Sister Outsider Read online

  Adrienne: And suddenly you were already being taken seriously by unseen people out there.

  Audre: That’s right. In particular, I was asked to be public; to speak as, rather than to. But I felt as if I’d come back from the dead at that point, and so everything was up for grabs. I thought, hey, very good, let’s see – not because I felt I could do it, I just knew it was new and different. I was terrified to go south. Then there were echoes of an old dream: I had wanted to go to Tougaloo years before. My friend Elaine and I were going to join the Freedom Riders in Jackson when we left California in 1961 to return to New York, and Elaine’s mother got down on her knees in San Francisco and begged us please not to do this, that they would kill us, and we didn’t do it. So going to Tougaloo in Jackson was part of the mythic …

  Adrienne: But it sounds as if earlier you had been more romantic about what going south would mean, and six years later, with two kids and everything that had happened in between in the south …

  Audre: I was scared. I thought: ‘I’m going.’ Really, it was the first thing that countered the fury and pain I felt at leaving that little boy screaming every night. It was like – all right, if I can walk out and hear that child screaming in order to go down to the library and work every night, then I’m gonna be able at least to do something that I want to find out about. So I went.

  Adrienne: Were you scared at Tougaloo, in terms of teaching, meeting your first workshop?

  Audre: Yes, but it was a nurturing atmosphere. I lived there for two weeks before I went around really gathering people, and there were eight students who were already writing poetry. The ways in which I was on the line in Tougaloo … I began to learn about courage, I began to learn to talk. This was a small group and we became very close. I learned so much from listening to people. The only thing I had was honesty and openness. And it was absolutely necessary for me to declare, as terrified as I was, as we were opening to each other, ‘The father of my children is white.’ And what that meant in Tougaloo to those young Black people then, to talk about myself openly and deal with their hostility, their sense of disillusionment, to come past that, was very hard.

  Adrienne: It must have been particularly hard since you knew by then that the marriage was going nowhere. It’s like having to defend something that was not in itself defensible.

  Audre: What I was defending was something that needed defense. And this moved it out of ‘I’m defending Ed because I want to live with him.’ It was, ‘I’m defending this relationship because we have a right to examine it and try it.’ So there’s the northern Black poet making contact with these young southern Black people who are not saying, ‘This is what we need you for,’ but were telling me by who they were what they needed from me. In the poem ‘Black Studies’fn3 a lot of that starts coming through. Tougaloo laid the foundation for that poem, that knowledge born five years later. My students needed my perception, yet my perception of their need was different from what they were saying. What they were saying aloud was, ‘We need strong Black people,’ but what they were also saying was that their ideas of what strong was had come from our oppressors and didn’t jibe with their feelings at all.

  It was through poetry that we began to deal with these things – formally. I knew nothing. Adrienne, I had never read a book about poetry! I picked up one day a book by Karl Shapiro, a little thin white book. I opened it and something he said made sense. ‘Poetry doesn’t sell Cadillacs.’ It was the first time I’d ever talked about writing; always before I’d listened – part of my being inarticulate, inscrutable; I didn’t understand in terms of verbalization, and if I did I was too terrified to speak anyway. But at Tougaloo we talked about poetry. And I got the first copies of my book there at Tougaloo.

  I had never been in this relationship with Black people before. Never. There had been a very uneasy dialogue between me and the Harlem Writers’ Guild where I felt I was tolerated but never really accepted – that I was both crazy and queer but would grow out of it all. Johnny Clarke adopted me because he really loved me, and he’s a kind man. And he taught me wonderful things about Africa. And he said to me, ‘You are a poet. You are a poet. I don’t understand your poetry but you are a poet, you are.’ So I would get this underlining of me. ‘You’re not doing what you’re supposed to do, but, yes, you can do it and we totally expect you to. You are a bright and shining light. You’re off on a lot of wrong turns – women, the Village, white people, all of this, but you’re young yet. You’ll find your way.’ So I would get these double messages, this kind of underlining and rejection at the same time. It reduplicated my family, you see. In my family it was: ‘You’re a Lorde, so that makes you special and particular above anybody else in the world. But you’re not our kind of Lorde, so when are you going to straighten out and act right?’

  Adrienne: And did you feel, there in the Harlem Writers’ Guild, the same kind of unwritten laws that you had to figure out in order to do right?

  Audre: Yes, I would bring poems to read at the meetings. And hoping, well, they’re gonna tell me actually what it is they want, but they never could, never did.

  Adrienne: Were there women in that group, older women?

  Audre: Rosa Guy was older than I, but she was still very young. I remember only one other woman, Gertrude McBride. But she came in and out of the workshop so quickly I never knew her. For the most part, the men were the core. My friend Jeannie and I were members but in a slightly different position; we were in high school.

  Adrienne: And so Tougaloo was an entirely different experience of working with other Black writers.

  Audre: When I went to Tougaloo, I didn’t know what to give or where it was going to come from. I knew I couldn’t give what regular teachers of poetry give, nor did I want to, because they’d never served me. I couldn’t give what English teachers give. The only thing I had to give was me. And I was so involved with these young people – I really loved them. I knew the emotional life of each of those students because we would have conferences, and that became inseparable from their poetry. I would talk to them in the group about their poetry in terms of what I knew about their lives, and that there was a real connection between the two that was inseparable no matter what they’d been taught to the contrary.

  I knew by the time I left Tougaloo that teaching was the work I needed to be doing, that library work – by this time I was head librarian at the Town School – was not enough. It had been very satisfying to me. And I had a kind of stature I hadn’t had before in terms of working. But from the time I went to Tougaloo and did that workshop, I knew: not only, yes, I am a poet, but also, this is the kind of work I’m going to do.

  Practically all the poems in Cables to Ragefn4 I wrote in Tougaloo. I was there for six weeks. I came back knowing that my relationship with Ed was not enough: either we were going to change it or end it. I didn’t know how to end it because there had never been any endings for me. But I had met Frances at Tougaloo, and I knew she was going to be a permanent person in my life. However, I didn’t know how we were going to work it out. I’d left a piece of my heart in Tougaloo not just because of Frances but because of what my students there had taught me.

  And I came back, and my students called me and told me – they were all of them also in the Tougaloo choir – they were coming to New York to sing in Carnegie Hall with Duke Ellington on April 4, and I covered it for the Clarion-Ledger, in Jackson, so I was there, and while we were there Martin Luther King was killed.

  Adrienne: On that night?

  Audre: I was with the Tougaloo choir at Carnegie Hall when he was killed. They were singing ‘What the World Needs Now Is Love.’ And they interrupted it to tell us that Martin Luther King had been killed.

  Adrienne: What did people do?

  Audre: Duke Ellington started to cry. Honeywell, the head of the choir, said, ‘The only thing we can do here is finish this as a memorial.’ And they sang again, ‘What the World Needs Now is Love.’ The kids were crying. The audience was crying. And
then the choir stopped. They cut the rest of it short. But they sang that song and it kept reverberating. It was more than pain. The horror, the enormity of what was happening. Not just the death of King, but what it meant. I have always had the sense of Armageddon and it was much stronger in those days, the sense of living on the edge of chaos. Not just personally, but on the world level. That we were dying, that we were killing our world – that sense had always been with me. That whatever I was doing, whatever we were doing that was creative and right, functioned to hold us from going over the edge. That this was the most we could do while we constructed some saner future. But that we were in that kind of peril. And here it was reality, in fact. Some of the poems – ‘Equinox’fn5 is one of them – come from then. I knew then that I had to leave the library. And it was just about this time that Yolanda took my book, The First Cities, to Mina Shaughnessyfn6 who had been her teacher, and I think she said to Mina, ‘Why don’t you have her teach?’ – because that’s the way, you know, Yolanda is.

  Adrienne: But also, Mina would have listened to that.

  Audre: So Yolanda came home and said, ‘Hey, the head of the SEEKfn7 English program wants to meet you. Maybe you can get a job there.’ And I thought, I have to lay myself on the line. It’s not going back south and being shot at, but when Mina said to me, ‘Teach,’ it was as threatening as that was. I felt at the time, I don’t know how I’m gonna do it, but that’s the front line for me. And I talked to Frances about this, because we’d had the Tougaloo experience, and I said, ‘If I could go to war, if I could pick up a gun to defend the things I believe, yes – but what am I gonna do in a classroom?’ And Frances said, ‘You’ll do just what you did at Tougaloo.’ And the first thing that I said to my SEEK students was, ‘I’m scared too.’

  Adrienne: I know I went in there in terror. But I went in white terror; you know, now you’re on the line, all your racism is going to show …

  Audre: I went in in Audre terror, Black terror. I thought, I have responsibility to these students. How am I going to speak to them? How am I going to tell them what I want from them – literally – that kind of terror. I did not know how to open my mouth and be understood. And my commadre, Yolanda, who was also a student in the SEEK program, said, ‘I guess you’re just going to have to talk to them the same way you talk to me because I’m one of them and you’ve gotten across to me.’ I learned every single thing in every classroom. Every single class I ever walked into was like doing it anew. Every day, every week. But that was the exciting thing.

  Adrienne: Did you teach English 1 – that back-to-back course where you could be a poet, a writing teacher, and not teach grammar, and they had an English instructor to teach the grammar? That was the only way I could have started doing it either.

  Audre: I learned to teach grammar. And then I realized that we can’t separate these two things. We have to do them together because they’re integral. That’s when I learned how important grammar is, that part of the understanding process is grammatical. That’s how I taught myself to write prose. I kept learning and learning. I’d come into my class and say, ‘Guess what I found out last night. Tenses are a way of ordering the chaos around time.’ I learned that grammar was not arbitrary, that it served a purpose, that it helped to form the ways we thought, that it could be freeing as well as restrictive. And I sensed again how as children we learn this, and why. It’s like driving a car: once we know it we can choose to discard it or use it, but you can’t know if it has useful or destructive power until you have a handle on it. It’s like fear: once you put your hand on it, you can use it or push it away. I was saying these things in class and dealing with what was happening with Frances and me, what was going on with this insane man I lived with who wanted to continue pretending life could be looked at one way and lived another. All this, every bit of it funneling into that class. My children were just learning to read in school, and that was important too because I could watch their processes. Then it got even heavier when I went up to Lehmann College and was teaching a class on racism in education, teaching these white students how it was, the connections between their lives and the fury …

  Adrienne: You taught a course on racism for white students at Lehmann?

  Audre: They were inaugurating a program in the Education Department for these white kids going into teaching in the New York City schools. Lehmann used to be 99 percent white, and it was these students coming out of the Education Department who were going to teach Black children in the city schools. So the course was called ‘Race and the Urban Situation.’ I had all these white students wanting to know, ‘What are we doing? Why are our kids hating us in the classroom?’ I could not believe that they did not know the most elementary level of interactions. I would say, ‘When a white kid says 2 + 2 = 4, you say ‘right.’ In the same class, when a Black kid stands up and says 2 + 2 = 4, you pat him on the back, you say, ‘Hey, that’s wonderful.’ But what message are you really giving? Or what happens when you walk down the street on your way to teach? When you walk into class? Let’s play act a little.’ And all the fear and loathing of these young white college students would come pouring out; it had never been addressed.

  Adrienne: They must have been mostly women, weren’t they? In the Education Department?

  Audre: Yes, mostly women, and they felt like unwilling sacrifices. But I began to feel by the end of two terms that there ought to be somebody white doing this. It was terribly costly emotionally. I didn’t have more than one or two Black students in my class. One of them dropped out saying this wasn’t right for him, and I thought, wait a minute, racism doesn’t just distort white people – what about us? What about the effects of white racism upon the ways Black people view each other? Racism internalized? What about Black teachers going into ghetto schools? And I saw there were different problems, that were just as severe, for a Black teacher going into New York City schools after a racist, sexist education.

  Adrienne: You mean in terms of expectations?

  Audre: Not just in terms of expectations, but of self-image, in terms of confusion about loyalties. In terms of identifying with the oppressor. And I thought, who is going to start to deal with that? What do you do about it? This was where I wanted to use my energies. Meanwhile, this is 1969, and I’m thinking, what is my place in all this? There were two Black women in the class, and I tried to talk to them about us, as Black women, having to get together. The Black organizations on the campuses were revving up for the spring actions. And the women said, ‘You are insane, our men need us.’ It was a total rejection. ‘No, we can’t come together as women. We’re Black.’ But I had to keep trying to straighten out the threads because I knew the minute I stopped trying to straighten this shit out, it was going to engulf me. So the only hope I had was to work at it, work on all the threads. My love with Frances, Ed, the children, teaching Black students, the women.

  And in ’69 came the Black and Puerto Rican occupation at City College. Black students outside of class on the barricades. Yolanda and I would bring over soup and blankets and see Black women being fucked on tables and under desks. And while we’d be trying to speak to them as women, all we’d hear is, ‘The revolution is here, right?’ Seeing how Black women were being used and abused was painful – putting those things together. I said, ‘I want to teach Black students again.’ I went to John Jay College and discussed a course with the dean on racism and the urban situation, and he said, ‘Come teach it.’ I taught two courses, that one and another new course I introduced to the English Department, which approached remedial writing through creative writing. It was confrontation teaching.

  Adrienne: John Jay was largely a police college, right?

  Audre: It had been a police college, but I began in 1970 after open admissions started, and John Jay was now a four-year senior college with a regular enrollment as well as an enrollment of City uniformed personnel. There were no Black teachers in English or history. Most of our incoming freshmen were Black or Puerto Rican. And my
demeanor was very unthreatening.

  Adrienne: I’ve seen your demeanor at John Jay and it was not unthreatening, but that was a bit later …

  Audre: … and also, I was a Black woman. So then I came in and started this course and really meant business. And it was very heavily attended. A lot of Black and white policemen registered for it. And literally, I used to be terrified about the guns.

  Adrienne: They were wearing guns?

  Audre: Yes. And since open admissions made college accessible to all high school graduates, we had cops and kids off the block in the same class. In 1970, the Black Panthers were being murdered in Chicago. Here we had Black and white cops, and Black and white kids off the block. Most of the women were young, Black, together women who had come to college now because they’d not been able to get in before. Some of them were SEEK students, but not all, and this was the one chance for them. A lot of them were older. They were very streetwise, but they had done very little work with themselves as Black women. They had done it only in relation to, against, whitey. The enemy was always outside. I did that course in the same way I did all the others, which was learning as I went along, asking the hard questions, not knowing what was coming next. I wish I had recorded some of it. Like the young white cop in the class saying, ‘Yeah, but everybody needs someone to look down on, don’t they?’ By then I’d learned how to talk. Things weren’t all concise or refined, but enough of it got through to them; their own processes would start. I came to realize that in one term that is the most you can do. There are people who can give chunks of information, perhaps, but that was not what I was about. The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot. And then, just possibly, hopefully, it goes home, or on.