Reading Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man at 75

 

NOT UNTIL I’M 75 YEARS OLD DO I READ

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLORED MAN

IN A SINGLE AFTERNOON, TELLING MY WIFE AT DINNER,

 

Karen, I’ve known about this book since high school,

But never read it. Listen. I take notes from first sentence,

...in writing the following pages I am divulging

The great secret of my life. The second paragraph

 

Reveals the regret in the book’s last paragraph.

Of course I read it next. Beginning again, his mother’s

Arms hold him, he becomes a solitary. He turns in

The wrong notebook in school…a book that cleared

 

The whole mystery…and who is this father? She’ll…

Someday…—and while I’m reading,

           

            My brother calls, He’s just seen

            This movie, a message of hope,

            David Byrnes’ American Utopia,

            Every song better than the last,

            If you need hope, especially

            The last one, a protest,

            Say her name

            Say his name

            Spike Lee directs

            We’re burning down the house

            Byrnes says and this

            This is a connection

            To the other side.

                                       

  He added,

‘of course, you could go in any place in the city,

 

they wouldn’t know you from white.’

Our author Learning language rolling cigars

Learning to speak by speaking.

Where vocabulary comes from.

 

One day his mother called him home.

This is your father. He promises a gift.

It’s a piano and you’ll never see him again.

But now you can talk to your mother,

 

And like Baldwin, you’ll get to Paris.

You’ll sit in a theatre watching Faust

Looking at a woman, imagining.

She’s young, beautiful, with her parents,

 

You’re there by accident looking

At her father, seeing, now, he’s yours’,

Too, this man you’ve seen once in your life.

Nothing is acknowledged.--

 

Another friend calls

Reading Yeats—

Turn to The Tower,

Last section, beginning,

Now I shall make my soul…

Yeats is an old man

My friend tightens down the poem

Like he did with Williams’

Red Wheelbarrow

Deleting ‘so much depends’

Now only this

Now I shall make my soul

However you make it

Repeating again, however

 

                        I would tell Karen

The story of the reading of this book

Reading it as James Weldon Johnson’s

Autobiography, misreading, because

 

I’d not known—published anonymously,

I’d not read enough—and I’d wake her

That night in bed, saying, I had it wrong,

The I in the story, it wasn’t Johnson,

           

It’s a book of fiction. Published that way.

And I got pulled in. Oh, man. This book.

Johnson knows the slave songs. It shows

In every piece of his work.

 

27 November 2020