MEMEWARS

ALDON LYNN NIELSEN

WITH

E. ETHELBERT MILLER

PREFACE BY TYRONE WILLIAMS

BL AZEVO X[ B OO KS ]
Buffalo, New York
MEMEWARS
by Aldon Lynn Nielsen
Copyright © 2022

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First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-416-1
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Author’s Note

Two days after my birthday in 2014, I received an email from poet and friend
E. Ethelbert Miller. The message opened with breaking news: Ethelbert’s
Collected Poems was in the works. He commented: “I'm slowly moving into the
next chapter of my life which will mark the undertaking of big projects and
being more productive.” Those who know Ethelbert and his work might
wonder how someone with his record could be yet more productive, but I
admired his resolution. Then came the surprise. “All this brings me to you. :-)
I was wondering if you would agree to being interviewed several times for my
E-Notes in 2015? I want to explore the 'making of a critic' and think you
would be an excellent choice.” I was flattered, and humbled, by the request but
quickly assented to what developed into what Ethelbert called “The Aldon
Nielsen Project.” I had followed closely his project with Charles Johnson, over
the course of which Johnson, among my favorite novelists, has responded to
daily questions from Miller. I knew there was no way I could handle a daily
inquiry, let alone with the intensity Johnson had brought to bear on the series,
but I was glad of this opportunity to look back over my own writing and
unwritten life under Ethelbert’s proddings. And so began a months-long
process of Ethelbert sending me questions in emails, and my responding, as
much as possible, as though we were doing an in-person interview.

Much has changed since we came to the end of that run of questioning. Today
nearly all my interactions are at a distance, the covid-19 pandemic having
zoomed in on all of us. I have restrained myself from updating any of this,
making only needed corrections in the text that follows. Today I would add
many more names to the lists of artists and scholars I recommended a few
years ago. Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our
Discontents has returned the concept of caste to discussions of race in America
without, it seems so far, having done much to return public attention to her
predecessor Oliver Cromwell Cox. Since completing these interviews, I have,
with Laura Vrana, edited The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas, and so there is
reason to hope many more readers will discover this powerful poetry. All of the
interviews were completed before the full reality of an approaching Trump era
was upon us.

So much has changed in the few short years since Ethelbert and I set out on
this project; even our past has been changed in the moving shadows of history.
C.L.R. James spoke often, ever the dialectician, of the need to discern the
future in the present. In my own work I have written of the future anterior, the
tense space in which we contemplate what will have been the case when we get
there. Get there we must. Here is a part of a piece of the story of how some of
us came to be in this particular place and time.
PREFACE
Tyrone Williams

As this interview-cum-memoir suggests, the cross-country journeys of Aldon

Nielsen from boyhood to adulthood might be mapped onto his formative
cultural influences and interests. Moving with his family from Nebraska to
Colorado, from Colorado to Washington D.C., and then, as an adult, from
D.C. to California and, finally(?), California to Pennsylvania, Nielsen reflects
on the multitudinous genres of music (country, rock, blues, R & B and jazz)
and literature (criticism and poetry from the continent of Africa, North
America and the “satellite” islands of the Caribbean and Cuba) that have made
him, well, him. Ranging over half a century of riding horses and reading comic
books, writing poetry and criticism, and playing in bands, Memewars is less a
series of conflicting impulses than an ongoing synthesis of cultural, social and
political interests. Indeed, Nielsen himself sometimes seems starstruck at the
way those tentative interests and temporary plans of youthful enthusiasm have
resolved themselves into an unending symphony of sounds and visual textures.
His mid-20th c. American childhood was typical—science fiction, comic books,
music, etc.---but his adolescence and early adulthood in D.C. cast him into the
extraordinary ordinariness of seeing the President leaving church or James
Brown on the streets of the Capital. Yet, Nielsen never succumbs to the
cultural insularity of big city folk; his lower middleclass and Midwestern
origins inoculate him against that kind of smugness. Indeed, it is when Nielsen
moves to California to take his first tenure-track teaching that he gradually
comes to comprehend the vast reaches of East Coast academic elitism. That
Nielsen has not only survived but also excelled during the intermittent cultural
wars punctuating the decades of unparalleled expansion and shrinkage in
institutions of higher learning is nothing short of remarkable. He is, after all,
an overdetermined professor, one who, today, would find himself in a rather
11
precarious position as a white man teaching African American, African
Diaspora and African literatures.

To his credit, Nielsen does not dwell, in fact, never mentions, his potential
precarity. Instead, he shuttles back and forth between his personal upbringing
(formally and informally) and his musings on music and literature. Still,
Memewars is not just, perhaps not even primarily, a memoir. Rather, Nielsen
the critic is still here, attempting to resurrect the legacies of social critics like
Oliver Cromwell Cox and the late poetry and criticism of Amiri Baraka. Nor
does Nielsen shy away from those cultural wars cited above, taking on racism
in both contemporary poetry circles and in academia. And here, as he has at
conferences, Nielsen repeats his sense of urgency regarding the necessity of
archival research, encouraging young scholars to pursue this unglamorous but
important work. For only in doing so can a better picture of the achievements
of African American (and African Diaspora writers) come into view. As
Nielsen has tirelessly pointed out, this archival work has the potential to not
only change our understanding of what 20th c. modern literature is but also
change the terms with which we comprehend the modern.

As you begin Memewars, think of Ethelbert Miller’s leading questions as

melodies, recognizable tunes, and Nielsen’s responses as harmolodic
extensions, waxing nostalgic, and just as moving, just as important, playing all
the changes on a prolific career and life in music and writing. Here, Nielsen
sings Schmilssen.

12
MEMEWARS
01
The Early Years

Q. Place is very important in literature. Describe the neighborhood that

shaped you as a boy.

1.
I’ve never really thought of myself as a “poet of place” (this from a poet whose
works include titles such as “Life along Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue” and
“S.E. Love Cry”), and have often wondered why nobody ever speaks of a “critic
of place” in the same way. If you think of the examples of Charles Olson and
Amiri Baraka, you quickly see how critique and verse can be so wonderfully
conjoined around an exploration of place and space. Olson took “SPACE” to
be “central fact to man born in America” and spent a lifetime in the spaces
afforded by his outward thrust from Gloucester. Baraka, a traveler of the
world, was always recognizably a passenger on the NEW ARK.

Still, though I’ve never stood still, several neighborhoods formed me, as they
formed that mode of my speech that seemed to confuse at least one speech
communications teacher in Junior High School who just couldn’t place me.
Perhaps it was due to my beginnings in the Midwest, a place where we
thought ourselves the only people on the planet free of an accent. It was only
after we moved to Northern Virginia that I could listen to my mother and hear
in her tones the distinctive, crackling drawl of the Great Plains. Nebraska
turned out to be a great place to be from.
We missed as much by accent as by trees. Nebraska was so devoid of groves
that they invented an annual observance, Arbor Day, on which we were
encouraged to plant trees. Wouldn’t want the state to blow away again like it
nearly did when the Great Depression hit the Great Plains. We were a state in
15
need of roots. For God’s sake, there were tumbleweeds rolling down the street,
just like in the song and movies. Once we belatedly got a T.V., I saw Roy
Rogers singing about “Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.” Like
most boys of my generation, I thought cowboy life looked pretty good on T.V.
I could locate myself in the spaces of that song: “See them tumbling down /
Pledging their love to the ground,” and it may be that was one of the early
experiences of lyric that sent me towards poetry. But that song had been
recorded six years before I was born (six years before E. Ethelbert Miller was
born, too). The only thing left of that already then imaginary life was the
tumbleweed itself. When I walked down the street to school, the tumbleweed
would pass me by, rolling in the opposite direction.

I had a closer view of cowboy life than my Eastern friends, though, thanks to
the farms and ranches my family had come from. We lived in a town of about
thirty thousand grandly named Grand Island, so called evidently because of its
originally being nestled between the Wood (ha!) and Platte Rivers. We were
surrounded by Prairie Dog towns (one reason I was so puzzled upon finding
Prairie Dogs on exhibit at the National Zoo once we’d made it to D.C.). There
was a sugar beet factory nearby, which, along with the many abandoned shacks
beyond the edge of town, made the perfect playground for us boys. The
presence of the factory meant there were trains coming and going, with tracks
for us to play around. (How many coins did we let the freights flatten out?)
Mine was a town life, but we were perched at the leading edge of town, so
there were always basements being dug around us, dirt roads turning to asphalt
(and thus plenty of that wondrous substance TAR for us to mess with) and the
fields with their mounds of sugar beets stretching away past the school.

Both sets of grandparents were still farming, not so far from Grand Island. My
mother’s brother had a ranch near the Sand Hills. Two Aunts, seeing
something of the nothing in the Midwest future, had decamped for Denver
and greater opportunity, where we would follow before too long. Summers and
many weekends were spent on horseback, playing in the grain bin, chasing the
chickens, wrestling hogs, going to that little rural church where people would
16
interrupt the preacher if he forgot something. But it only took a few times
being sent out to the soy bean field to uproot the volunteer corn to teach me
that I would be no cowboy. (Years later, when some of my D.C. friends were
moving “up to the country” and getting closer to mother earth, I wanted no
part of it.) But I was a natural in the saddle; loved the horses; loved riding
among the cattle, the ruminants. At bottom, what I found there was the same
thing Sterling Brown celebrated in “After Winter”: “fo’ the little feller, /
Runnin’ space.” In my case in space, “galloping” might have been more
apropos, closer to my accustomed gait. I was a climber, too, much to the terror
of my mother. There were no mountains to climb in Nebraska, so it was first
furniture, then the tallest tree in the park. Like so many climbers, I was a faller,
landing on my head countless times – maybe the true source of the poetry.

We lived on Louise Street in a house my parents had gotten built thanks to the
G.I. Bill. Before that we’d been a basement family, prefiguring the basement
apartments I was to favor as a young adult. The surrounding countryside
featured an odd architectural sight – flat fields on which someone had stuck a
door. Seems people would start a house, get as far as digging a basement and
laying the concrete, then go ahead and move in before any above-ground house
was in evidence. Driving past you’d just see a slab with a door standing at the
front of it. But maybe it wasn’t a matter of waiting for enough money for a first
floor; maybe those folk were just taking to heart the drills we had in school in
the Fifties. We had tornado drills and we had nuclear war drills. The grownups
seemed convinced that the Russians were going to fire atomic weapons at
Grand Island, Nebraska, largely because there was a Strategic Air Command
base over closer to Omaha. Never made much sense to me. I couldn’t help
noticing, have remarked frequently over the years, that the drill was the same
duck and cover for both nuclear war and the far more likely tornado. Maybe
those under-the-ground-living people were just being savvy. Live in a
basement house and you were already in the storm cellar, which might
conceivably double as a fallout shelter should Russia and us have another
falling out.

17
Like I said, it was a great place to be from. After nine years of running pretty
much without constraint, I moved with my family to the West. Good thing,
too. We never did have that nuclear war, but a few years later the inevitable
tornado wiped out roughly a third of the town, taking a fair number of those
trees we’d planted on Arbor Days along with the roofs of houses foolish
enough to stick out above ground level.

2.

My father’s work led to a promotion, which led to Denver, where my Aunts

had gone before. We’d been there on a car trip once earlier, for my Aunt
Leila’s wedding. I still remember my first glimpse of the mountains – snow-
capped and seemingly floating above the ground, though that illusion was
probably the result of my small body being planted on the car’s back seat and
looking up between shoulders through the windshield. That was something,
though, those floating Rockies drifting above my horizon. I don’t remember
anything of the wedding, but I remember my Aunt’s record player and her
copy of Peter and the Wolf, which I insisted on replaying. The name Sergei
Prokofiev meant nothing to me then. (There were those Russians again! – And
a composition completed fourteen years before Ethelbert and I were born.) But
here was text (I don’t suppose anybody in my Aunt’s apartment called it “text”)
with music. This was something that my brain locked down on. Spoken word
with music. It was clear that the music was not simply accompanying the text;
the two forms of creation were twining together and producing something
beyond what either could do alone. My Aunt was a school teacher and
probably used the record for its intended purpose, cultivating musical interest
in children. We were just far enough past the Red Scare that she wasn’t fired
for using Russian music to accomplish this end. I never forgot those final
words: "If you listen very carefully, you'll hear the duck quacking inside the
wolf's belly, because the wolf in his hurry had swallowed her alive." (The things
grownups tell children!) But the reason I never forgot them was the music. A
18
symphony for children – I knew there must be more – I knew we needed to get
a record player.

I went to three schools in the three years we lived in Denver, and we lived in
two houses. The first house was a rental we moved into while the parents
looked around for permanent housing. This was the house where I called
myself a painter and set up a studio in a crowded upstairs room, all as the result
of seeing the 1959 movie A Dog of Flanders. (The dog acting the title role had
also appeared in Old Yeller – this was the sort of thing I paid attention to –
Back in Grand Island I’d gone to a dog movie, The Littlest Hobo, at which the
dog himself came on stage, and typed on a typewriter! I got an autographed
[paw printed] glossy photo of the dog, which I kept for decades.) This was
also the house in which I conducted my first experiments as an inventor, one of
which involved my plugging myself into a wall socket. I had learned about
electricity but not about insulation. No doubt this was another of those
experiences leading me to poetry. My mother managed to disconnect me using
a broom, whose handle, of course, would not conduct the current from me into
her. Bill collectors occasionally came to our door looking for the previous
tenant, but more often our bell was rung by salesmen who had vacuum
cleaners, indestructible dining plates, even socks to try to sell to us.

It was in those Denver schools that I began to understand something of

racism. Back in Grand Island, several of my closest friends in the
neighborhood were Mexican-American. This was even more the case in
Denver, but it was in Denver that I first saw that this fact meant something
about my relationships with certain among the other white kids (though none
of us ever called ourselves white kids – we were just kids – but I was learning
that my friends weren’t just kids; they were Mexican kids, despite having lived
in Colorado considerably longer than any of my family had). By the time I got
to seventh grade, and my third school, “race” was becoming visible in more
dangerous ways. That school was huge, had so many students that it was split
in two. Half the students went in the early morning, while the other half, my
half, arrived a little after noon and stayed till late afternoon. There was an open
19
area with a lake adjacent to the school, and on more than one occasion as my
bus arrived I saw groups of boys fighting near the lake, always evenly divisible
by ethnicity.

Yes, we were bused to achieve education. The rule was in Winter you had to
wait at the bus stop at least an hour. If the snow was so bad that the bus hadn’t
shown up by then, you were allowed that shivering walk back to your home.
This of course meant that the street around the bus stop was subjected to
pretty ferocious snow ball throwing for an hour. One evening as we were
busing home, the whole side of one mountain was ablaze. I’d never seen a
forest fire before. (The prairie fires of the plains, on the other hand, remain
among the most terrifying things I have ever seen, able to spread faster than
any animal could run.) Given the distance to the mountain, and the fact that
the fire was illuminating the faces of us students in the bus, the fire must have
been of tremendous size.

Denver was where I began to learn something of Spanish, first from Mr. Vigil,
my favorite teacher at my second school. He was the one who let me and my
buddy take over the blackboards one day to work out some computation
involving the speed of light that we thought proved the possibility of time
travel. (I was deep into comic books and Sci Fi by that time.) On the first day
of class, Señor Vigil went around the room assigning each of us a Spanish
name. (I remembered this when I went to teach in China and learned that
nearly all my students had English names along with their Chinese monikers.)
Thus Robert became Roberto, Mary became Maria, Richard was to be
Ricardo, Dolores remained Dolores, but what to do with me? Señor Vigil
looked at the name “Aldon” in exasperation for a minute, then brightened.
“What’s your middle name?” “Lynn,” I responded truthfully, adding to his
exasperation. And that is the true story of how I became “Pancho,” a name I
was glad to leave behind when I moved on to Junior High School and lunch
time gang wars.

20
Grownups were worried about something they called Juvenile Delinquency. I
was worried about the guy who came to shop class straight from stealing a
knife from the drug store, which knife he proceeded to sharpen using the
school’s equipment. This was the same little dude who said I was probably
such a case of arrested development that I hadn’t looked at a Playboy magazine
yet. I lied and said I had, but then he asked how many times. There’s no
winning with those guys.

It was at my first Denver school that I was for the first time asked by a teacher
to write a poem. My initial effort was a great success, one that the teacher read
aloud to the rest of the class. Inspired by my triumph, I quickly wrote another
one, which was, to put it mildly, less successful. For the next year or so my
virtuoso rhyming was confined to warning signs I hung on the door to my
bedroom. Now that was an advance. In Denver, for the first time, I got a room
of my own. Once we’d moved to our permanent house, where we lived for all
of two-and-a-half years, my father, with me pretending to help, walled off a
section of the basement that became my room. So I had a basement place!
With a door! I put a sign on the door to keep everybody out, rhymed, and
hung one of those rubber fake shrunken heads on it to drive the point home.
Inside my little man cave, I built my own laboratory, where I concocted strange
chemicals and looked at stuff through a microscope. There too I created my
comic book library and spent countless hours reading adventure yarns, murder
mysteries, Sci Fi and Fantasy, and, my then favorite, science books. I decided I
was going to become a forensic pathologist. Even went to a science fair where I
got to talk to someone who cut up bodies to find out how they died. I was
somewhat unusual in those pre-CSI days in my selection of hero figures with
which to identify.

I have to think that my second poem is involved with my first act of criticism. I
knew that poem was not as good as the first one; I knew that it failed in
comparison to the poems that were beginning to fill my head, from my reading
and from listening to the radio. I had to think through what it was that made

21
those other poems so markedly better than my little failed poem. (It was about
mythical South Pole people and their ice church steeple/home.)

I had always listened to radio. We didn’t have a T.V. at first in Grand Island,
so radio was it in early childhood. (My parents remember having to come get
me from my friend Stevie’s house across the street. He had T.V., and it was in
color.) I listened to things like the Sparky the Fire Dog program. Sparky sent
me a coupon for a six pack of orange soda on my birthday. I never lost the
fascination with radio. In Denver I built a crystal set and would listen to it
under the covers when I shared a room with my two brothers, who had to have
lights out earlier than I would have liked. By fifth grade I had the Japanese
transistor radio that we all had, with the single ear phone screwed into an ear.
That was how I listened to the World Series out on the playground between
classes. One day I’d discovered that the old radio we’d brought with us from
Nebraska had a short wave band on it. I stretched a sheet of tin foil (what I still
call it, much to my wife’s amusement, the term marking the place and era of
my beginnings) across one wall and ran a wire into the radio, and then the
world came streaming into my basement. My favorite was a station coming
from Cuba that played mostly U.S. Rhythm and Blues.

By then, though, we had gotten that much-needed record player. (Like the big
blonde T.V. set we got, that record player stayed with us till long after I was
grown and out of the house. I listened to my sister’s records of The Everly
Brothers, The Isley Brothers, an unlikely pair known as Paul and Paula, the
indomitable Chubby Checker. One day in the drug store I spotted a plastic bag
full of 45s that I could buy for just 99 cents, which is how I came to have
copies of “Itsy Bitsy Teensy Weensy Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” along with
more interesting fare from Little Anthony and the Imperials, whose “Shimmy
Shimmy Ko Ko Bop” taught me another important early lesson in poetry.
There was a record store I could get to on my bicycle, and there you could
audition records as if you actually had the money to buy them. There were no
headphones. You would go into a little booth, rather like the isolation booth in
which game show contestants stood while being questioned, and there you
22
could play pretty much any record that was in the store on a turntable
considerably better than the Sears and Roebuck portable box we listened to at
home.

We had the advantage of the nearby mountains. (My buddies and me could
even, on a particularly adventurous day, ride our bicycles out of town and up to
the Red Rocks amphitheater.) And we still were within driving distance of the
grandparents and uncle with their farms and ranch and, most important,
horses. (One grandfather tried to train me to drive a tractor, but the
strangeness of separate brakes for the two huge back wheels flummoxed me.)

But the main thing was that we had come to a city. I discovered I was an
essentially urban person. Running space was fine in the country. It was far
better in the streets. Kerouac’s Neal Cassidy was running on Larimer Street,
but I wouldn’t know that till years later, when I could finally get a copy of a
book I remembered seeing in the paperback racks at the grocery store in
Denver.

3.

My father’s job was in the U.S. Department of the Interior, so that steady
promotions eventually promoted us all the way to the nation’s capital. This
time the parents went ahead to find us a house (in Arlington as it turned out –
I would quickly learn to tell people I was going to D.C., as otherwise they
seemed to think we were moving into a cemetery). I stayed on in Denver for a
month with my favorite Aunt and Uncle, the ones who read books and played
music and went to art museums. My Uncle even built his own sundial in his
backyard.

The day came that I took my first flight on an airplane, all the way to the
newly opened (and, I would later realize, hideously named) Dulles Airport.
23
(Like everybody else of a certain age from D.C., I still call that closer-in airport
National – can’t bring myself to call it by that other name. Same way we still
speak of Malcolm X Park, even though the city never made the name official.
Hi there, Meridian Hill !) I’d had no prior experience of anything that could be
called the South. My first impression, riding in from the airport, was one of
intense claustrophobia. Born on the plains, just arrived from the Rockies, I had
never seen so many trees, seemingly leaning threateningly over the also never
experienced before white board fences, forming a green tunnel and making it
impossible for me to have any sense of direction.

I got used to it.

As I got used to living in a brick house. The real estate people called it “antique
brick,” which just meant that it was used bricks, still bearing the tar and
markings from whatever structure it had been a part of in its past. Every row
house I lived in later in D.C. was built of that same brick, as if it were
following me around across the years.

My father went to work not far from the Lincoln Memorial, and I could take
that same bus right through Georgetown to downtown and across to the other
side of the city. I quickly discovered there was a train station you could reach
by bus, thus putting the entire North East in easy reach. We went to a Baptist
church at 8th and H, NW. Later, one version of WPFW would be housed
around the corner. THEN there was a pet store on 7th street we’d go to when
we were supposed to be in Sunday School. It was a tiny place, but it had a
llama. Not far away was SOUL SHACK, which continued my musical
education. They even had a section of records of people reading stories, telling
jokes, reciting poetry. I found Carl Sandburg and Redd Foxx within two bins
of one another.

Another bus would take me uptown to the Howard Theater, though the first
time I saw a show there I arrived by car with the boss of my little gang of
newspaper sales boys. Ben’s Chilli Bowl was the place where I had my first half
24
smoke. It would be twenty years more before I realized that people in the rest
of the country didn’t know what a half smoke was, perhaps another ten before
I realized that Ben didn’t eat half smokes.

Roberta Flack had grown up not far from where we lived (on her way home
from school she’d buy a peppermint stick and a pickle and stick one inside the
other – I never did care for sweet and sour), and by the time I was in high
school, she was beginning to play in places like Mr. Henry’s that I wasn’t old
enough to get into. She was also teaching school herself. D.C. and Arlington,
it transpired, were the kind of place where such things were happening every
day.

It was a city filled with music. Some evenings we’d go to sit on steps by the
Potomac and listen to a military band play from a barge in the river. In the
summers there were free concerts absolutely everywhere. Each summer the
Smithsonian held a folk life festival on the mall, where you could just walk up
and talk to the musicians. In short order I was to meet Lightning Hopkins,
Mance Lipscombe, Big Boy Arthur Crudup, Skip James. I remember the guy
going around the mall selling programs calling out, “learn how the Eskimoes
make ice.” A few years later I would hear a commotion behind me at the
festival and, turning, find myself in front of the first version of Sweet Honey in
the Rock. But that was much later after graduation, after the draft.

We saw the President coming out of a church one Sunday afternoon. I saw
James Brown in a music store. (He was a whole lot shorter than he looked on
our T.V. set.) When Carl Sandburg died, I persuaded my mother to take me to
a memorial event at the Lincoln, uh, Memorial. The poet’s widow and her
famous photographer brother were seated up there. Charlie Byrd’s group
played a song. Next thing we knew, that same President made his way to the
microphone in an apparent surprise move to pay homage to the late poet. I was
to stand in that same place so many times in the coming years; once to visit
Resurrection City; once to witness the Panthers’ rally for their People’s
Constitutional Convention.
25
We came to the area when I was twelve, when I was old enough to ride my
bike or the bus (more secretly the train) to just about anywhere. I was able to
discover book stores. I could hear about any kind of music. I could see
politicians ignoring us. I could join in demonstrations in the streets. I could get
tear gassed. I could walk right up to the friggin’ Library of Congress. I could
talk the nice Arlington librarians into letting me read books in the “adult”
section, at a time when the meaning of “adult” had not yet been narrowed to
just things I wouldn’t want to read. I could read Joyce. And there was some
guy named LeRoi Jones I was seeing mentioned.

At Arlington’s Kenmore Junior High, my English teacher, Mrs. Mowatt,

required each of us to memorize and recite a poem. “Old man Woolworth put
up a building. / There it was;” Don’t recall if it was before or after my
recitation, but I saw Sandburg on, I think it was, Ed Sullivan reading his poem
“Arches.” This was a time when a poet could be invited to recite his verses on a
network, prime time show, the biggest really big show of them all. This was
also a time before I sat down to read Sandburg’s complete poems in the library
and was horrified by the frequent racism in the work of this poet who wrote
“The People, Yes.” Another stage in my development as a critic, learning that
poets were not always good people. (Hey, I was a kid.)

Soon I was reading e.e. cummings. “my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give, / singing each morning out of each
night.” Again finding that reading someone’s complete works might well color
your reading of your favorite poems forever.

One day when I was thirteen, I was dawdling among the racks at a Brentanos
when I saw this face staring out at me. The look was of such intensity I had to
look at the poetry inside the book. The Dead Lecturer. Who was Edward
Dorn, and what did he have to do with the Green Lantern? (I for sure knew
who the Green Lantern was.) There was an explanation for the name of Willie
Best, but I had never seen any of those movies, and couldn’t in that pre-Netflix
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year. Who was Robert Williams and why was he in exile? But most of all: “The
symbols hang limply / in the street. A forest of objects, / motives.” There was
much of motives in the book, a motif. This was well beyond anything of
Sandburg or cummings, beyond yet the little of Eliot I’d ingested. Seemed,
though, to be in the neighborhood of Pound, Williams and Hughes. I was on
to something. First year at Wakefield High School, I went to the Brentanos
downtown and came away with a little black and white book titled Kaddish.

D.C. was a place of books, of free music, of free museums, of countless people
in the streets from every part of the globe. It was where I should have been
born, but then I would have talked differently.

I found myself saying “y’all.”

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02
RACE AROUND THE TABLE

Q. How were subjects like race, class and religion discussed around the dinner
table?

Easiest to speak of the third. Religion was there at dinner, lunch, breakfast,
day in and out. There was a Baptist publication called The Secret Place that had
a daily devotion rooted in a text from scripture, followed by a prayer. As a rule,
my father did the readings, though my mother took a turn often enough. I
can’t remember a time when I was not thinking intensely about the
complexities and contradictions of what I was hearing. (This is probably what
led to those religious studies courses I was to take as an undergraduate. I would
never take Ahura Mazda as my Zorastrian savior, but I would have some sense
of Robert Hayden’s B’hai faith when I met him; I would know what I was
looking at when I came to the two sided statue at the Buddhist temple I visited
in Wuhan.) It struck me that my father and I, when it was our turn to “say
grace,” invariably recited the same formula, as though there were never more
nor less to pray for or to. Being a Baptist, with that denomination’s emphasis
upon a personal relationship to the deity and the priesthood of all believers, I
always had a Bible. But that just multiplied the problems. Why was the
creation story told twice, with minor but telling variations? Why were there
two versions of those ten or more commandments? Why did Bruce, my
Mexican American Catholic friend across the street, have a different and
longer Bible than the ones in our house? (And why did they always eat fish on
Fridays over there?)

Church structure or strictures just compounded the confusions. I soon came to

see that anybody could teach Sunday School. Including the obviously mentally
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ill woman who one Sunday morning told us about the little devils she had seen
hovering in the corners of her ceiling the night before. Or the guy in
Richmond who told us solemnly that when you had a nightmare the blood in
your body stopped circulating and that if you didn’t wake up in time you would
die. (A piece of advice that put me in mind of the words of that prayer adults
for some unfathomable reason taught to small children that included the lines
“If I should die before I wake / I pray the Lord my soul to take.”) None of this
did much for my general opinion of the intellectual capacities of the grownups
of the world. I was growing a generation gap long before Time magazine talked
it up. I was agnostic even about gnosticism. I did not know the word
“hermeneutics” yet, but all this was making me a textual critic, not quite what
my parents had in mind in putting scripture in my hands.

We didn’t discuss class much, but it was clear that each of our churches in turn
seemed to be a step up the ecclesiastical social step ladder. I gathered that we
Baptists were somehow not in the same league with those Episcopalians with
their country clubs. It was not till I visited the deep South much later that I
came to a town where the Baptist church was the high class affair, with the
endlessly varying charismatics stringing themselves along the unspooling line
of class, speaking in tongues. (Usually the same tongues, it seemed to me,
despite their many doctrinal disputes.)

Race, it turned out, had something to do with our going to that church at 8th
and H NW instead of one of the many Baptist churches in Arlington. My
father had been elected to the presidency of the American Baptist Men’s
Association not long before our move East. The Baptist congregations in
Northern Virginia were aligned with the Southern Baptist convention. I knew
enough of church history by age twelve to know that the separation of the two
conventions had its origins in the arguments about slavery in the 19th century,
which fact didn’t do anything to ease my suspicions of Southern White folk. (I
did not yet know of the National Baptists, a Black Baptist convention formed
out of those same tectonic movements of the spirit.) The church we went to at
8th and H had not always been there, or been at all. It had formed, also in the
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19th century, when Baptist congregants at an existing church split over the issue
of praying for President Lincoln. (The Capital, even during the Civil War,
harbored an astonishing number of copperheads.) It was the pro-Lincoln
group that had left and established the new church we were to join in the next
century. The American Baptist Convention was founded at the new church, so
it made sense for my father to enroll us there. Even with that background, even
that church had gone through some painfully racist moments in the decades
before we arrived.

One of my father’s duties as President of the American Baptist Men was to

visit churches that had just formed men’s associations and present them with
charters. My father was called upon, upon such occasions, to deliver himself of
something resembling a sermonette. He did his best, rather in the tone of the
reports he made to Congress. Some of these churches were African American
congregations, and I can remember the first time that my father was the
recipient of an enthusiastic “Amen” from an older lady, which was followed
quickly by more Amens. My father had grown up with Ameners; our new
church even had an Amen corner of pews off to one side of the pulpit, though
nobody ever Amened from that quarter any more. But my father had never
before been on the receiving end of such spirited welcome, and he looked
genuinely surprised. The white gloved ladies who ushered everybody took a
particular liking to me, welcoming me as kin, but I was no doubt considerably
more likeable at thirteen than later.

Yet I really don’t recall overt discussions of race at the dinner table. Call it an
early, odd form of White privilege – the privilege to go about your business not
having to think much about race most of the time, especially at dinner time.
But I’m sure we did discuss race, and I’m pretty sure it would have been at my
instigation, because our move was causing me to think about race all the time.

I had, along with my radio and T.V. addictions, always been an avid reader of
newspapers. We always took one of the local ones, and for years the
newspapers from our previous towns followed in our wake. That’s how, reading
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the Grand Island Independent. I learned that a couple of my bonehead
neighbors from third grade were arrested for vandalizing another neighbor’s
home. I guess those abandoned shacks outside town had gotten boring to
them. My parents still subscribed to the paper from their tiny home town,
though there wasn’t much of race in that village sheet. As a reader of the news,
though, I saw the stories about the unfolding Civil Rights Movement, which
was often written about as if it were taking place in some foreign land, as if
there were no Black people in Denver.

The one memory of such a discussion at home I thought I had has, in

retrospect, to be a false memory. I thought I had a memory of my parents
sitting in the living room, looking at a map of a Southern state, and talking
over a possible job transfer that had been proposed to my father. And I
thought I remembered my mother expressing severe doubts about moving her
children to a place where crazy White folk segregated and attacked people;
most of those attacked and segregated, like Dr. King, appeared to be Baptists.
That conversation could not have happened, though. My father’s work with
the Bureau of Reclamation was restricted to projects West of the Mississippi
River. There was no way the Bureau would have offered to move him to, say
Georgia. So just what things from the Fifties were getting conflated in my
memory, and why?

It was the move East that crystallized things for me. Back in Grand Island, I’d
grown up looking at that painting of Jesus with “all the little children of the
world.” Reading the part of the Bible that picture had sprung from, I knew
that all the children gathered around him would have been Palestinian. (The
painting was inspired by Matthew 19:14, which, in my King James version,
read “ But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto
me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” The incipient poet in me wondered
about that “suffer.” Why would you “suffer” the children to go to Jesus? The
church grownups were no help on this point in semantics.) That painting,
though, presented an ideal I had no reason to question. “They’re all precious in
his sight.” I grew up with that assumption and nobody had told me there were
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any amendments or sub-clauses. Our family from time to time hosted visits by
people from Africa, and American Indians, all Baptists passing through town
to talk international Baptist efforts. (And I remember visiting the home of an
older couple who had glass cases in their house filled with artifacts from Africa,
where they had worked for many years.) If my mother and father ever had any
stereotypical ideas about races, they never expressed them in my presence.
(Grandparents were another matter. My mother’s father, for reasons lost on
me, compensated for his inability to remember people’s names, a problem I
inherited from him, by calling everyone by the same multipurpose nickname,
“Irish.”)

I’d always been a Civil War buff; read up on all the battles. I’d also spent an
evening listening to a Denver radio special about the history of the KKK in
Colorado, a Klan that had been pretty well busted by an expose in the Denver
Post back in the day. So the move to Northern Virginia and D.C., just as the
Civil War centennials were underway, meant I would see the real places I had
read about. (Children tend to have a tenuous grasp of history and geography.
My new neighbors in Arlington were impressed with my cowboy boots and
envied my knowing how to ride horses, but thought I was lying about driving
around in cars out West. I, in my turn, proved woefully ignorant of the racial
geography of my country, and nobody was in any hurry to enlighten me.)

We arrived just in time to witness the March on Washington on our T.V. set
that had just come off the moving truck. It was the year before the biggest of
the Civil Rights Acts. I never saw segregation up close in Arlington. (I saw its
legacy everywhere, as I’m about to explain.) But one day I stumbled into it in
the Virginia countryside. I’d gone on a trip, to what the locals thought were
mountains, with a car full of scouts. On the way back we’d stopped out in rural
Virginia for gasoline. I needed to use the rest room, so walked around the
corner of the gas station only to find myself blinking at a sign that read: “We
reserve the right to refuse service to anybody.” I had no idea what it meant, but
worried it meant I couldn’t pee. The adult driving the car saw me frozen, saw
the sign, grabbed me and pushed me into the car. We drove on a few hundred
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