Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Elizabeth Alexander. The name may sound familiar.  If I say “the inauguration of President Barak Obama,” a lightbulb might go off, because she was there, reading her poem for that momentous occasion, “Praise Song for the Day.”

Elizabeth Alexander (1962 — ) was born in Harlem, but as a child in a politically active family, she grew up in Washington, DC. Her mother, Adele Logan Alexander, is also a writer, and teaches African-American women’s history at George Washington University.  Her father, Clifford Alexander Jr., is a former U. S. Secretary of the Army and and former Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chair. Her brother Mark was a senior adviser to the Obama presidential campaign and a member of the president-elect’s transition team.

Alexander as a toddler went with her family to the 1963 March on Washington to hear Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. “Politics was in the drinking water at my house,” she said, describing her childhood.

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Almost every family has at least one relative who never quite fits in with the rest, but Alexander’s Great-Uncle Paul was a pretty extreme case.

Race

Sometimes I think about Great-Uncle Paul who left Tuskegee,
Alabama to become a forester in Oregon and in so doing
became fundamentally white for the rest of his life, except
when he traveled without his white wife to visit his siblings—
now in New York, now in Harlem, USA—just as pale-skinned,
as straight-haired, as blue-eyed as Paul, and black. Paul never told anyone
he was white, he just didn’t say that he was black, and who could imagine,
an Oregon forester in 1930 as anything other than white?
The siblings in Harlem each morning ensured
no one confused them for anything other than what they were, black.
They were black! Brown-skinned spouses reduced confusion.
Many others have told, and not told, this tale.
When Paul came East alone he was as they were, their brother.

The poet invents heroic moments where the pale black ancestor stands up
on behalf of the race. The poet imagines Great-Uncle Paul
in cool, sagey groves counting rings in redwood trunks,
imagines pencil markings in a ledger book, classifications,
imagines a sidelong look from an ivory spouse who is learning
her husband’s caesuras. She can see silent spaces
but not what they signify, graphite markings in a forester’s code.

Many others have told, and not told, this tale.
The one time Great-Uncle Paul brought his wife to New York
he asked his siblings not to bring their spouses,
and that is where the story ends: ivory siblings who would not
see their brother without their telltale spouses.
What a strange thing is “race,” and family, stranger still.
Here a poem tells a story, a story about race.

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She got her B.A from Yale. Then her mother said to her, “That poet you love, Derek Walcott, is teaching at Boston University. Why don’t you apply?” Alexander originally entered studying fiction writing, but Walcott looked at her diary and saw the poetry potential. Alexander said, “He gave me a huge gift. He took a cluster of words and he lineated it. And I saw it.”

Racism in America isn’t just a Southern thing, and the loneliness of a college student away from home is universal. Fortunately, no region, or group or religion has a monopoly on kindness to strangers.

Boston Year

My first week in Cambridge a car full of white boys
tried to run me off the road, and spit through the window,
open to ask directions. I was always asking directions
and always driving: to an Armenian market
in Watertown to buy figs and string cheese, apricots,
dark spices and olives from barrels, tubes of paste
with unreadable Arabic labels. I ate
stuffed grape leaves and watched my lips swell in the mirror.
The floors of my apartment would never come clean.
Whenever I saw other colored people
in bookshops, or museums, or cafeterias, I’d gasp,
smile shyly, but they’d disappear before I spoke.
What would I have said to them? Come with me? Take
me home? Are you my mother? No. I sat alone
in countless Chinese restaurants eating almond
cookies, sipping tea with spoons and spoons of sugar.
Popcorn and coffee was dinner. When I fainted
from migraine in the grocery store, a Portuguese
man above me mouthed: “No breakfast.” He gave me
orange juice and chocolate bars. The color red
sprang into relief singing Wagner’s Walküre.
Entire tribes gyrated and drummed in my head.
I learned the samba from a Brazilian man
so tiny, so festooned with glitter I was certain
that he slept inside a filigreed, Fabergé egg.
No one at the door: no salesmen, Mormons, meter
readers, exterminators, no Harriet Tubman,
no one. Red notes sounding in a grey trolley town.

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