Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (3 page)

who walks there? who goes toward death

whistling through the water

without his chorus? without his posse? without his song?

it is autumn now

in me autumn grieves

in this carved gold of shifting faces

my eyes confess to the fatigue of living.

i ask: does the morning weep for the dead?

i ask: were the bullets conscious atoms entering his chest?

i ask: did you see the light anointing his life?

the day i heard the sound of your death, my brother

i walked outside in the park

we your mothers wanted to see you safely home.

i remembered the poems in your mother’s eyes as she

panther-laced warred against the state;

the day you became dust again

we your mothers held up your face green with laughter

and i saw you a child again outside your mother’s womb

picking up the harsh handbook of Black life;

the day you passed into our ancestral rivers,

we your mothers listened for your intoxicating voice:

and i heard you sing of tunes bent back in a

cold curse against black

we anoint your life

in this absence

we anoint our tongues

with your magic. your genius.

casual warrior of sound

rebelling against humiliation

your life is still warm

on my breath, brother Tupac

Amaru Shakur

and each morning as i

pray for our people

navigating around these

earth pornographers

and each morning when

i see the blue tint of

our Blackness in the

morning dawn

i will call out to you again:

where is that young man born lonely?

and the ancestors’ voices will reply:

he is home tattooing his skin with

white butterflies.

and the ancestors will say:

he is traveling with the laughter of trees

his reptilian eyes opening between the blue spaces.

and the ancestors will say:

why do you send all the blessed ones home early?

and the ancestors will say:

you people. Black. lost in the memory of silence.

look up at your children

joined at the spine with death and life.

listen to their genius in a season of dry rain.

listen to them chasing life falling

down getting up in this

house of blue mourning birds.

listen.

& he says:  i ain’t mad at ya

& we say:   so dont cha be mad at yo self

& he says:  me against the world

& we say:   all of us against the world

& he says:  keep yo head up

& we say:   yeah family keep yo head up every day

& he says:  dear mama, i love you

& we say:   dear all the mamas we love you too

& he says:  all eyez on me

& we say:   kai fi African (come here African)

can you say it? resist. resist. resist.

can you say it? resist. resist. resist.

i say. can you do it? resist. resist. resist.

can you rub it into yo sockets? bones?

can you tattoo it on yo body?

so that you see. feel it strengthening you

as you cough blood before the world.

yeah. that’s right. write it on your

forehead so you see yourselves as you walk past tomorrow

on your breasts so when

your babies suckle you, when your man woman

taste you they drink the milk of resistance. hee hee hee

take it inside you so when your lover. friend.

companion. enters you they are covered

with the juices, the sweet

cream of resistance. hee hee hee

make everyone who touches this mother lode

a lover of the idea of resistance.

can you say it? RESIST.

can you say it? RESIST.

til it’s inside you and you resist

being an electronic nigger hating yo self & me

til you resist lying & gossiping & stealing &

killing each other on every saturday nite corner

til you resist having a baby cuz you want

something to love young sister. love yo self

til you resist being a shonuff stud fuckin

everything in sight, til you resist raping

yo sister, yo wife, somebody’s grandmother.

til you resist recolonizing yo mind

mind mind mind mind

how to respond to the genius

of our sister Toni Cade Bambara? How to

give praise to this brilliant. Hard. Sweet

talking Toni. Who knew everything.

Read everything. Saw everything?

And a generation of people began to question their silence. Their poverty. Their scarcity. Because you had asked the most important question we can ask ourselves:

What are we pretending not to know today? The premise as you said, my sister, being that colored people on the planet earth really know everything there is to know. And if one is not coming to grips with the knowledge, it must mean that one is either scared or pretending to be stupid.

You open your novel with the simple but profound question: Do we want to be well? And you said in an interview with Sister Zala Chandler that the answer tends to be “No! to be whole politically, psychically, spiritually, culturally, intellectually, aesthetically, physically, and economically whole—is of profound significance. It is significant because there is a correlative to this. There is a responsibility to self and to history that is developed once you are whole, once you are well, once you acknowledge your powers.”

Amiri Baraka wrote that Jimmy Baldwin was God’s black revolutionary mouth. So were you Toni. You made us laugh resistance laughter. You taught us how to improvise change shapes sometimes change skins. We learned that if we are to be, sometimes we must have been there already and have people wondering about us:

Get on board this liberation train called Bambara. Cmon lil children. And Toni had many children. She taught us how to organize. Be. Their names are Aishah, Mungu, Karma, Kevin, D Knowledge, Ras, Nora, Louis, Tony, Morani. Gar.

Aaayeee babo Aaaayeee babo

How do you praise a man who has traveled from Tulsa, Oklahoma, the first American city that dropped a bomb on an American community, to Harvard University?;

How do you see him walking always in his three-piece black suit, giving us lessons in morality and life? Always questioning the “morality” of the country/state/world that has enslaved and continues to enslave all of its citizens racially, and culturally, always questioning a country that remains silent while people stain the earth with their separate poverty, death, homelessness. Always questioning a country that denies the sanctity, the holiness of children, people, rivers, sky, trees, earth?;

I would say you look less at his credentials but more at the living work. The actions of a man destined to walk a preacher’s walk. A philosopher’s walk. A twenty-first-century man walk;

I would say you look at the father in him. The husband in him. The activist in him. The teacher in him. The lover in him. The truth seeker in him. The James Brown dancer in him. The reformer in him. The defender of people in him. The intellectual in him;

I would say that at the end of the twentieth century, we will remember him as a man who was
present
and
bore witness
to the terrible beauty of this time and the possibility of reconciliation and redemption;

This man. Born into history. This humanist. This twenty-first-century traveler pulling us screaming against our will towards a future that will hold all of humankind in an embrace. He acknowledges us all. The poor. Blacks and whites. Asians and Native Americans. Jews and Muslims. Latinos and Africans. Gays and Lesbians;

For he has seen the leper in himself. In all of us. And he cries out against a policy of leperdom. No longer the yells from the cities.

Thank you my Brother for patrolling our lives. Thank you for walking among the flowers and the columns.

Thank you for magnifying our souls and making of us humans a long journey.

Aaayeee babo
means Praise God.

you tell the stars

don’t be jealous of her light

you tell the ocean,

you call out to Olukun,

to bring her always to

safe harbor,

for she is a holy one

this woman twirling

her emerald lariat

you tell the night

to move gently

into morning so she’s

not startled,