Difference between revisions of "Dancing with Strom by Nikky Finney (2011)"
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− | In an interview Finney told about the poem, Dancing with Strom which is a true story from the wedding of her youngest brother, "This is a true story. It was the wedding day of my youngest brother. We had just left the church and arrived at the reception. My brother’s new wife was born in Edgefield, South Carolina. Edgefield, South Carolina, was also the home of Senator Strom Thurmond. Edgefield was where the reception was being held. Thurmond heard about the wedding and dropped by. There was no tradition. There was only this once-in-a-lifetime moment. Thurmond’s driver pulled up in a long black car. Thurmond got out. I was standing way up high on a balcony looking down. He danced with all the women there. All of the women were Black women. One of them was my mother. It was quite a celebration. Weddings usually are. I was the only one standing around feeling that the moment was a scandalous one. I was the sister of the groom. I was also the poet standing there staring down, rudely staring at all the happy dancing human beings, the poet who could not help but bring her long memory to the dance." <ref>[https://www.jetfuelreview.com/interview-nikky-finney.html Interview with Nikky Finney]. Jet Fuel Review. Retrieved January 16, 2021</ref> | + | In an interview Finney told about the poem, Dancing with Strom which is a true story from the wedding of her youngest brother, ''"This is a true story. It was the wedding day of my youngest brother. We had just left the church and arrived at the reception. My brother’s new wife was born in Edgefield, South Carolina. Edgefield, South Carolina, was also the home of Senator Strom Thurmond. Edgefield was where the reception was being held. Thurmond heard about the wedding and dropped by. There was no tradition. There was only this once-in-a-lifetime moment. Thurmond’s driver pulled up in a long black car. Thurmond got out. I was standing way up high on a balcony looking down. He danced with all the women there. All of the women were Black women. One of them was my mother. It was quite a celebration. Weddings usually are. I was the only one standing around feeling that the moment was a scandalous one. I was the sister of the groom. I was also the poet standing there staring down, rudely staring at all the happy dancing human beings, the poet who could not help but bring her long memory to the dance."'' <ref>[https://www.jetfuelreview.com/interview-nikky-finney.html Interview with Nikky Finney]. Jet Fuel Review. Retrieved January 16, 2021</ref> |
=Poetry= | =Poetry= |
Latest revision as of 02:58, 23 February 2021
In an interview Finney told about the poem, Dancing with Strom which is a true story from the wedding of her youngest brother, "This is a true story. It was the wedding day of my youngest brother. We had just left the church and arrived at the reception. My brother’s new wife was born in Edgefield, South Carolina. Edgefield, South Carolina, was also the home of Senator Strom Thurmond. Edgefield was where the reception was being held. Thurmond heard about the wedding and dropped by. There was no tradition. There was only this once-in-a-lifetime moment. Thurmond’s driver pulled up in a long black car. Thurmond got out. I was standing way up high on a balcony looking down. He danced with all the women there. All of the women were Black women. One of them was my mother. It was quite a celebration. Weddings usually are. I was the only one standing around feeling that the moment was a scandalous one. I was the sister of the groom. I was also the poet standing there staring down, rudely staring at all the happy dancing human beings, the poet who could not help but bring her long memory to the dance." [1]
Contents
Poetry
I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, there’s not enough
troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and accept the Negro [pronounced Nigra] into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches. —Strom Thurmond, South Carolina Senator and Presidential Candidate for the States’ Rights Party, 1948 I said, “I’m gonna fight Thurmond from the mountain to the sea.” —Modjeska Monteith Simkins, Civil Rights Matriarch, South Carolina, 1948
The youngest has been married off.
He is as tall as Abraham Lincoln. Here, on his
wedding day, he flaunts the high spinning laugh
of a newly freed slave. I stand above him, just
off the second-floor landing, watching
the celebration unfold.
Uncle-cousins, bosom buddies, convertible cars
of nosy paramours, strolling churlish penny-
pinchers pour onto the mansion estate. Below,
Strom Thurmond is dancing with my mother.
The favorite son of South Carolina has already
danced with the giddy bride and the giddy bride’s
mother. More women await: Easter dressy,
drenched in caramel, double exposed, triple cinched,
lined up, leggy, ready.
I refuse to leave the porch.
If I walk down I imagine he will extend his
hand, assume I am next in his happy darky line,
- 427 on his dance card. His history
and mine, burnt cork and blackboard chalk,
concentric, pancaked, one face, two histories,
slow dragging, doing the nasty.
My father knows all this.
Daddy’s Black Chief Justice legs straddle the boilerplate
carapace of the CSS H. L. Hunley, lost Confederate
submarine, soon to be found just off the coast of
Charleston. He keeps it fully submerged by
applying the weight of every treatise he has
ever written against the death penalty of
South Carolina. Chanting “Briggs v. Elliott,”
he keeps the ironside door of the submarine shut.
No hands.
His eyes are a Black father’s beacon, search-
lights blazing for the married-off sons, and
on the unmarried, whale-eyed nose-in-book
daughter, born unmoored, quiet, yellow,
strategically placed under hospital lights to
fully bake. The one with the most to lose.
There will be no trouble. Still, he chain-
smokes. A burning stick of mint & Indian
leaf seesaws between his lips. He wants
me to remember that trouble is a fire that
runs like a staircase up then down. Even
on a beautiful day in June.
I remember the new research just out:
What the Negro gave America
Chapter 9,206:
Enslaved Africans gifted porches to North
America. Once off the boats they were told,
then made, to build themselves a place—to live.
They build the house that will keep them alive.
Rather than be the bloody human floret on
yet another southern tree, they imagine higher
ground. They build landings with floor enough
to see the trouble coming. Their arced imaginations
nail the necessary out into the floral air. On the
backs and fronts of twentypenny houses,
a watching place is made for the ones who will
come tipping with torch & hog tie through the
quiet woods, hoping to hang them as decoration
in the porcupine hair of longleaf.
The architecture of Black people is sui generis.
This is architecture dreamed by the enslaved:
Their design will be stolen.
Their wits will outlast gold.
My eyes seek historical rest from the kiss-
kiss theater below; Strom Thurmond’s
it’s-never-too-late-to-forgive-me chivaree.
I search the tops of yellow pine while my
fingers reach, catch, pinch my father’s
determined-to-rise smoke.
Long before AC African people did the
math: how to cool down the hot air of
South Carolina?
If I could descend, without being trotted
out by some roughrider driven by his
submarine dreams, this is what I’d take
my time and scribble into the three-tiered,
white créme wedding cake:
Filibuster. States’ Rights. The Grand Inquisition
of the great Thurgood Marshall. This wedding
reception would not have been possible without
the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (opposed by
you-know-who)
The Dixiecrat senator has not worn his
sandy seersucker fedora to the vows.
The top of Strom Thurmond’s bald head
reveals a birthmark tattooed in contrapposto
pose: Segregation Forever.
All my life he has been the face of hatred;
the blue eyes of the Confederate flag,
the pasty bald of white men pulling wooly
heads up into the dark skirts of trees,
the sharp, slobbering, amber teeth of
German shepherds, still clenched inside
the tissue-thin, (still marching), band-leader
legs of Black schoolteachers, the single-
minded pupae growing between the legs of
white boys crossing the tracks, ready to
force Black girls into fifth-grade positions,
Palmetto state-sanctioned sex 101.
I didn’t want to dance with him.
My young cousin arrives at my elbow.
Her beautiful lips the color of soft-skin
mangoes. She pulls, teasing the stitches
of my satin bridesmaid gown, “You better
go on down there and dance with Strom—
while he still has something left.”
I don’t tell her it is unsouthern for her
to call him by his first name, as if they
are familiar. I don’t tell her: To bear
witness to marriage is to believe that
everything moving through the sweet
wedding air can be confidently, left—
to Love.
I stand on the landing high above the
beginnings of Love, holding a plastic
champagne flute, drinking in the warm
June air of South Carolina. I hear my
youngest brother’s top hat joy. Looking
down I find him, deep in the giddy crowd,
modern, integrated, interpretive.
For ten seconds I consider dancing with
Strom. His Confederate hands touch
every shoulder, finger, back that I love.
I listen to the sound of Black laughter
shimmying. All worry floats beyond
the gurgling submarine bubbles,
the white railing, every drop of
champagne air.
I close my eyes and Uncle Freddie
appears out of a baby’s breath of fog.
(The dead are never porch bound.)
He moves with ease where I cannot.
He walks out on the rice-thrown air,
heaving a lightning bolt instead of
a wave. Suddenly, there is a table set,
complete with 1963 dining room stars,
they twinkle twinkle up & behind him.
Thelonious, Martin, Malcolm, Nina,
Dakota, all mouths Negro wide &
open have come to sing me down.
His tattered almanac sleeps curled like
a wintering slug in his back pocket.
His dark Dogon eyes jet to the scene
below, then zoom past me until they are
lost in the waning sugilite sky. Turning
in the shadows of the wheat fields,
he whispers a truth plucked from
the foreword tucked in his back pocket:
Veritas: Black people will forgive you
quicker than you can say Orangeburg
Massacre.
History does not keep books on the
handiwork of slaves. But the enslaved
who built this Big House, long before
I arrived for this big wedding, knew
the power of a porch.
This native necessity of nailing down
a place, for the cooling off of air,
in order to lift the friendly, the kindly,
the so politely, the in-love-ly, jubilant,
into the arms of the grand peculiar,
for the greater good of
the public spectacular:
us
giving us
away. [2]
Author
Nikky Finney began writing in the middle of the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements. She was born in 1957 at the rim of the Atlantic Ocean, South Carolina. [3]
She is a child of activists and began to understand the powerful synergy between art and history at Talladega College, nurtured by Hale Woodruff’s Amistad murals. Her poetry books include Head Off & Split (2011); The World is Round (2003); Rice (1995); and On Wings Made of Gauze (1985). Heartwood (1997) edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007). Finney’s fourth book Head Off & Split was awarded at National Book Award for poetry in 2011. [4]
Racism Issue
Dancing with Strom tells about both private and public life as the poem tells personal events which result in poetry becoming relevant for the reader. The poem’s title is about heading off from home, as it is a dramatic ritual, leaving with a script where everybody is involved. [5]
Dancing is an example of how the author approaches the uncomfortable subjects differently. The introduction words from Thurmond quote in 1948 “I want to tell you, ladies and gentleman, there’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and accept the Negro [pronounced ‘nigra’] into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”
The author also included words by Modjeska Monteith Simkins, an underappreciated state civil right leader, said in 1948. “It’s the history that I wanted to know as a girl that I wasn’t taught in the South Carolina public school system,” said Finney, who was raised in Conway and Sumter. “We just keep the things we want to keep about history.” [6]
References
- ↑ Interview with Nikky Finney. Jet Fuel Review. Retrieved January 16, 2021
- ↑ Poetry and the Civil Rights Movement. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved January 16, 2021
- ↑ Head Off & Split: Poems. Muse JHU Edu. Retrieved January 16, 2021
- ↑ Interview with Nikky Finney. Jet Fuel Review. Retrieved January 16, 2021
- ↑ Finney, Nikky. SC Encyclopedia. Retrieved January 16, 2021
- ↑ R. Taylor Jr, Otis. Poet Nikky Finney takes on the history we know ... and the history we don’t. The State. May 12, 2011. Retrieved January 16, 2021