VI.

I didn’t have a Black mother to teach me how to be in the world. But I found a literary Black mother in the poet Lucille Clifton.

By summer 2007 our Three Books freshman orientation program was in year four, and after the difficult conversations over Possession by Byatt, we’d long since given up trying to select books by committee. For the past few years it had been my job to select a faculty member who would choose the three authors and their books and moderate the event. For the 2007 program, the faculty moderator selected Good Woman by Lucille Clifton to be one of the three texts.

I’d hated poetry for its confounding barriers. Had barely ingested what little of it they fed me back in the English classes at Middleton High School. Couldn’t make my way through the obscurity of poetic language, be it Whitman or Dickinson. Could barely make sense of Shakespeare last time I’d tried. Poetry was a locked gate I wasn’t interested in trying to open.

But as dean I had to read all three books. I would be meeting the authors for lunch in advance of the program, and I’d have the honor of making opening remarks onstage. I began reading Good Woman out of obligation. An hour later I looked up at the clock. I’d been hooked.

and if the man come to stop me

in my own house

naked in my own window

saying I have offended him

I have offended his

Gods

let him watch my black body

push against my own glass

If she is possible. If these thoughts are possible, this language. Then maybe I am possible?

“Pourquoi es-tu noire?”

Because I am.