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Funeral Diva
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FUNERAL DIVA
FUNERAL DIVA
PAMELA SNEED
Copyright © 2020 by Pamela Sneed
All Rights Reserved
Cover art “Self Portrait Abstract” by Pamela Sneed, acrylic on canvas, 2019.
Cover design by Linda Ronan
ISBN: 978-0-872-86804-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sneed, Pamela, author. | Scholder, Amy, editor.
Title: Funeral diva / Pamela Sneed ; Amy Scholder, editor.
Description: San Francisco, CA : City Lights Books, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020009381 | ISBN 9780872868113 (trade paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Sneed, Pamela—Poetry. | Autobiographical poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3569.N34 A6 2020 | DDC 811/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009381
Greatest thanks and heartfelt love and gratitude to Amy Scholder, for vision, belief, agenting, editing, and helping to bring this book to fruition.
Great thanks to Elaine Katzenberger for her work, support, and saying Yes. Many thanks also to Stacey Lewis at City Lights for all her work, and to everyone at City Lights.
Many thanks to Natasha Shapiro, Karen Finley, Gregg Bordowitz, Kyle Dacuyan, Nicole-Dennis Benn, Claudia Rankine, Sarah Schulman, Erica Cardwell, Tommy Pico, Avram Finkelstein, Dorothy Allison, Eric Pliner, and Jonathan Bloom, Alisa Yalan, Jenny Keyser, Matthew Buckingham, and Anselm Berrigan at The Brooklyn Rail.
Shout-outs to Jane Ursula Harris, Shelley Marlow, Ellen Goldin, Sur Rodney Sur, Zach Seeger, Franklin Furnace, and Denniston Hill.
City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133
www.citylights.com
CONTENTS
1.
HISTORY
2.
ILA
3.
FUNERAL DIVA
4.
NEVER AGAIN
5.
UNTITLED
6.
RUTH VICK
7.
THERE IS ME/THERE IS MY MOTHER
8.
MYSTI
9.
SIDEWALK RAGE
10.
YOU CAN’T GET OUT FROM UNDER
11.
TWIZZLERS
12.
PARABLE OF THE SOWER
13.
PARABLE OF THE SOWER 2
14.
BEY
15.
UPRISING
16.
POST-ELECTION
17.
ROPE-A-DOPE
18.
SILENCE=DEATH
19.
FOR DONALD WOODS
20.
HOLD TIGHT
21.
SURVIVOR
22.
CITIZEN
23.
CIRCUS ACTS
24.
BLACK PANTHER
25.
MASK
26.
PROPHECY
27.
BORN FREES
28.
A NEW STORY
29.
MARKED SAFE
30.
WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF
31.
A TALE OF TWO PANDEMICS
32.
I CAN’T BREATHE
33.
WHY I CLING TO FLOWERS
HISTORY
UNCLE VERNON WAS cool, tall, hazel-eyed, and brown-skinned. He dressed in the latest fashions and wore leather long after the 1960s. Of all of my father’s three brothers, Vernon was the artist—a painter and photographer in a decidedly non-artistic family. To demonstrate his flair for the dramatic and avant-garde, his apartment was stylishly decorated. It showcased a faux brown suede, crushed velvet couch with square rectangular pieces that sectioned off like geography, accentuated by a round glass coffee table with decorative steel legs. It was pulled together by a large ’70s organizer and stereo that nearly covered the length of an entire wall. As a final touch, dangling from the shelves was a small collection of antique long-legged dolls. This was my Uncle and memories of his apartment were never so clear as the day I headed to his apartment with my first boyfriend, Shaun Lyle.
It was the ’80s, late spring, the year king of soul Luther Vandross debuted his blockbuster album, Never Too Much, with moving songs about love. If ever there was a moment in my life that I felt free, unsaddled by life’s burdens, and experienced in the words of an old cliché, “winds of possibility,” it had to be the time with Shaun Lyle heading upstairs to my Uncle’s house as Luther Vandross blared soulfully out from the stereo, “A house is not a home.”
Of course Shaun was not the first or last person with whom I’d experienced feelings or sensations of unbridled freedom. Like seasons, freedom came in cycles, like in fall, in college with no money, chumming around with my best friend and school buddy Michael. We spent late afternoons wandering Manhattan’s East and West Village, searching for cheap drinks and pizza at happy hour specials, ecstatic in our poverty. Michael was a blond Irish Catholic punk rocker from Boston. We met when I was an RA at The New School’s 34th Street dorms at the YMCA. They were narrow tiny rooms like closets and some floors served as a hostel for homeless men. Punk music blared from Michael’s room. I would knock on the door commanding, “Turn it down.” Eventually, we united over the fact he put a towel under the door to block smells of weed smoke that frequently leaked from his room into the hallway. Michael and I were both writers, astute critics, and teacher’s pets. In fiction writing class, we formed a power block. No piece of writing done by another student escaped our scathing critique. Professors deferred to us. “Michael, Pamela, what do you think?” We sat next to each other with arms crossed. A student writer friend confessed to me later, “I was terrified of you two.” We were obsessed with Toni Morrison. I will never forget the last lines of Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, which Jane Lazarre, our fiction teacher, made us read out loud as a class together.
“And Nel looked up at the trees,” said “Sula, girl, girl, girl, all the time I thought it was Jud I was missing, but it was you.”
Jane’s eyes welled up as did mine and the whole class cried. Sula was a story of women bonding and friendship and longing and loss. “It’s a truly feminist novel,” Jane would declare. Feminism was her favorite topic. She was a straight woman with kids. She had grey hair and admitted she smoked pot. She was so cool, she’d write things on the board and say out loud, “Oh, I can’t spell.”
Michael and I were both work-study students. We covered for each other. He would call me after a night of drinking and partying and say, “I just can’t do it. I can’t go in. Will you go?”
“Sure,” I’d say.
One day Michael and I skipped school and hung out near the entrance of 72nd Street and Central Park West. I stared at a figure across the street in a café. “There she is,” I said.
“Who?” Michael asked.
“Toni Morrison, and beside her is June Jordan,” I said.
“You’re crazy,” he said. “No way. That can’t be them. How can you se
e that?”
“Yes, it is.” We investigated. Sure enough, sitting beside a low fence of the café was Toni Morrison with June Jordan in dark sunglasses. I approached. Michael lagged behind, astonished. “I love your work, Ms. Morrison,” I said. At the time I wasn’t such a huge fan of June Jordan. I’m not sure if the reason I disliked her had to do with the fact she had tried to pick up my girlfriend Cheryl while visiting/lecturing at The New School or perhaps I wasn’t ready for her message. Knowing what I know now—if only I could go back through a time capsule and tell her how much it meant for me to hear her in person. Long after she would die of cancer and wrote the words in dialect “G’wan, G’wan!” telling us a new generation, to go on. Long before the collapse of the twin towers, before the massacre of so many gay men from AIDS, wars against Brown bodies in Iraq, Harlem, and Afghanistan, before the growing epidemics of cancer, rape, police violence, domestic violence, mass incarceration, depression, demise of our pop stars, she said to a class at The New School in the true form of a prophet, speaking of the U.S.: “This country needs a revolution.”
Maybe it was June Jordan, like Audre Lorde, who taught me the power of what words could do. In retrospect, she opened the doors and flung open the windows to my consciousness, like when I heard Maya Angelou’s poem, “Still I Rise,” when I was nine years old. It awakened me. Just recently, with the terrible results of the 2016 presidential election, with Donald Trump elected, I can see June Jordan in sweet smiling profile, reciting as resistance, “Poem About My Rights.”
Michael and I had many other adventures. We frequented Lower East Side Clubs like The Pyramid and The World. The Pyramid was a dive on Avenue A near Tompkins Square Park and famous for its vodka and lime specials; where some nights vodka gimlets were 2- for-1. One night I was asked to dance by a handsome young white-skinned man. I learned he was from Brazil. When the dance ended, I walked away.
“OMG,” Michael said. “Who was that guy you were dancing with?”
“I don’t know,” I answered and shrugged.
“He’s beautiful,” Michael exclaimed. “Go back and get him.” Michael had a thing for Latin men.
I danced back over. I yelled over the music, “My friend wants to meet you.” I introduced him to Michael, and the rest was history. We learned he was visiting from Brazil and on vacation in New York for two weeks. It was his first time to New York. He spoke little English. He was bisexual. He and Michael had a two-week affair and fell in love. His name was Karim.
Six months later, after Karim had returned to Brazil, Michael and I were in Tompkins Square Park. It was the time right before they’d begun to gentrify the park. They started to impose curfews and later the police occupied it in a standoff with local residents. Michael and I were swinging on the swings. He had a container of beer masked in a paper bag. We were discussing Toni Morrison. Out of the blue Michael said, “I want to go to Brazil and get Karim.”
“Sure,” I said, just like that, no questions asked. We saved all of our money and six months later ended up in Rio. It was our first stop in a month-long trip to Brazil. Our mission was to get Karim and bring him back to New York.
I had only ever been out of the country once before. In Boston while still at Northeastern University, I met Annette. I’d been invited by her to go with her and her family to Jamaica. It was an exciting and new endeavor getting my first passport. It was also exciting when I received the blue square document, too square and big to fit in my wallet. Annette was mixed-race, Jamaican born, with brown skin and green eyes. I was working with the African American Institute at Northeastern to assist in recruiting more Black students. I traveled to New York with a Black man who looked like Sidney Poitier. He was dark and very proper, from the Islands as well. We stayed at a high-rise, budget hotel on 34th St. It was far from luxury, but you could see buildings and some rooftops of New York City. From the window you could also see people bustling on the street below. It was hot, there was a steel beige air conditioner in our meeting room.
The pool of Black applicants came. I noticed Annette immediately, she was pretty and exotic. I didn’t have a language then for attraction. Annette looked at me and shouted “That mole.” She was referring to a prominent black mole on the left side of my nose, a beauty mark. Annette also had a mole in the exact same place. We bonded over our shared feature. Later, I’d notice former President Barack Obama also has a mole in the exact same place. I see myself in him, in his long elegant stature. I imagine sometimes, not knowing my origins, he is my brother. Annette ended up enrolling at Northeastern. We became friends. We were both pot smokers. Annette’s appetite for it was much larger than mine. She stayed most days in a near coma. I suspected then she was hiding something, always numbing herself, but we never talked about it. She never talked about her feelings. I did learn something, which surprised me then, that she had a white boyfriend and expressed disdain for Black men. Still, she was fun in other ways and at the end of one school year, she invited me to Jamaica with her family. I was introduced to many new concepts. We stayed at a resort condo and her family had a cook and a housecleaner.
In Jamaica, I learned of and tasted many new foods like breadfruit, ackee, and salt fish. I was also introduced to a tropical climate and encountered for the first time the phenomenon of a flying cockroach. It flew through the air like a mutant ninja beetle. I heard of new names and places like Negril, and I went swimming in Dunge River Falls in Montego Bay. I tasted curry goat for the first time. I bought a large print dashiki and wore it to a family event and a beautiful dark Jamaican man stared at me. On the beach together, Annette and I met a young Jamaican guy who sold us weed and wove it into baskets to hide, unravel, and then smoke when we got home. This young Jamaican guy was also a delight to tourists because he knew how to eat or swallow light bulbs. I’m completely serious. The trip to Jamaica was life changing. The turquoise waters, the tropical air, the warm climate, winds blowing gently, the sun. I came to crave it all of my life; it was the very beginning of my wanderlust and appetite for freedom.
At the hotel in Rio with Michael, I was rereading Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which informs an unpublished memoir I wrote called My Soul Went With her. It is titled after Winnie Mandela’s memoir Part of My Soul Went with Him written in the apartheid years when she and her freedom fighter husband Nelson are separated, and he has gone underground to evade capture. Song of Solomon uses the mythology of the African runaways who could fly, but my story is based on a mother who left trying to escape an abusive marriage and me imagining as she takes flight, runs away for freedom, part of my soul goes with her. I imagine for all slaves left behind, forced into separations, part of their souls too went with the runaways, the dead, and the lynched. I imagine a character in Chimamanda Adichie’s, Half of a Yellow Sun set during the Nigerian Biafra war, and a traumatized mother carries her dead son’s head by hiding it in a calabash. Besides the stories of the Africans who could fly, what I remember from Song of Solomon was the character Hagar, who had fallen in love with Milkman, who decides if she couldn’t have his love, she would have his hate. I also remember the character Pilate, Hagar’s mom, who wears a hat and sucks straw through her teeth. She is mostly silent, but when Hagar dies, she breaks her silence, walks into a church, and screams out, “Mercy, I want Mercy.” That scene is resonant today, as so many Black mothers have to bury their children prematurely because of police and state violence. It’s like our collective grief as a people is being expressed. Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland … We are all Pilate and the real life Mamie Till in 1955 looking into the coffin of her murdered fourteen-year-old son, his face battered beyond recognition shouting up to the rafters, “I want MERCY.”
Karim met Michael and me in Rio. Initially we weren’t sure if he’d even show up. He was traveling from his residence in Brasília. While waiting in the hotel, I serenaded Michael with Nina Simone songs. Michael always shook his head appreciatively when I did this. “You’re Nina,” he’d say.
There was a funny moment between us when I noticed that all the women on the beach in Rio wore G-strings and bikinis and I wanted one. We went to a bikini shop. I tried on a G-string and stepped out of the dressing room. Michael’s face turned flush red. “My god Pamela,” he said, embarrassed. “You look amazing,” but I noticed he was shy to look.
When we were giving up on Karim and left the hotel for dinner one night, we saw Karim walking toward us. We reunited and spent weeks travelling around Brazil. Karim took to us to his home. It was a city nothing like I’d expected Brazil to be. We spent a few nights there snorting pure cocaine. Instead of making you speedy, it made you numb. Whitney Houston was popular at the time and every five minutes she played on the radio. The announcer yelled excitedly, “And Whitney Houssssson,” omitting the T.
Our trip was successful; months later Karim relocated to be with Michael. He enrolled in film school. During this time, Michael and I eventually outgrew each other, but moments of freedom came again and again, like the summer I spent with a lover, wearing Gucci sunglasses and her driving a Mercedes convertible through North Carolina’s back woods and hidden roads, imagining paths slaves once traveled, pursuing liberty. Top down, wind behind us, her one hand on the steering wheel, other in mine, we felt contented as we listened to hip hop sounds of the reigning soul priestess Mary J. Blige. In a piece I wrote called Motherland and Chitlin Chimichanga, I imagine the intersection of Latin and African American culture, the presence of Black blood all over America. In the past now and forever there is Black blood.
“In North Carolina looking at trees in a forest, you can still taste, smell, and feel remnants of Black blood. Driving past newly rekindled and restored plantations you can still imagine crimes that occurred, imagine hierarchies that defined us for centuries, house niggahs, field niggahs, overseer and master.”
Funeral Diva