Yvonne Battle-Felton

They come in twos, threes and sometimes fours, ushering, strolling, sauntering past those of us worried about such things as being on time, getting a good view, hearing a damn thing. They slide down cool metal bleachers, down neat shiny rows, sliding tighter than socially acceptable and just like that, they are us. We are a congregation of older women with smooth, mahogany skin; younger women with flesh the color of chestnut; children painted a baked-apple brown; a sprinkle of men like brown sugar on toast. We are textures and hues of varying shades of brown, though mostly we are categorized as black.

There are perhaps 150 distractions in Pavilion 4: the lull of chlorine waves; the splashing of dolphins, the whiff of salt water on their skin; the ceremonial symphony of cell phones being turned off; the soft shushing sounds of new books crinkling, flipping, turning. Perhaps the most startling distraction is the hum, the utter energy required to appear to wait patiently. We talk, we laugh, we smile at the children. Perhaps we wonder why children are here in the first place. The children seem almost as restless as the dolphins the National Aquarium’s Rosalyn Stewart worries will upstage Nikki Giovanni during her lecture for Women’s History Month—they won’t.

Giovanni is the second speaker of Celebrating Poetry, Prose and Praise, the Aquarium’s 2008 Women’s History Month celebration. According to Stewart, the aquarium’s community relations coordinator, the event honoring women is part of the Aquarium’s Cultural Heritage Series. The series includes programs to engage the community in Black History Month, Latino Heritage Month and International Day. Stewart is enthusiastic about giving back to the community. By tying in community programs with the Fridays After Five lower entrance fee program, her department is hoping to encourage more people to attend. While the event is nowhere near reaching the room’s 1200 capacity, Giovanni won’t seem to notice, neither will anyone else.

Giovanni approaches the room with a laugh, baseball cap worn backwards. She greets the Hokies first. A trill-like call and response: she calls, they respond. She laughs and a deep cadence fills each empty seat. Hokies unite! She greets the rest of the congregation. Most of us have never met one another, let alone met her, yet there is a familiarity amongst us. She is wearing the New York Yankees baseball cap in Baltimore because the Yankees embraced Virginia Tech after the shooting. She laughs; the sound is rich, genuine, vigorous. She wastes no time on implications, leaving you to wonder if the Ravens reached out to the Hokies; leaving you to wonder if any among us lifted a hand. But, she doesn’t talk about that. The Yankees, for lack of a better word, will play the Hokies in a baseball game. She clarifies; the Yankees will crush the Hokies in a baseball game. But, that of course does not matter, what matters is the relationship, the rebuilding of the Virginia Tech community, the restoration.

Giovanni loves the Ravens. But, “if that boy”, she says, “in that game had of been white…” Laughter confirms what she already knew; there is no need to continue the sentence. Still, she asks “how do you call pass interference on the 8 damn yard line?” We laugh. Some of us laugh because we know what she means. Others laugh because Giovanni is perhaps an inch over 5 feet if you include her tightly-curled black and silver hair; she is a dapper 64 in her black pant suit, black and white blouse, blue-stoned pin sparkling in her lapel; and her southern mannerisms and rapid succession of laugh, pause, anecdote, leaves you a bit unsure you heard her right in the first place. She tells stories and laughs. Maybe you laugh along, and maybe you know, as certain as you know anything else, the words and the laughter don’t mean the same thing.
Giovanni gives us the words because she’s a story teller, it’s what she does.

It’s 2008 and the anecdotes of yesterday are still the realities of today. If you believe it, the laughter is for you. There are those of us who have lived the past 10, 20, 36 years blissfully denying, avoiding, ignoring the issues of race. We have heard murmurs of racism in hushed whispers and ignored them, maybe we had to. Tonight, we can’t. The laughter eases the taste of the uncomfortable coincidences we have been diligently avoiding. It feels somehow like a deception, like sweet liquor. We know Giovanni is political; she is a lyrical call to action. She is, as she is introduced, “a Black woman, lover, mother, teacher, and poet.” She appears before us not as one of these beings, but as all of them.

So it seems somewhat appalling to be held, a willing captor to this rhythm, to this story, but no one walks away, perhaps no one else wants to. Giovanni says what she wants to say, she apologizes for it, but she says it. She talks about race and football, race and rules, race and cheating. While she is talking she says, “I shouldn’t be saying this,” and “I shouldn’t mention that, but it’s a Friday night.” And, she says it. Would you expect a woman who says, “if I can’t do what I want to do, then my job is to not do what I don’t want to do,” to not say what she wants to say?

Her voice deepens and she talks about “Rosa,” her children’s book about Rosa Parks. She says, “I don’t mean no disrespect to Ray, but…” Again, it’s the implication, the pause properly applied. But she wavers, reminding us that, “weak men don’t marry strong women.” Giovanni explains each page in detail, explaining what Bryan Collier, the book’s illustrator, wants the reader to notice on this page, on the next. But, speaking of Bryan, Giovanni points out the newspaper Rosa is reading on the bus, the Emmett Till headline. “Bryan wants you all to know…” she says. There is a call for anger as she describes the characters in Till’s murder, sets the scene, the tone, the setting. She may make you cry and make you sad that it can still make you cry, or angry, or disappointed. She may remind you that it hurts to respond.

But, it will remind her of Mrs. Parks, her friend for over 20 years, and how she must have felt when she politely refused to give up her seat on a bus. Giovanni tells us the story about Mrs. Tate, the bus driver’s wife, and how reporters told her that Giovanni was happy Tate had died. She finds it curious that they would interpret what she did say, “Oh, another one bites the dust…uhn,” as her being happy. But, she does not apologize for the miscommunication, only for letting the media goad her in to saying anything at all. She is tired, she confides, “of black people having to carry the burden of forgiveness,” or having to pretend to carry the burden. Tate chose to correct Giovanni by explaining her husband was simply a “man of his time.” With a fever barely confined, Giovanni explains she makes hundreds of mistakes, many “worthy of correction.” But, she would not, she explains after sharing the markers of men of the 17th, 18th and 19th century as they related to slavery, racism, the Holocaust, and human trafficking, “be corrected by Mrs. Tate” nor would she expect any man to endeavor to be remembered as a “man of his time.”

Giovanni summarized the Alabama boycott, “It started by one woman who said no, one woman who said yes, and then the men come in singing, ‘here I come to save the day…’ When she is finished not reading “Rosa,” she asks, pages already flipping, if she can read a poem. Perching her gold-rimmed glasses on her nose as she speaks, the links of the chains swaying as she reads, hands pointing, her voice lyrically lilting, climbing, falling, faltering as the microphone fades in and out, in and out. She doesn’t seem to notice. There is a rhythm. She weaves history, black history, women’s history, our history. We lean forward, stretched in silence until her voice fades, until she turns to walk away, until the story ends. Giovanni calls, and this time, all of us respond. “God is good,” she calls, “All the time,” we respond. And one by one we part, a congregation, a choir, a group of black women perhaps a little more certain who we are.