9/23/07

My friend Ed Whitfield and I get together every Friday morning at a coffee shop downtown to talk about writing. We won’t be getting together this coming Friday; Ed will be in his home town of Little Rock, Arkansas taking part in the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of Central High School. Ed graduated from Central in 1967, a star student and a Presidential Scholar; he went on to Cornell and became involved in the Afro-American Society, an organization fighting for a black studies program. He was among the students who took over the student union in April, 1969.

As Ed and I were sitting and talking last Friday, students and teachers coming to school at Andrews High School in High Point, just south of Greensboro, were discovering four nooses hanging around campus. The day before something like 50,000 people, including several busloads from Greensboro, had been in Jena, Louisiana protesting the treatment of six black students after nooses were found hanging from a tree outside the local high school.

“You can never quite tell,” Jesse Jackson had said at the rally in Jena. “Rosa Parks was not the first to sit in the front of the bus. But the sparks hit a dry field.”

Later that evening I heard more about the day in Jena from another friend, Tim Hopkins, who had been there along with dozens of students from Bennett College and North Carolina A&T. Tim is white; he said the crowd was overwhelmingly black. “Where were the white activists?” he said. “They should have been there.”

Tim and I were talking out on the sidewalk in front of the Carolina Theater in Greensboro where we had both gone to see a performance by Contra-Tiempo, a powerful activist dance troupe from Los Angeles; in dances heavily influenced by salsa they addressed immigration, Katrina and gender relations. The intermission was called early; the theater had received a bomb threat. As the nicely dressed crowd stood around on the sidewalk drinking wine and eating popcorn, police officers peered under cars with flashlights and rode by on bicycles. No one knew what prompted the bomb threat, but some people speculated that it might be connected to the fact that Ana Maria Alvarez, founder of the dance troupe, is from a family with close ties to victims of the 1979 Greensboro Massacre.

How dry is the field? The poet Clement Mallory says something’s happening, something big is in the air and it’s coming soon. When Clement and I talk I realize all over again that I have absolutely no idea what it’s like to be black in America. No idea at all. The spark might hit, the spark might have already hit, and I wouldn’t know until the field is in flames. Clement came over yesterday and we stood around in the kitchen eating pears and talking. Somehow our conversation turned to a recent video by Mos Def; we pulled it up on You Tube and watched it together.

“That’s powerful,” I said.

“Powerful,” Clement said. He asked if I could spare a piece of scratch paper. I gave it to him and he went off to walk around town and write more poetry.