CHAPTER 1
Light Years
LUCILLE CLIFTON IS AMONG THOSE time-traveling souls who Walt Whitman believed would âlook back on me because I lookâd forward to them.â1 In her sweeping, elegiac vision of the world, she is the Good Gray Poetâs descendant, his sister, his dark reflection in the waves. Her earnest voice bears witness to what she calls âthe bond of live things everywhereâ (GW 149). Combining Christian tenets with pantheistic African lore, the philosophy evident in her poetry holds that all life is sacred and all lives are interdependent. But because she was born âboth nonwhite and womanâ (BL 25), some fifty years after the elder poetâs death, her world is quite different from Whitmanâs. As an African American woman, whose great-great-grandmother was captured as a young child in Dahomey, Africa, and brought to the United States as a slave, Clifton is especially sensitive to the injustices that blacks, women, and poor people have suffered in the United States. Her poetry is in large part a response and antidote to these injustices as well as a tribute to the human spiritâs will to endure, and even soar, in the face of pain and loss.
Although she is not a strictly autobiographical poet, her identity is integral to everything she writes: âA person can, I hope, enjoy the poetry without knowing that I am black or female. But it adds to their understanding if they do know itâthat is, that I am black and female. To me, that I am what I am is all of it; all of what I am is relevant.â2 Upon reading Clifton, one finds that her poems often manage to be deeply personal while also speaking directly to universal emotions as well as social and political realities.
The poem â1994,â for instance, was inspired by the poetâs breast cancer diagnosis: âi was leaving my fifty-eighth year / when a thumb of ice / stamped itself hard near my heartâ (TS 24). In addition to recounting a personal ordeal, the poem acknowledges the looming threat of breast cancer to women as well as the risks that women and blacks assume every day: âyou know how dangerous it is / to be born with breasts / you know how dangerous it is / to wear dark skin.â History is, in large part, the story of a continuous assault on vulnerable groups, and Clifton assumes that her readers know that story, regardless of their role in it. The poemâs sorrowful reproachââhave we not been good children / did we not inherit the earthââsuddenly gives way to an unnervingly direct appeal: âbut you must know all about this / from your own shivering life.â One would be hard pressed to read this poem without experiencing a spine-tingling shock of recognition. Such is often the case in Cliftonâs poems, which time and again illuminate the universal within the individual, the black, and the female.
Born with twelve fingers, like her mother and her firstborn daughter, Clifton often uses her hands to symbolize a spiritual connection with others, a deep and abiding empathy flowing involuntarily from her body and soul. Her extra digits were removed when she was an infant, but their seeming magic (growing out of the old superstition that witches had twelve fingers) is still with her: âIâve always had a kind [of] sixth senseâespecially when somebody talks about hands. Yes, a sixth senseâif you want to call it thatâthat deals with spirituality and the sacred.â3 In the mid-1970s, Clifton was in contact, through a Ouija board and automatic writing, with her deceased mother, Thelma Sayles; poems in An Ordinary Woman and Two-Headed Woman draw on that moving but profoundly unsettling experience. Around the same time, she also wrote a series of poems based on the words of âThe Ones Who Talk,â disembodied spirits commenting on âthe fate and danger of the world of the Americas.â4 In a variation on the traditional reading of palms, she said that she could sometimes sense important things about people just by touching their hands.5 This phenomenon is the subject of âwild blessingsâ (Q 47). The poem begins with the fragmented revelation âlicked in the palm of my hand / by an uninvited woman,â which is possibly a reference to Thelma Saylesâs posthumous visitations. The poem goes on to list some of the hands Clifton has held, including âthe hand / of a girl who threw herself / from a tenement window, the trembling / junkie hand of a priest.â Given this history, the distraught poet declares:
do not ask me to thank the tongue
that circled my fingers
or pride myself on the attentions
of the holy lost.
i am grateful for many blessings
but the gift of understanding,
the wild one, maybe not.
(Q 47)
No matter its attendant difficulties, the gift of understanding has served Clifton and her readers exceptionally well. Reading her elegantly arranged volumes, in which hope just barely outweighs despair, we begin to see the mythic sweep of our own lives, the connections across generations and cultures, and we begin to feel that Clifton, in speaking for herself, is inviting us to listen, very carefully, to ourselves.
Like many of her poems, the story of Cliftonâs youth is more complex than it initially seems. Born in 1936 to a steel worker and a homemaker in Depew, New York, she grew up in Depew and later in Buffalo, a child of the Great Migration of southern blacks to the industrial North:
Depew is where I was born. Depew New York, in 1936. Roosevelt time. It was a small town, mostly Polish, all its life turned like a machine around the steel mill. We lived in a house on Muskingum Street, and my Mamaâs family lived on Laverack. My grandparents lived in this big frame house on Laverack Street with one toilet. And in that house were my Mamaâs family, the Moores, and a lot of other people, lines of people, old and young. (GW 265)
Though her southern-born African American parents had very little formal education, they both loved to read books and newspapers and tell family stories. Their daughter looked on with interest as Thelma Moore Sayles wrote poetry in iambic pentameter and Samuel Sayles read the Bibleâthe text that would become central to so many of Cliftonâs later poems.
The Sayles family appeared happy on the outside, but Clifton has exposed the painful troubles beneath the placid surface. Her father had two daughters in addition to Lucille: one by his first wife, who predeceased him, and another by a neighbor woman, around the same time that Lucille was born. Samuel Sayles Sr. stopped sharing a bed with Thelma Sayles after the birth of their son, Lucilleâs younger brother. These circumstances would have been difficult in themselves, but the trouble was greatly compounded by Samuel Saylesâs abuse of Lucille, who has written about the molestation in several of her poems and spoken of it in interviews. Clifton insists that this was not the whole story of her relationship with her father. In Generations, she writes forgivingly that âHe hurt us all a lot and we hurt him a lot, the way people who love each other doâ (GW 273). But the abuse was clearly a defining component of her youth and has been a continuing source of melancholy.
Despite her early private suffering, Lucille Saylesâs intelligence and academic achievement boded well for her future. She was not only the first in her family to graduate from high school but also the first to attend college, thanks to an academic scholarship, one of a small number that Howard University awarded to incoming students in 1953. A drama major with a keen interest in literature and writing, she met professors (and distinguished poets) Sterling Brown and Owen Dodson as well as fellow students Toni Morrison and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). The example of her professors and her gifted peers was an inspiration to the young poet from Buffalo.
That inspiration did not extend to studying, however, and Cliftonâs low grades cost her the coveted scholarship. She returned to Buffalo, deeply embarrassed, and enrolled in Fredonia State Teachers College. That experience lasted only a couple of months, however. Although she would eventually become a professor of creative writing, Clifton herself was not cut out for college life. She preferred, instead, to fashion her own approach to education, an approach that stood her in good stead as a poet and role model for her students. Noting that âthereâs a way of being that tends to be necessary for poets,â she explained that, for her, that meant an active pursuit of knowledge and understanding: âYou know, a way of not just accepting the taught, passed-on information, but trying to get more than that. That comes from being a little black girl in Buffalo, New York, and understanding that what people were going to teach me might not be all that I needed to know, and so choosing at some point to learn, not just be taught.â6
In 1958 she married Fred Clifton, who was completing his senior year at the University of Buffalo. She had met her future husband through Ishmael Reed, an up-and-coming black writer who was part of her circle of friends in Buffalo. The newly married couple lived in Buffalo for about a decade while Fred, a yogi with wide-ranging philosophical interests, pursued a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Buffalo. Lucille, who worked for the first several years of her marriage as a claims clerk for the New York state employment office, had six children between 1961 and 1967. All the while, she was writing poems.
During those busy years, the subject of race relations often dominated the national news. While Clifton was at Howard, the Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools were unconstitutional, and the following year Rosa Parks refused to give up her front seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. After the Cliftons had married, the upheaval continued. The assassinations of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. shocked the country. Race riots and campus turmoil added to the trauma. Still, there was the pervasive sense that black people were finally beginning to come into their own politically and artistically in the United States. The Black Arts Movement was proof of this phenomenon. Gwendolyn Brooks, the movementâs elder states-woman, issued a passionate call for nationalism among black authors: âThe prevailing understanding: black literature is literature BY blacks, ABOUT blacks, directed TO blacks. ESSENTIAL black literature is the distillation of black life. Black life is different from white life. Different in nuance, different in ânitty gritty.â Different from birth. Different at death.â7
Little did Clifton know that her own life was about to become quite different from what it had been, thanks to the (black) poet Robert Hayden and the (white) poet Carolyn Kizer. After Clifton had read about Hayden in the magazine Negro Digest and written to him in hopes that he would help her publish her work, Hayden showed a selection of her poems to Kizer, who in turn entered the poems in the YW-YMCA Poetry Center Discovery Award competition. By this time Fred and Lucille Clifton were living in Baltimore, where Fred was educational coordinator for the Model Cities Program and Lucille worked for the U.S. Office of Education. Clifton did not know that Kizer had entered her poems in the contest, so her selection as the winner came as a happy surprise. The Discovery Award drew the attention of Random House, where her first three books of poetry and her memoir would be published, with Toni Morrison as her editor.
Given all of the political and social tumult that accompanied her youth, it seems fitting that Clifton published the provocatively titled Good Times in 1969âa decidedly dramatic, news-filled year. Amid the nationâs impassioned debates about war, black power, and womenâs rights, Clifton learned that the New York Times had named her debut volume one of ten notable books of the year: now she had a nascent national reputation. Her career as an author of childrenâs picture books was taking off at the same time, with the publication of Some of the Days of Everett Anderson also occurring in 1969. It was a bittersweet time for her, however, since 1969 was also the year that her father died. Still, she was a black woman succeeding as a writerâa living paradoxâand thus fulfilling her fatherâs abundant hopes for her. In 1972, she followed up her debut success with Good News about the Earth, a book that is more explicitly political than her first.
As the womenâs movement gathered momentum in the 1970s, an increasingly self-confident and self-aware female persona began to appear in Cliftonâs poems and in her memoir, Generations (1976). In An Ordinary Woman (1974) and Two-Headed Woman (1980) we see a feminist spirituality infusing her poems. Her private spiritual experiencesânotably her supernatural communications with her deceased motherâbecame central to her vision of the world. After the publication of Two-Headed Woman, however, Clifton did not publish another poetry book until Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969â1980 (1987), the retrospective of her first decade as a published writer, and Next (1987). Important changes in her lifeâthe death of her husband at age forty-nine in 1984 and her new teaching position at the University of California, Santa Cruzâwere no doubt partly responsible for this relatively quiet period in her writing career.8 Her subsequent books reveal that her spirituality and mortality had become the definitive core around which her poetry revolved. Between 1991 and 2000, despite bouts with breast cancer and kidney failure, she published four volumes of poetry: Quilting (1991), The Book of Light (1993), The Terrible Stories (1996), and Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988â2000 (2000). Social justice, African American history, and the innate strength of womanhood remain important themes, but her own life cycle and her quest for self-understanding give her later poetry its primary force and direction. This development confirms her candid admission that âI donât write because I have a mission to heal the world. My mission is to heal Lucille if I can, as much as I can.â9
Though her books earned her a steady stream of national honors, including her 1999 appointment to the previously all-white Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, and her university teaching positions also bespeak mainstream status, Clifton is a voice speaking from, and for, the racial and social margins of American society. Her writing reveals her strong social conscience and broad awareness of human suffering. The concept of a âdouble consciousnessââW. E. B. Du Boisâ term for the pained recognition and tac...