiana Settlement Hou
ses, which were both on the east side.

  Ll. 42–43: “party more…Asphalt is bad”: Possibly a reference to the marches and demonstrations which were used by those in both the Civil Rights and the Black Power movements but which would have been anathema to someone like Wilmington, whose dancing is still a “shuffle,” regardless of its “militancy.”

  Ll. 56–57: “replaced jello…jellied gas (a Due-pontee specialty; housewise)”: A reference to napalm, a jellied gas produced by the Du Pont Corporation and used extensively in the Vietnam War.

  “Letter to a Bourgeois Friend Whom Once I Loved (And Maybe Still Do If Love Is Valid)”

  Written in July 1967.

  L. 12: “Johnson”: Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–73), thirty-sixth President of the United States (1963–69).

  L. 13: “Detroit”: The summer of 1967 was witness to race riots all over the United States. One of the worst started in Detroit on July 22 and lasted for several days. President Johnson ordered 4,700 federal troops into Detroit. In all some forty-three people were killed, thirty-three of them Black (see Charles M. Christian, Black Saga: The African American Experience, 1995).