Читать книгу Confessions of a Barefaced Woman - Allison Joseph - Страница 13

Back before we all became “multicultural,”

when blacks were beautiful in dashikis

and righteous rage, my father sold books

in Toronto, books of pride, sorrow, anger,

an inventory that ended up

in our living room in the Bronx,

a reading room I’d sneak into

when I wasn’t supposed to,

my chore and duty there to dust

the coffee tables and knickknacks—

souvenir ashtrays from Caribbean isles,

ebony elephants and pelicans,

hand-carved, foreign-wrought.

Mixed in among my mother’s

nursing texts, her medical dictionary

and anatomical tomes, I found

Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, a book too severe for my preteen brain, polysyllabic paragraphs sailing past my short-sighted mind, Cleaver’s

Soul On Ice, which I read fervently, loving every curse, every mention of sex, missing the revolution in his prose in pursuit of dirty words, staring

at the cover, captivated by Eldridge’s

prison-saddened face. Up From Slavery, Manchild in the Promised Land, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,

poems of Cèsaire and Senghor—those books

filled me with legacy, history, located me

with Jesse Owens, blazing his body

past fascism as he triumphed

at Hitler’s Olympics, with Jackie Robinson

through minor and major league hatreds,

with George Washington Carver as he

synthesized genius from peanuts.

Malcolm X spoke to me from the cover

of his autobiography, black-and-white

photo faded, but his face still sharply

turned upward, his finger up, out,

to signal the better world beyond us.

Could I join these men if I let words

dream in me, if I struggled, didn’t

settle, my gaze as bold and forthright

as Frederick Douglass’s, Booker T.’s?

Wiping each book clean, I kept that room’s

order, my torn rag mottled, spotted,

dark with that week’s dust.