Commentary

Since I do Not Dare . . .

As a child, my mother would take both my brother and I to the library. We would walk, from 65th and Stoney Island to the Woodlawn Public Library under the El tracks. I always thought this a strange location for a library – near a noisy CTA train station. Amazingly, I never noticed the clank of the trains passing, only the quiet of the space itself and the smell of the books. I loved the library.

Typically, my mother would find several books to check out and we would walk back to the tiny apartment on 65th Street and I would fill with anticipation as we got closer to home wondering what my mother would read. As soon as we got home – and put on our “house clothes” – my mother would sit my brother and I down on either side, pull an unsharpened pencil from a drawer, and while positioning the orange eraser under each word, she would read to us. I became a junky for the words, the imagery, and the music, all that came with the power of a library card.

Last year, upon accepting my being a lesbian and while having a general conversation on the subject of her reading to my brother and I as kids, my mother suddenly commented on how I was a precocious child. She said she knew I would be different because, as a baby, I never crawled; I walked. She said she would place me on the floor, walk down the hallway to the kitchen and wait knowing she would see me, using the walls to walk, coming down the hallway to the kitchen where she was. As my mother put it, because of my “refusal to crawl,” she now wished she had spent more time with her "precocious daughter."  Her belief is if she had, she would have been in a better position to understand why I am the way I am today.

Well, precocious was certainly not lost on me and my mother's revelation explained my obsession for always having a library card.  Books provided me with an escape by introducing me to worlds unseen, music unheard, history, and the spoken word. Later in life, my library card provided me with the opportunity to see foreign language films and documentaries. What a beautiful thing this library card was for me.  As I told my mother, I could not envision life without my library card.

Somehow though, somewhere in my journeys to the various libraries I frequented, I came across a poem.  I remember copying this poem onto a sheet of blue-ruled notebook paper and carried it with me everywhere I went. I loved the words of the poem because it aptly described my feelings for a teacher I liked at that time.  I must have assumed the poem was written by a man for a female he fancied. The poem evoked feelings of love unattainable, unrequited, and elusive. The words were:

Leaves, that whisper, whisper ever,
Listen, listen, pray;
Birds, that twitter, twitter softly,
Do not say me nay;
Winds, that breathe about, upon her,
(Since I do not dare)
Whisper, twitter, breathe unto her
That I find her fair.

Rose whose soul unfolds white petaled
Touch her soul rose-white;
Rose whose thoughts unfold gold petaled
Blossom in her sight;
Rose whose heart unfolds red petaled
Quick her slow heart's stir;
Tell her white, gold, red my love is;
And for her,-- for her.

Interestingly, I copied neither the title nor the author, just the words. I remember the days I sat in this teacher’s class opening the folded piece of paper and reciting the words to myself – silently. Come the spring of that school year I was hopelessly in love, and by summer, she was gone. She left me to teach at another school and so I knew the next school year would have me suffer a great void without her being near. So, I kept the folded piece of paper to read, over and over, to reminisce and then later to honor a new silent love in my life.

It was not until my sophomore year in college did I find the poem I had kept sacred for many years. The poem was written by Angelina Weld Grimke – a woman. I found Grimke through another woman I was researching at the time, Anna Julia Cooper, who ironically was a close friend of Grimke and even wrote a history on the Grimke family. In my interest to find out more about Ms. Grimke who was the friend of this early African American Feminist, I found my poem entitled Rosabel.

In my startled moment of silence, I asked myself a series of questions: How did I come across this poem? Did I know who wrote it? Is it possible I was born this way?

The last question had me wonder.  The year was 1978 and the movement for lesbians of color was still in its infancy. In fact, Lesbians of Color (LA) was organized in 1978 at the National Lesbian Feminist Organizing Conference in Los Angeles. (See Lesbians of Color Chronology, USA:1950-1995.) At that time, no real data existed on the subject of whether homosexuality was a gene or condition a person was born with. There certainly existed a wealth of data on our psychological imbalance.

I then posed two final questions to myself: How did I so comfortably copy a poem, in my youth, which I knew I would use and/or felt I could use to describe the feelings I felt for a woman and, why did it seem perfectly natural for me to do so? Second, did I feel some shame in copying this poem that prevented me from copying the name of the author and the title of the poem as well? In fairness to the second question I posed to myself, it is quite possible that homophobdom cited the poem as Anonymous as many poems were cited as such before the write-ful author was properly credited.

Homophobdom -- that place that permitted history to be rewritten deleting the contributions of many gays and lesbians in the civil and human rights movement. Thanks to the scribes who kept our history intact, we now know. Equally so, thanks to the women who live their lives OUT and on the frontlines, we will always know.

This month, FemmeNoir honors the women in our history, Angelina Weld Grimke and Mabel Hampton; those women who keep our history alive and who champion our rights and causes, Brenda Crawford and Mandy Carter; a woman who maintains truth in The Word, Rev. Irene Monroe; and a woman who brings truth through her words, Sapphire.
 

Rosabel
I
Leaves, that whisper, whisper ever,
Listen, listen, pray;
Birds, that twitter, twitter softly,
Do not say me nay;
Winds, that breathe about, upon her,
(Since I do not dare)
Whisper, twitter, breathe unto her
That I find her fair.

II
Rose whose soul unfolds white petaled
Touch her soul rose-white;
Rose whose thoughts unfold gold petaled
Blossom in her sight;
Rose whose heart unfolds red petaled
Quick her slow heart's stir;
Tell her white, gold, red my love is;
And for her,-- for her.

-- Angelina Weld Grimke