Elizabeth Alexander | Hilton Als
June 9, 2015
LIVE from the New York Public Library
www.nypl.org/live
Wachenheim Trustees Room
(applause)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Thank you, thank you very much, Tony. My name is Paul
Holdengräber. As you know, I’m the Director of Public Programs here at the New York Public
Library. And I always say that my goal is to make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution
dance, and when successful to make it levitate. You’ll also be very happy to hear that today we
booked an event with the Moth, a fantastic storytelling group, in late December, early December
of next year and the evening will in some way be about roaring lions, and we decided that on that
day it will be the last time that I will ever say that the lions are roaring. (laughter) Please
applaud that moment. (applause) My wife will be extremely happy when she hears that tonight,
because she’s had to live with this for ten years.
This is the penultimate event of the spring LIVE from the New York Public Library season, our
tenth anniversary spring season. Next Tuesday we end with Werner Herzog in a conversation
about his love for ancient Greek literature, an evening cosponsored and copresented by the
Onassis Foundation. The event is sold out but it will be live-streamed, and you can always try
your luck by coming on standby. I invited Elizabeth Alexander because I fell in love with her
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memoir, The Light of the World, and wrote her a fan or rather a love letter. I have done this a few
times before, for instance with Edmund de Waal upon reading The Hare with Amber Eyes, and
Patti Smith’s Just Kids. Both Edmund de Waal and Patti Smith responded positively to my letter,
as did Elizabeth Alexander, and both Patti Smith and Edmund de Waal will be back this fall for
more. It is thus my hope that Elizabeth Alexander will also come back sometime soon to the
New York Public Library for more.
Hilton Als and I cooked up a plan some years ago for a series of events that has not yet
happened. I hope there too we will revisit what we could do together in the years ahead. After the
conversation, which will last about as long as a psychoanalytical session if your shrink is
generous, Elizabeth Alexander and Hilton Als will sign books. 192 Books, our independent
bookstore, is here to help us with this sale.
I would like to say a big thank-you to the Ford Foundation and particularly to Darren Walker for
their fantastic support of LIVE from the New York Public Library tenth anniversary as well as
the support of many great cultural institutions across New York City. I also want to thank our
Spring 2015 season media sponsor, the Financial Times. Thanks to the continuing generosity of
Celeste Bartos and Mahnaz and Adam Bartos.
As many of you know, for the last seven years—I’m not going to retire that—I’ve asked my
guests to give me a biography of themselves in seven words. A haiku of sorts, or if you’re very
modern, a tweet. Elizabeth Alexander submitted these seven words to me: “Mother, poet,
teacher, race woman, evolving subject to change.” Hilton Als submitted these seven words,
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reminiscent to me of the seven words Joan Didion submitted to me some years ago. “Seven
words,” she said, “do not yet define me.” Hilton Als’s seven words are: “I do not know so cannot
say.” Please welcome them.
(applause)
HILTON ALS: Thank you all for coming. It’s a little warm, and I wanted to read this
introduction really as a way of celebrating Elizabeth and the event. Introductions are a strange
practice but a necessary one, usually polite at the core, fact-based and essentially essentializing,
particularly if the host or audience only has a cursory knowledge of the subject. But in this case,
none of that’s even close to the truth. I feel as though I’ve always known Elizabeth or known of
her. And in that knowing, which includes her work as a poet, a legendary professor in Yale’s
African American Studies department, a best-selling author, and a strong and committed mother
of two, there are perforce a multitude of feelings that cannot be contained in an introduction.
So, the project at hand is kind of moot, existentially speaking, but since we are on Earth and
there is a task to perform, let’s begin with her birth in 1962 in Harlem, USA, and her heritage,
which includes the people of Harlem and her father, Clifford Alexander Jr., former United States
secretary and Equal Opportunity Commissioner, and her mother, the very beautiful Adele, a
professor who has taught legions about black women’s lives, and her brother Mark, who has
been a senior adviser to President Obama during his first campaign, and forgive me if I’m
leaving something out. The point is, Elizabeth, a self-described race woman, comes from a house
not built on history lost, which is where most black Americans live, but history gained, and your
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ear had to be in your foot if you didn’t hear that in her poem, “Praise Song for the Day,” which
she read so exceptionally well and beautifully at President Obama’s 2009 swearing-in. And there
she said, “We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.” And that’s what tonight will give us, Elizabeth’s words, and
some memories, which might include the afternoon she read at President Obama’s first swearingin, which was the swearing-in of so much more stuff, too, including Elizabeth’s national
prominence as a poet, and it was the swearing-in as Elizabeth the playwright, author of Diva
Studies, a play her late husband Ficré loved, and it was also the swearing-in of Professor
Elizabeth Alexander, author of the two irreplaceable essay collections, 2004’s The Black Interior
and 2007’s Power and Possibility.
Now we have Elizabeth the memoirist, the poet working in prose, and her best-selling book The
Light of the World, which chronicles her nearly twenty-year love affair and life with Ficré, artist
and chef, father and friend, a bespectacled man who brought black difference into Elizabeth’s
black America, which is most of our America, and if you listen you know that Elizabeth is its
true laureate. Ladies and gentlemen, Elizabeth Alexander.
(applause)
Thank you, I have to say the rather eager young man has taken my questions. (laughter) I need
them back. Thank you so much. Well, this is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, only
because you have given so much of yourself to other people, and it is a rare person who does that
without complaint. I never hear you complain, I only hear you reinforce and support people and
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societies that you love. That’s going to be something that comes back in the conversation as a
theme, but I wanted to start really with words, and to talk about your life as an artist, which you
sometimes put to the forefront, sometimes you recede from in order to foster the talents of others,
but there’s no stopping you now with this book, so let’s talk a little bit about little Lizzie and
how did she come to be herself as an artist?
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Little Lizzie was a girl, a child, who dreamed at night very
vividly and who would come downstairs to her parents—and thank you for calling their names—
and say, “I had the most extraordinary dream,” and if my mother, who you know to be elegant
and dry, were here telling the story, she would say, “And so we put down whatever other things
we were doing, all else would pause, and you would say what you had seen or been visited with
the night before,” and so I think that I give that to my parents, and I never knew that other people
didn’t dream wildly or remember their dreams all the time, and it always surprised me. Ficré, the
most creative person I ever knew, was not someone who very often remembered his dreams, so
that’s probably where it began.
And I think also with listening, listening to the way that people spoke, listening to the different
ways that people spoke around me, listening to a Jamaican grandfather with one particular
inflection, one particular vocabulary, listening to—and I’ve talked about this before—my
father’s great, elegant Harlem swearing that was just like nothing else, thrilling, you know, we
would pray for traffic so that we could hear him just, you know, carry on and he does that now,
my children think it’s the most entertaining thing you’ve ever seen, and my mother’s
tremendously elegant way of speaking and understatement and hearing the traces of Alabama in
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my grandmother’s speech and seeing also the different kinds of words that she used and would
credit to her great teacher at Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., Miss Otelia Cromwell,
who years later I discovered was one of the first, I believe the fourth African American woman
to earn the PhD and that she received her PhD in English from Yale. So I felt that the person my
grandmother would correct my English and say, “That is what Miss Cromwell told us.”
And so, you know, clearly it seemed to me that a circle needed to be closed with beginning to
research her work and reading her letters about her time finding her way at Yale in the 1920s,
and wanting to be write about black people, and saying to her father, “But certainly I didn’t come
here to learn how to do that, so I will let these people teach me Shakespeare and I will then do
what I have to do,” which she did in 1931 with her first anthology of African American writing
for teachers.
And so I think that, you know, there’s all of that and also reading, you know, also reading, and I
think that all of us are children who read and read and read and read, and read everything and
read what we’re supposed to and read what we’re not supposed to, and read ahead of ourselves.
HILTON ALS: Yes, read under the desk.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Yes, read under the desk, read in secret, tuck things, you know,
beneath the mattress and read I think indiscriminately and just put it all in.
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HILTON ALS: Now there was something, an extraordinary moment. I met your mother for the
first time recently and there’s something very powerful about her presence and one of the things
that I would say was so unique about her was that she was a woman who stood square and she
looked you in the eye, and it wasn’t about defiance or being annoyed by your presence, it was
just that she was looking to see who you were, and one of the things that I love about your
writing, is that, you know, if—we’ll get into the individual volumes, but if you go through
Elizabeth’s writing, the female character, whether it’s Elizabeth or someone else that you’re
dreaming about, i.e., Toni Morrison and so on, they are women that look you square in the eye,
and one of the strengths I feel about your poetry and your essays is you’re looking at us square in
the eye and at the same time you want us to tell you who we are, so I’m interested in learning a
bit more about the kinds of things you were reading that spoke to you about that kind of
directness, emotional connection and directness.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: That is such an interesting observation and I think I can, you
know, answer it a little bit obliquely, because when I think about looking directly I think actually
about literally looking at people and looking at paintings, looking at art, growing up with art
around, growing up with paintings on the wall, many of them by my great uncle, who was the
painter Charles Alston, many of them which were made by my mother, who was a very, very
accomplished artist before she became a mother, before she became a historian, so she had many
amazing lives.
So there were always beautiful things to look at, and to look at again, and to regard with care,
and the expectation that you would look and see something different each time, there was that
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kind of full-on, I think, directness, and I don’t know, I mean all I can think of is a certain kind of,
you know, as my grandmother would say, “not raising, that is cattle, but rearing,” you know, a
kind of expectation that as black people you don’t break eye contact with anybody, ever, you
know, so that very, very keen sense that the world is yours, stand squarely in it, and that that was
part of kind of race work and race rhetoric and that to break that would be actually the shame.
HILTON ALS: This is fascinating and a wonderful segue to my next question because one of
the things that gets very short shrift in terms of the story of blackness are the many different
classes, right, that exist within black America, and Darryl Pinckney’s for instance novel High
Cotton was about the black middle class in the Midwest and your family being black, middleclass professionals, did that in certain black worlds make you feel outside of those worlds,
similarly did you feel outside of certain white worlds at the Sidwell Friends School, for instance.
Because—this is—
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: The Sidwell Friends School.
HILTON ALS: Did you feel outside of certain narratives because of that difference?
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Well, my grandmother always told us, she didn’t teach us, you
know, they weren’t these kind of black people who teach you to be superior to others, in fact that
was a kind of a verboten ideology, but she did teach us that if someone showed their racism or,
you know, she wouldn’t say showed their ass, you know, but if they did, you were to think of
them as limited. “Oh, isn’t that a pity, they are so very limited,” (laughter) she would say. You
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know, those surviving women, they were serious and cold like that, you know, and then you
moved on to the next thing.
HILTON ALS: You help me with that too when I’m going crazy, you just look at me and say—
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Limited. Limited. (laughter) That’s all you need to know and
you can’t expend too much energy on it, she would sometimes, she would just put a finger on my
forehead, “Limited.” So that’s to say, “Don’t use that brain on figuring this out, because you
won’t, because racism has infinite energy and fuel and irrationality, so don’t give it—
HILTON ALS: Any more power.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Any more power than that. And so and that was, so what I knew
about the Sidwell Friends School was it was recently desegregated, you know, so its
conservatism, which is how I experienced it, it’s changed a lot, its fundamental conservatism was
something that I could think about knowing that, you know, southern senators had successfully
kept black people out of it just a few years before I got there. You know, Washington, when my
parents moved from New York, when we moved in 1963, was a very southern city, still in its
desegregation process, and we were quite aware of that, and as New Yorkers, you know, they
just—this was all, so we were outside—it was wonderful that they were from New York, so we
were outside of that foolishness and also outside of a lot of the foolishness of, you know, black
D.C. high bourgeoisie, you know, which they taught us was foolish.
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HILTON ALS: And which Toni Morrison when she went to Howard she said she wanted to go
a black university and she was so shocked by that stuff that you’re describing in terms of the
black bourgeoisie, that there wasn’t a one community, it was about a hierarchy that was very
shocking and weird to her.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: And I think that that—So that didn’t much interest my parents,
and my parents too came from different backgrounds, as well, so even though they came from—
went to the same schools, came from Harlem, they came from different Harlems with different
backgrounds. So my mother’s family came to Harlem from Tuskegee, where they were a family
of educators. Her father was Booker T. Washington’s second in command, his treasurer when he
was building Tuskegee Institute, and my father would look at these pictures of these fancy, you
know, white-looking Negroes on the porch at Tuskegee, and say, “Well, all those clothes are
nice, but where’s the house, where’s the property? How come you all—” You know, he was
being funny but he was also sort of saying, “We know that you have the education to show for
it,” which obviously he revered, but also there was an irony in there, what do you actually have
to show, what do black people have to show?
HILTON ALS: Other than being siddity.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Other than being siddity. And other than having read a lot of
books, which again was of tremendous value, but there is a kind of a practicality that he had. I
found always that that was a very interesting conversation and he would you know again kind of
embellish it, Harlem storyteller. “There was your mother up on Sugar Hill, and there we were
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down below,” it’s their drama, (laughter) but I think that the nuances, and this is where you
start, the nuances and the beauty and the contours and the gorgeous differences in black life.
HILTON ALS: And they could keep each other in check, too, right, all the time.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Yes, all the time, yeah.
HILTON ALS: You said I read an interview recently, it was an old one where you said that
politics was just part of the family, it was part of the conversation. Tell me how that worked.
You were brought to King’s march on Washington as a baby. So it’s been in your ear for your
whole life. Talk to me about how it worked in the family. Why did your father go to D.C., by the
way?
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: So he went to Washington, D.C., having worked first at an
organization here. He was an assistant district attorney in New York City after graduating law
school. He had served in the army as a private. He worked for an organization called HARYOUACT, a Harlem community organization, and then he came at the behest of President Kennedy to
work for a moment for the National Security Council and then when President Kennedy was
killed he became one of Lyndon Johnson’s White House lawyers, and one of three people who
were working in the White House office on civil rights, so he was the liaison to the people
outside in the civil rights movement, so all of those meetings that the white man set up in Selma
my dad set up. Which is just worth saying not to say anything about the movie but to say a thirtyone-year-old black man, it’s hard to imagine, it’s hard to imagine, you know, was doing that
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work and in a way not thinking nothing of it, thinking everything of it, but stepping to the
moment, rising to the occasion, and always understanding that his seemingly rarefied position
was in service to what he always unambiguously understood as his people and our forward
movement. So that was just the way people were, but it was also, even in hearing about you
know Tuskegee, I remember in college reading Up from Slavery for the first time and thinking,
“I hate Booker T. Washington, he’s so conservative, stick up his butt,” I didn’t like any of that
stuff. But thinking about it from another angle, what did it mean for people born in slavery to be
thinking in any way about the education of newly emancipated people?
HILTON ALS: Well, here’s a complex and interesting point about your father. Was that the
South was not his old country, the Caribbean was his old country, so how was he relating to—
blackness was just blackness to him, it didn’t matter, geography didn’t matter, or what was his
feeling about coming up from the West Indies, culturally?
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: It’s interesting, so he spent all his years in Harlem, but his father
came from Jamaica, came to Harlem in 1918 and my grandmother, his mother, was from North
Carolina, then Yonkers, then Harlem. And so I think part of what’s important about that is that,
you know, global blackness was not invented yesterday.
HILTON ALS: Right, hello.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Right, you know, nor was the black Atlantic, nor was—I mean,
we’ve been crossing and talking to each other and you know to quote as I always do Gwendolyn
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Brooks on this, “we occur everywhere.” We occur everywhere, and that’s an old thing. So I think
that part of what’s really fascinating about the history of New York City in particular and the
history of Harlem in particular is that there was already that kind of—and I don’t mean to be
romanticize it or flatten its differences, but there was an umbrella of blackness under which
many, many, many different kinds of people took shelter and worked and were together.
HILTON ALS: And he, I mean, to give more due to your father, to give your kids that legacy is
profound in a country where most people don’t know past their grandparents what their world
was, let alone who their people were, so when you walk into room, one of the things that I notice
is that you face it squarely, too. That the great heritage of your parents is not only their history
but the ways in which history can reinforce our very being in the world now.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: That’s beautiful.
HILTON ALS: Oh, thank you. I wanted you to read something very beautiful, because
Elizabeth on top of everything else is an amazing performer, and I’m going to bust her on that in
a minute, but from your book Miss Crandall’s School of Free Young Ladies and Little Misses of
Color, which is a great title and a great book. It was published in 2007 and when I think of little
Lizzie, I think of the first poem, which is called “Knowledge.” Would you mind reading it?
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: And so this, the poet Marilyn Nelson, when she was the poet
laureate of the state of Connecticut decided that what she wanted to do, the project of that poet
laureateship was going to be to explore in poetry and turn resources to exploring and creating
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poetry about the history of black people in Connecticut, which a topic do we know a lot about
that, not a whole lot, and so she invited me, she had been writing poetry for young adults.
HILTON ALS: (laughter) Sorry, that was a delayed response, like an acid flashback. It was
quite funny.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: I’ll try to make that happen a few more times.
HILTON ALS: Thank you, thank you.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: But so she invited me. She had started writing poems for young
adults. She said, “Let’s do a project together, you write historical poems, I write historical
poems.” We were both obsessed with Prudence Crandall, a white Quaker woman who started a
school, first for any young girls in Canterbury, Connecticut, then when the townspeople, there
was a black girl who worked at the school and said, “If I perform my chores, may I stay in the
back of the room and study with the other girls?” and Prudence Crandall said yes and the
townspeople objected and she said well, and they continued to object, she said, “Well, then, your
girls, the white girls, can go home and I’ll run Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and
Little Misses of Color,” which she did, but the townspeople so opposed her, so fought her,
poisoned their water source, killed a cat and tied it to the front of—you know, so prevented her
from teaching, eventually set the school on fire.
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So that is her story and we thought about who was this woman and who was this woman who
met her moment, who didn’t set out to be this kind of a rebel but was, and who are these women
who so who desperately wanted to become educated? So.
“Knowledge.”
It wasn’t as if we knew nothing before.
After all, colored girls must know many
things in order to survive. Not only
could I sew buttons and hems, but I could
make a dress and pantaloons from scratch.
I could milk cows, churn butter, feed chickens,
clean their coops, wring their necks, pluck and cook them.
I cut wood, set fires, and boiled water
to wash the clothes and sheets, then wrung them dry.
And I could read the Bible. Evenings
before the fire, my family tired
from unending work and New England cold,
they’d close their eyes. My favorite was Song of Songs.
They most liked when I read, “In the beginning.”
And of course she’s the one in her family, the only one who can read, and so that’s what she has
for them, that’s what she gives to them.
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HILTON ALS: And also what I love about it is the humility that one can find in pride, you
know, that when you’re a deeply humble person, you don’t have to speak of your pride, you can
just do, and that’s one of the things I love about you and your work.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Thank you.
HILTON ALS: So I wanted you to read that.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: You know, I want to read one more—
HILTON ALS: Do, please!
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: In this sequence because—
HILTON ALS: Are you kidding?
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: This was a poem, you know, one of the things about—
HILTON ALS: Do you want me to hold anything for you?
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: No, so I’m holding this mike because I was too vain to take off
my beautiful earrings, and they were clacking on the microphone.
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(applause)
We can do many things at once. So one of the things that I think is so interesting about writing
historical poems and about writing in persona and it’s a wonderful writing trick, I don’t teach
poetry as much as I used to, but a great writing trick is to ask students to choose a historical
persona, someone they’re obsessed with, and write in the voice of that person and inevitably the
magic trick at the end is that you find that if you’ve been successful you’ve learned something
about yourself that perhaps you might not have been able to say directly.
HILTON ALS: Right, because you’re behind metaphor.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: You’re behind metaphor.
HILTON ALS: You’re free behind metaphor.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: And behind persona.
HILTON ALS: Yes.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: But you’re writing out of obsession.
HILTON ALS: Yes.
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ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: So this is a poem called “Allegiance,” again in the voice of one
of these girls, and it’s 1830 about in these poems, and they’re all sonnets.
Teacher is bewildered when packages
and letters come from far to say how brave,
how visionary, how stare-down-the-beast
is Prudence Crandall of Canterbury.
Work, she says, there is always work to do,
not in the name of self but in the name,
the water-clarity of what is right.
We crave radiance in this austere world,
light in the spiritual darkness.
Learning is the one perfect religion,
its path correct, narrow, certain, straight.
At its end it blossoms and billows
into vari-colored polyphony:
the sweet infinity of true knowledge.
And so when I start reading from that and imagining these young girls who traveled so far, and
of course what was travel in 1830, how did you get from Lynchburg, Virginia, to Canterbury,
Connecticut, in 1830, how did your parents send you there, how did your parents say good-bye
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to you? I would think as I read and would feel more and more fervor in my body as I read that
poem, I would think, “I believe that. I believe that.”
HILTON ALS: Well, you believe also in something that is remarkable for most writers are
interested in their nihilism, right? Most twentieth-century poets have an interesting nihilism that
the world begins and ends with their work. One of the things that’s continuous is that your work
is a continuum, that one gesture, poetic, is to me leading into the prose gesture or the dramatic
gesture and I’m wondering about the power of different genres for you. When you’re writing
does the genre dictate or do you dictate how you’re going to say it?
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Well, I’ve had a very, very interesting test of that with this
memoir, with The Light of the World, and since it’s a memoir and I am more known for writing
poetry, I’ve just been on this book tour and people ask me what have you—what else, what are
you working on now? I say like—
HILTON ALS: Sleep, sleep, perhaps.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: You know what? I’m going to cut you right now, is what I’m
working on right now.
(laughter)
HILTON ALS: Sleep perhaps.
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ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: That’s right. I mean, it’s a reasonable question but you know.
But also, you know, the sort of—
HILTON ALS: Limited. Limited.
(laughter)
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Are you writing— (applause) That’s right, “limited,” exactly,
exactly, but, “Are you writing poems? Do you still write poems?” And so to a few of my poet
friends, I’ve sort of you know dramatically taken to the fainting couch, and said, “I will never
write poems. I no longer write poems. Never again.” And that is dramatic but what is true is that
writing this book showed me very, very keenly that sometimes, you know, though I as a
professor and a scholar am incredibly interested in genre, I’m interested and wrote a whole
dissertation on collage and hybrid genres in, you know, black women’s creativity, I think that the
properties of genres are very, very—or genre—are very, very important. I think that young
writers need to understand what they are writing into and against both historically and also
formally. It’s very, very, very important but right now what I’m feeling is that to police those
borders too avidly is sometimes fundamentally anti-creative, and that, you know, if to discover
that I can feel a word and then a phrase and then some music coming up out of my viscera in the
way that it does in poetry but that it then builds into something that is prose, but its own kind of
prose, was thrilling and it made me feel that I could make so much more. It made me feel that I
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could keep working. It made me feel that I was a real artist more than I ever felt that in my whole
life.
HILTON ALS: Wow.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: So I feel that I have to honor the fact that genre was broken.
HILTON ALS: Yes.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: You know, because it made something else.
HILTON ALS: Or your role was broken, right? Your persona as poet was cracked in the most
essential way, it’s like a vase and something cracks and things still keep growing out of the vase.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: That’s right. That’s beautiful. That’s exactly right. Yes.
HILTON ALS: Thank you. And so one of the things—one of the things that I think is I’m just
going, when I was preparing today I was going back in my mind to amazing moments watching
you read or stand up for poetry. Now, when you started the poetry center at Smith College. This
is your first job.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: No, so my first job was at the University of Chicago.
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HILTON ALS: Chicago.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Well, my first, first job was a year at Haverford College—
HILTON ALS: Haverford, Chicago.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: And then a proper assistant professorship at the University of
Chicago.
HILTON ALS: And then Smith was when?
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: And then Smith was after that, after I ran away and joined the
circus and fell in love and started having babies.
HILTON ALS: Yes.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: So I left Chicago and was the Conkling poet in residence as you
were a Conkling writer there as well. And the amazing Ruth Simmons was the president at the
time.
HILTON ALS: Incredible.
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ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: And she had said to the entire campus, and by the way she very
pointedly said, “And by the entire campus, I mean the people who are cooking in the kitchens, I
mean the professors, I mean the administrators, I mean the sound people who make our guests’
voices audible. I mean everybody. What are your dreams for this campus? Dream your dreams
and write them and send them to me and we’ll see what we can do.” And that’s how the
engineering program was born at Smith.
HILTON ALS: Which is incredible.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Which is an extraordinary one.
HILTON ALS: Yes.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: And that’s how the poetry center was born. And as it happened
the moment that I arrived there, that was blossoming, and they said to me, “Do you want to run
this poetry center?” So—
HILTON ALS: Well, here’s the thing about that. We both enjoyed our time there immensely.
One of the things that was very hard to do walking down Green Street was not to tear up when I
saw the engineering building, because who says girls can’t do math, right?
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: That’s right.
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HILTON ALS: And I often wanted my classes to be in the engineering building just to inspire
the fact the architecture of language was my whole point. But anyway, so one of the things that
was powerful to me when I would go to the poetry center was to think about the ways in which
your family activism, you had translated that to the academic sphere, making the Af-Am
Department at Yale so powerful and huge when you were running it, starting the poetry center at
Smith. Are these—I want to call them sort of righteous activities. Is this part of your DNA as
well?
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Well, it’s interesting, you know. I’ve been thinking about all of
those kinds of things, even at Haverford College, you know, always, you know, some of it is
always wanting to put on a show, and loving putting on a show and being really bossy and, you
know, really, and just loving an extravaganza and loving getting everyone excited and going to
the barn and you’re saying, “let’s go, let’s go, come on, this is great!” But also I realized
seriously I swear to God it is about redistributing wealth and getting it to artists and people of
color and women, and that is a through line, all the way, even from in college, I would find what
little money was there and turn it to, you know, Ritual and Dissent, this incredible journal that
some of us made of African American arts and letters, always finding the money, asking the
money, hat in hand, raising the money, and making something happen that wasn’t supposed to
happen in that space, you know, but that needed to happen in that space, or that needed to happen
more fulsomely in that space, making sure always that artists were paid and paid properly. I
mean, you know, to the best of my ability. It seems like a little thing but having done it now for
thirty years, it’s very, very important. I work at a gazillionaire-ish university. You know, there’s
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24
so much money. Black folks and colored folks and women and poets ought to have some of that
money because we’re dead without the work they do, there’s nothing without that.
HILTON ALS: Well, you can’t speak if you’re not living.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: That’s right, that’s right, and I mean also as a friend of mine
says about getting paid, she said next time you’re not getting paid, just look out and the person
who made the ice sculpture got paid.
HILTON ALS: That’s right.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Right? And the person’s who’s pouring the drinks is getting
paid. You know, everybody’s getting paid. So the artists need to get paid and institutions I think
that have resources I think it is a joy when those resources come to flow in service of the life
force of art.
HILTON ALS: And there’s visible evidence. This is capital. So they want to see what’s going
to happen. If they give you that twenty-five dollars what can you do with it, oh, here’s another
seventy because you did this.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Which we know how to do.
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HILTON ALS: Hello. So here’s my statement was that when you did a reading. It’s a twopronged question/statement. Helen Vendler wrote an essay about an anthology of black poetry
that came under a lot of discussion, let’s say, because she was saying that there was not really
enough black poetry to make an anthology, that was one of her criticisms. Second part of that
was when I saw you read Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” and there was—you were
the “I” but you didn’t feel the same way that this Elizabeth felt about looking at these black
women in National Geographic, it was one of the profound performances that—
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Where was that? That was at Smith?
HILTON ALS: No, you were doing it with Frank Bidart and a bunch of other people, James
Fenton.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Yeah, yes.
HILTON ALS: It was at Cooper Union.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Yes, yes, yes.
HILTON ALS: And I was there, and it was one of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen.
And so I wanted to talk about this idea of the black vernacular in poetry world and also would
you read a little bit of this Elizabeth Bishop and I’d like to talk to you about it.
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ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Yes. I love Elizabeth Bishop, she’s one of my favorite poets,
and I think that one of the—the interesting thing about living with certain poems over time and
revisiting them and going back and understanding or being interested in different things as your
own life changes is that great poetry will continue to reveal those different things to you and
allow you to—like, I have a real relationship with this poem because when I first read it, my
grandmother, she didn’t read a lot of modern poetry, but she had a copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s
Geography III that was one of—and she had a beautiful little perfect bookshelf in her little
beautiful tiny studio apartment near the United Nations and when I would go and visit her, which
I did often, I would read her books over and over again and this Elizabeth Bishop was one of the
books she had. I’m not quite sure why. She had Countee Cullen, she had classic black poetry, she
had Shakespeare, but she had this Elizabeth Bishop.
And so the part that you mention—I remember as a child being compelled and a little
embarrassed and fascinated and not having words for what I was feeling, and then at different
points revisiting the poem I had more words. And I think also maybe it’s important to talk about
the part of an artist that is sheer ego, you know, of just following language that overrides all
language you’ve ever made before and about reading other poems and wanting to say those
words as though you wrote them, to take them in your body that way and so the sheer ego part of
me loved reading a line that you’ll know when I come to it, too.
“In the Waiting Room”
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
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27
to keep her dentist’s appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist’s waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
—“Long Pig,” the caption said.
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Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
—Aunt Consuelo’s voice—
not very loud or long.
I wasn’t at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn’t. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
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I was my foolish aunt,
I—we—were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.
I said to myself: three days
and you’ll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
And the poem goes on from there. So, you know, just sort of, you know, what to make of her
horror is that a racialized horror, you know, we get the word black before we come to the black
people, you know the black in the volcano and you know something’s about to happen and then
her horror at these images in National Geographic but is it a racialized horror or is it the kind of
voyeuristic horror of a child who can’t turn away? And trying to sort of think about that and the
satisfaction even as a young girl even in that discomfort, which I knew there was something that
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wasn’t quite right of being able to then speak the line “I am an Elizabeth” and to see it in a poem
I know meant something to me.
HILTON ALS: There is something very in tandem with that in your book Power and
Possibility, which I hope you pick up. It’s a wonderful book of essays. The first one is about a
poet that mattered a great deal to me as a young person, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and I used to try
to dress like Paul Laurence Dunbar and read to my mother as if I’d written the poems.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: And Mother loved Paul Laurence Dunbar.
HILTON ALS: Yes, she did. And this is a wonderful occasion to read the first couple of
paragraphs from Elizabeth’s essay called “Dunbar Lives,” which if you know anything about
jazz is a reference to “Bird Lives.”
“In the course of writing this essay I found something that surprised me: Dunbar matters very
much to contemporary African American poets. And I’ve also discovered how Dunbar matters to
me. Several years ago in conversation with another African American poet I mentioned that
when I was growing up my father would occasionally recite Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The
Party.” He did so joyfully and apropos of nothing but exuberance as far as my brother and I
could tell. This was always a thrill. He had “slipped into the vernacular,” as we said,
“vernacular” always having the article “the,” and one’s movement from another kind of speech
to said vernacular always described as “slipping.” I think actually that noticing and loving these
shifts in diction are what made me a poet growing up around my mother’s Sugar Hill Harlem
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Queen’s English, my grandfather’s Jamaican music and vocabulary, use of figurative language,
my grandmother’s soft, drawn-out Alabama vowels, mixed with wizardry and syntactic starts
shaped by her teachers in the 1920s at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C.”
Now, this is something that you come to again and again, especially in your discussions further
with Sterling A. Brown and Gwendolyn Brooks, and it’s jazz, really, this sort of amazing
amalgamation of different sounds that come out through the sensibility of you or Sterling or
whomever, but one of the things that interested me in terms of your development was, when was
it clear to you that the music was something that was feeding you as well? Because recently
Elizabeth read very brilliantly at Village Vanguard your Richard Stravinsky poem. And I’m
wondering was it because you were a dancer first?
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Well, I think that I always took music for granted. It was
ambient. My parents had records, my parents had dance parties. That was we loved when they
had dance parties, and my brother and I would watch and see what was going on from behind
closed doors, and that was another kind of slip, these very pulled-together, you know, race
people by day and then, you know, just getting down by night. We loved watching that
transformation. I still love, I love those moments, you know, well, “She got it right there, see,
whoop! She put it away.” But I think that’s a very beautiful and mighty kind of expressive
power. And you know how, I mean the great traditions of black music, right? I mean, how, from
jazz there was a—I’ve talked about this great DJ in Washington named Felix Grant who had a
show on WMAL-AM that began at 9:00 every night that I would listen to when I was doing my
homework on my little transistor radio. And it was a very kind of old-fashioned, wonderful,
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32
educational jazz show. You know, not quite the Leonard Bernstein Peter and the Wolf or the
Concerts for Young People, it wasn’t that kind of explanatory, not didactic, but I learned so
much listening to that, there was always, there was always music. That was where my first little
bit of money would go when there were the, you know, fifty-cent record bins.
HILTON ALS: Forty-fives.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: And they would have a little hole punch in the corner and you
could buy them. So music was just very, very important. And I think that certainly yes, you
know, growing up studying dance very seriously, being very devoted to that, I think that that was
classical music, which I don’t really know except through dance, but I think the understanding
that you’re trying to make your body move in relationship to this music and that music gives you
structure and form, is certainly something that came forward into the making of poems.
HILTON ALS: Now, when you were in college and going through college and grad school and
all of that, at one point in your biography, you worked as a newspaperperson. But it didn’t
speak—journalism didn’t speak to you as a writer, he said defensively. Why did you?
(laughter)
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: It spoke to me greatly as a writer, and I loved journalists and
their mystique and their knowledge and their ability to talk to strangers.
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HILTON ALS: There she goes, there she goes, she’s back.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: And their everythingness. I mean, I really did. I love journalists,
and when I, my little period working as a journalist, I felt that it made me much braver, you
know, it gave me a reason to go talk to people that I didn’t know and to explore the city where I
grew up but to places where I hadn’t been, because they’d send me, you know, to Lorton
Reformatory to write a story about something that was happening there, they’d send me to
wherever I went, I went and I had a reason to be there, and so I couldn’t be shy and that was a
really, really great thing, but what I realized was, I mean, it’s really true.
I felt the will to embellish. I felt that I could see the line. And this was very serious business
because it was the Washington Post, I arrived shortly after Janet Cooke unceremoniously left,
and this was an amazing story of a black woman journalist who made up a whole story about you
know an eight-year-old who was on heroin and so forth, and it turned out. And I don’t know,
maybe I need to write about that one day because this is still one of the most stomach-churning,
dramatic tales of negressitude I have ever heard, right up to the fake résumé and when the story
falls apart then on her résumé it says she speaks French and Ben Bradlee comes up to her and
says, “[fake French]” and she can’t answer because she doesn’t speak French, but she’s put it on
her résumé that she does. Like this in the newsroom he unravels her, but she’s unraveled herself.
Lord have mercy.
HILTON ALS: Let’s call that show Ain’t Misbehavin’.
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ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: And also that all the black editors and reporters at the newspaper
always knew she was lying.
HILTON ALS: Yes, yes.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: And they told the white people. Or they didn’t tell the white
people because they didn’t want to bust her because they knew that the story made no sense, and
they knew that the corner she described did not exist. So then the story also unravels as the
editors say, “Okay, take us there,” and she can’t. So I digress but it’s just to say, that was the
climate, you know, mendacious black women, (laughter) you know, was sort of in the air. But
when I started feeling that there were, you know, here’s what was true, but I was interested in
what was kind of right over here that that actually did tell me that I wanted to be a different kind
of writer.
But I feel so grateful even just for a journalist’s relationship to time, to go from journalism to the
academy where nothing’s ever really due and shame is the motivator as opposed to like you
don’t get it in by five and you’re not in the paper and maybe you don’t have a job the next day. I
love that. I think that’s just a wonderful thing. Sometimes I pretend it’s true if I need to get
things done, “You’ll be fired.”
HILTON ALS: One of the things that I loved about your relationship to the stories over there
was a salient feature of your playwriting, and it’s something that I’ve always been pushing you
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35
to go back to but it was one of the things that Ficré fell in love with. So let’s talk about that
aspect of your life as a lover, mother, and how that fed the work, and also what that life was.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Yes, well, you know, I loved, so look where we are, okay, but
more importantly it’s not just the Africa, and that we’re about to talk about my late and beautiful
Eritrean husband, but I mean that’s how he painted our children—
HILTON ALS: Little putti.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Like for seriously, beautiful little putti, just like that with very
knowing faces but with kind of East African Coptic iconography in the eyes and so forth, so I
feel that we’re actually kind in exactly the right space, yeah.
HILTON ALS: And the disco rope.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: And a disco rope, that was me, not Ficré. We skipped over the
disco years. But, you know, what can I say, I mean I was lucky enough to have a partner who
believed in me as no one ever has or will, you know, and who loved that, I mean, as I wrote in
The Light of the World, “I loved that she was an artist, I loved that she was a teacher, I loved that
she had short hair,” and that we instantly, went on and made our life together after one week.
After he saw my play his first words to me, which were, it’s funny now, but again, you know, we
have to have this theme, you know, of the kind of, “I loved your play, can we talk about it?”
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“Why, certainly. My work? Why, sit down, I’ll sleep with you.” But then I never left, so it was
okay.
HILTON ALS: Exactly. Exactly.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: But just to say yes to someone.
HILTON ALS: It wasn’t a boho situation. It wasn’t a boho situation.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Oh, no it wasn’t that kind of situation. It wasn’t that kind of
situation.
HILTON ALS: Exactly. Exactly.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: But you know to be fortunate enough to find a soulmate and
again I think the important thing to the young people in the room is the really seriously the
saying yes.
HILTON ALS: But seriously that’s a very emotional thing.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: But just saying, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. I’m
going to leave my job. I’m going to let this person come and pick me up in the car and take me
halfway across the country and I will start having babies, and he will not let me starve, and I will
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37
get a job because that’s how I’m made and that’s how I was raised, and we will be fine,” and we
were.
And the power and the beauty was that, you know, to each other he, you know, an amazing
brilliant person who came as a refugee from Eritrea first walked out of the country at sixteen to
Sudan, went to Italy, went to Germany, landed in the United States, worked as an activist, then
worked in a million kitchens, then made a restaurant with his brothers for sixteen years, then
really devoted himself to painting. That devoting himself to painting, he had always painted, but
I was the one who said, “Really, let’s do this. Really, let’s do this.” And now—
HILTON ALS: You mean to be artists together?
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: No, to him. To say like but it was collective because we had to
make conditions for each of us to make our work, so if that meant, you know, finding a place
where he could, you know, turn the garage in the back into a studio, or if that meant, you know,
that he would take the kids on an adventure while I would get my writing done or that we would
take the time as we did, to always be each other’s usually only critic, he was my only, the only
person to whom I ever showed my work, ever, ever, ever, ever, and he would always tell me
what he thought very, very honestly as I did with every single line he ever made. So that kind
of—
HILTON ALS: And one of the things that is so brilliantly described in your book are the many
languages he spoke, so it was almost as if he had a built-in translator for what you were working
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38
through as an artist. That he was someone who could hear languages that maybe weren’t even on
the page yet.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Oh, that’s so interesting.
HILTON ALS: That’s what I felt when I reread the book, “Oh, Ficré was an amazing translator
as well, translator of your poetic soul.”
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: That’s really amazing, because, you know, so he had a gift for
languages, but it was also forged out of necessity through brutal colonial occupation and
relocation.
HILTON ALS: Which is how most of us get to speak English, right?
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Well, exactly. He didn’t, you know, aspire to study German. He
learned German because he ended up there and had to figure out a way to go to school. He didn’t
know a word, and in nine months he was successfully going to school in German. Having—and
that’s just one of the many, you know—these are languages that aren’t even like each other.
German is not like Arabic, is not like Tigrinya is not like Spanish, is not like, you know. There
are relationships but but, but so, so he was a gifted child but also history demanded these things
of him to survive. You know?
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And the bounty of that, you know, once we were safe, and once we were in one place and
building a life together was indeed someone who knew so many things and had so many words
and so many sounds and we would, we would talk about what were the things we had had—we
had so much in common even though our lives were seemingly very different and started
halfway around the world, and we would talk about, it was interesting, we discovered, we would
say growing up, and the book talks about this a lot, you know, how do people born halfway
around the world find their way to each other and make a life together? Well, it happens every
day. It actually happens every day.
HILTON ALS: Well, I have only one slight objection to what you said, and it’s only because I
feel so much love for you just reading everything, and the person that emerges is someone who
was perfectly attuned to it but had yet to hear the notes of the person, so when he spoke to you,
in your book you talk about your body relaxing, I don’t think that that’s just for young people, I
think that when we stay open to the possibility of love and connection, that weird relaxation
happens to us all.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Wow.
HILTON ALS: And so, you know, I feel it talking to you. I’m ancient. It doesn’t mean anything
in terms of the youth being part of what makes love accessible, I think it has everything to do
with where we put our bodies in the line of fire. And you put your body there and he did too and
one of the beautiful parts of this book is you said, you know, you are a relentless backseat driver
and you let him drive the car. Everyone has to have one person in this life that they tell the
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absolute truth to. And when they say, “You know, I was at work and I told this fib and I didn’t
do the work,” and, you know, that person that you talk to and say, “I’m so ashamed, but I didn’t
call my mother back and I said, ‘Oh, I left you a message,’ and I didn’t do that.” All of the stuff
that makes us feel morally compromised. You have to have one person that you reveal that to or
you will go crazy in this world. And so the power of the book is that you’re not just telling Ficré
that in life you were sharing but you’re telling to him now, and so doing that you’re telling it to
the rest of us.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Well, thank you. You know, I mean, you know, that’s—thank
you.
HILTON ALS: I don’t think you will ever stop having that openness, Elizabeth, you just won’t.
It’s in your work.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Well, you know, one of the things that’s been—So I’ve been on
this really interesting book tour, and I say interesting because you know with books of poems
people meet the poems in all kinds of ways for all kinds of really interesting reasons, but there
are a lot of people who come to this particular book because it’s memoir, because of the story.
But it’s not just because they feel like that happened to me. It’s because something else happened
to them that feels resonant that they want to share, and so that’s been really interesting.
But I’ve also been learning, this is to your point about kind of what happened to make this book.
You know? And I’ve been thinking about. You know, you cite the passage where I describe
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myself as a backseat driver—I have so many revelations—but that I finally relax and then you’ll
recall at the end of that I open my eyes and I hear his voice and he says, and this is after we’ve
known each other for a month, he said, “Lizzie,” he calls me Lizzie, he’s never called me Lizzie
before, and he says, and that’s my intimate name from my nieces and nephews, he says, “Lizzie,
you have land in Africa.”
And I feel like I just bore witness to some things in this book and, you know, or because, you
know, when I describe going when my son Simon at the age of twelve says, “Do you want to
come to visit Daddy with me in Heaven?” you know, “and I’ll take you there,” I feel like, yes,
craft, absolutely, there’s tremendous, tremendous, you know, blood-soaked, sweat-stained craft
in here and I’m very proud of that but I also feel like there’s a bearing witness to life and its
power and its beauty and its terror, we were talking earlier about you know there’s the Rilke
quote in the book that’s so meaningful to me, “let everything happen to you, beauty and terror,”
and then it continues, “No feeling is final,” and so I feel that that’s kind of what happened here.
HILTON ALS: Exactly it’s sort of like when you’re watching a film and the film, you’re
looking at the corners of the film and you know that there’s life not being framed, but it’s there,
and that’s permeating and making the image so vivid for you, it’s not just what you see but
what’s around, and the aura of the book and the aura of your writings has something to do with
life that will continue past the page. A lot of what I meant by nihilism in poetry, twentiethcentury poetry, was that the world begins and ends with the word, in a lot of twentieth-century
and twenty-first-century poets but one of the things, poetry encompasses all of your work. One
of the things that is extraordinary about all of your work is that it continues past the page in my
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mind. You can go. You can visit the page in your writing and then your mind will go somewhere
else because that was the passport to go somewhere else.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: That’s so nice and that I think the—one of the pleasures, you
know, I mean of course writing is both not pleasurable and profoundly pleasurable, you know, I
mean, actually doing. It’s so—I mean, hard isn’t even the word. What is the word for what we do
when we labor to make it?
HILTON ALS: Masochism?
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Something. Something.
HILTON ALS: Something like that.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: But then when you turn the corner.
HILTON ALS: There’s no better feeling.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: And you realize there’s no better feeling. When you can make
shape from all the muck, and that to me, the joy of the experience of kind of following you talk
about, the passport, you know, following this to this to this. Should I read a little bit?
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HILTON ALS: Well, I want you—I’m desperate to have you do that. And I just want to say one
other thing to that point, was that one of the things I love about the book and in all of your
writing, I really want to stress, people, you’ve gotta read the whole schmear, there’s a great Paule
Marshall essay called “The Poets in the Kitchen.”
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: I love that.
HILTON ALS: And she talks about the West Indian women sitting around the kitchen and
discussing life and you’re talking about past the craft aspect of it really is the voice of the book is
beyond literary convention. And it’s free in that way, the conversation and the soul is free. So
please read.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Wow. Did you have—
HILTON ALS: Know what I love? I thought they would like the part of just the list of things
you had together, you know, two houses and children and stuff. Is that a good thing?
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: That is good.
HILTON ALS: Okay. Yes please.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: We had fifteen Christmases together. Almost fifteen years of
marriage, sixteen years together, 1996 to 2012, we always said it felt longer than it was. I would
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estimate at the end that we had a twenty-five-year marriage, and Ficré would agree. That long,
that much struggle, that much jubilee. In our extended family and family of friends, two cancers,
two heart surgeries, one drug addiction, two mental hospitalizations, marriages, babies, funerals,
Easters, and Thanksgivings. Our friends’ parents and one friend’s son died. Together we went
bearing food and hot coffee. Together we went to the various places of worship in our best black
clothes, three houses, two cities, one job change, two closed businesses, one started business,
money went, money came. Several bad boyfriends of nieces, several good, three lovely husbands
of nieces, one lovely wife of a nephew, six lovely babies. Four homes owned, three sold.
Hemorrhoid surgery, dental surgery, no broken limbs, one political regime change, the end of
one war, the start of another, an East African American U.S. president, several refugees, two
U.S. naturalization swearings-in. Two new citizenships.
Together we chose two daycares, two nannies, fired one nanny in six days because at one and a
half Solo said NO. Stayed with the other for three years and wept when it was time for her to
leave us. One nursery school, two elementary schools, one middle school, one high school. We
planned fifteen Thanksgiving dinners, fifteen Easters, and at last one Feast of the Seven Fishes.
One Easter Ficré found a sheep farmer in Cheshire, Connecticut, and had a lamb slaughtered for
his sister Tadu for her tsebhe. the rich and spicy Eritrean meat stew and her roast. We found
where we could buy Italian Easter bread shaped in a cross with a hard-boiled egg baked in. Buon
Pascua, he’d say and so would I. Three trips to Italy where we had family and which was our
ironic colonial demi-motherland, each time to different places: Rome, Venice, Florence, Amalfi,
yes, but also Bari, Ceglie, Ferrarra, to see in-laws and friends. London, Scotland, Spain,
Oakland, the diaspora of our family. Milan awaited and Belatoscana and Naples once the crime
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settled down and Cecelia—he wanted to smell the mint crushed underfoot. The Alhambra
awaited and the orange blossoms in southern Spain in very early springtime.
We loved Jimmy Scott’s version of the David Byrne song “Heaven.” “Heaven is a place where
nothing ever happens.” These days I picture Heaven populated by the umber angels Ficré painted
in abundance, but that seems too fanciful. I never truly believed in Heaven and cannot
manufacture it. Little Jimmy Scott’s plaintiveness seems right when he sings, “Nothing ever
happens.” How better to describe the infinite solitude of the afterlife?
“When this is kiss is over it will start again, it will not be any different, it will be exactly the
same,” he sings. Each kiss is fixed. It is the same long kiss but it will never change. That is the
comfort and that is the heartbreak.
One night at bedtime Simon asks if I want to come with him to visit Ficré in Heaven.
Yes, I say, and lie down on his bed.
“First you close your eyes,” he says, “and ride the clear glass elevator. Up we go.”
What do you see, I ask. God is sitting at the gates, he answers. What does God look like, I ask.
Like God, Mommy, he says. Now we go to where Daddy is.
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He has two rooms, Simon says, one room with a single bed and his books and another where he
paints. The painting room is vast. He can look out any window he wants and paint. That room
has four views: our backyard, the dock he painted in Maine, Aamara, and New Mexico.
New Mexico? I ask.
Yes, Simon says, the volcano crater with the magic grass.
Ah, yes, I say, the caldera, where we saw the gophers and the jackrabbits and the elk running
across and Daddy called it the veldt.
Yes, do you see it?
And I do see it. The light is perfect for painting. His bed in Heaven is a single bed.
Okay, it’s time to go now, Simon says, so down we go.
You can come with me anytime, he says.
Thank you, my darling.
I don’t think you can find it by yourself yet, he says, but one day you will.
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(applause)
HILTON ALS: I thank you for coming.
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