Cultural Exchange, by Langston Hughes

In the Quarter of the Negroes
Where the doors are doors of paper
Dust of dingy atoms
Blows a scratchy sound.
Amorphous jack-o'-Lanterns caper
And the wind won't wait for midnight
For fun to blow doors down.


By the river and the railroad
With fluid far-off going
Boundaries bind unbinding
A whirl of whistles blowing.
No trains or steamboats going--
Yet Leontyne's unpacking.


In the Quarter of the Negroes
Where the doorknob lets in Lieder
More than German ever bore,
Her yesterday past grandpa--
Not of her own doing--
In a pot of collard greens
Is gently stewing.


Pushcarts fold and unfold
In a supermarket sea.
And we better find out, mama,
Where is the colored laundromat
Since we moved up to Mount Vernon.


In the pot behind the paper doors
on the old iron stove what's cooking?
What's smelling, Leontyne?
Lieder, lovely Lieder
And a leaf of collard green.
Lovely Lieder, Leontyne.


You know, right at Christmas
They asked me if my blackness,
Would it rub off?
I said, Ask your mama.


Dreams and nightmares!
Nightmares, dreams, oh!
Dreaming that the Negroes
Of the South have taken over--
Voted all the Dixiecrats
Right out of power--


Comes the COLORED HOUR:
Martin Luther King is Governor of Georgia,
Dr. Rufus Clement his Chief Adviser,
A. Philip Randolph the High Grand Worthy.
In white pillared mansions
Sitting on their wide verandas,
Wealthy Negroes have white servants,
White sharecroppers work the black plantations,
And colored children have white mammies:
Mammy Faubus
Mammy Eastland
Mammy Wallace
Dear, dear darling old white mammies--
Sometimes even buried with our family.
Dear old
Mammy Faubus!


Culture, they say, is a two-way street:
Hand me my mint julep, mammy.
Hurry up!
Make haste!

The House on Moscow Street, by Marilyn Nelson

It's the ragged source of memory,
a tarpaper-shingled bungalow
whose floors tilt toward the porch,
whose back yard ends abruptly
in a weedy ravine. Nothing special:
a chain of three bedrooms
and a long side porch turned parlor
where my great-grandfather, Pomp, smoked
every evening over the news,
a long sunny kitchen
where Annie, his wife,
measured cornmeal,
dreaming through the window
across the ravine and up to Shelby Hill
where she had borne their spirited,
high-yellow brood.


In the middle bedroom's hard,
high antique double bed,
the ghost of Aunt Jane,
the laundress
who bought the house in 1872,
though I call with all my voices,
does not appear.
Nor does Pomp's ghost,
with whom one of my cousins believes
she once had a long and intimate
unspoken midnight talk.
He told her, though they'd never met,
that he loved her; promised
her raw widowhood would heal
without leaving a scar.


The conveniences in an enclosed corner
of the slant-floored back side porch
were the first indoor plumbing in town.
Aunt Jane put them in,
incurring the wrath of the woman
who lived in the big house next door.
Aunt Jane left the house
to Annie, whose mother she had known
as a slave on the plantation,
so Annie and Pomp could move their children
into town, down off Shelby Hill.
My grandmother, her brother, and five sisters
watched their faces change slowly
in the oval mirror on the wall outside the door
into teachers' faces, golden with respect.
Here Geneva, the randy sister,
damned their colleges,
daubing her quicksilver breasts
with gifts of perfume.


As much as love,
as much as a visit
to the grave of a known ancestor,
the homeplace moves me not to silence
but the righteous, praise Jesus song:


Oh, catfish and turnip greens,
hot-water cornbread and grits.
Oh, musty, much-underlined Bibles;
generations lost to be found,
to be found.

Act Seven

Sometimes we are good
Other times we feel bad
Often we talk
To crack jokes
To make fun of tourists
Or idiots unworthy of our village
Created through kinship
Islands that form into a land
Returning history before
Magellan, Vespucci, and De Gama
Beating Columbus even
They call it Pangaea
Pangaea loved to sing, talk, dance, and eat
We all do the same thing
Many moons later
When we feel like Kafka's aliens
When we feel enlightened
When we just don't care
But watch out
Our boxing gloves are strapped
If necessary
Our love for one another
Beats through our shirts and blouses

87 Rafts from Lungi

It's been a while
Longer than that magnificent Chicago mile
We met after a date with Amsterdam
Followed by a lam with Casablanca
Then Sam played it again
At the Lungi airport
With female robes called lapa
Merchants of clothing
Palm Oil
Peanuts
Cassava Leaves
Bunga Fish
Yuca becoming fufu
Spinning faster than a Spiderman web
Despite the old Victorian squalor
Laying on Bent Street
Forgetting Kissy Road
Daring not to muss
Your silky white beaches
Your crystal waters
I de ask mesef
How for do
I ge'fo go to toun
When I finish me study
Aha

Ka' Ba, by Imamu Amiri Baraka (former Leroi Jones)

A closed window looks down
on a dirty courtyard, and black people
call across or scream or walk across
defying physics in the stream of their will

Our world is full of sound
Our world is more lovely than anyone's
tho we suffer, and kill each other
and sometimes fail to walk the air

We are beautiful people
with african imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants

with african eyes, and noses, and arms,
though we sprawl in grey chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun.

We have been captured,
brothers. And we labor
to make our getaway, into
the ancient image, into a new

correspondence with ourselves
and our black family. We read magic
now we need the spells, to rise up
return, destroy, and create. What will be

the sacred words?

Technical Difficulties

According to you, I'm fuckin' up
According to you, I forgot thangs
According to you, I'm not down
According to you, I should fry
My hair, my food, and my serotonin
And break my English
But ain't no reason for that
Not only does North America place the welcome mat
At my feet
My ol' pa invented it
Not only is my destiny claimed
The world is my oyster
Not only do I remember five hundred years
I have walked them, and am still moving
With power steps and stealthy verbal spits
But you think the pigs wouldn't do a cavity search
Cause of my Ferragamoes
You think because I can't dance
I'm not here and living a lie
You think because I'm with Bai, Indira, Rosa, and Carmela
I don't want Lena H.
Please
If you woke up in my pores
In this cocoa epidermis
You would be in a Huggies box
On the mutated Hudson shore
Acting hella nervous
So what you talkin' bout, Willis?

Before you knew you owned it, by Alice Walker

Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.