My epic poem, Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass: Remembrance of Things Past and Present, was a co-winner of the 1998 Edwin Mellen Poetry Prize for an epic poem on the theme, “the captivity, exploitation, and suffering of Black people in America.” I added, and their “triumph,” for the Black experience in America is more than a tale of woe.
When the contest was announced, as a poet and a history buff, I knew I could write something compelling on the subject. I knew I could win this contest. In fact, I was so sure of wining the contest that I stated to myself, albeit without much conviction, that I would retire pen and paper and give up the writing life if I didn’t win. To understand the import of this, at this stage of my writing career, I was considered by my peers and even my enemies as a writer. In fact, I could not imagine breathing without writing. I reframed Rene Descartes’s famous statement to: “I write; therefore, I am.” I was nothing, I was not alive, without my identify as a writer.
I would write this award-winning book!
Before beginning my epic poem, I made a list of all the “Black history” books that influenced my thoughts and understanding of Black history, including all of the works of J.A. Rogers, to name a few World’s Great Men and Women of Color, the three-volume set of Sex & Race, and Africa’s Gifts to America, Lorraine Hansberry’s To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, and the book would be anchored by the thought of W.E.B. DuBois, who wrote about the gifts Africans and their descendants in the so-called New World gave to America: the gift of sweat and brawn; the gift of story and song; and the gift of the spirit. These “gifts” would serve as a counterpoint to the “woes” that were articulated as the subject of the epic in the contest announcement.
Even though this was an epic poem, I began with the ending in mind. I knew that I would have passages where Black folk, past and present, would lift up their Voice. Thus, the ending would move towards the hopeful lines in the Negro National Anthem:
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us…
— Lift Every Voice and Sing
And since the story begins, based on the theme, in some ways, in America, the beginning of the epic would be framed Constitution-like, with a Preamble. In writing the book, I sketched out sections, or “books,” for the epic, since there was no “unity” in the strict Aristotelian sense; and many poems I wanted to be able to stand on their own. Ironically, my epic was not informed by the greatest epics in Western literature, The Iliad and The Odyssey, though there are parallels in Greek tragedy with the Black saga in America, the ongoing wars with periods of uneasy truces, exemplified in the Civil War and ending with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise (1877).
(Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home,
Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home.)
— Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
Additionally, I needed to address an ongoing problem with American history, that is, the whitewashing and sanitized version of it written by white historians. (America likes to think of herself as “great,” and in many ways she is, but the treatment of Black folk for hundreds of years wreaks havoc on the narrative in history books, which has a mythological quality). Thus the title of my epic, the distortion of American history through a self-serving looking glass that distorts. Think The Picture of Dorian Gray; its public-facing picture is beautiful, though its doppelganger in the attic, distorted by the whips and scorns of time, is the real face, hidden away from the world. The world has been treated to American mythology posing as history. American streets are not paved with gold. In each cobblestone there is the blood, sweat, and tears of Black folk. And this we need to remember. This history should not be relegated to the Shadows!
In my next blog I’ll discuss knowing that I was a writer when I got my first piece of hate mail.