I do not recall who or what acquainted me with Tracy K. Smith’s name–I’m early in my learning the names and creative works of poet laureates, whether their designation is national recognition or bestowed by a local blessing–this fall, but once I glanced at her bibliography, I requested multiple books, spanning poetry and memoir and other nonfiction, on hold with the librarians. As I read the first 20 pages of To Free the Captives: a plea for the American soul, her way with words, sentences, and syntax stirred me so much that I grabbed screenshots of a sequence of 8 pages to share with other beloved bookworms before I kept reading.
The sentence that begins page 53 seized my focus. Then, as read to the end of the paragraph a second time, I noted how Smith attributes subtle, intangible acts of love and care that enabled her father to stand tall. He was immersed in a kind community in rural Alabama that treated him so well as an adolescent and a teenager and was still there for him when he returned to Alabama, embracing him anew after he encountered difficulties and challenges in Detroit. Reading her interpretation of her father’s life before she was born mirrored the community, standing tall, that I was a part of a few days prior, in a zoom room no less. This was the 30th month of a group of Black men that I spawned two years ago after hearing a brother named Kevin describe how he longed for a kindred group of Black men. After two years of URL, I met Kevin for the first time last week IRL. 2 years in and growing stronger, we overcome the physical distance between us by revealing the emotional and psychological innards of our lives and how we navigate the world before us. Sometimes with levity and laughs, other times I have asked about the music listened to as teenagers or for the playlists we assemble now. Each month is tender as we call upon, what Maria Ressa describes as “The present moment of the past.”
Last week, we shared stories from previous decades describing people and moments that altered our path and some combination of: how we live, how we understand ourselves, and what in our lives has changed in the last 12 months. Skipping across generations and decades reminded me of Smith’s writing at the top of page 53 in To Free the Captives:
My father hates to talk about racial discrimination. Segregation has been an everyday reality his whole life, closing doors, ushering him toward what’s left over after whites take what they regard as their due. But plenty has kept him standing tall. The warmth and support of going to school with friends, neighbors, and kin. The care and encouragement of teachers who recognize something in him and tell him as much, priasing his discipline, attesting to his potential. Wholesome, abundant food grown on his family’s own parcel of land. Nature’s peace and beauty. Kin on their patchwork of neighboring lots. Such things bolster my father’s soul, minister to his pride. They make a way out of what it might be easy to mistake for no way.
From my 3 pivotal years in Minnesota, I told them of James attesting to my potential in ‘98 and again in 2000. I didn’t tell them of the fateful exchange with Rodney, a friendship borne out of sweet potato pie, in the kitchen of the Mac Grill where he told me about books, family, construction, life after incarceration.
From what I recall, for most of my life, my father, of the same generation as Smith’s dad, rarely spoke of the everyday discrimination that discolored his childhood and distorted his early adulthood. Since the ’90s, I was flummoxed by what I perceived as his rose-colored glasses, tendency, and disposition to view things as so much better in my childhood in the late 20th Century compared to his childhood 30 and 40 years prior. If I persisted by asking a specific question then he’d give a brief answer that may reveal more of the double standards, the value gap, and the multiple lies that defined American culture, identity and history. Though, most of his reflections minimize mentions of discrimination. When he reflects on the decade that he spent as an attorney at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he tends to wax on about how he was there in the “heyday” during Eleanor Holmes Norton’s leadership rather than expounding on the endless cases of racial and gender discrimination, which was the purpose of his job. How there was always more cases than there were lawyers, paralegals, budgets or time for as the rivers of racist and misogynist harassment and culture never run dry.
Despite the ugly savagery of contemporary America, Smith describes endless acts of tenderness, repeated moments of care, concern and checking up on each other, that nourish and ward off feelings of worthlessness, not-knowingness and self-doubt. By turning inward, among peers and those who have a baseline of shared experience and ancestry, we can care for each other in ways that dominant culture is incapable of doing. That we make a way out of [seemingly] no way—being creative and fertile in spite of daunting circumstances, just like flora and fauna across the planet. We must not be mired in our own beliefs of futility—repeated with the oppressive, dominant cultures’ messages of our insignificance—becoming so convinced of the impossibility that we fail to act and deny ourselves dreams. In spite of many miscarriages of longings, we still germinate, fertilize, feed, nourish, and care for others, just as they and others love on us.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 