don’t keep a maid!
He is murderous and lazy
And I fear him,
This small, white man;
Who would be neither courteous
Nor clean
Without my help.
By the hour I linger
On his deficiencies
And his unfortunate disposition,
Keeping him sulking
And kicking
At the door.
There is the mind that creates
Without loving, for instance,
The childish greed;
The boatloads and boatloads of tongues…
Besides, where would he fit
If I did let him in?
No sitting at round tables
For him!
I could be a liberal
And admit one of his children;
Or be a radical and permit two.
But it is he asking
To be let in, alas.
Our mothers learned to receive him occasionally,
Passing as Christ. But this did not help us much.
Or perhaps it made all the difference.
But there. He is bewildered
And tuckered out with the waiting.
He’s giving up and going away.
Until the next time.
And murdered quite sufficiently, too, I think,
Until the next time.
I used to read this poem occasionally to my students, but stopped. The young white men present always thought “This small, white man” meant them, and that they were being “murdered” and excluded even in the classroom; the black men and women seemed to think the same thing, and that the “murder” was both literal and justified. They may all have had a point, and the poem does work on that level. However, the impetus for the poem came out of my struggle with my great-great-grandfather, the slave owner and rapist (what else was he? I’ve often racked my brains!) whom I had no intention of admitting into my self. The more I heard him plead, like a damned soul, to be let into my psyche (and it occurred to me that karmic justice being as exact as it is, I might be the only one of his descendants in whom his voice still exists), the more I denounced him as a white man, a killer, destroyer of the planet, a Wasichu, naturally no part of me. Get lost, you old bastard, is essentially what I said. Being a part of me already, however, he couldn’t.
I dreamed of him. My image of him at the time—and over a period of years, and still—was of a small, white, naked, pale-eyed, pale-haired, oldish white man. Weak-looking: weak, nearsighted eyes, weak limbs. Ineffectual. Hard to imagine him raping anyone—but then, she, my great-great-grandmother, was only eleven.
That is what I learned from relatives when I began to ask questions about “this small, white man,” wringing his hands and crying and begging outside my psyche (on his knobby knees) all alone. Already I had found my Indian great-great-grandmother, and she was safely smoking inside my heart.
It took the death of John Lennon to squeeze the old man through. John had been Irish, too (though born in Liverpool). And when he was murdered (and I loved him, “white” as he was, for there is no denying the beauty and greatness of his spirit), I felt the price we pay for closing anyone off. To cut anyone out of the psyche is to maim the personality; to suppress any part of the personality is to maim the soul.
And so, I opened the heart of my soul, and there, with the Africans, are the Indian great-great-grandmother and the old white child molester and rapist. Lately I have been urging him to enlarge his personality to include singing or making music on the fiddle. And to stop shouting!
But when I wrote a poem about the peaceful coming together racially, at last, of my psyche, a black male critic wrote the following:
…So as I receive Alice Walker’s 11th book (she has edited an additional one as well) and her fourth volume of poetry, I face my usual decision: Given my disdain for what she and her work represent, in too large a part, should I assess her work? I know I can count on having to cut through her whimpering, half-balanced neurosis and wonder how on earth to avoid an exercise in negativity. And, of course, all of this contemplation begins before I even open her latest book.
After I open it, the worst slaps at me almost before
He is murderous and lazy
And I fear him,
This small, white man;
Who would be neither courteous
Nor clean
Without my help.
By the hour I linger
On his deficiencies
And his unfortunate disposition,
Keeping him sulking
And kicking
At the door.
There is the mind that creates
Without loving, for instance,
The childish greed;
The boatloads and boatloads of tongues…
Besides, where would he fit
If I did let him in?
No sitting at round tables
For him!
I could be a liberal
And admit one of his children;
Or be a radical and permit two.
But it is he asking
To be let in, alas.
Our mothers learned to receive him occasionally,
Passing as Christ. But this did not help us much.
Or perhaps it made all the difference.
But there. He is bewildered
And tuckered out with the waiting.
He’s giving up and going away.
Until the next time.
And murdered quite sufficiently, too, I think,
Until the next time.
I used to read this poem occasionally to my students, but stopped. The young white men present always thought “This small, white man” meant them, and that they were being “murdered” and excluded even in the classroom; the black men and women seemed to think the same thing, and that the “murder” was both literal and justified. They may all have had a point, and the poem does work on that level. However, the impetus for the poem came out of my struggle with my great-great-grandfather, the slave owner and rapist (what else was he? I’ve often racked my brains!) whom I had no intention of admitting into my self. The more I heard him plead, like a damned soul, to be let into my psyche (and it occurred to me that karmic justice being as exact as it is, I might be the only one of his descendants in whom his voice still exists), the more I denounced him as a white man, a killer, destroyer of the planet, a Wasichu, naturally no part of me. Get lost, you old bastard, is essentially what I said. Being a part of me already, however, he couldn’t.
I dreamed of him. My image of him at the time—and over a period of years, and still—was of a small, white, naked, pale-eyed, pale-haired, oldish white man. Weak-looking: weak, nearsighted eyes, weak limbs. Ineffectual. Hard to imagine him raping anyone—but then, she, my great-great-grandmother, was only eleven.
That is what I learned from relatives when I began to ask questions about “this small, white man,” wringing his hands and crying and begging outside my psyche (on his knobby knees) all alone. Already I had found my Indian great-great-grandmother, and she was safely smoking inside my heart.
It took the death of John Lennon to squeeze the old man through. John had been Irish, too (though born in Liverpool). And when he was murdered (and I loved him, “white” as he was, for there is no denying the beauty and greatness of his spirit), I felt the price we pay for closing anyone off. To cut anyone out of the psyche is to maim the personality; to suppress any part of the personality is to maim the soul.
And so, I opened the heart of my soul, and there, with the Africans, are the Indian great-great-grandmother and the old white child molester and rapist. Lately I have been urging him to enlarge his personality to include singing or making music on the fiddle. And to stop shouting!
But when I wrote a poem about the peaceful coming together racially, at last, of my psyche, a black male critic wrote the following:
…So as I receive Alice Walker’s 11th book (she has edited an additional one as well) and her fourth volume of poetry, I face my usual decision: Given my disdain for what she and her work represent, in too large a part, should I assess her work? I know I can count on having to cut through her whimpering, half-balanced neurosis and wonder how on earth to avoid an exercise in negativity. And, of course, all of this contemplation begins before I even open her latest book.
After I open it, the worst slaps at me almost before
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