A Sojourner Speaks

I’ve been away a long time,

but every goodbye ain't gone.

I’ve been in the desert.

Came back to

this crossroads

of art and marketplace

with an offering

of fragments

and spaces between.

Quote:

“Making people happy.

That's been your business.”

The interviewer assessed.

Josephine Baker said,

“No. It hasn't been a business to me…

I've always tried to touch

the sensibility of each human being.”

She identified our work as a matter of consciousness.

1996:

Thirty years ago exact

on a frigid Austin, Texas night:

at twenty six 6 I moved onstage

as Josephine Baker,

dancing naked on the edge of the moon.

A dance with the dead

to weave

evidence of love

across time

for future folk.

1978:

On the left, Ms. Zehline A Davis,

my fourth grade teacher

in the public school where my friends and I were bussed.

We daily left a vaster world

where we were whole

and crossed a bridge

to a too-tight school where we were

weighed and

sorted and

tracked toward pre-imagined outcomes

causing discord among us, who quietly longed just to learn.

Ms. Davis, the one Black teacher, put a stop to all of that.

Making space inside her room, she promised justice.

“I will treat you all the same” she said, day one, and kept to her word,

teaching us to stoke our curiosities,

and stretch our consciousness.

Freedom, she instructed,

roots and branches from within your mind. Then taught

us all the meanings tucked within “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”

In the center,

Robbie McCauley with Laurie Carlos behind her

on Broadway in Shange’sfor colored girls…

Embodying their sisterhood,

they and the other women,

stage a rite of recollection

to the pulse within themselves

unsanctioned, ungoverned, and full.

Fifteen years later, when they chose to mentor me,

I vowed to carry what they gave me. 

Robbie was steady about staying free,

striding the breaks, grabbing hold of contradictions,

as she stood in the space

in the presence of the people,

and said the thing that must be said—

proving we must find our way to embodied courage

each time.

On the right, I’m next to my father, Arthur Leroy Jones.

He and Mom

walked us through the snow

each Christmas Eve

to visit every elder in the neighborhood

from afternoon til well past midnight.

As under incandescent lights,

they spun tales of their befores in

Jamaica,

Puerto Rico,

Italy,

Ireland,

Indigenous folk,

and Black folk from the South, where Dad’s side was from.

Again and again,

year after year ‘til their stories grew as close as glow.

I’ve always had

prophetic dreams

and nightmares

which to my mentors meant I was just

regular

in our traditions

but such seeing meant

it was in service of the work.

Spectral terrors and graces

are thus coded through my art.

As Jomama Jones spoke in Black Light in 2018:

“what if I told you we won’t all make it through?”

It’s leaning on that nightmare side.

Attentions hijacked.

Imaginations snared

in algorithmic loops.

The connective tissue

among us percussively

wounded.

It’s a difference between

something dying

a natural death

and being killed,

between the turmoil of creation

and brutality from thieves

who sow discord to distract

while they raze

living archives to the ground.

War.

Genocide.

Brazen greed.

I don’t need to tell you what

story we are stuck in.

Quote: “...human beings need

deepening places…”

wrote Madeline L’Engle

wherein

consciousness can root and branch

and we find each other’s

stories just in time.

I bow to all of you

who use your art

to deepen consciousness,

who guide us

past edges

and stay in the heat

of real time transformation

to remind us

to embody

our vast archive

of soul.

I have been in the desert

walking with the dead

who whisper yet of epochs changing.

The Struggle Continues,

Robbie’s book was

published last year

after her death in 2021.

She left maps to help us set down our masks

and navigate what lies ahead.

My Dad, a lifelong community worker,

with a book of poetry in the final summer of his life.

At the end of his eighty seven years,

he suddenly despaired: what difference had he made?

In hospice we bore witness

as a line of people stretching in age from seventeen to eighty eight

came to say: Art Jones saved my life.

Pulled me out of trouble and put a book in my hand.

Showed me to seek the wonder

in the people that we meet.

And in sum, Ms. Zehline Davis:

Very much alive at eighty seven years old,

just this past November.

We spent a glorious morning catching up after decades.

What did you love best about teaching, I asked?

When they gave me the “difficult” kids.

She saw right through to their capacity and demanded they stand up

for their own freedom.

In the end, she smiled and said, they outdid the whole school. Every time.

Cross back from canon to archive.

Take back our attention.

I dare you,

in this killing time,

ask your

neighbor to trust you with

a story.

Make it your business

to carry it

well.