Love Jones

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in sort of a black middle-class racial cocoon. We had black-owned businesses and strong block clubs. My parents filled our childhood with messages of black uplift and positive images to counter the prevailing mainstream narrative about African Americans. Exposure to African-American literature came from my mother. Learning about black poets and writers nurtured me and let me know I, too, could be a writer. When my sister or 
I had a bad day, we joked: “life for me ain’t been no crystal stair,” 
a line from a Langston Hughes poem we learned early on.

When we were children, my mother would gather us for story time. Occasionally, she read poetry. I remember when she introduced us to Paul Laurence Dunbar:

’LIAS! ’Lias! Bless de Lawd!

Don’ you know de day’s erbroad?

Ef you don’ git up, you scamp,

Dey’ll be trouble in dis camp.

T’ink I gwine to let you sleep

W’ile I meks yo’ boa’d an’ keep?

Dat’s a putty howdy-do —

Don’ you hyeah me, ’Lias — you?

— From In the Morning

My younger siblings, Joey and Megan, and I loved Dunbar’s use of black dialect. We took turns reading stanzas aloud, cracking up at whoever this ’Lias person was getting fussed at so early in the morning. Megan recited the poem anytime she had to perform an oratory contest.

Poetry changes for me depending on what I need. I can’t count the number of times I heard little ones perform Useni Eugene Perkins’s “Hey Black Child” at talent shows. Chicago native Perkins is a poet and youth activist influenced by the Black Arts Movement of the sixties. He served as executive director of the Better Boys Foundation, a Chicago social services agency. Working with youth informed his writing. He wanted teens to soar above stereotypes served up by Hollywood. Perkins’s plays lionized Ida B. Wells and Paul Robeson.

Hey Black Child

Do you know who you are?

Who you really are

Do you know you can be?

What you want to be

If you try to be

What you can be

Hey Black Child!

Do you know where you are going?

Where you’re really going

I took acting classes at a black theater, which furthered those messages of elevation. As a teenager, my go-to monologue came from Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide /  When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” I pretended to be a grown-up like Lady in Blue.

one thing I dont need

is any more apologies

i got sorry greetin me at my front door

you can keep yrs

i dont know what to do wit em

they dont open doors

or bring the sun back

they don’t make me happy

or get a mornin paper

didnt nobody stop usin my tears to wash cars

cuz a sorry.

When I attended college in the nineties, the coffeehouse/jazz/
poetry scene flourished. The movie Love Jones, whose lead character wrote poetry, reflected the smoke-hazed mood. Unfortunately, in real life, much of the poetry sucked — from people who used open mics as a pick-up schtick to those who made Hallmark card writers seem profound. Throw in some perfunctory “motherland” militant pieces and oversexed erotica under a bed of audience snaps. I say this not out of snobbery but because back then I thought I needed to write poetry. It fit the boho writer aesthetic I craved. So much so it became a joke to my family that I only dated dreadlocked poets.

More than a decade later, I participated in the local humanities program. My good friend Alice, a poet, led a workshop in which we riffed on a Gwendolyn Brooks poem: “We are each other’s / harvest: /  we are each other’s / business: / we are each other’s / magnitude and bond.” In small groups we discussed how we are each other’s business in a racially segregated city like Chicago.

When writing my latest book, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, I asked Alice to recommend a passage about the meaning of home because sometimes poets can do what I can’t. She found Maya Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes: “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”

I recently had a baby and at my shower friends and family created a keepsake book with pearls of wisdom. Alice tapped into Angelou again and wrote in gold cursive: “Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.” Another reminder that we are each other’s business, 
and proof that when one is searching for the right words poetry can express the sentiment.

Now that I have a new baby girl, I hope to repeat what my mother did for me with black poets. Now I just have to decide which poem 
I will read to her first. I’m leaning toward one by Gwendolyn Brooks.