Never-before-seen unpublished works by award-winning American literary icon Ntozake Shange, featuring essays, plays, and poems from the archives of the seminal Black feminist writer who stands alongside giants like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, curated by National Book Award winner Imani Perry with a foreword by New York Times bestselling author Tarana Burke.
In the late ’60s, Ntozake Shange was a student at Barnard College discovering her budding talent as a writer, publishing in her school’s literary journal, and finding her unique voice. By the time she left us in 2018, Shange had scorched blazing trails across countless pages and stages, redefining genre and form as we know them, each verse, dance, and song a love letter to Black women and girls, and the community at large. Sing a Black Girl’s Song is a new posthumous collection of Shange’s unpublished poems, essays, and plays from throughout the life of the seminal Black feminist writer. In these pages we meet young Shange, learn the moments that inspired for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf…, travel with an eclectic family of musicians, sit on “The Couch” opposite Shange’s therapist, and discover plays written after for colored girls’ international success. Sing a Black Girl’s Song houses, in their original form, the literary rebel’s politically charged verses from the Black Arts Movement era alongside her signature tender rhythm and cadence that capture the minutia and nuance of Black life. Sing a Black Girl’s Song is the continuation of a literary tradition that has bolstered generations of writers and a long-lasting gift from one of the fiercest and most highly celebrated artists of our time.
Release date:
September 12, 2023
Publisher:
Grand Central Publishing
Print pages:
256
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
There is a memory of the wish-swishing of skirts, the smells of powders and coffee, my father’s cologne seeps from her skin and the pillow I nestle my head, my whole body curved again as in the beginning. I am the only one. This is my mother, Eloise, who married Paul who was my father and that’s how she became my mother.
Mirrors, small delicate bottles. Dresses with pearls and lace from Paris I knew this. I saw it on the globe that lit up at night like the neon signs across the way, letting me know we were colored in the colored part of town. Yet, the movies and photographs were black and white. Not fitting all the different shapes and odors of folks who came to see my mother. Laughter from the kitchen. Laughter up the stairs Aunt Emma was here, Uncle Jimmy was here with Aunt Margaret. So, were my Grandmothers. My mother had a special greeting for each one, as if there were something in her soul that let her know what touch or hug a body needed. My Grandmother hovered like Billie Burke. I couldn’t distinguish my mother from Jean Seberg, Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, or Dorothy Dandridge. I remember her eyes glowed as mine widened when Carmen de Lavallade1 danced.
The lindy hop was not the only vernacular activity my mother mastered. There were collard greens and smothered porkchops. There were the nights when sleep came dragging its heels and my mother had a rhythmic pat that was so soft, yet steady that sleep gave up staying away from me. Let my mother calm my soul so that when my dreams came, I dreamt in color.
I liked to hide in the back of my mother’s closet with her dresses and smells. Now I realize many many other little girls did the same. Even my own daughter waltzed about in my robe, wrapping my scent about her like some kind of magic.
1 Movie stars of the 1950s. Dorothy Dandridge and Carmen de Lavallade, also a distinguished dancer, were African American.
Once we all wore the same color blue dresses, my sisters, my mother and I. We were one for a long time. I could not tell long after I should have known better that I was not my mother. I wanted to be my mother. I liked her. I liked that way people liked her. I liked my father. But, I could not be him. I could be her. I could deep-sea fish, play baccarat, sing like Marian Anderson, defend the race. We were a vulnerable people. I could tell from the stories my mother told with her friends when they played inscrutable games of cards for hours. Bridge. What did I know then about mother, this bridge called my back. What do I know now about my mother?
I live with the myth of her, my indisputable legend of her. Executing intricate steps of the cha-cha-cha- in La Habana, dressing us all for The March on Washington, surviving disastrous lover after lover that I chose for myself, since I was not my mother. Since I was not mother, I am still learning to mother myself which Alta and Adrienne told me years ago. But, I couldn’t give up the black and white films of Ellie, who is my mother to another time, or other places. I see horizons sometimes and think of what she saw for me. I am guilty of spending days under huge oaks imagining myself as my mother when I became a mother, yet I am not. I really know I am not my mother, but if I were to ever lose my myth of this woman of independent thought and chutzpah during the fifties, who actually demonstrated the meaning of ‘each one teach one’, I would be less a woman than I am, less a mother than I am becoming. I respect Ellie. Then, sometimes I feel sadly for her because as colorful and colored as we were, our world was defined in black and white. Our world was featured in Ebony, Jet, Sepia. Now when I look at us, Ellie and then, me and my daughter, something is awry. I become uncollected. I never saw my mother, ‘uncollected’. She was not one to accept or expect to survive on Blanche’s risky kindness of strangers, nor was she ‘invisible’. But, I’m saving all my images, all the touch recollections I can sustain because the depth of Ellie’s presence in me is ante-deluvian, fierce, and infinite. So unlike what she appears to be, all of which she gave to me.
Ntozake Shange
18 September 1997
I could say, imagine. I am the ultimate conclusion of the allure of silk, the shimmer and breeze of silks, After all my skin is silken. My grandmother’s hands sheer as silk. My mother’s cherry-blond hair hard to picture without the capricious play of light, changing her thick mane of a coif moment to moment from golden to cerise, ash blond to emboldened chestnut. These are but a few of the qualities of silk that are my blood, my blood memory, my dreams. Yet without the extraordinary vision of Ferdinand and Isabelle, Cristobal Colon would not have been charged with the mission to find an alternate route to India, thence, China, where silk was born. Colon, Columbus, the adventurer would not have set foot on Santo Domingo in search of the riches of silks and gold, then synonymous in the Old World, never suspecting sugar, tobacco, rice, and cotton would be as gold to silk; that Africans, wrapped in a tight ivory cocoon of bondage, we call slavery, would inhabit these ‘Indies’, indigo damask demographic, fertile, furtive, hybrid, glistening as silk does when the moon changes phases, as we do under a tropical sun. Silken and foreign to these shores and to the thought, these are the origins of my genealogical essence, my blood trail in the New World, another Silk Road.
Though my earliest recollections of all that is silk, all that swish, soft fondling fabric conveys is perfumed and gliding my eyebrows in the depths of my mother, Ellie’s closet. What shrouded my young head, braids and all was the miracle of the night, of conga drums, claves, and castenets, formal dinners, chandeliers of translucent swirls of lights dancing above the heads of very important guests whose crepe, velvet, chiffon, and silk, I’d bask in under the dining table. So like an ocean of unexpected sensation were the skirt hems tickling my shoulders, sometimes I’d forget to gaze at the ankles in silk stockings that left ordinary brown and bronze calves the magic of rose quartz, moonstones, tourmaline, sculpture as secret as the next brush stroke of Sonia Delauney or Raoul Dufy turning silk painting to a landscape abstractly worn by Parisian women adept at becoming art that could walk. While we in the New World far from St. Germain de Pres or Tours, ignorant of the smell and thick layers of medieval Venice, we drew La Habana to us, as if the satin-bodiced and feathered brocatelle of the mulatas at The Tropicana were more than our senses could bear, enough to sate our sense of beauty and illicit treasures. Were not the seeds of white mulberry trees upon which the silkworm dined contraband, smuggled, hidden, dangerous cargo transported by the foolish or fool-hardy headstrong bent on wealth and stature. But we needn’t concern ourselves with distant and ancient menace. The flickering of home-style black and white movies after the flan, after the cigars and cognac, bringing lampas skinned brown beauties swinging from trees, swinging their hips was intimidating enough. Surely, there was no one more beautiful than a woman in silk smiling down at me from a gargantuan Cuban cypress tree, while I hid at the foot of the stairs waiting for the exception.
…
As I understood with the mind of a child befuddled by the Cold War and immersed in films of WWII, my mother visited a fashion showroom not far from La Place de L’Opera where an impish French model paraded in front of her as she sat, probably in chairs of chine velvet with thickets of exotic plants, peacocks, and bizarre Oriental leitmotifs. As she sat admiring the models, my father, Paul T., who was smooth as silk, decided upon a white silk taffeta strapless sheath embossed with pearls with a flying panel of the same materials, that I now know to be a ‘robe a la francaise’ on the back, so that my mother’s figure was virginal, salacious, and regal at one and the same time. A velvet cape with the same pearled pattern was strewn over her left shoulder as she mysteriously moved down the winding staircase. I was speechless, not because I’d been found out, but because I was sure I was not to see my mother in such a state of ethereal sensuality in my lifetime. I almost believed the glow on her face was a reflection of the moon flirting unabashed in front of my father. My father who was smooth as silk, though not named ‘Silk’ like so many others of us. His muscular frame interacted with the world as something precious to behold, beyond the possibility of an ordinary anything. This couple slipping into a black Missouri night to hear the raw silk voice of Tina Turner, the velvet cisele intonations of Gloria Lynne or the heightened boucle of Maria Callas were mine. I came from this phenomenon as Toomer said rare as a “November cotton flower”.
Ntozake Shange
25 May 1998
Houston, Texas
Above all else St. Louis was a colored town: ’a whiskey black space’. That’s not to say there were no white people. It’s just to say I had to go out of my neighborhood to find some and then they’d wish I hadn’t. This maybe all new for those of you born after 1964, but I grew up in St. Louis in the midst of a struggle for the soul of the country and I’m not talking about Sputnik. There was nothing but struggle surrounding us as colored children in America from 1954 on. But, aside from some political meetings held in my house late into the night, I just knew there were a lot of Negroes in St. Louis, that I lived among them, and that I was one. Race defined my reality and if more people would admit this it’d be a saner world we live in today…
For years my sisters, my brother and I went to Clark School which was luckily at the end of our block and we only had to cross one boulevard to get there. I had a wonderful teacher, Mrs. Smith who always lucked swank and rouged her cheeks just a wee bit too much. From Mrs. Smith I learned about decorum and that colored children must always have it. Mrs. Smith loved Paul Laurence Dunbar, so any time she could that’s what we would read aloud. Now the problem presented by Dunbar is that it’s written in black English which we were not encouraged to speak at all. Yet there was Mrs. Smith, letting the ‘de’s and ‘dahs’ roll off her tongue with a smile. This was also true of my mother who lawled in her Dunbar as if she could she see Malindy right in front of us or Ike just as Dunbar described him. So I grew up in this strange world of contradictions.
Yes, we were Americans and my uncles fought in the wars, but we couldn’t try on hats in the store. We could take pride in Hughes and Dunbar, but we mustn’t use double negatives if any white people around. Yes we ate ‘chitlins’ but we mustn’t tell anyone one. Yes we traipsed off to the Veiled Prophet parade like the rest of St. Louis, not realizing we were watching a ritual that grew from white supremacy. The Veiled Prophet himself was clocked in satin and beaded robes. Now I think he should have been carrying a burning cross, but then I was drawn into the beauty of it all with the rest of St. Louis. There’s something about childhood that finds joy and excitement almost everywhere. Anyway all these tidbits about growing up in St. Louis will mean nothing to you, if I don’t talk about the veneer of elegance that is the city. No matter what kind of house or what neighborhood there were medians and granite sculpture at the end of the blocks. The bricks of the houses hid the crumbilin’ insides of many of them or exalted the many mansions. & Oh, the churches and synagogues were just like in the Bible, and our songs, especially “in my Father’s house there are many mansions;” which meant to me that there was a colored one for sure.
I stayed at Clark School for two years surrounded as folks like to say among my own kind, happy as I could be. Then one day a woman came to see a few of us. She took us in a little room where we had to repeat number backwards, define words, look at strange images and tell her what they were. It was all very strange. I think maybe ten of us went into this room and were asked to complete logical sequences of objects, ideas, things. This was the first clue that I was being singled out to join the true struggle of my people, but you couldn’t have told me then. The lady came back for a meeting with our parents and told them we had high IQ’s and belonged in the gifted program which for us was in a far off white working class neighborhood. They didn’t tell us we’d end up being the only colored children around, that we’d have to take a trolley and two buses, or that we weren’t welcome where we were going.
Going to Dewey School was nothing like what the children in Little Rock endured. There were no crowds or police, but there was a silence my sister and I met that was hurtful and intimidating. My fifth grade teacher Ms. Baldwin tried to Ameliorate the situation, but my classmates insisted that I was Greek or Sicilian. It was inconceivable to them that I was a Negro amongst them. This meant for a lot of tight rope walking. I didn’t want to do or say anything that might get me beat up and I still wanted to say ‘Yes, I am a Negro’. When a brown-skinned boy arrived the next year, my fate was sealed. Robert Alexander and I were paired off together to projects, to square dances. You name it, if we had to have partners Robert had to be mine. It was as if we were being treated ‘separate but equal’ in the very place integration was to be buoyed. But we weathered the ‘togetherness’ as best we could; exchanging as few words as possible. Here is my contradiction. I’d get on my bus to go home with such relief. Home was nothing but colored people and everyday I couldn’t get there soon enough. Yet, poor Robert and I couldn’t make a go of it in the very white environment we shared everyday.
On Windermere Place where we lived. There was always something going on: double dutch, kick ball, monopoly, or bid whist. We had free reign of the street, since only those who lived on it had the right to drive on it, so we rode our bikes right down the middle of it, or if we felt brave we’d ride up to the parking lot of Harris Teacher’s College and ride in circles around the parking lots. This when our parents sent out messages that we were ‘missing’ and we got in trouble. But this was not my only world, I lived in the world of books as well.
We were lucky that the Cabanne Street Library was within walking distance because I walked it as often as I could. To learn, to feel, in some cases to see. That’s where I discovered Susan B. Anthony and Toussaint L’Ouverture. I also read every Nancy Drew there was at the time. I found Carter G. Woodson “100 Facts about the Negro”1 and DuBois, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, and Jane Austin and Charlotte Bronte, Wild Bill Hickock and so many more. Then, too, my father brought home a mass of socialist literature like “The Ukraine” with a cover of a White woman surrounded by brilliant roses lauding the success of collective farming. Or he’d he’d have the latest “Science Digest”. Or my mother would sneak Books like Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” or “Mandingo” into the house, but her favorites were Frank Yerby’s romance novels like “Foxes of Harrow”. She took special delight in Yerby because he’d made it in publishing and in Hollywood never denying he was a Negro as well. I loved books. I slept with them and tried to eat with them at my side, but mother insisted that I take part in dinner table discussion which was really interesting. My parents would facilitate discussions about the race and our individual lives. But, nothing was like finding a quiet place to hunker down with a stack of books, be they poetry or medical journals. I actually wrote a letter to one journal asking for more information about the newest discovery that could prevent pregnancy. I guess they were taken aback by an eleven year old wanting this information and wrote me the sweetest reply explaining that I should speak with my parents. That makes me laugh now, but then I was very serious. I also wrote away to a physicist who was working on the quantum theory who wrote me back too. And I knew for sure they wouldn’t have responded if they’d known I was colored. This is how racism warps one’s perceptions. I was raised when these perceptions: ours of white people and theirs of us were in violent upheaval and childhood did not last long. *Childhood however, can last forever in many lands and times, if you always keep a book near you. I do and I travel the world from my back porch.*
1 J. A. Rodgers (1880–1966) was the author of 100 Facts About the Negro. But given that Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950) was popularly known as the Father of Black History, this may be a misattribution, or two references in the list.
As a child I was raised on Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon1 the poets my mother felt comfortable with and held precious. Later she introduced Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Hayden, and Sterling Brown. So before the age of five, this was my literary world. I, therefore, never took to what was called children’s literature. Simultaneously, my father my father enveloped my world s a sea of black and Latin m.2 of all kinds. I listened to the early Miles Davis, Hank Mobley, Ellington, Count Basey through to Art Blakey3. Somehow the two worlds integrated themselves as one realm of sounds. This has never changed. If it hadn’t been for my parents obsessions. I would have had a traditionally classic education. I am saying all this because the dichotomy of learning that racism created for me has never disappeared. I have always had to think very hard about which audience I was addressing and which language I could use. I was smitten with the cadence and characters of black English and the rhythms of the bl.,4 jazz, and Afro-Cuban improvisations.
I stole Giovanni’s Room from under my mother’s pillow and The Invisible Man from my father’s bookcase. I scoured St. Louis libraries for biographies of artists and politicians mentioned over the dinner meal. So Toussaint L’Ouverture5 and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.6 were circulating in my head as one continuous phenomenon. Once I left the all black schools I attended in St. Louis, none of my teachers knew of whom or what I was talking about. This situation remained so throughout my graduate school. Although I applied myself diligently to Greco-Roman classics, French, English and Russian poetry, there was never a space for me to express the realities of my black/Pue. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
