First, I am a poet and then I am a Black poet

May Miller abhorred labels; in fact, she fought being labeled in a country and a time when people insisted that she be cataloged like so many unlabeled opaque bottles left dusty on a basement shelf. And so when called upon to read during the month of February, she would sigh in bafflement. "I wonder" she remarked, one night, as we rode to a reading,  "if my work somehow transforms itself into some spectrum of relevancy during Black History Month, only to stagnate the first day in March." And then we talked of the stars.

Dark Instrument

Hold me and hear me, America,
For I am that instrument
Spring in Africa
Tuned to this land
Beat out my music.

Beat it out lightly.
Response comes shivering
To the hand
As when foliage leans
In wind trembling.

Beat out the lyric briskly.
Vibrations quicken to staccato
Sharp as spearheads
Thrust in bodies
Moving through the night.

Beat it out heavily,
Stroke heavily.
Passion flows deep
In the runnels of my song,
An undercurrent dark with woe.

Beat out my song steadily.
Strike deliberately with calm.
A new note could throb andante
In contrapuntal voice of men,
A rhythm caught in minors,
Echoed in tempered vessel of time.


    

More Than Half a Century Ago

It's been more than 50 years since the Birmingham, Alabama church blast killed four young Black girls 11 year old Denise McNair and 14 year olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. May Miller was so horrified at the brutality and waste that she penned one of her most powerful poems.

 Blazing Accusation

(In racial upheaval in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963, four young girls died in the blasting of a church.)

Too early a death for those who young
have lost prophecy in blast and flame.
The broken have been assembled
as best could be to pose for burial.
The man in bleak authority intones
the word that cannot tell when last the girls stood singing
under the sweetest tree,
how remote from nightmare
they giggled secrets believing
death was the end for the old.

After the moans are choked
and the flowers gone petalless,
the girls will be with greatgrandparents,
themselves not long in that last room.
Mothers and fathers,
grandfathers and grandmothers
still pace the waking street
though few are the footballs
that echo where the children lie.

But walk they will
the sixty-odd more years they're due.
Beyond allotted time and self
the four of them will go
down red gullies of guilt
and alleys of dark memories, 
through snagging fields of scarecrows,
and up an unforgetting hill
to blazon accusation of an age. 

Fourteen years later, when Robert Chambliss was brought to trial and convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1977 in connection with the bombing, May Miller, once again, pen in hand wrote viscerally of redemption.  

Afterglow

(Belated trial and conviction, 1977)

The wounded and the wounding peek

from doorways screened by vines and blooms turned black.

They clutch and tear the shroud

to share a wind

brave with caroling of the just.

Shamed by echoes of lost laughter

they lift heads to promise

of fledgling wings,

and high over greening hills

look to the sweep of doves.

A Reading for Black History Month

The Scream

I am a woman controlled.
Remember this: I never scream.
Yet I stood a form apart
Watching my other frenzied self
Beaten by words and wounds
Make in silence a mighty scream -
A scream that the wind took up
And thrust through the bars of night
Beyond all reason's final rim.

Out where the sea's last murmur dies
And the gull's cry has no sound,
Out where city voices fade,
Stilled in a lyric sleep
Where silence is its own design,
My scream hovered a ghost denied
Wanting the shape of lips.

Unfinished Business

               The first two lines of May Miller’s poem “The Scream,” announce

I am a woman controlled.

Remember this: I never scream.

may be autobiographical. In life, she never screamed, but she did as she says later in that same verse

Beaten by words and wounds

Make in silence a mighty scream –

So I begin this blog to provide the lips she says her silent scream was denied, right a wrong and honor a promise. May Miller, I believe, has ink droplets in her DNA strands. The ink imprinted on her very soul words so prolific that she could do nothing if she did not write. She won a children’s poetry contest when she was still a wisp of a girl and continued to write and publish her poems for the rest of her life. But poetry was only one of the many ways May met her manifest destiny as a writer. She kept a diary in college, she called Pal; her notes on teaching the short story I still refer to when I want to take a different approach to teaching elements of the genre. I treasure May’s personal writing all the more because much of it is done in her own hand, with a fountain pen. Not only do I treasure her ideas and perspective on topics that are just as relevant today as they were then, but I also treasure the art of her cursive writing more today than ever before because the craft of cursive writing and the subject of penmanship have fallen victim to technology. So while she lements a paper that she has due in Professor Locke’s class the next day or her concern for a young woman who had been denied access to her sorority, I welcome the nostalgia her everyday musings herald. 

               While May Miller is well known for her plays and her poetry, few of her contemporaries and fewer of those born after her lifetime know that she was also a novelist. If she ever allowed herself the luxury of a gut wrenching scream, it would have been when she realized that a man she trusted had pilfered many of her treasures including the hundreds of typed pages that lay in the bottom drawer of her childhood desk. The one thing she treasured most in her last years was the novel she wrote set in 1900 Baltimore. Her characters, Marthy and Jonas, like so many other Negroes of the time had migrated north and settled in the downtown area of Baltimore. Fine Market is their story, and a fine story it is, not only for its rich description of Negro life in Baltimore at the turn of the last century, but also for its use of Negro dialect as the standard of speech of that time. So, it is my hope, that May Miller will find redemption in her blog as she shares her masterpiece with her readers. Every week, May Miller will post a new chapter of her book and serve her guests a literary digest that has been all but lost in the historical fiction genre. You will be reading May Miller’s original manuscript complete with her annotations for possible edits. The manuscript written in the 1930s and typed on her father’s Underwood typewriter, by my grandmother, (May Miller’s sister by marriage) awaits your reading pleasure. 

 

May Miler