It's All Love Read online

  This book is dedicated, with thanks, to all

  the individuals who have provided moral and

  material support for the mission and work of

  the Hurston/Wright Foundation, and to the

  next generation of Black literary voices, who

  will make a new and better world.

  Content

  A Letter from the Executive Director of the

  Hurston/Wright Foundation

  Introduction

  PART ONE: THAT LOVIN’ FEELING

  Poems

  Wedding Night A. Van Jordan

  A Black Wedding Song Gwendolyn Brooks

  Autumn Poems Nikki Giovanni

  Haiku Kwame Alexander

  Kupenda Kwame Alexander

  Untitled E. Ethelbert Miller

  After Midnight Jalal

  Nonfiction

  Lamu Lover Doreen Baingana

  After She Left Will Bester

  Loving Johnny Deadline Lisa Page

  One Hundred Days of Bliss Sonsyrea Tate Montgomery

  A Shared History W Ralph Eubanks

  My Own Happy Ending Marita Golden

  Fiction

  Chinaberry Tina McElroy Ansa

  The History of the World Veronica Chambers

  Coming Clean Nicole Bailey-Williams

  An Act of Faith David Anthony Durham

  Barking in Tongues Kenneth Carroll

  Wilhelmina Jonetta Rose Barras

  The Story of Ruth Victoria Christopher Murray

  A River to the Moon Anthony Grooms

  PART TWO: TIES THAT BIND

  Poetry

  Why I Will Praise an Old Black Man Honoree Fanonne Jejfers

  Acts of Love Kwame Alexander

  Nonfiction

  When There's Trouble at Home

  Lonnae O'Neal Parker

  At Its Best Tracy Price-Thompson

  Becoming a Grandmother Becomes Me—Finally Robin Alva Marcus

  Learning the Name Dad Reginald Dwayne Betts

  My African Sister Faith Adiele

  Isaiah 9:6 Brian Gilmore

  Grandpa Dutstun Simone Bostic

  Silence … The Language of Trees Abdul Ali

  Two Cents and a Question L. A. Banks

  Love Is a Verb Kim McLarin

  Missing You Pearl Cleage

  From Finding Martha's Vineyard Jill Nelson

  Love Lessons Patricia Elam

  The Heart Does Go On Debbie M. Rigaud

  Fiction

  Geraldine's Song Felicia Pride

  Be Longing Stacia L. Brown

  Why We Jump William Henry Lewis

  Notes on the Contributors

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  A LETTER FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF

  THE HURSTON/WRIGHT FOUNDATION

  IT HAS BEEN SAID, if you are able to utter only one prayer a day, let that prayer be thank-you. This is a letter of thanks and praise to the ancestors and the many people and organizations that have supported Hurston/Wright for the past nineteen years.

  The first person I wish to thank is my partner, Hurston/ Wright cofounder, fellow cultural worker, friend, and inspiration Marita Golden. It was because of her insatiable desire to give back to the community that Hurston/Wright came to be. If it is true that the future exists in language, Marita has not only helped to speak Hurston/Wright into existence but she has also been the keeper of the faith. And keeping the faith is the one ingredient essential to building an institution.

  Thanks in part to my and Marita's mutual commitment to social change, Hurston/Wright has become an institution recognized for its contribution to the development and cultural continuity of African-American literary arts. As a nonprofit institution, Hurston/Wright strives to continue the literary traditions and achievements of generations of African-American writers from Frederick Douglass and Gwendolyn Brooks to James Baldwin and Dudley Randall, as well as the renowned namesakes Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston.I feel grateful and privileged to have helped direct the process that honors and preserves the genius of Black people and our magnificent story for the past nineteen years.

  As a natural progression, since its inception the organization has experienced exponential growth and development of its programs. In order to accommodate this expansion we have refined, broadened, and updated our mission and goals.

  The mission of Hurston/Wright is to preserve and advance humanity through the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge and information through literature, with a specific focus on literature by and about people of African descent. We accomplish this mission through programs that discover, honor, and develop writers of Black literature at every stage of their development.

  This mission does not tell the whole story, however. The story is the continually unfolding narrative of the individual readers’ and writers’ lives we have touched, by offering unique opportunities to them for fellowship and to pursue shared interests.

  Another important part of the story includes our gratitude for the support of the publishing industry, especially Random House, which has so generously invested in our work for many years; the many individual and corporate donors who have underwritten our programs; and the committed literature lovers who have served on our board of directors and our advisory board. It is evident, these individuals and organizations have provided Hurston/Wright with financial and intellectual resources because they understand the valuable contribution that Black literature has made to civilization.

  Of course, the whole story would not be complete without a blueprint for the future, which includes the enhancement of our programs for young people. In keeping with our mission we will continue to provide services for aspiring, emerging, and published writers, and for readers of their work. Our annualprograms, including the Writers’ Week Workshops, the Award for College Writers, and the Legacy Award for Published Writers, and soon to be developed Online Workshops, will continue to be offered.

  Based on the requests of participants and attendees, we have begun to expand our programs to include a younger age group—middle and high school students. This program, the Hurston/Wright Creative Writing Intensive, is a year-round tuition-free reading and writing program that complements the students’ formal schooling—a finishing school for the literary arts. All students in the program will be given the opportunity to develop skills in their chosen genre while at the same time being exposed to all forms of literary art, including poetry fiction, playwriting, nonfiction, public speaking, and debate.

  Adding the Creative Writing Intensive to our program mix completes the cycle. Our adult programs will ensure the development of a pool of good writers from which to recruit writing teachers for all of our training programs, including the middle and high school classes. As is the case in the life of successful people and organizations, Hurston/Wright is involved in sustaining and perpetuating itself while simultaneously taking steps to advance.

  I was once told, “There is no hovering in life;” you are either going forward or crashing. With the continued support of people and organizations that understand literary arts, which are powerful platforms for sharing our collective history and culture, healing our communities, and assisting us to become agents for change, Hurston/Wright will always remain in flight and on course.

  —CLYDE MCELVENE

  For more information on the Hurston/Wright Foundation, please visit our Web site at www.hurstonwright.org.

  Introduction

  LIKE ALL THE BOOKS I've written or edited, this anthology is an effort to answer a question. The question is: Where is the love among Black folk? The question arose, haunting and obsessing me, against the backdrop of the following:

  A Washington Post article headlined “Marriage Is for White People” popped
up in my e-mail one day Making the rounds of the Internet, the article sparked outrage, jokes, and considerable embarrassment. The article included the quote “Marriage is for white people,” a statement made by a twelve-year-old sixth grader in southeast Washington, D.C. A first-person account of writer Joy Jones's visit to an elementary school to speak to a class about future careers, the story recounts how the boys in the class thought it was more important to be a good father than to make a lot of money but saw no correlation between fatherhood and marriage.

  The article discussed the extremely low marriage and exceedingly high divorce rate among African-Americans. I know the dominant family profiles of the community these youth live in. Many of these young men live in single-parent homes, and they may see more married couples on television or in the movies than in their neighborhood or extended family.

  The import of the beliefs expressed by these young peopleconcerned me for a multitude of reasons, among them that as half of a bedrock-solid marriage, I am keenly aware of the multitude of types of love and commitment a good marriage can produce. The attitudes of these youngsters also was searing evidence of the instability so prevalent among Black families, the result of generations of racist social policies, as well as a deeply entrenched trust and commitment phobia among Black men and women.

  Then I kept reading about the “drop” in the urban homicide rate of the major urban areas, a decline that annually, however, still leaves too many mostly Black men dead at the hands of other Black men. The fact that African-Americans are 13 percent of the population but 49 percent of the country's murder victims is proof that the supposed decline is mostly an illusion.

  On the personal front there was the news that hit me one weekend like a meteor: that three longtime married couples who were friends of me and my husband were divorcing. I began to wonder if those students were right.

  As we say among ourselves, I was suddenly too through with my people. Increasingly, I began to feel assaulted by a steady bombardment of negative, soul-sapping pronouncements, discoveries, and statistics that seemed to declare, “Black love is dead.”

  But I was determined not to deliver a eulogy until there was an actual funeral, so the optimistic realist in me took a deep breath, put on my reality-check glasses, and adjusted the picture.

  I realized that searching for evidence of the presence of Black Love in the images produced by mainstream popular culture was like looking at myself in a fun house mirror. By their very nature the purveyors of popular culture—magazines, newspapers, the Internet, television, movies—are at odds with representations of resiliency, strength, and love in the lives of African-Americans. Dedicated to the easy answer, the disposable lie, the half-truth, the thirty-second answer, the arresting image, the quick sale of a product or an idea, the media hemisphere that surrounds us like oxygen makes pitifully little breathing room for dimensional representations of the good and the true.

  When I adjusted the picture, I could see that the Washington Post story was merely titillating and designed to sell newspapers. I also remembered that love and commitment can flourish without a wedding ring. Neither a ceremony nor sharing the key to the same house is a guarantee of readiness to give of oneself and to be fully open to another, which is what the bonds of real love entail. Quiet as it's kept, love is not easily defined, quickly mastered, or nonchalantly tossed aside.

  So I began talking to friends, colleagues, and my fellow writers about love and specifically Black Love. Because I believe so fervently in the power of the written word, pretty soon I had an idea for a book.

  You are holding the answer to my question in your hands. Don't believe the hype. Surely that is one answer to the question I posed. African-American history is so much more than the Middle Passage, assassinated prophets, a catalog of the dead and dying, the imprisoned and the failing among us. The human spirit is never summed up or adequately captured by a litany only of its weakness, confusion, and fear. So once my fellow writers began their dialogue with me through the pieces in the book, I could see with the same old but made-new eyes: the work of a group of women in Washington, D.C., all mothers of young men who had been killed, joining with the mothers of the young men who killed their sons, in an act of mutual forgiveness and support and love, love so deep that it took the mothers of the dead youth to prison to visitand offer forgiveness to the men who had killed their sons. Friendships and unbreakable bonds have formed between these remarkable women whose grief did not close their hearts to life and redemption.

  As I traveled around the country, lecturing and speaking, I became more aware of and attuned to the willingness of young African-Americans to ask themselves tough questions in seminars, at conferences, on panels, about everything from colorism, sexism, hip-hop, politics, and the future of the world they are preparing to govern and rule. These conversations rarely show up on the popular culture radar screen. But they are taking place all over the country and the world and are embedded in love of the search for truth, love of community, and love of self.

  Love is all around me. In the eyes of my three-year-old grandson. In the pride I feel as I witness my thirty-year-old son's spiritual and emotional quest to consciously become a “grown man.” In the prayers I offer up each morning for my family and friends. In my dedication to enlarging my students’ intellectual horizons. In the work I have performed for nearly two decades, creating and expanding opportunities for Black writers through the Hurston/Wright Foundation, work that will benefit from the sales of this book.

  It's All Love is divided into two sections, “That Lovin’ Feeling” and “Ties That Bind.” These wonderful, often wondrous expressions of love are affirmative, but never sentimental, and wrenching in their honesty.

  Dwayne Betts's meditation on his eight years in prison and his reconciliation after his release with his long-absent father in “Learning the Name Dad” is a deeply moving essay about courage. Kim McLarin in “Love Is a Verb” excavates the heart and soul of the complexities of a mother's love for her children,how often it is tested and tried and what makes its endurance possible.

  In “Loving Johnny Deadline,” Lisa Page writes of how she met her husband, journalist Clarence Page, and the new birth they gave to each other at the beginning of their romance and continue to give each other in a long, serious, and loving marriage. Sonsyrea Tate Montgomery recounts her victory over the naysayers who said a good Black man could not be found, as well as her own demons and doubts, as she remembers how she learned to write her own love story in “One Hundred Days of Bliss.” W. Ralph Eubanks, in “A Shared History,” writes of his White grandfather's absolute devotion to his grandmother, a woman he married in the South at a time when interracial unions were illegal and how he made a universe of love for her where despite the insanity outside their door, she was safe. And she knew she was loved.

  Working on this anthology was an honor. The spirits of these writers have enlarged and restored me, my faith in myself and in Black Love as a living, breathing source of strength that is real and resilient. I sincerely hope you, the reader, will be renewed.

  I also want to thank my editors, Janet Hill and Christian Nwachukwu, Jr., and Doubleday for their continued support of my projects and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. This book was made possible because they all believe in the foundation, they believe in me, and they believe in love.

  Marita Golden

  Poem

  Wedding Night

  A. VAN JORDAN

  John

  let's strip off our words

  to speak without our tongues, let's

  try to tongue without

  saying a word, let's turn speech

  back into struggle tonight.

  MacNolia

  no, in the middle

  of the night, afternoon, or

  morning, let's pull up

  our voice, our moan, yes, our song.

  at 3:00 A.M. bring back words.

  John

  why bring words when we've

 
waited so long for silence?

  why bring light when we've needed

  to knead heat from our shadows? Johnwhen dark rooms call out our names?

  MacNolia

  in the shadow's heat,

  in the dark's light, in the night's

  promise of morning,

  there's always a language born

  out of the struggle to touch.

  John

  I don't know if I

  have the words to touch the back

  of your knees, the small

  of your back … brown lines in your

  palms … what language can frame you?

  MacNolia

  our language frames us

  as we resemble our words,

  the words we speak when

  an open window carries

  our new language to rooftops.

  John

  and here I thought I

  was teaching you! now, you show

  me a mirror in

  which I see a stranger, how

  good it is to meet me when—

  MacNolia

  when we are standing,

  nose to nose, as my wedding

  dress falls to our floor.

  A Black Wedding Song

  GWENDOLYN BROOKS

  First dedicated to

  Charles and La Tanya,

  Allen and Glenda,

  Haki and Safisha I

  I

  This love is a rich cry over

  The deviltries and the death.

  A weapon-song. Keep it strong.

  Keep it strong.

  Keep it logic and Magic and lightning and Muscle.