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." [1]

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,

  1. 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

  1. Interview with Nikky Finney. Jet Fuel Review. Retrieved January 16, 2021
  2. Poetry and the Civil Rights Movement. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved January 16, 2021
  3. Head Off & Split: Poems. Muse JHU Edu. Retrieved January 16, 2021
  4. Interview with Nikky Finney. Jet Fuel Review. Retrieved January 16, 2021
  5. Finney, Nikky. SC Encyclopedia. Retrieved January 16, 2021
  6. 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