How I Discovered Poetry Read online

  Africans

  (Sacramento, California, 1959)

  Mama brings Africans home from grad school,

  like a kid who keeps finding lost puppies.

  She’s so proud of their new independence.

  She brings home smooth-faced mahogany men,

  dressed in suits like beautiful pajamas,

  so Jennifer and I can shake their hands.

  Nodding polite answers to her questions,

  they go to town on her catfish and grits.

  Later, while Daddy drives them to their dorms,

  she washes and Jennifer and I dry.

  “Some of the greatest wrongs of history

  are being righted now,” she says. “These are

  our people.” As I put a plate away,

  I ask myself who is not my people.

  Bitter Apple

  (Sacramento, California, 1959)

  Who should be transferred here but Helene’s dad!

  Miracle of miracles! Thank you, God!

  Last night, the first of what we vow will be

  many sleepovers, she explained to me

  in whispers that excluded Jennifer

  something she’s learned since our last heart-to-heart

  when we were stationed here two years ago:

  how to get a boy’s love, and how to kiss.

  I don’t know what she said: It’s hard to hear

  when someone’s words are breath tickling your ear.

  But what I understood has made me taste

  the bitter apple of disappointment.

  To think souls touching is so trivial

  you can practice it with a Coke bottle.

  The History of Tribal Suppression

  (On the Road, 1959)

  We drive through Indian territory,

  every vista inhabited by ghosts

  almost visible on the horizon.

  Daddy says he has some Indian blood;

  something he thinks his mother told him once.

  Mama, as co-pilot, reads from the map

  the history of tribal suppression.

  Plump, brown-faced weavers sit along the road.

  At last, Daddy pulls over. TRADING POST.

  I choose a turquoise and silver bracelet;

  Jennifer picks an authentic tom-tom.

  Too many miles later to turn around,

  she sees the tom-tom says “Made in Japan.”

  And my wrist is beginning to turn green.

  Sinfonia Concertante

  (Fort Worth, Texas, 1959)

  Daddy’s here on temporary duty,

  so Mama’s piano is in storage.

  Home is a four-room third-floor apartment

  in a Negro quarter of the city.

  My all-black classmates act like I’m from Mars.

  Are you the girl from California?

  Talk for us. And these boys act like I’m cute!

  Miss Jackson saw me pretend piano

  and had me put into a music class.

  String quartet: two violins, cello,

  and on viola, me, sawing away.

  Daddy says my squawks set his teeth on edge,

  so I practice out on the balcony,

  genius on view all up and down the block.

  Mischievious

  (Fort Worth, Texas, 1959)

  Between classes, teachers patrol the halls,

  slapping their palms with short, thick leather straps.

  Some tell kids to “assume the position,”

  then whack them with perforated paddles.

  My English teacher uses a ruler

  to smack the palms of kids who mispronounce.

  His bugbear’s mischievous, which every kid

  who reads it pronounces mischievious.

  That added syllable drives the man mad.

  He blew his stack when I corrected him:

  “They’re eu-cal-YP-tus, not eu-CAL-yp-tus, trees.”

  (I guess I was being mischievious.)

  He said, “Stand up and hold out your right hand.”

  I’m in the office now. Mama’s coming.

  To Miss Jackson

  (Fort Worth, Texas, 1959)

  Miss Jackson loans me her own poetry books:

  More Hughes, Cullen, Johnson. Gwendolyn Brooks,

  First Negro Poet to Win the Pulitzer Prize.

  (Maybe she’s trying to tell me something.)

  Isolated by temporariness

  and unable to wholly comprehend

  the things boys say to me under their breath

  when we pass by each other in the hall

  so close that we can sense each other’s heat,

  I flee into the arms of poetry.

  I take my books to bed. I read so late

  Daddy shouts, “Lights OUT!” Then Mama urges,

  “Get the Man’s hand out of your dad’s pocket!”

  I lie in the dark. My head whirls with words.

  Let Me Count the Ways

  (On the Road, 1959)

  A sleeping princess startled from a dream

  of tall, dark, handsome fifteen-year-old boys

  surrounding me, like Gidget on the beach,

  with warm eyes and begging-to-be-kissed lips,

  cute, eager, willing . . . I’m back in my place

  in the backseat, my face a fist because

  I’ve been robbed of such tantalizing fruit.

  Odessa’s brother told her he likes me.

  Now I won’t find out if he’s my true love.

  I’m so bummed out. Life is passing me by.

  Texas is becoming Oklahoma.

  What if Odessa’s brother was my prince?

  How might I have loved him, given the chance?

  I count the ways as miles and time streak past.

  A Quartet of Geeks

  (Clinton-Sherman AFB, Oklahoma, 1959)

  All Hell seems to be breaking out down South!

  My days start with radio news; they end

  blessing the students integrating schools

  and giving thanks for the National Guard.

  Here, in God-Forsaken, Oklahoma,

  we live on-base in the good neighborhood.

  Majors and Colonels get bigger homes,

  NCOs have an apartment complex.

  We’re assigned three bedrooms, two baths, garage.

  There’s no school on the base. We have to go

  to schools in town: our teachers’ First Negroes

  (though I doubt they pronounce the word that way),

  and the First Negroes of most of the kids.

  But I’ve found a place in the seventh-grade cliques

  with three best friends: We’re a quartet of geeks.

  Dances With Doorknobs

  (Clinton-Sherman AFB, Oklahoma, 1959)

  When Daddy’s in control of the high-fi,

  we listen to his favorite jazz albums.

  Sometimes Mama talks about way back when

  the greats were just young musicians on tour,

  unwelcome in hotels. How this one stayed

  with them once or twice, before I was born;

  how that one loved her chicken and dumplings.

  Sunday afternoons, Mama’s in control

  of which LP will release its music:

  Marian Anderson, Mahler, Heifetz.

  But I have a transistor radio,

  the latest thing. One hand on the doorknob,

  I jitterbug alone in our bedroom

  when Jennifer’s not here. Not often enough.

  My Friends

  (Clinton-Sherman AFB, Oklahoma, 1959)

&
nbsp; My friends all live in the same neighborhood

  because our dads are officers. We’re stars

  in all classes except gym, and, outside

  of school, part of each other’s families.

  Cheryl dropped by last Saturday afternoon,

  as Mama finished straightening our hair,

  and said she smelled hair burning. Jennifer said,

  “We put our heads in the oven once a week.”

  The other day at lunch, John blurted out,

  “Your eyes aren’t black, they’re brown!” He’d just noticed

  that he hadn’t really been seeing me.

  His mom talks to me as if we’re equals.

  Last night Kim, Cheryl, and I slept outside

  in Kim’s yard, giggling under the stars.

  The Baby Picture Guessing Game

  (Clinton-Sherman AFB, Oklahoma, 1959)

  The Home Ec Baby Picture Guessing Game

  ended soon for me: Everyone could see

  which baby I was. They all looked alike.

  When all the babies were identified,

  they gave the Cutest Baby prize to me

  and we ate the cupcakes we’d baked and iced.

  My classmates voted down a class party

  at the Elk City Theatre because

  Negroes have to sit in the balcony.

  Oh, it’s not a bed of thornless roses:

  Some of the farm boys punch each other’s arms

  and make kissy sounds when they walk past me.

  But Mama and Daddy tell me every day

  that I’m a cygnet in a flock of ducks.

  And anyway, it isn’t Little Rock.

  Safe Path Through Quicksand

  (Clinton-Sherman AFB, Oklahoma, 1959)

  I belong to the Protestant Youth Group

  and go to chapel on Sunday mornings.

  Do I believe? Well, let’s just say I hope.

  I think Jesus is an elder brother

  whose footsteps mark a safe path through quicksand.

  Maybe we’re already in “Heaven” now:

  Every place I’ve been holds its own beauty.

  But I do hope to God there is a hell

  waiting for some people. For racist cops.

  For grandmothers who spit hate at children.

  A hell for mean, sneering, slicked-back-hair guys

  like Rick Havard and Donald Goeringer.

  A hell for Mr. and Mrs. Purdy,

  who smile at me in class, and do evil.

  How I Discovered Poetry

  (Clinton-Sherman AFB, Oklahoma, 1959)

  It was like soul-kissing, the way the words

  filled my mouth as Mrs. Purdy read from her desk.

  All the other kids zoned an hour ahead to 3:15,

  but Mrs. Purdy and I wandered lonely as clouds borne

  by a breeze off Mount Parnassus. She must have seen

  the darkest eyes in the room brim: The next day

  she gave me a poem she’d chosen especially for me

  to read to the all-except-for-me white class.

  She smiled when she told me to read it, smiled harder,

  said oh yes I could. She smiled harder and harder

  until I stood and opened my mouth to banjo-playing

  darkies, pickaninnies, disses and dats. When I finished,

  my classmates stared at the floor. We walked silent

  to the buses, awed by the power of words.

  Thirteen-Year-Old American Negro Girl

  (Clinton-Sherman AFB, Oklahoma, 1959)

  My face, as foreign to me as a mask,

  allows people to believe they know me.

  Thirteen-Year-Old American Negro Girl,

  headlines would read if I was newsworthy.

  But that’s just the top-of-the-iceberg me.

  I could spend hours searching the mirror

  for clues to my truer identity,

  if someone didn’t pound the bathroom door.

  You can’t see what the mirror doesn’t show:

  for instance, that after I close my book

  and turn off my lamp, I say to the dark:

  Give me a message I can give the world.

  Afraid there’s a poet behind my face,

  I beg until I’ve cried myself to sleep.

  Author’s Note

  This book is a late-career retrospective, a personal memoir, a “portrait of the artist as a young American Negro Girl.” The poems cover the decade of the fifties, from 1950, when I was four years old, to 1960, when I was fourteen.

  I prefer to call the girl in the poems “the Speaker,” not “me.” Although the poems describe a girl whose life is very much like mine, the incidents the poems describe are not entirely or exactly “memories.” They are sometimes much enhanced by research and imagination.

  The Speaker’s growing awareness of personal and racial identity are set against the tensions America experienced during the fifties. Some of the poems that seem to be “about me” are as much about the “Red Scare,” the shadow of the atom bomb, racism, the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, or the first stirrings of women’s empowerment.

  Each of the poems is built around a “hole” or “gap” in the Speaker’s understanding. As she grows older, the holes are less obviously evident, but they are always there. Her maturing voice, growing self-awareness, and broadening interests are a major theme of the book.

  This is also the story of military family life. Though this is the specific story of the wife and children of one of the first African American career officers in the Air Force, most military families share some of the experiences described here. Their frequent transfers cause a sense of rootlessness, as the extended family and friends are more and more often seen waving good-bye as the family drives away. For most military children, home is something more longed for than known.

  Another theme of the book is the Speaker’s increasing fascination with language. In the last poem, at approximately the age of Confirmation or Bat Mitzvah, she realizes, with a feeling of awe and responsibility, that she may grow up to be a poet. As that poet, I have written this book as a sequence of fifty unrhymed sonnets. Like other sonnets, these have fourteen lines, and are roughly iambic pentameter (ten syllables per line), but they don’t rhyme, and they don’t always have the traditional volta, or “turn” from one thought to another thought, in the middle.

  I’d like to thank my sister, Jennifer Nelson, for helping me remember things; and to thank my friends Inge Pedersen and Stephen Roxburg for giving me good advice; and to thank my editor, Lauri Hornik, for pushing me to develop my original idea; and to thank my agent, Regina Brooks of Serendipity Literary Agency, for cheering me on; and to thank my friend Pamela Espeland for thinking through things with me and making me laugh as I worked on the poems.

  Who’s Who in the family photos:

  page 46, left: Marilyn’s mama and daddy, Johnnie and Melvin Nelson, Melvin’s aunts Edith and Effie, Marilyn, and younger sister Jennifer; right: Marilyn, Mama, and Jennifer in the Painted Desert;

  page 47, Marilyn and Jennifer on the Pacific coast

  back cover: Marilyn’s parents, Lt. Melvin Nelson and Johnnie Mitchell Nelson, newlyweds

  The author gratefully acknowledges the editors

  of the following publications, in which some

  of these poems first appeared:

  Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems by Marilyn Nelson, copyright 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, Louisiana State University Press: “How I Discovered Poetry”

  Beloit Poetry Journal (Vol. 62, No. 3, Spring 2012) Split This Rock Chapbook 2012: “Called Up,” “Your Own,” “Making History”

  “30 Poets/30 Days: April 2012,” GottaBook blog (gottabook.blogspot.
com): “Telling Time”

  Tygerburning Literary Journal (No. 2, Summer 2013): “Pink Menace,” “Mississippi”

  Saranac Review (No. 8, 2013–2014): “Career Girl”

  Cimarron Review (No. 180, Summer 2012): “Nelsons,” “Parking Lot Dawn,” “Thirteen-Year-Old American Negro Girl”