A Voice Within Community

. . . and every member rejoiced

in a single segment made whole

with the circle

in the recognition

of a single voice . . .

   --Williams’ epigraph to Some One Sweet Angel Chile  

In its rejoicing at a single voice that makes whole a circle, this epigraph to Sherley Anne Williams' long poem Some One Sweet Angel Chile foregrounds her commitment to the communal nature of the African-American oral tradition.  Williams traces this rich and complex tradition to the arrival of African slaves in North America.  In her critical study, "The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry," she says the first artifacts of that tradition include "the spirituals, play and work songs, cakewalks and hoe-downs, and the blues" (542).  She sees this oral tradition as part of an ongoing, "collective dialogue" within the African-American community.  For more detailed descriptions of the African-American oral tradition in literature by African-American women, see Anita M. Vickers’ "The Reaffirmation of African-American Dignity Through the Oral Tradition" (1994) and Karla Holloway’s "Revision and (Re)membrance" (1990).   Also see Houston Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (1984); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey (1988); Bernard Bell, The Folk Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry (1974); and Roger Abrahams, Afro-American Folktales (1985).

Appropriately, then, Williams' long poem, which the above epigraph introduces, is divided into three sections, each of which recognizes an individual voice joining the circle of the African-American oral tradition and making a community "whole."  In form and content, the poem promotes the blues as a model for the creative work of contemporary African-American writers.  Williams believes it is African-American writers who bear the responsibility of maintaining community in a time when African Americans can "no longer depend on a collectively created and maintained oral tradition to perpetuate our values and traditions'' (''Cultural and Interpersonal" 51).  A professor of African-American literature as well as a poet, playwright, and novelist, Williams is "preachin' " a literary blues in almost everything she writes.  (I take the term "preachin' the blues" from Paul Oliver’s study of Bessie Smith.)  She believes that without its literary record, the African-American oral tradition, of which blues is a part, will be lost.  As Hortense Spillers has put it, "Traditions are not born.  They are made. . . . They survive as created social events only to the extent that an audience cares to intersect them" (250).  Through her poetry, Williams is creating a social event: that is, a social history that sustains an originally oral culture in a written form.  In statement and in act, she encourages all African-American writers to create "a new tradition built on a synthesis of black oral traditions and Western literate forms'' ("Blues Roots'' 554).  In an interview with Claudia Tate published in Black Women Writers at Work (1983), Williams clarifies the significance of maintaining a literate recording of the oral tradition:  

What I really believe is that we as a people must be consciously aware that we must perpetuate ourselves and some idea of ourselves. Western white people do this through literature, but we black people don't have that: we don't emanate from a literate tradition . . . but where we do, in fact, perpetuate ourselves is in the blues. . . . Blues is a basis of historical continuity for black people. It is a ritualized way of talking about ourselves and passing it on. (208)

In order to "perpetuate ourselves and some idea of ourselves," Williams insists, African-American writers must draw on the blues tradition as form and method for writing.¹ Writing that perpetuates the blues tradition would place black characters in a black context where, as Williams says, those individuals can "learn to deal with whites, with the western world, as incidentals which will have increasingly smaller roles to play as Black people attack the task of getting themselves together" (Give Birth to Brightness 130).  In using this phrase, "getting themselves together," Williams is signaling her rootedness in the African-American culture and language.  The phrase becomes useful as one tries to understand Williams' poetry and purpose.  By using in her description of black literature a vernacular, oral phrase that grew out of the 1960s Black Power Movement, Williams is reinvesting that phrase with new meaning.  

In Williams' work, "getting themselves together" means active self examination, self scrutiny, and self improvement.  And this process is assisted by a blues tradition that offers a "ritualized way of talking about ourselves."  It offers a model for active engagement and scrutiny that takes the form of a conversation, a dialogue.  Part of the "true story of the blues," Williams says, is a dialogue "between equals'' (" Returning to the Blues" 821).  Thus, it is through dialogue and community negotiation that individuals get themselves together.  

This concept of a dialogue between equals is as central to Williams' message as her emphasis on getting selves together, for one cannot exist without the other.  It is for this reason that Williams is critical of Michele Wallace's Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979) and Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf (1977).  Williams writes that these works share ''limitations based on the fact that they are portraits rather than group scenes, monologues and soliloquies rather than dialogues or conversations."  Williams concludes that "our sense of ourselves as a people cannot be developed from isolated snapshots or monologues'' ("Cultural and Interpersonal" 51).  It can only be developed, she is convinced, through oral and written work that records, perpetuates, and creates community values and traditions.  It is to develop that sense of a people, a circle of individuals, that Williams writes poetry written in the blues tradition.  

While the ''blues tradition" is far too complex to encapsulate briefly,²  for the purposes of understanding Williams' work, one must grasp two key aspects of that tradition.  First, the blues express intimate, tangible depictions of shared experiences; and second, they simultaneously create a critical distance from those very concrete experiences.  Ralph Ellison expresses this exquisitely when he writes, "The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near tragic, near comic lyricism" ("Richard Wright's Blues" 90).  And this ''near tragic, near comic" quality is achieved, I would argue, by the necessary distance that Williams says the blues afford: "The internal strategy of the blues is action rather than contemplation. . . . The blues singer strives to create an atmosphere in which analysis can take place" ("Blues Roots" 544).  And the analysis that takes place in the blues is active and dialogic.³  

Looking more closely at the first of these aspects, one finds that this blues tradition evokes an emotional response from an audience through the intimate depictions of concrete and shared experience made real by the singer's delivery.  Williams argues that ''much of the verbal strength of the blues resides in the directness with which the songs confront experience" ("Blues Roots" 550).  So, for example, in an early poem from her collection entitled The Peacock Poems, Williams' own concrete description and delivery solicit from her audience the recognition of shared experiences and values:

I piece together my child

hood for my son and this is

more than reminiscence more

than who said or what happened  

or what I have done. I weave

the word ritual where time

and pace are meaning, weave it

best in anger and love: You

don't believe fat-meat greasy,

huh? as I wield the belt; grunt

behind his good night kiss, say

yo suga almos mo'n one

mamma can stand; giving him

sounds to link what's gone with what

we renew in our coming. ("Quartet" 71)

Here, Williams uses language that resonates with physical experience.  The speaker is actively piecing, weaving, and wielding.  Through words that vibrate with the physical experience they name, Williams creates "sounds" that, because they actively engage the communal audience, "link what's gone" (the immediate and historic past of lived experience) with "what we renew in our coming" (the present forged by community).  

Like the poetry of Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, and others whom she praises in her critical writing, Williams' own poem is the literary recording of those sounds and physical qualities of an ongoing oral culture.  The value of this literate recording, as Williams explains in her discussion of Clifton’s poetry, is that it extends "the verbal traditions of the blues [and makes] those traditions 'classic' in a recognizably Western sense while remaining true to the black experiences and black perceptions which are their most important sources" (''Blues Roots" 554).⁴  Williams weaves individual words, heavy with the weight of black experience, with phrases that are part of lived communal experience.  

Williams suggests that getting selves together also must be achieved by gaining a critical distance from lived experience.  Accordingly, the tradition that Williams urges writers to sustain, that ritualized way of talking, involves more than the concrete descriptions or evocations of lived experience which encourage and provoke an emotional recognition; it also involves the creation of an analytic distance from which an audience can critically view itself, its values, and experiences.  Williams argues that the blues functions as a form of social critique, and an opportunity for argument, growth, and change:

The self-mockery and irony of the blues pull one away from a total surrender to the emotions generated by the concreteness of the experiences and situations described in the song. ("Blues Roots" 545)

In poetry that draws on this tradition, ''the power of first person experiences is balanced by distancing techniques -- shifts in diction, voice, and focus" ("Blues Roots" 553).  The value of this critical distance is, of course, that it offers communities of listeners another way of deeply understanding their experiences and values: The analytic nature of the blues tradition keeps communities vital.  

Thus far I have drawn on Williams' use of the phrase "getting themselves together" to illustrate how oral tradition serves and creates community.  The phrase also functions to illustrate the single identity that is created from multiple identities in the person of the blues singer.  In worrying the line, one finds a metaphorical meaning that coheres with Williams' argument that in the blues, "[t]he individual expression is always seen within the context of the collective experience" ("Blues Roots'' 554).  The plural "them" in the word "themselves'' is always inseparable from the singular self which adheres within the plural "selves."  Citing poet Michael Harper on this point, Williams says that he acknowledges the "communal nature of the relationship between blues singer and blues audience when he speaks of the audience which assumes ‘we’ even though the blues singer sings 'I' " ("Blues Roots'' 542).  

While the "I" in the blues song is speaking for community, she is also an individual speaking of her life.  In Williams' work, the "selves" that the individual weaves into a collective, collected self include foremothers, role models, and sisters.⁵  Thus, irrespective of her audience, the individual singer is always at once "I" and "we."  And this multiple identity is central not only to the blues tradition, but also to Williams' vision of herself as a poet in the oral tradition.  For example, Williams says that as a blues singer, a writer, and an African-American woman, ''I am the women I speak of in my stories, my poems" (Black-Eyed Susans/Midnight Birds 226).  Her effort is to find a synthesis of these multiple selves, and to weave their individual and collective story to make and sustain a community and a tradition.

In the Blues Tradition

I focused on the familiar AAB song patterns of the classic blues shouters of the twenties and thirties -- Ma Rainey, the Smith girls, Clara, Mamie, the fabulous Bessie -- as a way of organizing what I was hearing

   --Williams, “Returning to the Blues” 820

The poet in the blues tradition is a single voice that improvises on established patterns, as did the classic "shouters'' of whom Williams speaks.  The poet serves the community as she shouts her blues; she provokes a dialogue, and she helps members of a community engage in the process of getting themselves together.  

In Some One Sweet Angel Chile Williams is a blues "shouter."  The poem is divided into three sections that loosely conform to the AAB verse pattern of the classic blues.  The speakers in the first two sections sing the same line with variations, while the final section offers a synthesis and solution.  In its form and content, Williams' poem advocates for poetry composed in the blues tradition.  

The persona in each section of Williams' long poem functions as the blues singer, allowing her audience an intimate proximity to her struggles, her sweats and shouts, as well as a certain humorous or ironic distance from which they can view shared experiences.  Williams is getting "her selves" together.  A central part of this process, for Williams, involves acknowledging ''my mother before me and my sisters around me" (The Peacock Poems 30).  The poem sings the blues as a continuity of black culture -- and particularly black women -- by tracing from the music of the freed slaves, through the blues of Bessie Smith (1894-1937) and Ma Rainey (1886-1939), to the political rhetoric of the 1960s Black Power Movement.  Williams' is not just a song of love and trouble, but a song of triumph, of communal growth, setback, and survival. It is also an expression of irony, analysis, and social criticism.

Listen to the Voices of Tradition (A)  

The first of the three sections of Some One Sweet Angel Chile, "Letters from a New England Negro,'' is set in 1867 and composed of the letters of Hannah, a free-born black woman from New England.  The letters are addressed to various individuals Hannah knows in New England.  Hannah writes from a converted slave plantation in the South where she is teaching ex-slaves to read and write.  Raised in poverty in the North without sustained contact with an African-American community, Hannah does not know the "oral tradition" when she heads South to teach.⁶  This section reveals the transformation of the individual through the communal teaching of the oral tradition.  

With Hannah, Williams problematizes the simple picture of the "Savior from the North'' who comes to prepare the ex-slaves for survival in the "free'' world (as the well-meaning white school mistress might see Hannah).  For when Hannah begins to interact with the ex-slaves, she finds that they have as much to teach her as she them: They teach her the value of community and the permanent record of her race's history, values, and unique identity which is recorded in the oral culture.  They teach her the traditional oral forms of communication that unify the black community in the South.  And, to continue the circle, it is through Hannah's learning that Williams teaches us the form and values of the oral tradition.  

At first, Hannah feels only her distance and her difference from both her students and her fellow white teachers.  She is as shy with the ex-slaves as she is with her colleagues.  Yet when Beryl, a fellow teacher, compares Hannah to her student, Pansy, Hannah writes:

Beryl sees the poverty of my

childhood as a dim reflection

of the slavery in which

Pansy lived, sees in her, as

indeed in all, some vestige

of my former self that teaching

frees me of. (27)

Teaching does free Hannah from poverty and slavery.  Hannah's education was the means by which she overcame the poverty of her youth; and in teaching the ex-slaves, she frees them from the enforced illiteracy of slavery.  But Hannah comes to see much more in Pansy than a primitivism and poverty that need to be "educated" out of her.  The poem suggests that Pansy, who is in touch with an ancient history, has much to teach Hannah.  

Invited by Beryl's simple parallel and her own appreciation for Pansy's bold distrust of the white world and the printed word (both of which Hannah partly represents), Hannah views Pansy:

She is as black and lovely

as her namesake's heart

and teases me about

my "learnin"

She would

row my head with seed

plaits And prays I have

not been ruined by

this white man's schooling. (31)

Pansy's concern that Hannah might have been "ruined by the white man's schooling'' speaks a theme recurrent throughout the poem: that the education Hannah offers in literate culture, and the threat it poses to the oral culture, will ''ruin" the individual and, by extension, the community.  ''Teasing," "plaiting," and "praying," Pansy draws Hannah into the "safety" of community.  

Hannah responds to Pansy, her teacher, who (re)joins Hannah with a community which becomes vital to Hannah's existence and to her developing vision of herself.  Hannah writes:

Pansy mimics the

old prayer, torso going

in one direction, limbs in

some other. There is laughter,

murmurs of "Do, Lawd" and "Amen."

But it is memory she

dances. (28)

Pansy and her husband Stokes are teaching Hannah through oral and physical performance that perpetuates the customs and values of the community.  Through their very physical enactment of an oral tradition, Hannah learns the tale of her cultural history.  

As Hannah joins the community of ex-slaves, she begins to understand the heritage she shares with them.  What the newly emancipated slaves do not know of the white world, Hannah can teach them: They teach her history, her language, and her place within the community.  Thus, as Hannah joins the community of ex-slaves, everyone teaches, everyone learns, and the community grows and changes accordingly: The tradition is being perpetuated and continually created as the circle is made whole by the single voice.  

Indeed, it is relevant that the ex-slaves who appropriately change their own names after emancipation also rename Hannah.  Misunderstanding the white School mistress when she dubs Hannah the ''herald of Emancipation's new day" (13), the freed slaves call her "Miss Patient Hannah'' (25) thereafter.  When Hannah corrects them, explaining that Miss Esther did not call her patient, they persist in calling her Patient Hannah.  When she snaps at them one day in the classroom for their persistent use of the name, Stokes performs a virtuoso performance of spontaneous improvisation:

"Hannah

our name for the Sun," Stokes said

in the silence that followed

my remark. "You warm us like

she do, but you more patient

wid us when we come to learn." (25)

There is both comedy and irony achieved by Stokes' improvisation here.  Like the traditional African-American hero whose features Williams delineates in Give Birth to Brightness (1972), Stokes "hustles" linguistically.  As a word "hustler," he is playing Hannah -- complimenting her, saving face for his community, and teasing her for snapping at them.  Stokes' "signifyin' " teaches Hannah.  It reminds her of the significance of naming in the black community, and it provokes her to examine her own ambivalence about being associated with the ex­-slaves.  

Stokes' riff on re-naming also calls to our attention the fact that learning and community change identity.  Naming is a part of the oral culture because it is, as so many have argued, embedded in the physical act of survival in a racist world.  Where racism splits selves, writing in the blues tradition and naming oneself within community get those selves together.  As selves get together, community is supported, recreated, changed, perpetuated.  Thus, who is Hannah in the community of the ex-slaves?  She is changed by her very interaction with them.  If one examines Hannah's letters closely, they signal the code switching she must perform as she gets her multiple selves together: She is a different "persona'' when she addresses her white teacher, than she is when she addresses the "brother" she was raised with, than she is when she "performs" within the community of ex-slaves.  The change in the letters reveals that Hannah goes from an individual "I" to a communal "I/We."   

In the final lines of this section of the long poem, Hannah's identity has expanded and the lines between her selves have blurred.  She is a woven (both written and spoken) multi-self. She now gives voice not only to her own experience, but also to the shared experiences of the individuals within the African-American community now within her.  She says:

I have

grown to womanhood with my past

almost a blank.

            I do not

recall, yet the memory

colors all that I am. I

know only that I was a

servant; now my labor is

returned to me and all my

waiting is upon myself. (34)

"Myself" becomes here not only Hannah but the race.  Individually, Hannah has a ''blank'' past because she was raised in the North without a large black community; but Williams reminds us that slavery sought to destroy the communal history of black people.  As Hannah tells her story, her "I" speaks for the community of freed slaves.  Like them, Hannah has quite literally used teaching and learning to free herself from working for white society; now she can turn to her community to teach and be taught.  Hannah's role as a synthesizer of Western written and African-American oral traditions is as much a part of her waiting upon herself and her community as is her teaching.  For in synthesizing, she keeps the tradition new and vital.  With the book learning that Hannah brings to the ex-slaves and with the learning of memory and history that they return to her, Hannah can begin to re-embody that history, to write her "selves" back into it.  

Struggling to write the stories of black women, Williams is on the same path as Hannah.⁷  Both are re-embodying African-American history by telling and exploring their stories.  They are the "single voice" that makes the circle whole and leads every member to rejoice.  As Williams' semi-autobiographical poem synthesizes the selves that have made her who she is, she performs the blues.  In this first section of Williams' long poem, then, we see Hannah, Pansy, and Williams herself as blues foremothers who are preaching and teaching through the written record of the oral tradition.⁸  They teach memory, history, and community: They teach "getting themselves together."

Listen and Learn from the Voices of Tradition (A)

In the second section of Some One Sweet Angel Chile, the music of Hannah, Pansy, and the ex-slaves develops into the blues of Bessie Smith, the ''Empress of the Blues."  Entitled ''Regular Reefer," this section takes its form and content from Smith's life.  Where Hannah was just beginning to know herself within community, and where she was just beginning her education in the oral tradition, Smith already embodies the blues.  She is the "Empress" of the blues, a regal foremother.  

Of course, Williams is not the first to weave "mothers" into her blues. It is a tradition of the blues to sing the praises of "mothers."  In her essay on Esther Phillips, ''Returning to the Blues," Williams reminds us that the female blues singer knows that what your "mamma" passes on to you is power.⁹   In that same essay, Williams cites "Billie's Blues" as modeling a persona who ultimately rebels against a lover's injury and insult and declares that, as Williams paraphrases, "her mamma gave her an ineffable 'something' that will carry her through the world" (818).  "Billie's Blues" exemplifies for Williams that "ineffable something": love, pride, power, courage, and more.  And ''mother" in this instance, and indeed throughout Williams' work, is rarely singular: Constructed as she is by the traditions of a community, she is a "we" as much as she is "I."  These women have endured and can pass on to the individual blues singer, the "I," their skills.  They embody a steady, self-confident force that gives a daughter the power to get herself together.¹⁰  

Just as the music of the southern blacks taught Hannah her role in the community, her multidimensional self, so, too, is it Smith's blues which initiate Williams into a community of powerful women.  Thus, the increasingly autobiographical poem, like the blues that informs it, constructs a multidimensional identity.  The ''me'' or "I" throughout this section is multivalent, never static.  It sometimes signifies Bessie, sometimes Williams, and always speaks for community.  Thus, for example, in poem "15," it becomes appropriately unclear whether the "I" in this section is Bessie Smith or the author: Williams would have us understand that Bessie Smith and her music are within all black women.  The ''I'' is communal.  

In the selection from poem "15" below, it is Smith's voice that we hear speaking of her "mother" Ma Rainey, the woman who taught Smith the blues and launched her career:

I looked in her face  

and seed the woman

I'd become. . . .

and I knowed

no matter what words

come to my mind the

song'd be her'n jes as

well as it be mine. (40)

Smith, Ma Rainey, and Williams are generationally related within the oral tradition. Just as Ma Rainey initiated Bessie into the blues tradition, so, too, has Bessie done for Williams, and so Williams will do for each of us.  By tracing her lineage through Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, by weaving her blues mothers into her own song, Williams suggests that all black women can find a community of teachers and learners in the blues tradition.  

The blues songs throughout this middle section of the long poem record the struggle of black women in love and trouble.  They tell tales of strength and pride.  They sing of boastful, flirtatious interaction with men. Bessie Smith's voice sings:

 . . . a rowboat out on the stormy seas . . .

I was walkin mens when I met you,

honey; it ain't no harm in that.

It wouldn't be blues if I didn't trance

mens to my side. Ma showed me that.  

She can walk a man around a tent --  

even the ones think they so cute. (48)

Shouting the love, power, and pride of black women, this passage particularly boasts of the mothering which is passed on in the oral tradition: Ma Rainey embodied the active power and pride of black women.  Under her tutelage, conveyed in action and in song, Bessie learned to respect and enjoy herself.  

This strutting image of Bessie Smith as a powerful black woman appears in the following selection:

She carried herself

like she didn't know she

was ugly, almost

like she didn't know she

was black -- buying dark

glasses in Chicago

cause fans recognized

her in the streets or

that night in Concord --

she chased the Klan out

from behind our tent;

said she hadn't never

heard of such shit. (50)  

Bessie refused to be held down by any myth of her evil or ugliness: She was righteously proud, and knew her powers as a black woman.  She passes the power of this "strutting boastfulness'' on to other women through the blues.  It is this confidence, this power, which Williams feels contemporary audiences have forgotten when they complain that the blues are only songs of loss and misfortune.  In "Returning to the Blues" she writes, "The essence of the blues is as much a sister boasting about her man as it is her bemoaning his behavior" (821).¹¹   She says, further, that she believes songs such as "Billie's Blues" must be seen "in the tradition of black boasts usually thought of as exclusively male'' (821).  Williams calls our attention to the power and confidence which the blues can offer a generation of black women and men seeking to define themselves.  

A final poem in this section, "down torrey pines road," enacts a complicated embrasure of this power.  Williams' first person voice re-embodies Bessie Smith and evinces both the pain and pride which Bessie boasted in her music:

[S]omething like Mississippi

that stretch of highway

outside Coahoma close by

Clarksdale and the Jim

Crow ward in the hospital

that used to be there.  

I dare each curve to

surprise me as I

round it show me the

rear-end of some truck  

before I can stop.  

I beep the solitary

biker, worry that

his leg mounted flash won't shine

far enough, sweep on

to the traffic light at the

summit. This is not

the road to Clarksdale. I say

over and over

what my name is not. (64-65)

In an incantation that carries at least two opposing meanings, the "I" of the poem repeats "what my name is not" (Bessie) as Williams merges with Bessie Smith on the night of Bessie's fatal car accident in Mississippi.  In saying "over and over what my name is not,'' Williams suggests that she would bring Bessie closer, and evoke Bessie and the road she travels as merged with the road that Williams is on.  Yet the repetition also suggests a necessary critical distance from Bessie and her experience.  Williams is not on the same deadly road, even though she walks Bessie’s blues road.  

Bessie died from the wounds of an accident in which her car struck a truck on a road in Clarksdale, Mississippi.  Unable to get treatment in a nearby hospital because the "Jim Crow" ward was closed, Bessie died when she might have been saved.  The speaker in this poem dares a curve to reveal the rear-end of a truck, and struggles with rage at Bessie's needless death.  As the two time periods and two lives become one in Williams' blues poetry, we are reminded that the individual in the blues tradition is always multiple, always both I and We.  Williams re-embodies the powerful message that Bessie conveyed, even as she is drawn back to the present moment on a road in California to ''beep'' a solitary cyclist and warn him of her presence.  The poem thus enacts the dual strategy of the blues: It "fingers the jagged grain'' of Bessie's death at the hands of racists, and pulls away to offer a critical distance from that visceral pain.  This complicated final verse to the middle section of Some One Sweet Angel Chile leaves one aware of both the difficulty of survival in a racist world and the increased necessity of continuity in the face of such hostility.  And this is precisely the point to begin the final section of the poem.

With those voices of tradition we get ourselves together (B)  

In this final section of Some One Sweet Angel Chile, Williams makes a personal statement in the traditional form of the classic blues. She offers her own position as part of the resolution to the problem posed in the song.  As Williams says, "The assertion of self usually comes at the end of the blues song after the description/analysis of the situation or problem and is often the only solution to that problem" ("Blues Roots" 549).  This section focuses on Williams' experiences as a student in the 1960s in confrontation with certain black nationalists who rejected the blues tradition.¹²  Additionally, this section offers an intimate look at Williams' immediate family, and the lost stories there.  

The line ''I beep the solitary biker" from the last verse in the middle section carries us into the final section of the long poem, which is syncopated by a repetition of "beepbeep" after many of the individual poems.  The "beepbeep" blends Williams' warning that the blues may be lost, with her Black Power chant "beebbeep, ungawa, black power" which resounds throughout this section. The weaving of blues and Black Power is a deliberate effort to rebut what Williams feels was a casual dismissal.  

Larry Neal referred to the Black Arts Movement, out of which grew the "Black Aesthetic," as the "aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.  As such, it envision[ed] an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America" ("The Black Arts Movement" 272).  Williams argues that with the Black Power Movement came a rejection of the blues and other elements of the oral tradition.  She sees this rejection as a serious break in the oral tradition of the race: "[What] the pundits and self-proclaimed prophets rejected as Tomish and old-fashioned, is one source in which there remains some record of how black men and women have seen themselves and each other down through the years" (qtd. in Tate, 208).  Dismissing the blues tradition constitutes a severe and destructive break with self, community, and history.  Williams would rejoin these Black Arts and Black Power Movements with an understanding of the blues tradition.  

As she travels the same blues road as Bessie before her, Williams warns those near her to attend to the road signs established by the blues: "beepbeep."  In her own music-making, Williams insists that the rhetoric of the Black Power Movement is part of the oral tradition: The epigraph of this section reads, "their speech was music."  By locating the music in the speech of those involved in the Black Power Movement, Williams teaches us that even as those involved in the movement thought they were rejecting the blues, they were actually speaking the same themes that the blues had been singing since slavery. 

In order to emphasize her point that "their speech was music,'' Williams sets the ''lingo'' of the 1960s to the rhythm of the blues, bringing the tradition into the present and using the power it offers to persuade her community to "listen up."  As a blues Empress like her mothers before her, she is "daring" her audience to deny their place within the oral tradition, of which the blues is irrevocably a part.  In so doing, she enacts the living quality of the blues, illustrating its adaptability and its salience.  As in "a young woman's blues" (which is also a title to a Bessie Smith song, and thus a classic blues reiteration), she writes:

I tell a dude in

a minute, better

get your business straight

before coming to

talk that talk to me  

cause the cat got to

be together with

his own self before

he try to get

together with me. (76)

This is the blues singer's theme in the voice of the 1960s woman, a voice and woman informed by and infused with the values of togetherness, pride, and power which are also inherent in the blues.  She will only accept a man who has ''his own self'' together: Notice the emphasis on togetherness which Williams has been preaching throughout this poem.   Williams provokes her audience to re-experience the full power and resonance behind the cliché "get it together."  Its popular meaning is thin indeed without the weight of the oral tradition which Williams returns to it .¹³  

In "Witness," Williams warns what a rejection of the blues will lead to:

This is not romance,

private fictions spun

from scattered readings

in public documents

bastard logic, nor

Sambo's tricking. This

is a metaphor

liable like Harlem

to be dis/missed in

liberal anthologies (69)  

The blues which Williams is defending in this poem become a "metaphor" for community and tradition.  If not attended to by the community, if not ''witnessed" in the traditional oral sense, it is liable to be forgotten, excluded (dissed) from anthologies of literature, lost (missed) to a future generation of African Americans trying to "get themselves together."  Just as the blues must be attended to and known intimately, and taken seriously, so, too,  must the stories and messages of the community experienced in the 1960s, Williams warns.  The blues are the carriers of history and learning, and also mechanisms for self-knowledge in the present.  

The I/We which we have traced from Emancipation through Harlem Renaissance blues performers like Bessie Smith, has now come into the "present" experience of the poet.  Getting her own selves together in the "Iconography of Childhood," Williams explores the struggles of her mother and grandmother and finds the same strength, pain, and love she hears in the blues.  Williams sings her own blues, looking to her personal foremothers' history, pain, and power.  Of her mother she writes in ''miss lea's chile": "She was a weaver, born / in an age of ready-made / cloth" (95).  Williams confronts her mother's frustrated creativity and spirit as her dreams were destroyed by life in the projects, her craft made useless by a mechanized time and place.  

In "California Light," Williams incorporates her present community into the poem, weaving diverse peoples and histories with the scenery of a mesa in San Diego:  

The Indian dead are here

buried beneath Spanish place

names and the cities of the

pioneers and the droning

silence is witness to what

each has claimed, what each owned.  

My father's grave is here some

where his tale lost like that jet

in clabber his children

scattered along the river

voices singing to the night. (94)

With a warning and a plea for the people who live still within the oral culture, Williams brings together all peoples of this geographic history, especially those who have been conquered, displaced, and killed.  The only witness to their stories was silence.  Williams identifies her father as one of those silenced by white people, his "tale lost" just like those of the Indians and Mexicans.  In her naming of those who have gone before, Williams breaks the silence and brings the "scattered children" back into the circle.  If their story, their song, is not to be lost like her father's, it must be retold in every generation.  

In the final selection in this poem, Williams embodies a community of black women who have shaped her: She acknowledges I/We.  In so doing, she models the creation of a new tradition that she advocates for all African-American poets.  Her return to the personal at the end of the blues song/poem is Williams' final evocation of the individual constructed by and within community.  Like Hannah and Bessie before her, Williams pays her respects to her foremothers:

 . . . I am

the women of my childhood

just as I was the women of

my youth, one with these women  

of silence who lived on the

cusp of their time and knew it;

who taught what it is to be grown. (112)

Embracing her oneness with these women, her "place in this line'' (112), Williams accepts her responsibility to teach, via a written record of an oral culture, "what it is to be grown." Some One Sweet Angel Chile testifies to Williams' sense of responsibility as a poet in the blues tradition.  Her single voice makes whole the circle, and "every member rejoice[s]."  


Notes  

1.  In many ways this is the argument for art and criticism, rooted in the experiences of the African-American community, promoted by Larry Neal (1937-1981) and the Black Arts Movement.  Williams situates herself within this Movement in a biographical statement in Black-Eyed Susans/Midnight Birds (1990).  She says, "I remain . . . a proponent of Black consciousness, of 'The Black Aesthetic,' and so I am a political writer" (225).  And Baker's defense of the proponents of the Black Aesthetic bears repeating here.  He says that "they thought of the text as an occasion for transactions between writer and reader, between performer and audience . . . [They supported] an open-endedness of performance and response that created conditions of possibility for the emergence of both new meaning and new strategies of verbal transaction" (Blues, Ideology 102).  Certainly, Williams' conception of her work fits well here.  

2.  For a more detailed discussion of the blues tradition in African-American literature, see Baker.   He argues for the conception of the blues as a matrix, as a "vibrant network" which defies narrow definition. Williams also discusses the blues tradition in some detail in her "Returning to the Blues" (1991) and "The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry" (1977).  

3.  This argument that the blues are essentially analytic is consistent with Christian's argument (1989) in "The Race for Theory" (226).  She says, "people of color have always theorized -- but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic."  Such theorizing, she continues, is rooted in "dynamic rather than fixed ideas."  One can easily situate Williams' argument for the analytic distance of the blues within Christian's construction.  

4.  This is consistent with Gates' argument for an African-American canon in his essay, "The Master's Pieces" (1990).  He says that, ''Just as we can and must cite a black text within the larger American tradition, we can and must cite it within its own tradition, a tradition not defined by a pseudoscience of racial biology . . . but by the repetition and revision of shared themes, topoi, and tropes" (108).  

5.  While this may sound as though it is uncritically embracing the notion of a transcendent subject, I would cite Gates' discussion of subjectivity in "The Master's Pieces" as a way of explaining the importance of Williams' act of self-definition: "The Western male subject has long been constituted historically for himself and in himself. And, while we readily accept, acknowledge, and partake of the critique of this subject as transcendent, to deny us the process of exploring and reclaiming our subjectivity before we critique it is the critical version of the grandfather clause, the double privileging of categories that happen to preconstituted" (105).  Furthermore, the always multiple nature of the blues persona resists a simple and transcendent subjectivity.  See Holloway’s and Christian’s essays as they relate specifically to the writing of African-American women.  

6.  I would venture the argument that heading south, like Janie in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), is a deliberate reference on Williams' part.  Like a blues artist, she is working the traditional and inherited lines and reinvesting them with contemporary meaning.  

7.  In her article, "The Lion's History" (1993), Williams writes about the difficulty of finding a publisher for her novel Dessa Rose (1986). "I was writing in the days when black women had no history, when black people barely had one" (250), she says.  Her assertion rests in the immediate territory of the United States and the history of slavery.  It is the work of writers like Williams which has begun to remedy this situation.  

8.  In recent years, a number of feminist critics of African-American women's writing have noticed a trend in that writing toward acknowledging foremothers.  For example, as Pryse argues in the Introduction to Conjuring (1985), "In the 1970s and 1980s, black women novelists have become metaphorical conjure women, 'mediums' like Alice Walker who make it possible for their readers and for each other to recognize their common literary ancestors (gardeners, quilt makers, grandmothers, rootworkers, and women who wrote autobiographies) and to name each other as a community of inheritors" (5).  Also, see the other essays in Conjuring, especially Christian's.  

9.  Williams' poetry reveals the weakness as well as the strengths of "mothers" like Bessie, Esther, and Billie.  But in the analytic tradition of the blues, Williams would have us investigate, appreciate, argue with, even critique mother figures.  She would invite us to emotionally and intellectually explore the mothers.  In deed and word, Williams is intent upon reminding us that the trope of the mother in the blues tradition is an element with which constructive change can be wrought.  

10.  There is a subtle polemic embedded in Williams’ figuration of the mother.  Williams has been outspoken in her critique of certain aspects of the Black Power Movement of the 1970s that placed women in a subservient role.  By evoking the power of the maternal figure, a tradition in the blues, Williams rebuts efforts to downplay this figure.  For an interesting argument in support of the maternal image in the writing of African-American women who resist certain aspects of the ideology of the Black Power Movement, see Korenman’s essay.  

11.  And it is on this score that Williams particularly took exception to Shange and Wallace in their respective works For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf (1977) and Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979).  Williams argues that Shange, for example, has only taken on the bemoaning aspect of the blues and left out the crucial strutting boastfulness which is an important part of the blues persona.  See her comments in "Cultural and Interpersonal Aspects of Black Male/Female Relationships" (1979).  

12.  Williams discusses her disenchantment with black nationalists in "Returning to the Blues," and in her biographical piece in Black-Eyed Susans/Midnight Birds.  

13.  Her work with the phrase "getting themselves together" can be understood within the frame of Stephen Henderson's concept of "mascons" which she discusses so powerfully in "The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry."

References

Abrahams, Roger.  Afro-American Folktales: Stories From Black Traditions in the New World.  New York: Pantheon, 1985.

Baker, Houston, Jr.  Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.

Bell, Bernard.  The Folk Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry.  Detroit: Broadside, 1974.

Christian, Barbara.  "The Race for Theory."  Gender and Theory: Dialogues in Feminist Criticism.  Ed. Linda Kaufman.  New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 225-37.

---. ''Trajectories of Self-Definition: Placing Contemporary Afro-American Women's Fiction."  Conjuring.  Ed. Pryse and Spillers.  (See complete citation below.) 233-48.

Ellison, Ralph.  ''Richard Wright's Blues.''   Shadow and Act.  Ed. Ellison.  New York: Signet, 1966.  77-94.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.  "Introduction: 'Tell Me, Sir, . . . What Is 'Black' Literature?' " PMLA 105.1 (1990): 11-22.

---.  "The Master’s Pieces: On Canon Formation and the African-American Tradition." South Atlantic Quarterly 89:1 (Winter 1990): 89-111.

---. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism.  New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Holloway, Karla.  ''Revision and (Re)membrance: A Theory of Literary Structures in Literature by African-American Women Writers."  Black American Literature Forum 24.4 (1990): 617-31.

Korenman, Joan.  "African-American Women Writers, Black Nationalism, and the Matrilineal Heritage."  CLA Journal 38.2 (1994): 143-61.

Neal, Larry.  "The Black Arts Movement."  The Black Aesthetic.  Ed. Addison Gayle, Jr. New York: Doubleday, 1972.  272-90.

Oliver, Paul.  Kings of Jazz: Bessie Smith.  New York: A.S. Barnes, 1959.

Pryse, Marjorie, and Hortense Spillers, eds.  Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition.  Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.

Shange, Ntozake.  For Colored Girls Who have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf.  New York: MacMillan, 1977.

Spillers, Hortense.  "Afterword: Cross-Currents, Discontinuities: Black Women's Fiction.'' Conjuring.  Ed. Pryse and Spillers.  (See complete citation above.)  249-61.

Tate, Claudia, ed.  Black Women Writers At Work.  New York: Continuum, 1983.

Vickers, Anita.  ''The Reaffirmation of African-American Dignity Through the Oral Tradition in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God."  CLA Journal 37.3 (1994): 303-15.

Wallace, Michele.  Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman.  New York: Dial Press, 1979.

Washington, Mary Helen, ed.  Black-Eyed Susans/Midnight Birds: Stories By and About Black Women.  New York: Anchor, 1990.

Williams, Sherley Anne.  "The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry." Massachusetts Review 18 (Autumn 1977): 542-54.

---.  "Cultural and Interpersonal Aspects of Black Male/Female Relationships: Comment on the Curb."  Black Scholar 10 (1979): 49-57.

---.  Give Birth To Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature.  New York: Dial, 1972.

---.  "The Lion's History: The Ghetto Writes B[l]ack."  Soundings 76 (1993): 243-59.

---.  "Quartet."  The Peacock Poems.  Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1975. 71-73

---. "'Returning to the Blues': Esther Phillips and Contemporary Blues Culture."  Callaloo 14.4 (1991): 816-28.

---.  Some One Sweet Angel Chile.  New York: Morrow, 1982.

An Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Massachussetts-Lowell, Marlowe A. Miller received her Ph.D. in English and American Literature (with a subspecialty in Composition) at the University of California-San Diego in 1991.  She spent 1991-92 in Prague, Czechoslovakia as a Fulbright Scholar: There she interviewed numerous Czech dissident writers and activists, and assisted in the Gender Studies Program at Charles University.  She has published articles on Virginia Woolf, Maxine Hong Kingston, and feminism in the Czech Republic.