Year’s ending-horses still galloping

Posted on December 24, 2014December 24, 2014 by admin

I know that the Year of the Horse will go into late January, so the galloping is not over. We have been on a very wild ride. The news of day has often been mysterious, horrific, terrifying or utterly silly. Sometimes the same item can be described with all those words. I know that it has been a wild ride for me and one that I treasure because I am breathing and too many people I love no longer breathe.

Florence Tate whom I only met in “real life” recently passed. I knew her son Greg Tate for what seems like forever. But his famous Mama I met via social media–she was a great presence on Facebook and intensely encouraging to me and many other writers, artists, singers, organizers, activisits and bon vivants. The last time I saw her breathing was at the Funeral for Amiri Baraka–the kind of affair that brought his friends, enemies, former lovers, their children and just about anyone who was a who in the downtown/Black Arts Movement/literary scene to Symphony Hall in Newark. I will also miss Galway Kinnell whose readings at Brooklyn’s Ferry Landings at the end of the Poets House Bridge Walks were so very very special. His passion for life, for poetry for oatmeal LOL never left him. Like Baraka, Kinnell was a fighter for justice; a great teacher–they were poets who created communities and they both lived long enough to modify earlier excesses and mend some fences.

I can’t breathe #Ican’tbreathe has become a chant; an indictment; a statement of anguish and demand. Eric Garner’s utterly unnecessary death at the hands of the NYPD and others who are here to serve people galvanized and continues to galvanize young people on top of those marching/organizing/agitating in Ferguson MO. The parade of dead Black, Brown and occasionally White bodies at the hands of Law Enforcement (LE) has made a significant number of people who had otherwised kept their heads in the sand. look up and see that the police are more soldiers than peace officers and that much of policing has become occupation–the lastest military incursions by the Israel into Gaza serves as a kind of template, it seems to me. These are ugly times. Ugly times.

And yet I am writing on a chilly rainy day in Brooklyn, a piano solo-some minor league European composer’s work makes perfect background noise. Today I went to the Museum of Modern Art to read “Lave” a poem commissioned for the catalog for One Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence Migrations Series which will open in early April at MOMA. Elizabeth Alexander has done a great job of bringing Black poets with very different poetics together to honor and respond to Lawrence’s seminal work. I know that this was a great opportunity; a great challenge. I hope people will respond to our response. I also saw the Robert Gober Retrospective. Gober is White. He’s Gay and he’s Young and very definitely breathing and I am glad. His sculptures defy standards of beauty; his bodies are never complete; his anguish not extinguished; his fears what should be feared–bullies, killers of the mind as well as body–the title of the exhibition is The Heart Is Not a Metaphor and you know what it is not Pulsating, pumping, a muscle whose only job is to keep the body upright and moving, the heart is beyond compare. And yet even Gober allows the heart, the hearth to become symbols for the ways we attempt to stunt pulsation; to destroy intimacy, charity, erotic impulse.

At the end of this Year of Baldwin; this Year of Losses, public and private; this year of Protests and Counter Protests. The fighting t-shirts: I can’t breathe/I can breathe the year when too many White People found themselves in a racial quagmire of their own making with no understanding of how to get out–I for one listen to the young people who started #blacklivesmatter; who demanded to be heard in at unneeded Al Sharpton organized march; who march and chant and tweet and demand to be able to BREATHE and to have a future. Saludos to you. May we all get off that horse when the Year of the Horse ends, saddle sore, yes, but ready to walk on this altered/altared earth. May we find a way to breathe together in justice, in peace.

Crech, Bed-Stuy, photo by Patricia Spears Jones

Harlem is a small town

Posted on August 4, 2014August 4, 2014 by admin

When I first came to New York City, Harlem seems a forbidding place, mostly because I lived downtown and going uptown even for 35 cents was a chore. Most of my community, artistic and otherwise lived below 14^th Street, mostly on the East Side. But Harlem is where Black people lived, worked and in the mythology of NYC, made the Harlem Renaissance. But that was decades ago. And yet, artists friends took me up to the Studio Museum, which was housed in an old studio, upstairs on Fifth Avenue. Down the street was a seriously good Latin restaurant. The pawnshops and nail salons and cheap furniture stores that dotted 125^th street looked like the pawnshops and nail salons and cheap furniture stores on 14^th street. There really is something about cross roads.

James Baldwin grew up in East Harlem. Grew to hate it, left America, but then again, his family stayed near. He stayed near his family. In a very psychic way, he really never left Harlem. Paris, Turkey the world travels were ways to bring his issues to the larger world, but those issues came from a specific place in America. I am not sure of what he would make of 128^th street where he went to school. The well-appointed townhouses and brownstones have been spruced up. The beautiful green house across the street has one of the most perfect paint jobs I’ve ever seen.

by Patricia Spears Jones

On his birthday, August 2 his family and the community that came out on an overcast Saturday afternoon to sing his praises and present a ceremony honoring the placement of a street sign on the street were glad for the cool breezes and the day’s calm. I got there just as Sonia Sanchez was chanting Baldwin’s name. At some point, she said that Baldwin did not receive awards for his work—but he did receive many grants, fellowships. He would not have survived w/out that support and recognition. I often think that we put too much on awards as if the National Book Award or a Pulitzer will assure your place in the culture. Like on the tip of your tongue, could you tell me who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in say 2000? Or 1995 or 1978? I could look these up, but is it Updike or Bellow or Morrison? I don’t know. I do know the work of these fine writers and I now know much more about Baldwin.

by Patricia Spears Jones

As Rich Blint pointed out the street sign will not be put up for a while the city puts up all new signs on one day. (as if by magic) so they provide mockups that can be shown to the adoring populace. So on Saturday, the mockup was held up for all of us to see. It is green. Baldwin’s name is correctly spelled. His nephew Trevor Baldwin spoke eloquently for the family in accepting this honor. And representatives from the National Black Theater, from the school where this event took place and where Baldwin went to school were happy and proud. Black people mostly who know the family, knew “Jimmy” care about art and culture and Black history and Black people’s lives and this slice of Harlem and its volatile history were there. And then I got it, Harlem really is a small town. One where people do know each other, look out for each other, worry about each other. And who see the town slowly change as newcomers with more money come in; people who may not understand how hard won the beauty of these blocks from 125^th and up was fought for against red lining, racism, neglect and countless deaths from bad drugs, bad decisions, poor diet or a life spent working 2-3 jobs so that children only had to get one. Baldwin understood that. His love is often cited, his ability to not the need for that. And I think like St. Paul who in First Corinthians 13 says “For now we see through a glass darkly”—that darkness must be acknowledged. It seems to me that all of this “transparency” and “illumination” that everyone talks about covers up more than darkness does. There is not light at the end of a tunnel of light, there is blindness.

Baldwin understand like St. Paul that “the greatest of these is charity”, but he could also say that you can only love after you recognize the rage resulting from injustice, brutality, hatred. He aspired to and achieved greatness as a writer, thinker, human being. We can only hope that generations hence seeing the street sign will think, I need to find out who this James Baldwin is. I hope that there will be many books, articles, oral histories, etc. along with his essential work available to those future readers.

by Patricia Spears Jones

Baldwin and me? July 11, 2014

Posted on July 12, 2014July 12, 2014 by admin

book table HBF Fiction Festival, Columbia U.

This morning I participated in a roundtable organized by Rich Blint for the Harlem Book Fair Fiction Festival, The Year of James Baldwin and I think because Rich really wanted this discussion of Baldwin. It was the first of three programs. It had the lofty title, Inheritance: James Baldwin and His Literary Progeny. Along with Kiese Laymon, the novelist and writer; Christopher Winks, the well-known academic and moderated by Aimee Meredith Cox, we delved into what Baldwin’s work and example has left us and how we are trying in our own ways to carry on work that deals with the human heart, the American psyche and the American empire. We did not even touch on sexuality or gender issues too much. Baldwin looms large for Black writers because in the 1960s and early 1970s he was the face of Black intellectualism. He wrote beautifully, powerfully and yet he was in the streets too. He talked to everyone and people listened. He was hated and haunted too. That’s the way it goes for a man who thought of himself as ugly and identified with Bette Davis because she has pop eyes and so must be ugly too.

Aimee Cox started the conversation by mentioning the idea of Baldwin’s life as representing a “probable impossibility” (I hope I am saying this correctly). Given Baldwin’s background, poverty, etc. how did he grow up the eldest of nine children to become the man and the writer that he became. Probable impossibility seems apt. But he did. Over the past two weeks I have read two Baldwin novels and re-read several of his essays. It was not a total immersion by any measure, but these works remind me of why his voice-sensual, intellectual, cajoling, angry, loving, hinting at redemption, but not necessarily forgiveness remains vivid,loud and powerfully present. American literature would have been so much poorer if he had not had the career that he did.

This morning we talked about courage and cowardice; what is at stake in our lives as writers; as educators; as American citizens while our nation sinks into an even greater morass of mistakes inside and outside our borders and indeed on our border–the humanitarian crisis with thousands of children fleeing possible murder. The appalling situation in the Middle East. And the nihilistic GOP aka just say no to governance party. We can only guess what Baldwin would say, but frankly, it is up to us to have our say on these and other issues. Art is political because it involves communication with people; with setting up dynamics of dialogue started by the poet, the artist, Will these dialogues lead to insights, new ways to thinking, some form of transformation or will we refine what is already there. Today, other members of the panel explained to me what neoliberalism is because I see this word used all the time as a kind catchall for bad public (private partnership) policy. I thank them.

Later, Pam Sneed, Mendi Obadike and Rashida Ismaili discussed The Artist Struggle for Integrity. It was a very important discussion and some of the same issues: Baldwin’s “preaching”; the uses of African American religious music-those hymns come up over and over in his work; the fact that “Baldwin identified as a gay man” as Pam pointed out were all important. Right now artists/poets are struggle to being seen and heard in an era where many of potential artist are texting; have the same songs on heavy rotation; or just don’t read; don’t go to events, even free one. Where many young people do not have the habit of having an opinion because nobody asks them what they think. They should be asked and we need to start asking and sooner than later. Forces are arrayed to make the lives of most people more difficult as salaries stagnate; wages rarely go up; collective bargaining is underminded; and those with wealth and power further consolidate their wealth and power. I know this is a long piece, but well Baldwin makes you think about what we have had to face; what so many desired; what has happened and what still needs to get done. I am honored to have been asked to participate in such an amazing program.