Birth of the Blues
Was it Miles Davis’ “Kinda Blue” bringing me home to you?
Or the musical memories of our mutual histories?
Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll laid back and fingering those piano keys,
on an instrument played by Langston Hughes, Bontemps, Zora Neale and Countee Cullen while Black women danced a close sweating two-step
with their men in Harlem jook joints?
Were the blues born on sultry evenings under canopies of stars?
Come into this world between dark southern thighs
while our enslaved ancestors danced to strumming banjos, wailing mouth harps
and ancient rhythms of violins, tambourines and drums?
Men and women dancing to words become songs:
work songs
praise songs
kin songs to the blues?
Were the blues born with the birth of “The New Negro?”
or “the flowering of Negro literature”? Or were the blues
more hidden, ever more subtle in the eyes and on the tongues of Harlem?
In the lyric of Billie Holiday crooning “Strange Fruit” at Café Society?
Or the crackle of Louis Armstrong’s voice?
or the clarion call of his trumpet?
Was it in the unstoppable Trane: a love supreme flowing from his horn?
or in a Black child’s first giant step?
Black man, my lover, I held your newborn in my arms
wondering just what he would make of this world,
a world he gazed on with sad, irreverent yet innocent brown eyes.
Black man, my lover, do not ask me
how you will survive without the blues.
A White Rosary
for Thomas Lux
A white plastic rosary pale and polished,
Curled like a worm waiting on the nightstand
Beside the bed is my gift to you
In the event of my death.
Also to be found on my nightstand
Is an album of recent photographs
Taken of my sons and a calendar of angels
In memory of our mutual departed friends.
I remember one cloudy and restless Ash Wednesday
Witnessing the bold tattoo of charcoal
Across your forehead beneath your shock of white hair,
Your white hair gleaming in the early morning light.
As a child I possessed a similar white rosary.
Beads fashioned of quartz with an image
Of the Christ suspended from a silver cross.
Faithfully every Sunday my family attended Mass.
Finally, when I renounced my father’s religion,
At the young age of twelve,
Much to his disappointment, I refused
To acknowledge how much I needed confession.
I feared the priest hiding in his shadowed box.
I did not want to tell him of my strange desires,
And my sensual, haunting dreams.
But Father told me to recite ten Hail Mary’s in contrition.
And so my rosary for which I no longer had any use
Disappeared into my mother’s black lacquer jewelry box.
I hope this present of a cheap plastic rosary
Will please you when I am gone. And, for you
This gift will assume eternal value.
Collage – after Romare Bearden
Gather out of star-dust:
memories of tender Harlem evenings where portraits filled
my young mind with jazz. And we stayed awake late nights
in our rented place on West 131st Street laughing and talking
the talk. DuBois, Hughes, Ellington. The gatherings
when I heard their stories, the abstract truth, scientific in grandeur
yet ever so real, down to earth, stories of Time and then,
the soothsayers, the truthsayers, singing their jogo blues.
Silence willfully broken. Scrapbooks of faded brown photographs,
clippings from Ebony and Jet. Folks dancing the original Charleston,
the fine old step, the swing and the sway.
Gather out of moon-dust:
There was crisis and opportunity. Black new voices, new forms.
Voices of folk singing real soft and mellow.
Lessons on how to become a “real poet,” while Claude McKay
joined the Russian Communist Party. Fire from flint.
Letters were penned by Countee Cullen to Langston Hughes.
Shadows reigned over the evening skies of Harlem.
Gather out of sky-dust:
a time for the “new negro.”
For Pullman porters to unionize
and for Josephine Baker, chanteuse extraordinaire, to exercise
her wings of gossamer silk and satin.
Music warbled from an ebony flute
while poor folk sold their fine clothes to the Jews.
Was Christ Black?
Do angels really play trombones for God
in a black/brown heaven?
Gather out of song-dust:
Did we owe it all to Spingarn, Knopf or Van Vechten?
Or was originality and improvisation our sacred creed?
As I gazed from the window at the skies
of my fading youth, all I could see was fire.
I wanted to hear the Blackbirds Orchestra wild on a Saturday night.
To hear “Go Down Moses” sung in church on a Sunday morn.
Wanted a style of my own.
To become Emperor Jones.
Daddy Grace.
Childhood
Music became a halo, a birthmark, the praiseful signifying voice
warning me not to live in the past, nourishing my young mind.
While rehearsing a sonata on the family piano, I forgot
the repetition of finger exercises, the scales, the tempo
on an otherwise quiet Sunday evening when no one was listening
save my daddy who thought of me as perfect and knew
each note to every song by memory.
When I turned twelve
a backyard party entertained me with a stack of 45s, rhythm ‘n’ blues,
dancing, chilled sodas, and the sizzle of an old-fashioned colored bar-b-que.
A time for sprouting breasts, long, lanky legs, and knobby skinned knees.
While the Four Tops wailed their sweet soul Motown symphonies on the phonograph,
I looked down from my bedroom window on the second floor
as fate come a-knockin at my door. It was all so right.
Years later, memories of being twelve returned to me like the ghosts
of failure with the sound of unwritten songs in my ears.
And, my father, who once thought I was perfect, forgave me.
Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist with two collections of poetry from the Broadside Lotus Press and two chapbooks of poetry, including OXYGEN II (Moonstone Press, 2022). She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College. She has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania; and, a Bread Loaf Scholar. She is at work on two new poetry collections, a collection of short fiction, and a memoir. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in CALLALOO, CALYX, HIRAM POETRY REVIEW, PATERSON LITERARY REVIEW, PENNSYLVANIA REVIEW, SENECA REVIEW, and many other literary and scholarly journals.
