by Pamela Sneed
whom I’d often performed with, who died from AIDS
and his mother who still grieves.
It’s not about my friend Don Reid, the beautiful collages he made
and the son, lover, and friends he left behind.
It’s not about Jody from the South, the first white boy whom I ever heard say Y’all
and all those gay boys I met and worked with at a restaurant in Boston,
who disappeared like thousands of bits of paper,
wind just simply took.
Gone, disappeared, like those dissidents of Castro’s Cuba
Like the friends and supporters of Allende
this story is not about them
It’s not about heroic women, Audre Lorde, June Jordan,
Pat Parker, my grandmother and cancer they fought.
It’s not about conspiracies, neglect, nor costumes
I wore.
It’s not about today where some people can actually live
with HIV and AIDS.
It’s not about those miracle drugs and cocktails, though
I do wish could have gotten here just one day
a moment or second sooner
and saved one more
In the words of Schindler who saved Jews from the Gestapo
and bought their freedom.
Even after he spent his lifetime fortune, he wants to save more.
At the end of the film, he’s broken and cries out as if bargaining
with God. “One more. Please God, Just one more.”
In my own words after every semester teaching students
seeing so many grow and change but wishing my hands and reach
were big enough and I could save
just one more.
Like Harriet Tubman after every mission, having rescued
over 300 slaves, but said, “if they only knew they were slaves
I could have saved so many more.”
No this story is not about them, but like a song is sung
with all of my soul and blood and is dedicated to one person,
one memorial, one funeral, tribute,
where I did not speak.
In this lifetime
there are people with whom you become friends
for reasons unknown
to whom like stars you gravitate
no need for words, long explanation, like a lost or missing piece
of an enormous puzzle,
they just fit,
like when flipping through photographs in an old album,
resemble someone you met once, can’t name
but are part of your tribe, a long lost family member
as once described in a book and subsequent film by Alex Haley,
Roots, an autobiography in which he, the grandson
of Southern slaves traces his family tree from Southern plantations back to Africa.
The search consumes almost his entire adult life.
Finally, he stumbles upon an African village
containing members, descendants, aunts, uncles, cousins,
grandchildren, and great great grandchildren of his long lost family.
In the film’s most memorable and moving sequence, all the members of his tribe
and village line up on the edge of a river bank
to greet him. Alex spots them at first by boat.
As if closing a great divide, chasm and loneliness that’s existed
in his soul for so long,
he touches the ground and screams out,
“I found you. I’ve finally found you.”
With arms outstretched he and his family embrace,
welcoming and treasuring each other immediately.
This family is who poet Donald Woods was to me.
We met in 1987 outside of a lesbian and gay bookstore
on Hudson Street in the West Village. It was called A Different Light.
Via the grapevine, I heard the literary troupe, Other Countries
was performing and Donald Woods, a star student of Audre Lorde’s
was the main attraction.
After the reading’s summation, I stood outside on the sidewalk
and met Donald.
No matter how skilled and eloquent his words were,
I was struck by beauty, his elegant and
dark chestnut skin, gleaming teeth, proud mane of dreadlocks
and long lanky stature resembling the African Masai.
Like Alex Haley, I too have endured a lifelong search,
being adopted, I do not know my own history.
I have never known a biological family or experienced physical likeness.
So, I imagined in a small but narcissistic way
if my birth parents had had a son, in this lifetime or another
Donald was part of my family, a lost connection, link, or as they say
the missing piece.
In our first conversation outside of A Different Light,
I mentioned offhandedly, “I’m looking for place to stay, Do you know any?”
“No,” he said thoughtfully. My apartment's tiny. My sister stays with me,”
but then added in the generous spirit I came to know,
“You’re welcome if you want to sleep on my couch.”
I guess I was again struck by Donald and the fact that in 1987
I’d been befriended by a complete stranger who offered me a place to sleep.
I didn’t accept, but it began a friendship and camaraderie
heightened by frequent dinners, telephone conversations, and
subsequent artistic collaborations.
The most memorable collaboration was at the tribute to Pat Parker,
The pioneering Black lesbian poet who hailed from San Francisco
like Audre Lorde had died prematurely from cancer.
It was an all-star event where Craig Harris and Essex Hemphill appeared.
Cheryl Clarke read Pat’s signature work,
“Where will you be when they come?”
Donald and I read Pat’s work about childrearing
With her signature humor
“Some people think we wake up
chanting to our children
you’re gonna be a dyke, you’re gonna be a dyke.”
In addition to activism and poetry, Donald was part
of a musical group that sang acappella spirituals.
His favorite was an old soul classic titled, “Grandma’s Hands.”
Seeing him as he sang this song in concert, caused me to write
after his death:
I know if there’s heaven,
He’s wearing kente cloth
head back
eyes to sky
singing about grandma’s hands.
He was pivotal to my development as a poet.
He sometimes grabbed me after a reading like a protective older brother,
wrapped his arms around me and said, “God bless this woman, bless her.”
A few years later, when he disclosed he was HIV positive,
Within months had full blown AIDS, we grew closer
Spent long hours on the telephone talking
when we both should have been at work.
Our most memorable dialogue came during the LA riots
after the Rodney King verdict when white policemen
were acquitted of savagely beating Black motorist Rodney King.
In response, in certain LA neighborhoods Blacks began looting
stores and stealing among many things washing machines.
Donald, as a devout Christian and moral human being
was appalled by the idea of Black people looting stores and stealing washing machines
which in my mind aren’t in any way restitution for more than
400 years of slavery
equitable recompense for the physical and psychological stress
not a compensatory package for our massive and
remaining
scars
So I as a self-styled revolutionary I believed in a
temporary settlement,
while Donald as if he could see all of the gains of our ancestors disintegrate,
repeated in shock and disbelief, “Washing machines?!
I can’t believe they’ve stolen washing machines.”
In subsequent conversations, his positions on life,
and body weakened.
He left work.
What I didn’t know then but know now as
the last time I would ever see him in the flesh
is after I had gone to see him accept an award for his
extraordinary work as the director of AIDS films.
For the honor, he wore a dark blue suit. He resembled a soldier,
a statuesque and decorated warrior recently returned
from fields of World War II.
Donald was proud and only indicated illness after the ceremony
when alone with him.
He asked for a drink of water and held onto my arm feebly
like a young man who’d aged in rapid, meteoric amounts of time.
Weeks later he was emaciated, smothered with KS lesions, pneumonia, and bedridden.
He lost motor skills, even ability to control his bowels.
Like many in the end, he did not allow visitors,
needed a nurse to clothe and bathe him.
In our final conversation, he could no longer speak,
but when told by a friend and nurse I was on the line
he whispered into the mouthpiece a barely audible,
“I love you.”
I was standing outside of my job at the agency for lesbian
and gay youth when I received news of Donald’s passing.
Like a cords of a broken exposed telephone, all I felt were wiry fingers
of cold, steel, stock.
As I looked around at the surrounding birds, trees, sky,
all that seemed to remain on that early summer day only the ground
looked welcoming like a cool and restful mat, I wanted to lie down on,
press my ears, face against it to feel closer to Donald.
I wanted to lay down, rolling back and forth,
screaming out, the way I’d seen one grief stricken young man
do on the late spring day Rory Buchanan died.
He laid on the pavement outside of the funeral home and
screamed rocking and rolling the way people in some Black Pentecostal
churches do when someone’s possessed by spirits
or the holy ghost
Or at funerals when grief gets too much
The way I’d seen once at a childhood family cookout
too much lighter fluid caused a gas grill to blow up
my father shielded me but I suffered third degree burns.
My aunt’s clothes caught fire, she tried to put it out by laying down
on the ground and rolled back and forth to relieve the horror
and sensation of skin and flesh burning.
The same way I’d seen my father do when his mother, my beloved grandmother
died, he picked up her face and from the casket and kissed her.
My grandfather’s skin too was on fire and he shouted, I will meet you, Pearl,
at those pearly gates
Wanting to join his partner in heaven.
This was all I felt, every emotion held, while I sat at the memorial
for Donald where I was not asked and did not speak.
The memorial had been arranged by Other Countries, and his brothers
had full control.
Perhaps they too were weary, tired of the Funeral Diva.
Perhaps they wanted a new person, a fresher face,
but to see and hear all of them assembled who at that moment
seemed to be strangers, it was all I could do to show restraint,
not scream out at the top of my lungs—
None of you really knew him as I did, he was my brother.
For a politico, a so-called revolutionary, someone belonging
to a larger picture, these were selfish thoughts, but I needed in one way
to clear the room, be alone with Donald once more,
like during our intimate phone talks, to place my ear against his,
treasure our bond, but in another way,
I had simply wanted to speak.
At the funeral, inside of the church loyalties again were divided
between some of Donald’s activist lesbian and gay family
and his biological one.
Like him Donald’s immediate family was devoutly Christian
at odds with the fact he was gay and purposefully failed to mention
in the program or eulogy one thing most important
Donald lived most of thirty-three years as an out gay man
Like Rory Buchanan, Craig Harris, Alan Williams,
Don Reid, David Frechette, he died of AIDS. Like our elders
Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and James Baldwin he was a
pioneering figure in a Black lesbian and gay literary movement.
All of them died with dignity, fighting for rights of lesbian and gay people.
They did not die in shame.
This glaring omission ignited our fury and caused
the late great activist and poet Assotto Saint, a brown-skinned man
whose own recent AIDS diagnosis was a ticking time bomb
who stood more than 6' 5" in stocking feet, a self-proclaimed diva
with a French Haitian accent used for effect,
to rise from his pew, saunter down the church’s long aisle like a Parisian
model walking on a runway with determination
speed and attitude, he stormed the pulpit, uninvited
slammed his hand on the bible as done when one wants
to tell truth
to everyone’s shock he screamed, “Donald Woods was a
proud Black gay man, he did not die of heart failure.
He died of AIDS. If you agree with me, stand up.”
As in the way I met Donald without questioning I leapt
to my feet and felt for the first time in a ceremony of
pomp and circumstance—free.
In my peripheral vision I saw a room full of strangers
divided by politics and identity
In the middle stood Donald’s biological sister.
For all of the stated reasons, I felt a strange affinity with her
like between us was an unspoken bond
like distant stars always having shared the same love
from a different proximity.
EPILOGUE:
Twenty years later I received a call from Gregg Bordowitz who asked
me to read poetry at a tribute to Other Countries at the Whitney Museum.
Without knowing our relationship, he asked me to speak about Donald Woods.
“He was one of my best friends,” I said.
At the tribute, I read David Frechette’s poem, “Je Ne Regrette Rien”
as well as Essex Hemphill’s, “When My Brother Fell.”
I also read Donald Woods’s poem, “Prescription.”
I read an inscription Donald had written to me
on the inside cover of Brother to Brother, a Black gay male anthology:
Dear Pamela,
Thank you for appreciating the love of brothers for brothers.
Love is the light of the world.
When I finished there wasn’t a dry eye.
Later in an unfinished poem I would describe that moment
As I imagined a soldier would,
“I had to go back to the warfront, to reconstruct his body parts,
and bring him home.”
And I felt like Alex Haley finally closing a chasm,
a great divide in his soul
having put my brother to proper rest.
There are many things to up
date, since Rodney King,
at this time the number of police killings has increased against Black men
and reached crisis proportions.
I do not believe as some writers do that this violence is new, only
the cameras are. America is imploding
from crimes of the past.
Those of us who are left from that Black lesbian and gay literary
scene still write.
After a period of silence
we are finally able to process
and writing about that time has begun to flourish.
Documenting the lives of Black lesbians and gays who died
of AIDS and cancer is part of my life’s work.
I am a professor.
I feel often like the daughter of Kizzy in Roots who returns
to the grave of her father the famous runaway
Kunta Kinte.
In defiance, she scratches off his slave name Toby on a wooden marker
and writes his preferred and biological name Kunta Kinte
as if to say as I am saying now, we are still here.
Don’s son Baby Max is a young man like his father
He has become a visual artist.
He still struggles with the loss of his fathers to AIDS.
There is a picture of Donald and me at a gay pride event in March 1991.
He is holding my waist and we are looking out and smiling.
At present, I am in love. One day at a time.
Some days I look at her and wish like Alex Haley after a lifelong
search,
I could shout “I found you. Finally, I found you.”
This piece took fifteen years to write.
I am tired.
I can feel the hands of Donald, Don Reid, David Frechette,
Rory Buchanan, Bert Hunter, Alan Williams, Audre Lorde,
Pat Parker, Marlon Riggs, Essex Hemphill, and Assotto Saint pushing me
across the finish line.
NEVER AGAIN
At the end of every Holocaust film I’ve seen and
there are not many
they show real life survivors and say the words
Never Again
Some of us like me/stare into these films
down the long tunnels of history wondering
how it could have ever happened at all
that a leader and his minions could be so toxic, poisonous
you’d turn against your neighbors
you could be so oblivious, brainwashed, scared
desperate to be superior or to survive
you’d do anything, or almost.
They say never again
but it is again
as I look at the deportations
round-ups
I’m reminded of Idi Amin when he cast out foreigners
