Photo: C.B. Claiborne, 2004

a wail

a whoop

a line brought back from nowhere.

deep violet of memory,

stored up against hard times’ coming. 

we were righteous then, 

experienced in things we had not seen

but always knew

would pass this way. 

we had righteousness on our side. 

they say you stood before a small audience in

     new orleans last year and abused them for their smallness. 

not just their numbers

but their looks. 

their soulless way of sitting 

and waiting to be entertained.

they told me how you stood there and cursed them good. 

told me how they took it

for the sake

of all they used to be so long ago they never could forget.

could only say like the old folk, when cornered perhaps, 

said “i disremember” 

i  asked them what you wore. 

i remembered the years i struggled with the very private fear

that i would remain a child forever

and miss all that was major in our one moment of glory. 

even a child knows there is one such moment. 

one. 

even i had sense enough to see you and not weep.

even a child understood the words

“sister”

“brother” 

“people” 

“power” 

and anyone could see we were all the evening news

and hear you sing—

at least that was what they called it.

it was my best girlfriend’s sister

who came up on us closed off in her bedroom

laughing over her cosmetics, her jewelry, her sex, her t.v.

and instead of sending us out

leaned there in the doorway and smiled.

“you two know so much, 

want to be so grown and everything, 

need to quit all that giggling 

and learn to listen to nina.”

that was late autumn.

aletha came into her own bedroom and sat between us on the bed. 

she turned up the volume

but did not change the station.

we watched her and her college friends

in dashikis and afros

on the evening news. 

that year marceline and i listened close

to the lyrics and the ways

the easy breaths and breathless lines

the underground silences

of you and roberta.

we argued and sassed,

slapped hands on our hips and the slightest provocation,

and learned when and when not to apologize for it.

two brown girls acting out, 

mothers looking out over our heads that way they had then

whenever we went so far we did not need to be told.

we gave our telephone numbers to those boys

with the hippest walks

the better grade of afro

the deep-changing voices, 

and we never took their calls. 

we danced the sophisticated sissy

the thing

the shake

the go-on

the soul strut.

we counted our girlfriends

“soul sister number 1”

“soul sister number 2”

marceline learned to cornrow

and i braided my older brother’s bush each night.

we were too much and we knew it.

we thought we understood it all. 

deep violet

deep violet

but that was years ago.

and you were in your glory then. 

then, 

while i was still younger than i knew or admitted, 

and studying in the south of france, 

i danced four nights out of five and all weekend,

my arms on the hips or shoulders

of some wiry brother from cameroun or ivory coast

senegal, algeria, panama, martinique,

one of only six or seven young black women at university

among the dozens and dozens of dark men who circled us

weaving their weightless cloth

their heavy guard. 

escorted when i would have been alone

fed when i had no hunger

driven when i lacked a destination

protected from the mere possibility of danger–

and danger to them

we knew

meant “frenchmen/

whitemen”–

courted and cossetted 

and danced into sleeplessness. 

“you will be old one day, sister.

then you will sleep fine.”

but their hearts,

the dark wiry hearts of the brothers, 

were in the right places.

the foolish ones said

“you are like women of my country”

and feigned weaknesses no one would believe 

they ever even remotely had known. 

and often enough

had the immediate good sense 

to laugh at themselves

and then at the rest of us. 

the others did something like waiting. 

danced endlessly, and at the end of evening said

“i have this sister,

this nina.

play some for my sister here, man.

man, get up and put on that nina simone.”

and we sat in the silence in the dark

as one found the shiny vinyl

and put the needle to the darker groove.

we sat choked with roman cigarettes

too much dancing

too much good food.

we sat listening and did not touch.

we looked at one another’s hands

and read recognition there. 

one day we would be old.

we would sleep

and no longer know one another.

we sat into the night

until we grew hungry again and sick from the stale air.

we listened

we wailed

we did not touch

or bow down our heads.

and that is the meaning

of the word expatriate. 

if you live right

if you live right

if you live right

but what has living done for you? 

i heard your voice

over the radio late one night in cambridge 

telling how you never meant to sing.

whoever interviewed you hardly said a word.

he asked his questions

and you took your time.

you breathed long breaths between phrases, 

your speaking voice lighter

and less lived than i remembered.

you sang a line or two

and talked about your “life.”

i asked my question

directly into the speaker—

“what the hell did living do for you girl?”

i sat on the floor and drank my coffee.

i paced the carpet between your pauses.

i pulled my nightdress up in both hands and danced.

but i got no satisfaction that night.

and, for what it matters,

heaven did not come to me either.

don’t talk to me about soul.

don’t tell me about no damned soul.

years and years and years

of all night long

and-a where are you

and making time and doing right.

expatriate years.

years, woman, years.

where were you?

and then you sang “Fodder on My Wings”

with not a note of holy in your voice,

and what could i do?

a young woman,

i put myself to bed.

it was the following year 

that you cursed them down in new orleans.

dragged for them like muddy water.

i listened to the story on the telephone

or looked into the faces i came on in the streets.

“what”

i asked them

“did she wear?”

and do you think they could tell me?

all i asked the people

was what did the woman have on?

and what about it? 

if your country’s full of lies

if your man leaves you

if your lover dies

if you lose your ground and there is no higher ground

if your people leave you 

if you got no people

if your pride is hurting

if you got no pride, no soul

if you living in danger

if you living in mississippi, baltimore, detroit

if you walk right, talk right, pray right

if you don’t bow down 

if you hungry

if you old

if you just don’t know

please

please

outside-a you there is no /

place to / go

these are the expatriate years, these.

what is left. 

the people dragged their sorry asses out to see you

and you cursed them

you looked out into their faces, those you could see

and accused them

you called them down for all those years.

you sang the songs you sand when you were younger

and you made them pay.

and then

deep violet

and a longer time no one will speak of.

dear nina, 

i want to say to you how we did not mean it.

how we did not mean to give you up

to let you go off alone that way. 

i want to say how we were younger people, all of us. 

but none of it is true.

we used you

and we tossed what we could not use to the whites

and they were glad to get it.

we tossed you out into such danger

and closed our eyes and ears to what was to become of you

in those years– 

deep

deep violet–

and worst of all

we did not even say your name.

we ate you like good hot bread

fresh from the table of an older woman

and then we tossed the rest out for the scavengers. 

does it matter? 

does it matter when and how we did it to you?

does it matter we got no righteousness from it?

that we felt no shame?

does it matter we took all good things in excess then, 

and then again?

not only you

but all things?

does it matter we sometimes return to you now,

in the back rooms of childhood friends, 

forgiven lovers?

does it matter this is no gift or tribute or right or holy thing

but just a kind of telling

a chronicle to play back

against those images that never quite made it

to the evening news?

how cursed 

how sorry a mess of people can we be, nina

when outside-a you

there is no place

to go?

afternoons

i rubbed the length of your thigh and hip beneath the covers.

you pressed your face across the entire wide plain

between my breasts.

you spoke words into that space,

against the bone,

words i never fully heard

or cared to comprehend. 

it was enough to feel your hands working their hoodoo

in and around

the hollow places between my meat and bone.

distance and the years and the dying:

these stand between us, 

preventatives to the kind of desire

that makes no allowance 

for sobriety 

or discretion.

there is danger still between us here,

tactile as a child’s warm breath at prayer-time,

and remembrance like stones about our waists.

but this much i can tell:

how some mojo, once worked, 

cannot be undone

not for love or money

guilty dreamings

or death—

and

long years from now

on sacred ground

we will have these stones between us

to count

and weigh

and rub together.