Still Life With Forehead

Poets don’t usually put pictures of themselves on the front cover of their books. It comes off as gauche and needy—Here’s my picture! Here’s my name! Here’s my book! I’m not sure it’s any good! Love me!  But when it came to my first volume of poetry, Life According to Motown, I worked hard to make sense of the decision.

I didn’t know anything about book covers. Or books. Or the poems that went into books. I was a fresh-off-the-stage slammer whose work happened to catch the eye and ear of one Luis J. Rodriguez, a friend about to realize the dream of starting his own press. When he casually inquired, “Do you have a manuscript?,” I nodded yes so vehemently, and for such a long time, my left eye crossed. (To this day I instruct my students: When you hear that question, always always say yes. Fret over the consequences—like not actually having a manuscript—later. With wine.)

So when my hastily crafted manuscript morphed into a book, I picked a picture of me for the cover. Everyone seemed to think it was a good idea, and it did relate to the book’s title. Kinda.

In the black-and-white photo, I am four years old. At first glance the entire picture seems to be forehead. My noggin is glossy and prominent, a little brain beacon in the forefront of the picture. It doesn’t help that my mother has severely brushed my hair backwards and forced it into three tiny braids, exposing even more of my cranium.

I wear the dress my daddy said he loved the most—it is pink and wispy and chiffon-y, with a wide shawl collar and a flower which looks like it has been plucked from a garden and pinned to my chest. I remember everything about that dress. The way it peeked at me from the rack, so much more elegant than the dresses around it. The way my mother grimaced at the price tag, but my father, seeing my face, didn’t. The agonizing months it languished in layaway, where I couldn’t see or touch it or convince myself that it still existed.  And my father’s eyes the first time I danced in it, twirling the skirt and asking him, again and again, to marvel at how real the flower looked.

In the picture, taken in the living room of our tenement apartment on the West Side of Chicago, I wear my dress and my strained little smile. My hand rests on the focal point of the whole place—a ponderous room-gobbling Philco television/radio/phonograph combo, an extravagance that marked our poor little family as “otherwise.” The one big ol’ unit featured the TV—which blessed us with Have Gun-Will Travel and This Is Your Life and Make Room For Daddy—and a drawer which pulled out to reveal a record player and space for albums and 45s filed upright in their paper sleeves. I remember flipping through. Fontella Bass. Johnny Taylor. Skinny Aretha. The Miracles. The Temptations. The Four Tops.

Those latter groups were pretty much the soundtrack for my little colored existence. I learned everything I knew about life, love, and heartbreak from Motown—the liquid-y slink of Diana Ross’s hips, the gritty way the Temps begged for forgiveness, and every single syllable that dripped from Smokey’s pout. (That is not necessarily a good thing—grab a jug of brown liquor and give those syrupy verses a close read sometime.) So that’s how I justified the photo gracing the cover of Life According to Motown. In the picture, my hand was on the record player and the record player held Motown records and those Motown records held the secret to me living my best life. Or what I thought a best life was. So there.

Turns out that it’s extremely fortunate that I chose that particular photo—that my father showed it to me because I was posing in a dress he loved and that I held on to it and that I decided it would make a good book cover and that I handed it over to the book designer and that she kept it for awhile and that it’s now on the front of a thousand books—because it’s the only surviving image of me as a child. If, for some reason, you’re curious to see what I looked like as a child, the cover of Life According to Motown is your only chance.

As anyone who knows my work knows, I’m a daddy’s girl. I’ve written about the day my father was orphaned, after a car carrying his parents smashed into an Arkansas tree. I’ve chronicled my father’s fledging and laughable attempts at blues crooning. I’ve written about riding his shoulders as we paraded the West Side candy factory where he and my mother spent their entire working lives. And one of my favorite poems talks about the two of us in the kitchen, working diligently on a recipe for hotwater cornbread.

I sat at my father’s feet every evening, listening to him spin glorious tales starring the characters who populated our neighborhood, the people he worked with, even members of our family. My father taught me to look at the world in terms of the stories it could tell, and he showed me that there were a million ways to tell those stories. I’ve written, again and again, of what I learned from him about storytelling’s sweet hoodoo.

Oh. And I’ve written about losing him. About the bullet that felled him, about the hollow left where his voice had been.

I am an only child. My mother was the person who checked my grades, pressed my hair into shivering strings, half-shoved me into a church pew every Sunday. She was the functional parent who crossed the parental t’s and dotted the parental i’s. She never said “I love you too” (wow, that sounds like one side of a therapy session, but really) as a response to an “I love you,” but instead perfected the hesitant head nod. She clearly resented the relationship I had with my father—he was the person I spilled my secrets to, the person who listened carefully when I said “I want to be a writer.” His response: “Then you’ll be a writer.” My mother’s response, delivered with a grimace that dismissed and belittled that dream: “Only white men do that.”

I’ve suspected for some time that I was an inconvenient daughter. My mother needed a child in order to leave behind Alabama ways and cement her fresh standing as a Northern woman. She needed a child to hold on to my father, who was dazzled by the city. She was ashamed of being from Alabama, wanted with all her heart to be a city girl—and once she gave birth, she trusted that that city would take care of me, that the concrete would contain me, or that I would just continue to be my daddy’s shadow while she became what twirled in mirrors.  She was an unapologetic narcissist, proud of her coordinated suits and ski-slope hats, her flawless press-curl, the shoes she’d had dyed to match, the subtle (or so she thought) way that Artra Skin Tone cream bleached the Negro from her cheeks. I was my daddy’s girl—hanging on to his every word, and perhaps she resented that. I’ve since come to believe that women aren’t automatically built to be mothers.

After my father was murdered, my mother and I looked at each other like, “And you would be…who?”

I didn’t know her. She didn’t know me. But we were forced to be two people grieving for the same man.

Fast forward. My mother is older, cognizant and relatively healthy, just flirting with the edges of forgetfulness. It’s rumored that she has two suitcases of photographs, and my husband and I want to sit down with her and identify the people in those photographs before their names and faces elude her. My husband Bruce is one of those infuriating people who can trace his family back to just about the Middle Ages—he has cabinet cards of ancestors, the scale that hung in his great-grandfather’s store—and I had hoped for some time to fill in my paltry side of the family tree.

So we looked forward to clawing through my mother’s stash in order to fill in my ancestral blanks. My husband was also dying to see pictures of me as taken while I was growing up. Who wouldn’t want to laugh uproariously at photos of your husband/wife as a gangly 10-year-old?

After the ancient Samsonites were opened, I sat there with a blooming sense of doom. Most of the scarred, curled-corner Polaroids were pictures of my mother—primping the latest Baptist couture in one of what seemed like a hundred church fashion shows, posing with a frothy drink during a vacation I didn’t know she’d taken, flashing her gold-toothed grin in a group-shot at the candy factory where she and my father both worked. But I wasn’t surprised that there were no pictures of my father—although I was rocked dizzy to just happen upon his death certificate and autopsy report slapdash in with the photos—because my parents had lived apart since I was ten years old, and I could never figure out how such a mismatched duo had coupled in the first place. 

But as we finished going through one suitcase and opened another, I realized that something else was missing.

Me.

There was no picture of me in my crib swaddled in pink blankets or grinning toothlessly over the top rail. There was no picture of my first stuttering steps or posing outside my very first school on the very first day, clutching a tin lunchbox and slyly hiding the gap in my smile. There were no stiff portraits marking my progression from grade to grade—no pimples, no lopsided pigtails, no first lipstick. No photos of my 3rd-grade class, my 6th-grade glass, my 8th-grade class. There were no pictures of me receiving various diplomas or hugging Mrs. Carol Baranowski, my 5th-grade teacher, who called me a writer when I was just 10 years old. There were no awkward Easter Sunday Polaroids or snapshots of me surrounded by breakable bounty under our thin silver Christmas tree. There were no pictures of me in my jammies, romping gleefully with the dog I only imagined we had. There were no pictures of me with my father, which was impossible, because I was always with him. And there was not a single picture of my mother and I standing close enough to touch, sharing the same mindset, sharing that sanctified link called mother and daughter.

In one scratched black and white photo, a single patent leather Mary Jane ghosted the edge of the frame, its wearer clearing walking past, walking beyond, walking away.  I was thrilled, at least, to know I’d been there.

If not for the picture I used to call “still life with forehead,” there would not be a single existing image of me as a child. After my father was gone, my mother allowed his apartment to be cleaned out by the city, and everything was thrown away—his snazzy Stetson hats, his journals and shot glasses, his fledgling poems, and every picture of me, all of which she had given to him.

So.

What does this have to do with poetry, you ask? Everything. I’ve been writing to fill in a hollow, to conjure an image of myself that can’t so easily be thrown away. Because I have just a single visual to prove that I was alive before high school, I try to write as much of that life into being as I can. Because my mother was famously ashamed of being from the South, I’m also piecing together the history she kept from me. In her warped version of love, she thought she was keeping me from moving backwards.

My book Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah has a long poem imagining how my mother and father forged and failed at a life together. There’s a poem about how I locked myself in a bathroom and tore hair from my head when I learned my father was moving out of our apartment. A syllabic piece chronicles brutalities of being 13. Another poem tells of my mother trying to scrub my Negro away with Lysol. One poem tries to replicate the glee of doubledutch. There’s a poem about the only white boy in our west side neighborhood, who achieved local stardom by flashing his penis for a dime. I read Savannah the same way most people sit down and thumb through photo albums.

All those giddy childhood screams woven in the stanzas.

All those jumprope rhythms and Motown harmonies masked as meter.

All those Patricia Anns peeking from the lines, waiting for the shutter to click.