Star Quality: A Dull Mix of Potential
By: Paulette Oke
Tags: Religion, College, Education, Race, Writing

Star Quality: A Dull Mix of Potential

I was never a student who made my mother proud. Curious, a reader, somewhat eloquent, or, as a professor described, “belligerently intellectual,” but not bright shining. Rather, a dull mix of potential of what could be, though not likely. If anything, prior to college, I saw myself as a future senator or city councilwoman, given that I regularly volunteered in St. Alban’s, Queens, a middle-to upper-middle class black community where my parents lived in proximity. They moved there to get away from what my mother in her island tongue called “jugs people dem,” troublesome, drug-addicted neighbors who occupied the other half of our semi-attached brick house on the Van Wyck Expressway side of South Jamaica. Much like other young Duboisian strivers steeped in the narrative of uplift and upkeep, who read Ebony Magazine, watched A Different World, listened to jazz and admired the art of Romare Bearden — and, of course, the United Negro College Fund’s creed that “a mind is a terrible thing to waste,” I wished to go to a college historically black and proud.

However, I attended Bard College, a small liberal arts school in Annandale, New York, because I was charmed by its slogan that it was a place to think. I took it as an implicit promise that I could relinquish the draconian rules of a Caribbean, Pentecostal upbringing, for a looser way of being — which, since the time I snuck two houses down, to Aquilah’s house, and her unlawful, polygamous father had us sit cross-legged on the cold linoleum living room floor and listen to all thirty-two minutes of American tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders’ “The Creator Has A Master Plan,” was about transcendency. As a teenager, I was drawn to the pathos of language, so much so, I believed at the end of a Toni Morrison novel, I had to cry.

The other reason I chose Bard was that I was admitted into its H.E.O.P program, a sort of backdoor entrance for kids who were financially limited and whose grades fell just below the admissions mark. Bard was an easy sell to my legally adoptive mother, a senior citizen, retired nurse’s aide, who planned to buy out her share of the house from her Nigerian husband and move to Sarasota, Florida. I sensed, at the time, she was tired and had not forgiven me of childhood crimes of smart mouthing grown- ups, biting the doctor, misbehaving in church, and that she had to take off mornings from work to go to my elementary school as I had yet, again, not heeded her warning that I was not to hit white people’s children, else they would “carry mi go jail.”

I do not know what crippled my writing in college. I know that after I accepted the chair’s verbal invitation to the sociology major, words were not clear. I could not move the lengthy, ten- to-fifteen, fifteen-to-twenty-page task of writing, to a place of joy. Complexity scared me; it was off-putting, and as vulgar as it sounds, felt white — by that, I mean, foreign. Terms such as anomie, conscious collective, functionalism, symbolic interaction, when compared to Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and its beautiful asking: “to whom do I owe the power behind my voice?,” was to me the distinction between what in black church homiletics is an anointed word and a word: one resonates with soul; the other, fashioned in logic and form. And if what James Baldwin claims is true, that “what joins all languages is the necessity to confront life,” then reading Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, and Alice Walker’s In Search Of Our Mother’s Gardens — books I found in the college library, was crucial to learning the black diaspora’s literary voices as it was reimagining my Jamaican birthmother as an artist, whose dreams, though wilted into perfect madness, walked with her, “in di sun hot,” up and down the island roadside.

Perhaps it was my preoccupation with new blackness, why each paper I turned in, was returned with a C. It is too long ago to recall specific errors in my writing, only that I was told in passing by the chair it needed to be “less sophisticated.” A criticism I took without protest or question. In those days I did not ask for help or any more than what a grade said I deserved, and in this case, the chair, an older German woman, whom, as a general of the discipline, once called on a student to read aloud an impeccably written paper, during which she marked time with militaristic nods and a pencil, was neither a champion of excuse nor the effort of lackluster.

Somewhere around either sophomore or junior year, a new, younger professor, fresh from the University of Michigan, joined the two-person faculty. It was easy to see from the black motorcycle jacket she wore, bushy hair, and that she uninhibitedly stood outside, in front of the sociology building, and smoked cigarettes with students, she was affable. Yet she, too, expected the best writing from students. I was not surprised when she called me to her office to review my paper in which she pointed out areas she found unclear, rewrote a few sentences, then asked that I rewrite the paper. To be honest, I do not think I understood what she wanted me to do, but as with the chair, did not ask that she re-explain. I rewrote the paper, and it was probably the slowest writing of my life. I thought taking my time and not rushing through sentences, would change things, but after I resubmitted the paper, the young professor called me back to her office, and returned it to me with an “A for effort” written at the top of the page.

I remained a sociology major and continued to write poorly. I figured I was asked to be part of something, so I stayed, and took refuge in the pages of black power. I ritualized Nikki Giovanni’s, “Cotton Candy on A Rainy Day,” an introspectively written poem I read at the start of each morning, and settled in the words, “sweet, soft essence of possibility never quite maturing.” But I went even further than hope blemished with uncertainty, for I was long accustomed to that shifty juxtaposition. At times, as a child, perhaps out of fear or shame, believed that I really had, “come from nowhere,” and because of that, would end up like my birthmother, on what my mother in her unholiest of tongues, called “shit street.” Other times I believed I would one day grow up and possess the same star power as Diana Ross, whose child-friendly biography I’m Gonna Make You Love Me, I, an 8 year old, read in one sitting in the children’s section of a local Queens Library branch, after which wished to become and belong to someone so grand. Whatever that meant, I was already a private dramatist of a single, never-ending play I continuously rewrote in my head of a queen mother and her abandoned princess daughter she eventually reclaims, which in moments of reprieve, when I was not called downstairs to stand up in front of my mother and recite a Psalm I was told to learn or multiplication she wrote out on both sides of a pantyhose insert, I stood as the lone star in the middle of my bedroom and silently acted out the two-character play, ending always, with the queen mother reaching for her princess daughter.

This same determined consistency, though not evident in my writing, was in vocal power. I had not realized — and still do not know — how it is I managed with ease to corral students and win them over to a cause; how it is my words mattered. Whenever I left for break and attended my “home church,” I made it a goal to know from the high schoolers there, the prospective colleges they were considering. Their scholastic interests mattered to me, and if I thought they downplayed their potential, I let them know. In fact, I felt that a girl who attended Hillcrest High School would fare well at Mt. Holyoke and connected her with a recent friend I made who went to the school, and, of course, was elated that she was accepted and enrolled. Likewise, I returned from break eager to impart to my peers knowledge gained from a range of dissidents I encountered in the streets of downtown Brooklyn, shop owners, mostly, who sold to “conscious” blacks fed up with America’s capitalist, anti-black agenda, common must haves of the “motherland”: African fabric, jewelry made of cowrie shells, incense, and shea butter. It was not that the black students I hung with were not radicalized in thinking, as many had parents, much like Aquilah’s, who espoused cultural nationalist ideology, celebrated Kwanzaa, read Jawanza Kunjufu’s, Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys, and gave their children African and Islamic inspired names. Even still, I held to the notion that ancient Egyptian cosmology was what we, as black students, needed to learn, for according to Brooklyn doctrine, it was where everything mathematically, scientifically and spiritually enlightened about us, originated. So, at my suggestion, the Bard Black Student Organization of which I was a part, invited a young woman I met who relinquished her West African name for the name of the Egyptian deity Maat. In one of the smaller rooms on the ground floor of Olin Humanities Building, used for faculty presentations, she stood on stage spookily dressed in a black headwrap mounted high, black pencil skirt and black leotard, and recited a poem she wrote in which she yelled at what I presumed were the few black male students in the audience: “Black man! Can you be a black man?” She then switched off into the kind of “knowledge dropping” akin to conscious rappers of the day who believed the reason we, as a people, fell short in America, was that we failed to use our “third eye,” which was the real eye needed to see the countless lies black people have been sold. It seemed that most present were, at best, on board with her beliefs, or at least mesmerized that someone close in age, was so “Egypt” and deified. For me, who endured Pharoah Sanders, this blackness, I realized, was too mystical, too esoteric to know. I saw it as a response to the psychological effects of slavery and colonialism and the inequitable treatment of descendants of that history but preferred the polished, less arcane sound of Flowers of Evil — Kincaid’s brilliantly conceived piece about conquest through the lens of gardening. I liked her question: “At what moment is the germ of possession lodged in the heart?”

I soldiered on and formed a friend-collective with a group of women I met during another college recess, who attended Oberlin and Sarah Lawrence, and decided I was more of a black feminist and less black nationalist. True to custom, I returned to school, converted two friends to the doctrine and together decided to approach the two white feminist professors in the literature department and propose a black feminist literature tutorial — a mini-course designed by the professor with input from the student. Back then, the college had one black woman professor on staff, an historian, who did not, to our knowledge, identify as black feminist. Had she, I imagine she would have discerned that I and the other participants were unintentionally caught between the revolutionary blackness of Assata Shakur and the blackness of abiding friendship in Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. I guess in some way it was this unresolved tension of “which blackness to choose,” that I undertook a senior project outside of my scholarly reach and writing skill. In order to graduate Bard, a senior thesis, the minimum of 110 pages, was required of students, and for mine, I chose to unearth the voices of black women formerly part of the Black Panther Party. Ambitious, for sure, but given the dearth of information at the time, was an impossible feat for a trained scholar, let alone an undergraduate student of mediocre standing. I am sure my thesis advisor, the sociology professor from whom I received the “A for effort,” thought the project well over my head and wished to steer me differently. However, from the spirited, unwavering manner I spoke of the need to make known these women whose names were in FBI files, but not in any black feminist texts I read, I meant business. Also, by then, I was a campus powerhouse in my own right, who knew smart, attractive, activist friends at other schools, which I think is what made it difficult to convince me that I did not have the right to undertake what I wanted. It was I who, on sensing that something at the school needed to happen, abruptly got up from the table in the dining commons, and went from table-to-table, whispering in the ears of students, “meet me at 8 p.m. in the H.E.O.P office.” No one knew why and I did not say. And when more students than I imagined turned up, it was a miracle what transpired. Without prompting or superfluous banter, students talked about the lack of diversity in faculty hiring, student body, and course offerings. I was most taken with the Asian student, who seemed the angriest of all, and took a back seat as he got everyone organized and talking about a date to protest and takeover of the main administrative building. I do not know if the Multicultural and Ethnic Studies program is still in existence at Bard, but we are the reason it was created.

Even for the marginalized, it is hubris to expect a favorable outcome from dishonest and stubborn pursuit. I knew when I sat down at the computer to write my senior thesis, I did not have adequate source material. The closest I came to any is an edited work by Angela Davis, If They Come in the Morning… Voices of the Resistance. I cannot say what it was about the title and the thought of FBI capture or government intrusion that overtook my thinking, why I did not attempt to evaluate the text properly to see where, if at all, it fit, except that it made hauntingly real the experience of Akua Njeri, the widow of Fred Hampton, whom during my first semester, BBSO invited to the campus to discuss the Black Panther Party raid of their Chicago apartment and her husband’s murder, when she, nine months pregnant, was taken out of the room in handcuffs.

Notwithstanding, I came up with the grand idea to alter my topic some, and instead of focusing on ex-black panther women, I would keep to the theme of the protest voice albeit in black women’s literature. That approach worked in my head, especially that I incorporated American Studies into my major, which permitted a freer space of exploration than the density of sociology. What I wanted to showcase in the project was an amalgam of words — the entirety of the books I read by black women in the four years of college. Around the computer station were the collected poems of June Jordon, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde; fiction of Morrison and Hurston; criticisms of bell hooks, Deborah McDowell, Hortense Spillers. Hazel Carby, Houston Baker Jr., the Angela Davis text, and a host of other works I wanted to include just because. In the steps and stages of completing the project, titled “Struggle and Sistahs” or something close to that, I felt I created something of high value and confidently submitted it to the three faculty members on my thesis board. It never occurred to me that in the world I came from, despite its myriad of insult and injury, God was to be the center at everything I endeavored. For example, I hoped my mother would write an endearing note to me in my senior yearbook of how proud she was that I finished high school and now on my way to college. She instead carried the book to her bedroom and took what seemed days to write in her fanciest, double lettered script, King Solomon’s instruction in the Book of Proverbs to “remember now the creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say I have no pleasure in them…” Then, in the car, one Sunday, on the way home from church, I was warned by my mother’s first cousin to never let go of God or else “yu can forget about makin’ it.” It must have unsettled her that I habitually repeated what I heard a church peer say about their prospective college major and wanted to do the same because of its impressive sound. Besides which, she ridiculed the dreams of American blacks, whom she thought mere talkers than doers. That I was admonished to keep God with me was more than rudiments of church-going, bible reading, or upstanding comportment. It was survival. Based on similar chidings and talks given me by the same relative, it was the worry that I, an only child and adoptee, had no one in the world on whom to rely and to let go of God was to diminish or altogether darken everything good and possible for me. What neither she nor my mother knew was that I had no intention of God in my future. I intended to go to college and read my way to freedom. In retrospect, maybe the relative could have said what is popularly sung in church that God is “More than Enough,” and at some point, perhaps, I would give thought to it, understood it, felt complete in it, or even used it as a lens through which to explore the terrains of blackness that consumed my college experience, and not act as an hasty, busy, hungry tumultuous outsider learning how to multidimensionally fit or not in a white milieu, or, as the speaker says in Giovanni’s poem, “I share with the painters a desire to put a three dimensional picture on a one dimensional surface.” Knowing that would not necessarily result in better papers but would mean I was committed and patient to learn.

I arrived at the thesis board subdued by the shot of vodka I took before leaving the dorm. The confidence I thought I had I did not have, and either it was prescience that told me my project was not liked, or the nimbus clouds that morning. As soon as everyone was present, they opened the individual copies of the black binder, and from each faculty, to the next, decimated my words. If I am correct, the issue was not clarity of language; it was lack of direction. The project was embarrassingly foolish and gave even more reason for the faculty member who said I was belligerently intellectual, to truly think me unwound. Since “bad” and “trouble” were, for me, common language, it was easy to accept punishment and shame and never think myself above reproach or sin. Mine was a young life spent in and out of the principal’s office for fighting, of course, and when not that, it was the bevy of Sunday school teachers and choir directors and church members, who took my mother aside and told her to have me checked out; that I am not right in the head; that demons, someone witnessed, “danced in my eyes.” I was given the choice to accept a low C grade or a pass/ fail. And, yes, I cried. I stood outside the sociology building, rested in the arms of a friend, and bawled.

If I came to college wanting a place to think, I left with joy. In four years, I visited my mother once in her Florida home. I lacked the money to go often, and, besides, though glad to see me, I did not know how to be around her anymore — and she must have felt the same when she, appearing confused, touched my short natural “twist-out” hair, and called it “picky,” meaning coarse. Maybe it was money she wished to save or that she was in the first stage of Alzheimer’s, why she left urine in the toilet and bought a whole, fatty pork shoulder, which she fed me the duration of my week-long visit. No matter how unfairly she treated me, depending on context and whom, she did not like when others did the same. This explains why she became overwhelmingly worked up on hearing that I never received the yellow peasant dress she sewed me, after she mistakenly sent it to the Queens address instead of school. She believed her “evil,” “wicked” ex-husband stole the dress and gave to one of his “women dem.” My mother did in fact make me dresses, but she never cooked that cut of pork, I do not think, and certainly always flushed the toilet. Not just that, when she took me to the Greyhound station to board the bus back to New York, and I kissed her cheek, she said, “Mi probably won’t see yu again until Glory.” What she meant was that she would not see me until we were finally together in heaven. And she was right. It must have been selfish to make greater my need to survive and not the fear I felt of losing a mother or that she habitually drove her car down Florida sidewalks or that she sent a get-well card to her twenty-one-year-old godson who died in a car accident. In the end I was not alone at graduation. A friend from Pennsylvania showed up with a spaghetti strapped black dress for me to wear; a cousin I called at the last minute drove from Queens with her beau; and a recent graduate was also there, who after the ceremony, handed me a copy of Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Then an unexpected moment occurred when one of the professors on my thesis board came up to me and said that while I crossed the stage to accept my degree, I was pointed out by the honorary degree recipient and Nobel Prize writer Doris Lessing. She called me beautiful and wanted to know my name. I took that as a sign that I mattered big; that there is not one second of being, lived, that is useless or ruined. That takes time to learn; for some, the longest lifetime. And it also takes time to learn that stars do not dim-out because we falter or do not win. We are not made cheap, for God’s light seen, above and below, is a priceless quality and abundantly more than enough.