Bob Marley is the person who taught me to trust the Universe enough to respect my hair; I don’t even have to close my eyes to see him dancing his shamanic dance onstage, as he sang his “redemption songs” and consistently poured out his heart to us. If ever anyone truly loved us, it was Bob Marley, and much of that affirmation came out of the way he felt about himself. I remember the first time I saw pictures of Marley, and of that other amazing rebel, Peter Tosh. I couldn’t imagine that those black ropes on their heads were hair. And then, because the songs they were singing meant the ropes had to be hair, natural hair to which nothing was added, not even a brushing, I realized they had managed to bring, or to reintroduce, a healthful new look, and way, to the world. I wondered what such hair felt like, smelled like. What a person dreamed about at night, with hair like that spread across the pillow. And, even more intriguing, what would it be like to make love to someone with hair on your head like that, and to be made love to by someone with hair on his or her head like that? It must be like the mating of lions, I thought. Aroused.
It wasn’t until the filming of The Color Purple in 1985 that I got to explore someone’s dreads. By then I had started “baby dreads” of my own, from tiny plaits, and had only blind faith that they’d grow eventually into proper locks. In the film there is a scene in which Sofia’s sisters are packing up her things as she prepares to leave her trying-to-be-abusive husband, Harpo. All Sofia’s “sisters” were large, good-looking local women (“location” was Monroe, North Carolina), and one of them was explaining why she had to wear a cap in the scene instead of the more acceptable-to-the-period head rag or straw hat. “I have too much hair,” she said. “Besides, back then [the 1920s] nobody would have been wearing dreads.” Saying this, she swept off her roomy cap, and a cascade of vigorous locks fell way down her back. From a downtrodden, hardworking Southern black woman she was transformed into a free Amazonian Goddess. I laughed in wonder at the transformation, my fingers instantly seeking her hair.
I then asked the question I would find so exasperating myself in years to come: How do you wash it?
She became very serious, as if about to divulge a major secret. “Well,” she said, “I use something called shampoo, that you can buy at places like supermarkets and health food stores. I get into something called a shower, wet my hair, and rub this stuff all over it. I stand under the water and I scrub and scrub, working up a mighty lather. Then I rinse.” She smiled, suddenly, and I realized how ridiculous my question was. Through the years I would find myself responding to people exactly as she had, delighting in their belated recognition that I am joking with them.
The texture of her hair was somehow both firm and soft, springy, with the clean, fresh scent of almonds. It was a warm black, and sunlight was caught in each kink and crinkle, so that up close there was a lot of purple and blue. I could feel how, miraculously, each lock wove itself into a flat or rounded pattern shortly after it left her scalp—a machine could not have done it with more precision—so that the “matting” I had assumed was characteristic of dreadlocks could more accurately be described as “knitting.” How many black people had any idea that, left pretty much to itself, our hair would do this, I wondered. Not very many, I was sure. I had certainly been among the uninformed. It was a moment so satisfying, when I felt my faith in my desire to be natural was so well deserved, that it is not an exaggeration to say I was, in a way, made happy forever. After all, if this major mystery could be discovered right on top of one’s head, I thought, what other wonders might not be experienced in the Universe’s exuberant, inexhaustible store?
My Face to
the Light
THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTMAS
Seed Catalogs like Paper Flowers
I did not know what Christmas was until I moved to the West Coast. During much of my adult life I’d viewed it as a season marked by the ritual killing of millions of trees, just as, for me, Thanksgiving is a day that represents the ritual killing, and eating, of millions of birds. I was sickened by the thought of all those stumps, all those bleeding necks, and by the message given to children that it is okay to sacrifice living beings in order to express appreciation for being alive yourself, or in order to celebrate the birth of a sacred person, Jesus Christ, who was himself against killing.
As a child I had not thought of this at all. Then, the message was entirely different. I grew up in a historically oppressed (racially), economically poor, rural black Southern community where Christmas was the only time it was possible to collectively celebrate the only generous and cheerful white man anyone in the community was ever likely to know: Santa Claus. This was done with such enthusiasm and tenderness—and Santa’s rosy cheeks were described with such bemused accuracy—that as a three-year-old one Christmas morning, I announced I’d actually seen him the night before, as he stole about the house, sampling the pies and cakes my mother always made and left out for him, and filling our shoeboxes and brown paper bags with apples, raisins, oranges, and nuts. (What would have been the imprint on white children’s minds, I was later to wonder, if once a year they were encouraged to welcome a stealthily moving large black man into their sleeping houses in the middle of the night?)
When I became a student in college and studied the oppression of black people by white ones, and by the laws of white supremacy that still obtained in the South (so that as a child I could not enter a “public” restaurant, library, or swimming pool), I was angry with my parents for their Santa Claus worship. Until I realized that, like the white figure of Christ, whom they also appeared to worship, Santa Claus represented an ideal person who was compelled to be white (in a society in which the country’s president, the mayors of towns, and the police were also white), and that their intention in accepting him was to help us all remember that there could indeed be an ideal white man, worthy of friendliness and tender regard (in a setting where not one white man was known to fit Santa’s merry, adventuresome, and undiscriminating description). It was their desire to instill in us, amid the racist violence of the segregated American South, as perhaps it is the desire of black parents today to instill in their children in the apartheid violence of South Africa, a degree of faith in the miracles that one can expect to occur in human nature per se: a degree of hope.
But when I moved to Northern California I left behind all I had known about Christmas, and against the hectic shopping days that Christmas has become for so many, I barricaded myself. Going to the beach, reading, taking long walks, eating at Chinese or Thai restaurants on Christmas Day, or fasting on fruit. And then, because of the person with whom I share many of life’s rituals (and a good number of its trials), I discovered what Christmas is. That it is the day of the winter solstice and was originally celebrated on the twenty-first or twenty-second of December, the day when the sun, having gone as far south as it ever gets, begins to move back north. It is, my friend said, the day the sun, the light, begins to come back in the Northern Hemisphere. In a way you could say it is the first day spring becomes possible. The birth of Jesus has been affixed to the seeming rebirth of the sun, but the rebirth of the sun has been worshiped since many millennia before Christ. Undoubtedly it has been worshiped, by plants and single-cell animals, since the very beginning of the planet’s life.
This changed forever how I feel about Christmas. And how I celebrate it—usually, these days, with a sweat (via sauna), a vegetarian feast, and music making and dancing, with friends. I would never dream of killing anything for it; or even of thinking of it as an event that requires the least bit of frantic activity. For me, the excitement about the sun’s return begins to build several days in advance of the winter solstice, and my celebration consists of a heightened awareness of the losing ground of winter, no matter how cold the days might be, and an intense expectation of the day itself, which, when it arrives, is greeted by my face turned up to the (if I am lucky) sunny heavens. The days after are spent in quiet appreciation of the possibility of another spring (my favorite of all seasons) and
thoughts of seeds and planting. I lie late in bed, thinking of the sun as of a long-traveling friend who is at last coming back home to me, my collection of seed catalogs covering me like paper flowers.
It isn’t that I don’t think of Christmas at all anymore as a possible birthday for Jesus Christ (though it’s true that I never think of Santa Claus, faith in whom, it seems to me, has been perhaps permanently lost), but I think of it more as the rebirthday of every being that longs for the return of the warmth of the sun and loves the light. Surely it is my rebirthday too.
What Can I Give
My Daughters,
Who Are Brave?
This speech was delivered at Spelman College on Commencement Day, May 22, 1995.
A Woman Is Not a Potted Plant
While thinking of you, and of this special, blessed day—this day when you embark on yet another journey in your life; this day when you say good-bye to so much that is known, in order to embrace the much larger Universe of what is not known—I was thinking of the famous anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, edited by Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith.
Brave. That’s you. I look out at you now and I see it clearly. Brave is simply your name. I see the hope, the optimism, the joy, on your beautiful shining faces, and I know exactly what you are bringing out into this very scary world: you are bringing bright and willing minds, and strong and capable hearts and hands. The world, in its suffering and confusion, needs you desperately.
But what can I give you, on such a special day? I have stayed awake in the night asking myself this. At last it came to me. I can offer you the gift of my experience in many areas of life, in the thirty years since I left Spelman. I can honor my role as mentor, big sister, aunt, or even mother. Because, after all, you are all daughters of my heart.
My years since leaving Spelman have been rich in experiences of all kinds: in creativity, in struggle, in suffering, in growth, in evolution and change. The poet in me has made good use of everything, and as I look back, the poems are like glistening stones along the moist riverbank of trial and error I have walked along. It is the benefit of distilled experience you must have. It is the essence, the poem of my experience, that you deserve as medicine for your own journeys.
And I ask myself:
What can I give you for comfort on those bleak days to come—and they will—when you are wondering if “this” (whatever the limit is that you have reached) is all there is. I can give you this poem:
EXPECT NOTHING
Expect nothing. Live frugally
on surprise.
Become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.
Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress
Unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.
Discover the reason why
So tiny human giant
Exists at all.
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
on surprise.
What can I give you for a day when the inequality of the world strikes you as so blatant that you are at a loss for words? When you weep instead of speak? When the scenes on your television and in your town cause you to feel some people are wearing generations of the suffering of others dangling from their ears and throats? I can give you this poem:
THE DIAMONDS ON LIZ’S BOSOM
The diamonds on Liz’s bosom
are not as bright
as his eyes
the morning they took him
to work in the mines.
The rubies in Nancy’s
jewel box (Oh, how Ronald loves red!)
not as vivid
as the despair
in his children’s
frowns.
Oh, those Africans!
Everywhere you look
they’re bleeding
and crying
Crying and bleeding
on some of the whitest necks
in your town.
What can I give you to remind you that each one of us constantly makes and remakes the world? And that if we can only trust in our own willingness to change, we need not despair? I give you this poem:
WE ALONE
We alone can devalue gold
by not caring
if it falls or rises
in the marketplace.
Wherever there is gold
there is a chain, you know,
and if your chain
is gold
so much the worse
for you.
Feathers, shells,
and sea-shaped stones
are all as rare.
This could be our revolution:
To love what is plentiful
as much as
what is scarce.
What can I give you to help you stay strong when you feel that the world is turned against you and that you are standing, perhaps even naked, absolutely all alone? I give you this poem:
BE NOBODY’S DARLING
Be nobody’s darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm.
Watch the people succumb
To madness
With ample cheer
Let them look askance at you
And you askance reply.
Be an outcast;
Be pleased to walk alone
(Uncool)
Or line the crowded
Riverbeds
With other impetuous
Fools.
Make a merry gathering
On the bank
Where thousands perished
For brave hurt words
They said.
But
Be nobody’s darling;
Be an outcast.
Qualified to live
Among your dead.
What can I give you to help you through the day, which will surely come, when you give your glowing heart to someone unworthy of it? I give you this poem:
NEVER OFFER YOUR HEART TO SOMEONE WHO EATS HEARTS
Never offer your heart
to someone who eats hearts
who finds heartmeat
delicious
but not rare
who sucks the juices
drop by drop
and bloody-chinned
grins
like a God.
Never offer your heart
to a heart gravy lover.
Your stewed, overseasoned
heart consumed
he will sop up your grief
with bread
and send it shuttling
from side to side
in his mouth
like bubblegum.
If you find yourself
in love
with a person
who eats hearts
these things
you must do:
Freeze your heart
immediately.
Let him—next time
he examines your chest—
find your heart cold
flinty and unappetizing.
Refrain from kissing
lest he in revenge
dampen the spark
in your soul.
Now,
sail away to Africa
where holy women
await you
on the shore—
long having practiced the art
of replacing hearts
with God
and Song.<
br />
And what can I give you for that day, which shall come without fail, when you love and are loved by “the wrong person”? The person all of society deems unsuitable. But rather than honestly stating its prejudices, it says instead that Love itself, and particularly the fierce, heartbeat-accelerating love you are experiencing, is wrong. Or, at the very least, out of style.
I give you: “While Love Is Unfashionable” (which I wrote for the “unsuitable” person I married many years ago—who was simply the sweetest, bravest person around). And although this union did not last forever, I have no regrets. Rather, I have a beautiful daughter and memories of uniting in love and faith with her father against the grinding humiliation of daily racist oppression in the Deep South.
WHILE LOVE IS UNFASHIONABLE
While love is unfashionable
let us live
unfashionably.
Seeing the world
a complex ball
in small hands.
Love our blackest garment.
Let us be poor
in all but truth, and courage
handed down
by the old
spirits.
Let us be intimate with
ancestral ghosts
and music
of the undead.
While love is dangerous
let us walk bareheaded
beside the Great River.
Let us gather blossoms
under fire.
Besides, in another poem about love, “Beyond What,” I can tell you:
We reach for destinies beyond
what we have come to know
and in the romantic hush
of promises
perceive each
the other’s life
as known mystery.
Shared. But inviolate.
No melting. No squeezing
into One.
We swing our eyes around
as well as side to side
to see the world.
To choose, renounce,
this, or that—
call it a council between equals
call it love.
And what can I give you for the day when you realize you don’t know what you’re doing or where you’re going? A day that will come, as surely as the night follows the day. A day when you’ve lost your way, your light, your joy, and maybe even your self. A day, in fact, when all you have are questions, not one single answer, and these questions feel like a nest of snakes slithering back and forth through your brain.