A Walk Through Jesus: A Critical Look at the Church as a Tourist Attraction (or could it just be Black Privilege?)

The church door is opened by an oak colored woman. She greets you with a smile while saying, “Where are you visiting from?” Good morning to you too my Sister. Your feet touch the traditional red carpet, eyes look for the perfect red pew to receive the Lord, but in stepping closer to the sanctuary, you are bum rushed by ushers in black. God’s got secret service agents and they go to church in Harlem. They turn you toward the stairs.

Three flights of concrete later, the nose bleed section, and you are among your Harlem church family: A sea of wide-eyed, white faces seated in at least 12 rows all the way up to the ceiling. You notice anticipation in their eyes, realize those visitors are here for a show. Who’s Jesus anyway? You’re corralled and seated like a cow to a stable.

Segregation? Yes. Black privilege? No. Couldn’t be... Yes, it could. You blink hard and hold it for a moment, force your eyes away from that shocking portrait of sameness and try to make eye contact with the man at the podium. He never looks up from the first-floor, you assume members-only congregation. He never makes you visible, never acknowledges that you came from afar, paid good money to be in the house of Lord. Except you didn’t pay; the tourists behind you, chatting as if 200 whispers can’t be heard, did.

The choir makes a grand entrance. You forgive cliché and finally understand what angels sound like. Tears well up and go down your face. And those tourists, well, they herd out immediately after the concert, before their formal welcome: A sister speaks of being a visitor, a stranger, in God’s house. She shouts out at least seven countries represented this Sunday morning and welcomes them all, even though their representatives have already left. She closes with Hebrews 13:2, “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for some have entertained angels unawares.”

Momma says don’t knock blessing, can’t blame a church for knowing the same. And so you see. Yes. You see. More than a child of God, here to receive blessings from the word, you are a butt in a seat. You are a spectator. Or maybe you were just caught up, present with the wrong color of visitors. But never mind. You were entertained, and wasn’t that the point, or at least the church’s point?

Either way, part of you wants to come back next week, alone, see if you can slide into a pew on the first floor just to trick the man. The other part of you can’t help but wonder how much a group rate is at such an establishment. Too quickly, you hope the choir gets a cut of whatever is the tourists’ mighty dollar and you opt to leave early, knowing you can pray and praise well enough alone. Besides, it’s first Sunday, and you’d rather thank God for coffee than communion.

Your Average Black Chick

It's snowing in Central New York this evening. Syracuse to be exact.

I know because I just ran out with the trash when something begged and begged me not to run back. My hair was uncovered, as black as the sky where the snow is falling from. I realized on the walk back to my apartment, some 50 feet away, that I'm just your average black chick. Despite what the profile pic may suggest with that hair, that wild and free hair. It was part of my Halloween costume. I went as a poet; for me, the hair fit. Not to mention I was coming well past due for a perm; the hair just kinked and curled by nature. But it's not my usual. I'm a roller wrap kinda girl. Always have been.

The point is that under my night-black, iron-pressed wig, I, your average, homegrown black chick, actually stopped in the snow. The snow. Snow hits like water, and I was taught well, hence why I ran to the dumpster.

But on the walk back, it came to me: running in the snow, as if I could run from it, dodge it in some superhuman way, is such a silly action and an even sillier idea. Why not walk? As a sista, I've been running from rain damn near my whole adult life. And I mean running for real, like an escape convict with other folks' eyes at every window and sirens in earshot. So crazy, right.

I stood in the snow for longer than a moment. Felt its flakes kiss the crown of my head, and even muscled the audacity to look up. To let the cold, white pieces of longevitiy kiss me, as a friend who is also a lover would. I smiled, embarassed and upset with myself that I had been running all this time just too proud to be your average black chick.

Silly me. As if beauty can be seen ducking and dodging and running from rain and its cousin, the snow. Silly me. Beauty is best seen when she is standing still.

Podcast: Full Moon of Sonia

. . . Because I'm still on Sonia, a podcast reviewing her spoken work cd, Full Moon of Sonia. It's an amazing performance collection and a reminder that poetry, always meant to be read aloud, can, when read by the right person, jump into our ears and move our souls to better.

An article about a concert of the cd in NYC from Dec. 2004
http://reviews.aalbc.com/fullmoon.htm

An article about the cd, with track samples

http://cdbaby.com/cd/soniasanchez

Sonia Sanchez at AWP this year

Prose Is Poetry

Sonia Sanchez’s 1984 poetry collection Homegirls and Handgrenades won an American Book Award the next year, though these years aren’t especially vivid for me. I was born in ‘83. Nonetheless, I read the collection with a degree of familiarity bubbling over in my mind, leaving my cheeks damp with tears. She is telling me about myself, about my experience and the people of and in this experience, this black experience. The content of Homegirls and Handgrenades is so familiar that this year’s reprint, its first, couldn’t be more appropriate.

In 88 pages, Sanchez lays out what Langston Hughes, in his essay “The Negro and the Racial Mountain,” would call our “beautiful, and ugly too”—meaning that a black artist must be comfortable with all truths of black life. That as a people, we are both beautiful and ugly, and expressing this should not be feared or cause shame.

Sanchez’s smiling face covers Homegirls and Handgrenades. Beyond the cover is her range as a writer, displayed through poetic blues and haiku forms, free verse, and prose that is similar in sound to memoir. These literary mediums form the strong tie of the poet’s purpose; however, it is her prose that best illuminates the worlds of black love and life and the struggle to maintain the two.

Her prose is more than just words to associate with. There’s no sign that Sanchez has fallen into the all-too-common trap of being too poetic (fluff over meaning). She simply writes of people, people that have laughs and ways, have lived and have lessons. The ugly of it is how or where their living took them, and beautiful are the lessons, and joy even, in their living at all.

In the story “Just Don’t Never Give Up on Love,” Sanchez records her own vulnerability as a woman wanting to find love. She meets the 84-year-old Ms. Rosalie Johnson in a park. Ms. Johnson speaks to Sanchez about love, pretty men, and her second husband, William (she “wuz christen’ with his love”). Before the story ends, Sanchez is crying for herself and “all the women who ever stretched their bodies out anticipating civilization and finding ruins.”

It is the beautiful construction and ugly truth of lines like that one that evoke a reader’s emotions. Her word choice is exceptional and unwavering; it is the result of what many poetry professor’s see as poetry’s number one rule: No images except in things.

She addresses teenage pregnancy through “Norma,” a girl from her childhood who was the brain in especially Algebra and French. Norma “laughed only with her teeth,” but with an education full of teachers lacking control over their students, her story is just as prevalent now as it was in the '80s. Idle hands and body: Norma, mother of four.

And there’s “Bubba,” the hustler, who Sanchez believes “gave his genius up to the times.” I could only read “Bubba” once initially; his story was too real. I closed my eyes and Sanchez’s words projected him onto the backs of my eyelids—yet another young black man caught up in the hustle, planting himself on a corner of the concrete jungle just to get ahead of his world, his ugly world.

But Homegirls and Handgrenades is not without hope, another reason its reprint is timely. In “A Letter to Dr. Martin Luther King,” Sanchez’s voice as a believer in all the beauty and ugly of her people shows through as vivid as a dream in color: “It was black in the universe before the sun; it was black in the mind before we opened our eyes; it was black in the womb of our mother; black is the beginning, and if we are the beginning we will be forever.” Her prose is poetry.

To Be Real: Beads, Weave, and Curtains Be Art A Review of "Kori Newkirk: 1997-2007"

2004. "Younger." 228.6 x 243.8 cm. The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

I was seven or eight years old when my Aunt Joyce broke my tender head. She rattail-parted through my hair, tightly braided its strands, adding plastic gold pony beads to the bottoms. When I looked upon my bright yellow, almost white, scalp for the first time down to the ends of hair crowned with gold, I was awe-struck. Yes, there were friendship bracelet beads in my hair, and it was divine.

It was also art then, and so still believes Kori Newkirk, an artist on exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem through March 9, that it is art now. Newkirk is known for beaded curtains strung with braided synthetic hair hung along aluminum brackets. I didn’t look to see if he burned the ends. I imagine he did, though, since his choice media are practical, things like the beads and even hair grease, and burning is the practical way to keep synthetic hair braided.

The curtain installations range in size but bring to mind the expanse of bay windows, and as would a tapestry or an afghan, Newkirk’s beaded pointillism creates focused and detailed landscapes. In “Breaker,” one of the five curtains on display, a sky of clear beads to floor is interrupted by a two-dimensional tree standing tall in its middle. The leaves, stems, and trunk are hues so convincing I had to step closer to see that the beads were still manufactured, not painted to be different greens or browns.

The range of colors in the curtains struck me just as I had been as a child. To think that something so simple and so often cast as merely a cultural norm could support more than that Garvey-ism, “black is beautiful.” Newkirk’s work takes an every-childhood thing, pony beads, and manages them into scenes that are specifically human in experience. And that is more than divine. That’s real.


Exhibition and Museum Information:
Studio Museum of Harlem
http://www.studiomuseum.org/
144 West 125th Street New York, NY 10027
212.864.4500 phone

What else does the Studio Museum of Harlem have in store?
Exploring Kori Newkirk. Hands-on workshop.
http://www.harlemonestop.com/organization.php?id=3

And what about the man behind the beads? Check out this interview from Vibe.
http://www.vibe.com/juice07/2007/08/kori_newkirk_npg/

Movie Review: The Great Debaters

In Character, Washington Displays What Words Can Do

The Great Debaters is a movie for a reason: It reminds us now what had to be endured and overcome then, and it does so with a black man just as fearful of being lynched as the next. Written by Robert Eisele, The Great Debaters is called Oprah’s movie because she produced it, and it’s tagged as yet another for Denzel Washington to star in, never mind that he also directed it. And although he does shine, as does Forest Whitaker, they do so softly. The movie is not concerned with famed faces. It’s concerned with the actual man that brought about a need for these faces to tell a story in the first place.

Set in 1935 in the Jim Crow South, The Great Debaters is about a black college debate team, Wiley College, in Marshall, Texas. The team is pitted as the underdogs, but the coach, Professor Melvin B. Tolson (Washington), didn’t believe in being under anything or anyone. At most times radical and at all times passionate, he wanted more for his team, more for his people, and more for his community than the South wanted to give, and as a result, it is Tolson that projects this story, this movie forward.

An inspiring teacher, activist, and man, he separates the Wiley College debate team’s story from the others involving the struggles and uplifting of the black community. The team wasn’t led by an outsider, an educated and soon-to-be humbled white coach, teacher, or leader. The Great Debaters isn’t another Glory Road, Freedom Writers, or even Glory. It’s more like a Lean on Me with the megaphone-carrying, door-chaining principal, Mr. Joe Clark.

And it’s like cool water on a July day. Tolson believed in the power of words. He believed that knowledge, once gained, could never be taken away and once spoken, could never be silenced. “I am here to help you find and keep your righteous mind,” he says to his team. And thanks to Oprah and Washington, Tolson, some 70 years later, has said the same to us, for we are representative of the change he spoke, wrote, and fought for.