NATALIE Y. MOORE is a reporter for WBEZ-Chicago. Her latest book is The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation.
When we were children, my mother would gather my two siblings and me for story time. Occasionally she read us poetry. I remember when she introduced us to Paul Laurence Dunbar. “In the Morning” quickly became a favorite and is one of my earliest poetry memories.
’LIAS! ’Lias! Bless de Lawd!
Don’ you know de day’s erbroad?
Ef you don’ git up, you scamp,
Dey’ll be trouble in dis camp.
Tink I gwine to let you sleep
W’ile I meks yo’ boa’d an’ keep?
Dat’s a putty howdy-do-
Don’ you hyeah me, ’Lias -you?
My younger brother Joey and sister Megan and I loved Dunbar’s use of black dialect. We took turns reading stanzas aloud, cracking up at whoever this ’Lias person was getting fussed at so early in the morning. Megan recited the poem anytime she had to perform an oratory contest.
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in sort of a black middle class racial cocoon. We had black-owned businesses in proximity and strong block clubs. My parents filled our childhood with messages of black uplift and positive images to counter the prevailing mainstream narrative about African Americans. Our exposure to African American literature came from my mother. Learning about black poets and writers nurtured me and let me know I, too, could be a writer. When either my sister or I have a bad day, we joke, “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair,” a line from a Langston Hughes poem we learned early on.
Poetry changes for me depending on what I need. I can’t count the number of times I heard little ones perform Useni Eugene Perkins’s “Hey Black Child” at talent shows. Chicago native Perkins is a poet and youth activist influenced by the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. He served as executive director of the Better Boys Foundation of Chicago social services agency. Working with youth informed his writing. He wanted teens to soar above stereotypes served up by Hollywood. Perkins’s plays exalted Ida B. Wells and Paul Robeson.
Hey Black Child
Do you know who you are?
Who you really are
Do you know you can be?
What you want to be
If you try to be
What you can be
Hey Black Child!
Do you know where you are going?
Where you’re really going
I took acting classes at a black theater, which furthered those messages of uplift. As a teenager, my go-to monologue came from Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. I pretended to be grown à la Lady in Red.
one thing I don’t need
is any more apologies
i got sorry greetin me at my front door
you can keep yrs
i don’t know what to do wit em
they don’t open doors
or bring the sun back
they don’t make me happy
didn’t nobody stop usin my tears to wash cars
cuz a sorry.
When I attended college in the 1990s, the coffeehouse/jazz/poetry scene flourished. The movie Love Jones, whose lead character writes poetry, reflected the smoke-hazed mood. Unfortunately, in real life much of the poetry sucked—from people who used open mics as a pick-up schtick to those who made Hallmark card writers seem prolific. Throw in some perfunctory “motherland” militant pieces and oversexed erotica under a bed of audience snaps. I say this not out of snobbery but because back then I thought I needed to write poetry. It fit the boho writer aesthetic I craved. So much so it became a joke to my family that I only dated dreadlocked poets. (Not true. Yet my father and older male cousin frequently said I needed to stop dating those poetry readers. They laughed; I rolled my eyes.)
After standing up once in front of a warm coffeehouse crowd, I realized I need not ever do that again. No one booed. In fact, they clapped. But I vowed to stay in my journalistic writing lane following that open mic experience. Poetry appealed to what I projected a writer to be, which was no more realistic than the secluded cabins on the lake that people think all writers have. Once free of that fictive notion, I could appreciate poetry and look to it as a nonfiction writer for lyrical inspiration, simplicity and loveliness. Or cheekiness. The tagline on my personal email is a Nikki Giovanni quote: “I’m so hip, even my errors are correct.”
More than a decade later I participated in the local humanities program. My good friend and poet Alice led the workshop in which we riffed off a Gwendolyn Brooks poem. “We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” In small groups we discussed how we are each other’s business in a racially segregated city like Chicago. I loved how poetry helped bond us in that moment.
I’ve turned to Alice many times since then to help me find poetic words. When writing my latest book, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, I asked Alice to recommend a passage about the meaning of home, because sometimes poetry does what I can’t. She found Maya Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes. “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
I recently had a baby and at my shower friends and family created a keepsake book with pearls of wisdom. Alice tapped into Maya Angelou again and wrote in gold cursive: “Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”
Another reminder that we are each other’s business, and proof that poetry can fill the sentiment when one is searching for the right words.
Now that I have a new baby girl, I hope to repeat what my mother did for me with black poets. Now I just have to decide which poem I read to her first. I’m leaning toward Maya Angelou.