Cecil Brown, June Jordan, Richard Wright

The poem that grabbed hold of me tightest was, aptly placed, the first entry in the Politics section, “Integrating the Strawberry Swimming Pool in 1998.” Reed initiates us into this section with Cecil Brown’s Blues-inspired piece, one whose disquieting and sorrowful refrain belies title year of 1998. The lilt of the slow, swaying opening lines dances me into the section, while at once making the clear, grizzly statement that the reality of these poets will be lain before us, stark and honest—nothing hidden, nothing cushioned. Then, the questions swell in my head: Could it be that a segregated pool still exists in Berkeley at the turn of the 21st Century? Are we, as readers, shocked? If so, who is shocked? And, as such, whom is Brown aiming to shock?

The story unravels in a tight, punched dialogue, as the set of the springtime swimming pool flows in around the cast: the poet and the twos sets of Gestapo boots. Brown thinks, “Isn’t it strange…how they now have cops everywhere/.” In 2009, when I drive home on Sacramento late I am slow and steady alongside cruising black-and-whites, my hands tight on the wheel. Isn’t it strange, I think, how there are cops everywhere. Hard to know if they circle in pairs waiting to protect ya or waiting to catchya.

But this poem isn’t about the police so much, with their twisted gestures, demands, icy voices and glares. Maybe they plucked him, profiled him (this most decorated academic swimming in his own backyard campus pool) or maybe they followed the lead of the lifeguard who profiled, rang the town bell, swung the rope; followed the lead of the white ladies in bikinis who swept eyes to their sides and whispered into receivers; followed the lead of professors and deans who parsed their departmental budgets and cast a proprietary watch over these facilities. The final stanzas crescendo into an indictment of the academy itself.

At the top of page 197, Brown tells us “Not more than a few hours/ I asked the Department of _______ / to teach a course in James Baldwin.” But he doesn’t tell us whether this was a few hours before or after the Strawberry Canyon Swimming Pool incident. When his course was declined did he take it just as the perennial struggle of any academic for recognition and funding? Then, after being attacked a few hours later did he allow the connection to snap together that this purportedly liberal university has biased, canon-entrenched, racist policies? Or did he ask for the course afterward, to vindicate himself, to create a platform in this mecca of learning where he could declare: “James Baldwin was carried off to a Paris jail under the accusation of pilfering bed sheets and I too, here too, have known this injustice!” We don’t know which department he asked or when he asked it. —Why this choice?— But the importance of the timeline, the details, evaporates, and the verse pounds to the thundering crux: “We pay taxes, they get the classes. / We have the melanin in our skins, but they get to lie in the sun in/ The Strawberry swimming pool.”

Brown holds the blues beat throughout; he writes in speech-slang and employs double negatives in his refrain—a guideline June Jordan and her students once outlined for the formal use of Black English (“Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan”). He uses these linguistic tropes ironically in the face of abject racial profiling, but also because the the emotional impact of lines like “They don’t want no blacks up there / Ain’t goin’ there no mo’/” runs directly into the soul in a way a formally rhetorical condemnation never could.

Somehow I have left little room for the other poems I loved. June Jordan’s poem dedicated to Dr. Elizabeth Ann Karlin: “I think / I have decided / I wish it to be understood.” I don’t know this language but it sounds like the way the Pope might address us—how one’s whims or wishes can so easily turn into a decree. I love that she turns this language right back around, claiming the power for women over their own bodies and elucidating the pope’s harbored sexuality/privacy. The short lines emphasize the point so brilliantly—crisp and tumbling after one another like the words on a scroll.

Also Richard Wright’s well-placed closing poem chilled me. I read it backwards and forwards, over and over. The scene of the lynching was pieced together, re-invented, torn apart, embodied. It comes upon us, “the thing” like a sinister breeze—at once a memory and a premonition. The imagery of white bones in a cushion of ashes clashes against images of black blood, charred stump, traces of tar. We know what’s been here even before the details arrive; the sky and the trees have borne witness. Wright stumbles upon the scene that wrenches a chasm between the world and himself. Perhaps he begins outside, part of the world, far from this treachery; and he ends, having traced through the “sooty details” only to find himself within the scene, but a skull, far divided from the world he once inhabited.

-Jessica