I can take another breath. Her poem-dedication reads:
for two who
slipped away
almost
entirely:
my “part” Cherokee
great-grandmother
Tallulah
(Grandmama Lula)
on my mother’s side
about whom
only one
agreed-upon
thing
is known:
her hair was so long
she could sit on it;
and my white (Anglo-Irish?)
great-great-grandfather
on my father’s side;
nameless
(Walker, perhaps?),
whose only remembered act
is that he raped
a child:
my great-great-grandmother,
who bore his son,
my great-grandfather,
when she was eleven…
So again, here we go with the old Negro refrain of: me ain’t really a nigger…no, no … me really a injin; and let me point out the rapist in my bloodline to you. The Negro is the only species who goes around advertising he or she was raped and has a rapist in his or her bloodline, it is the kind of twisted pathology that black psychology is still trying to unravel.
Yet none of this can be taken lightly because Alice Walker is being pushed by the Liberal mainstream as the black writer in season—while they seek to remove Toni Morrison—with her incessant searching for truth and healing in black life—from that pedestal. But the truth is Mrs. Morrison won’t go for the bone of divide-and-conquer that the Liberals especially like to see black people gnawing at. One can see their dribble-laden glee when they can find a black man who through his actions or words attacks a black woman and vice versa. So, of course, they love Ms. Walker, lover of queer bourgeois Liberal affectations and deep-down hater of black.
These comments, by black poet and writer K. T. H. Cheatwood, appeared in a review of my collection of poems Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful in the Richmond (Virginia) News Leader, in the winter of 1984. Unfortunately, in quoting my poem-dedication to my white and Indian ancestors, he left off the most important section:
Rest in peace.
The meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.
Rest in peace.
In me
the meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.
Rest in peace, in me.
The meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.
Rest. In me
the meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.
Rest. In peace
in me
the meaning
of our lives
is still
unfolding.
Mr. Cheatwood thinks, apparently, that I should be ashamed to mention, to “advertise” my great-great-grandmother’s rape. He assumes an interest, on my part, in being other than black, of being “white.” I, on the hand, feel it is my blackness (not my skin color so much as the culture that nurtured me) that causes me to open myself, acknowledge my soul and its varied components, take risks, affirm everyone I can find (for I, too, have been called everything but a child of God), and that inasmuch as my great-great-grandmother was forced to endure rape and the birth of a child she couldn’t have wanted, as well, the least I can do is mention it. In truth, this is all the herstory of her that I know. But if I affirm that , then I can at least imagine what the rest of her life must have been like. And this, I believe, has some importance for us all.
We are the African and the trader. We are the Indian and the settler. We are the slaver and the enslaved. We are oppressor and oppressed. We are the women and we are the men. We are the children. The ancestors, black and white, who suffered during slavery—and I’ve come to believe they all did; you need only check your own soul to imagine how—grieve, I believe, when a black man oppresses women, and when a black woman or man mistreats a child. They’ve paid those dues. Surely they bought our gentleness toward each other with their pain.
So, these are my thoughts, Mpinga. I love that, though born in America, you have chosen an African name. I can remember when such an expression of psychic and cultural duality would have been but vaguely understood. But times change, and people do, too. Now such affirmations are almost routine. The infinite faith I have
for two who
slipped away
almost
entirely:
my “part” Cherokee
great-grandmother
Tallulah
(Grandmama Lula)
on my mother’s side
about whom
only one
agreed-upon
thing
is known:
her hair was so long
she could sit on it;
and my white (Anglo-Irish?)
great-great-grandfather
on my father’s side;
nameless
(Walker, perhaps?),
whose only remembered act
is that he raped
a child:
my great-great-grandmother,
who bore his son,
my great-grandfather,
when she was eleven…
So again, here we go with the old Negro refrain of: me ain’t really a nigger…no, no … me really a injin; and let me point out the rapist in my bloodline to you. The Negro is the only species who goes around advertising he or she was raped and has a rapist in his or her bloodline, it is the kind of twisted pathology that black psychology is still trying to unravel.
Yet none of this can be taken lightly because Alice Walker is being pushed by the Liberal mainstream as the black writer in season—while they seek to remove Toni Morrison—with her incessant searching for truth and healing in black life—from that pedestal. But the truth is Mrs. Morrison won’t go for the bone of divide-and-conquer that the Liberals especially like to see black people gnawing at. One can see their dribble-laden glee when they can find a black man who through his actions or words attacks a black woman and vice versa. So, of course, they love Ms. Walker, lover of queer bourgeois Liberal affectations and deep-down hater of black.
These comments, by black poet and writer K. T. H. Cheatwood, appeared in a review of my collection of poems Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful in the Richmond (Virginia) News Leader, in the winter of 1984. Unfortunately, in quoting my poem-dedication to my white and Indian ancestors, he left off the most important section:
Rest in peace.
The meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.
Rest in peace.
In me
the meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.
Rest in peace, in me.
The meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.
Rest. In me
the meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.
Rest. In peace
in me
the meaning
of our lives
is still
unfolding.
Mr. Cheatwood thinks, apparently, that I should be ashamed to mention, to “advertise” my great-great-grandmother’s rape. He assumes an interest, on my part, in being other than black, of being “white.” I, on the hand, feel it is my blackness (not my skin color so much as the culture that nurtured me) that causes me to open myself, acknowledge my soul and its varied components, take risks, affirm everyone I can find (for I, too, have been called everything but a child of God), and that inasmuch as my great-great-grandmother was forced to endure rape and the birth of a child she couldn’t have wanted, as well, the least I can do is mention it. In truth, this is all the herstory of her that I know. But if I affirm that , then I can at least imagine what the rest of her life must have been like. And this, I believe, has some importance for us all.
We are the African and the trader. We are the Indian and the settler. We are the slaver and the enslaved. We are oppressor and oppressed. We are the women and we are the men. We are the children. The ancestors, black and white, who suffered during slavery—and I’ve come to believe they all did; you need only check your own soul to imagine how—grieve, I believe, when a black man oppresses women, and when a black woman or man mistreats a child. They’ve paid those dues. Surely they bought our gentleness toward each other with their pain.
So, these are my thoughts, Mpinga. I love that, though born in America, you have chosen an African name. I can remember when such an expression of psychic and cultural duality would have been but vaguely understood. But times change, and people do, too. Now such affirmations are almost routine. The infinite faith I have
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