SOURCE: Hull, Akasha (Gloria). “Channeling the Ancestral Muse: Lucille Clifton and Dolores Kendrick.” In Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, edited by Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller, pp. 96-116. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

NARRATIVE ONE

One afternoon in 1975, Lucille Clifton and her two eldest daughters—then sixteen and fourteen years old—were sitting idly at home while the four younger children napped. After rejecting an outing to the movies, they pulled down the Ouija board from the closet where they stored the family games. It was a casual item that they had played with before and gotten only “foolishness.” Rica said that she would record the message; Lucille and Sidney put their hands on the board. When it began moving—faster than it ever had before—Lucille said, “Sidney!” Sidney answered, “Ma, I'm not doing that, you're doing it.” Lucille said she wasn't and asked the board emphatically, “Who is it?” It responded “T … H,” at which point the two of them removed their hands. When they tried again—this time with their eyes closed—it spelled out “THELMA.” Absolutely skeptical, Clifton put the board away. A few days later, they took it down again, with Lucille challenging, “Now, this is not funny. What is happening here?” It answered, “It's me, baby. Don't worry about it. Get some rest,” and then dashed off the board.¹

Both Clifton and her daughters recognized THELMA as Lucille's mother, Thelma Moore Sayles, who had died one month before Clifton's first child was born. This unsought, unexpected supernatural contact with her mother inaugurated Clifton's conscious recognition of the spiritual realm. Her next volume of poetry, two-headed woman (1987a; first published 1980),² charts the turbulence of this awareness but ends with a calm acceptance of the truth that she has come to know:

in populated air
our ancestors continue.
i have seen them.
i have heard
their shimmering voices
singing.

(1987a, 221)

NARRATIVE TWO

One night, Dolores Kendrick, who is usually a good sleeper, could not fall asleep. Getting up at three A.M., she made a cup of tea and began reading the slave narratives in Gerda Lerner's documentary history, Black Women in White America. She became totally immersed and was particularly ensnared by the story of Margaret Garner, a woman who in 1856 had slit the throat of one daughter and attempted to kill herself and three other children rather than be reenslaved after an unsuccessful escape for freedom (the same harrowing story from which Toni Morrison's Beloved germinated). Kendrick awoke the next morning with an insistent urge to write a poem based on the Garner incident. Beyond this, the voice of the woman was coming to her “loud and clear,” even though she had had no previous experience with that mode of writing. The voice spoke in a dialect and used words with which Kendrick was not familiar:

Cain't cry, 'cause I be dead,
this old tarp 'round me,
my flesh rottin', my bones
dryin' out, my eyes movin'
through some kind of cheesecloth,
like a fog.

(1989, 34)

Kendrick did not know that “tarp” was “tarpaulin” until she found it in the dictionary. So, she wrote down tarpaulin, but then realized that, no, this was a slave woman talking and she should simply listen to what she said. She decided “not to fight it,” to “just go and follow what I heard.”

Thus began a process whereby Kendrick sat down with a stack of black female slave narratives on her lap, read them with intense emotional involvement, and then “let the voices work” within her. What eventuated was her volume The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women (1989).

Aside from their intrinsic interest, these narratives are remarkable for several reasons. At the most rudimentary level, they reveal how the overt spiritual connection of the two poets, Lucille Clifton and Dolores Kendrick, to black female ancestors has provided both the content and creative modality of their work. In this, they are joined by an unprecedented array of contemporary African American women writers who are likewise foregrounding the spiritual in their themes and inspiration—Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Octavia Butler, Sonia Sanchez, to name some of the most prominent. Writing thus, all of these authors are producing literature from historical-cultural specificities of black women's lives in the United States and, more particularly, from African American spiritual traditions (reverence for the dead, acknowledging the reality of ghosts, honoring “superstition” and the unseen world, spirit possession, rootworking, giving credence to second sight and other forms of suprasensory perception, paying homage to African deities, the power of voodoo and hoodoo, and so on). Other cultures of color and strong ethnicity also, of course, embrace similar worldviews, and wherever it is found, this sensibility contradicts dominant Eurocentric ontologies. It must be said, though, that nonrational, non-Western modes of apprehending reality are being increasingly legitimated by mainstream or mass culture as it moves into New Age awareness of our human-planetary connections with larger metaphysical forces and with all beings.

These two ministories about Clifton and Kendrick also enhance our understanding of creativity and creative processes. Writers have always talked about their muses and/or the inexplicable origins of their best and most original work. However, a higher level of clarity and confession is reached when Kendrick and Alice Walker thank their characters for coming to them and Clifton quotes sentences from her automatic writing in her poems. Where in the current theorizing about poetic form and politics is there space to explicitly situate such matter(s)? Speaking more narrowly from the arena of the two writers, studying them through their supernatural consciousness spotlights their achievement in unique and appropriate ways. In addition to the great value I place on their poetry as art and cultural expression, I feel that their willingness to frankly share their spiritual selves and experiences—knowing that this is usually regarded with scepticism—is laudable. Looking first at Kendrick and then Clifton, I wish to discuss the transmission of female ancestral energy as a vital force in their lives and poetry.

Dolores Kendrick was born 7 September 1927 in Washington, D.C., where she received her B.S. in 1949 from Miner Teachers College and, after years of teaching English and poetry, her M.A.T. from Georgetown University in 1970 (Kendrick 1975, book jacket). She designed the curriculum for the School without Walls and served as its humanities coordinator for several years. Since 1972, she has been an English instructor at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Her poems began appearing in small magazines and literary quarterlies during the 1950s, with frequent contributions to Percy Johnston's Dasein throughout the 1960s. Her first book, Through the Ceiling, was published in the London Paul Breman Heritage series in 1975, followed by Now Is the Thing to Praise (1984).

Although Kendrick long conceived of poetry as “a living force capable of working in everybody's life,” she had not produced anything as extraordinary as The Women of Plums. Nor had she channeled voices from the spirit world. She believes that it may take years of “preparation” of one's spiritual self to be ready for that sort of experience to happen and that she herself would not have been prepared any sooner. Years of contemplative living had rendered her open to receive the voices when they came:

I started that kind of life when I was quite young. I was a great one for going off on retreats and being alone. In fact, I have a whole book of spiritual writings, journals I have done in search of the soul, dealing with one's connection to God and the universe. I've been doing this for a long, long, long, long time. And my mother was very much that way. She raised us to believe in it and not to be afraid of that sort of thing. I just accepted it as a way of life and was extremely comfortable with it. I remember girls in college talking about parties and how strange I was because I liked to be by myself. They would say, “How can you stand being by yourself?” And I'd think, “How can you stand not being by yourself!”

Now, as a mature adult, she has “no problems with whatever inner voices are in [her]” and is growing even stronger in “contemplative prayer, in which you just sit and listen.” She also spends a part of every summer writing at a Benedictine monastery in Boulder, Colorado.

Not a practicing spiritualist of any type, Kendrick only recalls three pre-Plums experiences that “may have been introductions to opening parts of me that I didn't know were there.” The first occurred some years ago in an old courtyard in Aix-en-Provence, France. Though it seemed pleasant enough, she and a friend felt “funny,” “weird,” sensed a strange presence that prompted them to want to leave—only to discover bullet holes and a plaque that informed them that the Germans had executed a number of Frenchmen in the courtyard during World War II. This same sensing of unseen presences again occurred one Sunday when Kendrick attended mass at the Catholic church where segregation had forced her to sit in the balcony as a child. Running up to tell a choir soloist how much she had enjoyed her Met-quality singing, Kendrick felt all of the black people who had sat there, “all of our grandfathers and aunts and uncles. It was a very strange, wonderful feeling, sustaining.” Her prose poem, “Now Is the Thing to Praise,” concludes with a rendering of this experience:

And I: the choirloft holding me too suddenly, opening tired wounds because I remembered my childhood in that loft … And I: in mid-air, stunned, wanting to cry, wanting to lift myself away from all that pain and all that Past. And I: finding their ghosts stilled in the pausing pews, knowing they were surely the true elite, smiling, gracious, leaning upon their fine endurances, the wealth of their witness, their celebrations of longer matters. … And I: dazed, restored, brought to my beginnings, in joy.

(1984, 27)

A third, more uncommon, incident relates to her mother, who died in February 1976. After her mother's funeral, Kendrick returned to the apartment that she had occupied with her, despite friends and family worrying about her being there alone. In the apartment, Kendrick kept a small calendar with “wonderful little sayings usually attending to our spiritual natures,” which was opened to the week her mother died and the injunction, “Remember the lilies of the field.” One morning she rose to discover the same phrase scrawled on the calendar in her mother's print. (Her mother had been a beautiful cursive writer but exhibited “lousy penmanship” when she tried to print.) Kendrick reports:

I thought, how did that get there? She wasn't even here when that calendar was on my desk. And I never knew or understood how it got there. I ran looking for her occasional print in her own papers and I found it and compared them and surely it was her print. I have that framed and in my room right now. That for me was scary. I just don't know how that happened. But I don't question these things.

Because of these experiences, Kendrick came to the writing of Plums having discovered her ability to sense spirit beings, to mystically connect with her own ancestral past, and to accept these phenomena without questioning. After her first Margaret Garner—inspired hearing, she decided “not to go entirely on instincts” but to conduct some focused historical research. At the beginning of Plums, she acknowledges George Rawick's Federal Writers' Project interviews, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography; John Bayliss's Black Slave Narratives; Guy B. Johnson's Folk Culture on St. Helena Island, South Carolina; and the Lerner history. Essentially, however, her writing process remained the same:

Basically, I would sit down with this package of narratives and some of my research notes and I'd read them. Some of them became very painful. I began either to get angry or to come out of it crying, so I had to decide just what I was going to do.

Not wanting to write “history” or “angry poetry,” she fixed on the slave women's strength, thinking about how they and the women in her own family belied the shallow and demeaning media images of African American women.

Ultimately, Kendrick has decided that she “summoned” “The Women of Plums” through the historical texts:

I would read them and some I would deal with and some I wouldn't. I got the historical outline of the character, who the person was, or the narrative, and then I would put it aside and sit down and begin to write. Now what is she saying? What is she really saying? What is the voice here? Once I got the idea of the woman in my head, I began to sit down and write the narrative in her voice, in what I was hearing from her, not in terms of who I was.

Kendrick sees her role as giving voice to women who had not been able to speak for a hundred years but admits that she cannot totally explain the “mechanics”:

We know very little about the creative process. This experience has taught me that. I've always believed that I as an artist am a vehicle through which the creative energy flows, and that that links me with God. I thoroughly believe that. I don't believe I originate anything. I think God originates it and He in His wisdom has given tons of people on this planet certain talents through which they can bring their art to the surface. I think I saw that manifested very, very strongly in this particular work, and I don't understand it. And I'm not going to try to understand it. I'm just going to try to accept it because I think that there is a level of creativity that people hit that we know very little about.

She encapsulates these sentiments in an acknowledgment at the beginning of the book:

I thank these women
for coming, and I thank
the good God who sent them.
The Women of Plums

(1989, [15])

Notable here is an intertwined but still double identification of creative cause: (1) the women themselves who came, a word suggesting actual physical movement and travel, and (2) God, who might be visualized as standing behind them, sending them forward.

Explanations notwithstanding, one fact is certain. The level of creative accomplishment that Kendrick reaches in The Women of Plums surpasses her prior achievements. The poems are remarkable productions that evidence their spirit-driven origins and, at their best, can deeply affect many readers. Almost all of them chronicle strenuous moments: running away from slavery, having a picnic with a dead best friend, being in love, being prostituted to white men by the master when he needs extra money, praying on the auction block to be bought with daughter and not separately, nursing the Civil War soldiers on both sides of the conflict, sleeping with the master, being beaten, being abandoned, singing lullabies to a downcast child, and so on. And the names of the women themselves sound like a litany or a conjuring: Ndzeli, Leah, Peggy, Sophie, Bethany Veney, Prunella, Jenny, Hattie, Rya, Juba, Lula, Lucy, Polly, Aunt Mary, Liza Lily, Jo, Sidney, Lottie, Anne, Julia, Gravity, Harriet, Miss Maggie, Cora Sue, Tildy, Althea, Emma, Aunt Sarah, Vera, and Sadie. As the book jacket aptly states:

Kendrick gives each poem a distinct voice that expresses how these women used their imagination and spirituality to rise above the confines of slavery. Taken together, these poems provide a vivid indictment of the oppression of slavery and the beauty of souls that, no matter their outward bonds, refused to succumb to it.

(1989)

One of the earliest authentic voices is the Garner—inspired one of “Peggy in Killing.” With a section labeled “Traveling,” the poem begins: “They done found me, / Lord! They done found me again!” (1989, 28). The next section, “Visions,” powerfully details her reasons for refusing even at the cost of her own and her children's lives to remain unfree:

                    I tried to escape
from they dark breaths,
they glories, hallelujahs!
they fine houses and sweet fields,
they murders murders murders!
they coffins stenchin' in they smiles,
they come heah Peggy,
dress my little one,
then fix her somethin' to eat,
maybe some cake and milk,
and mine sittin' on the stairs
in the cold, in the dark,
waitin' to do some waitin' on
waitin' for the milk to sour
and the cake to crumble,
hearin' all this
without a word, a whimper,
eyes freezin' in they dreams,
hungers freezin' in they dark,
takin' they dreams to supper
like candles meltin',
after 'while no more light,
they walkin' softly
makin' sure they seen and not heard
and they dreams screamin'
in they bright, soft eyes.

(29-30)

After she drowns the children, she pronounces herself “dead” and prepares to sing to the ghosts that watch her, “like a star.”

Voice is the dominant feature of these poems. The sound of engaged, impassioned human expression drives each successive thought and line, imparting emotional and rhetorical urgency. The dialectal use of the easier-to-say “they” for their, dropping of g from ing word endings, and locutions such as “heah” for here couple with the common but resonant adjectives like “fine,” “sweet,” “soft” and everyday concrete nouns such as “houses,” “cake,” “stairs,” “milk,” “supper” to swiftly and strongly communicate, convince, overwhelm. Even the sarcasm is tellingly nonabstract. Juxtapositions of archetypal pairs—dark and light/bright, food and hunger, cold and candles, speech/sound and silence—extend the depth of meaning. The metaphoric formulations of coffins stenching in the slaveowners' smiles, the black children's eyes freezing with dreams screaming within them are plausible as folk inventiveness and, at the same time, poetically effective. These linguistic qualities also combine with the situations described in the poem(s) to impart documentable or intuitively felt historical accuracy. Whether anybody had ever recorded it or not, we know that slave children waited on cold, dark stairs to spring into service on command.

It is less easy to talk about another, otherworldly quality that inheres in most of these poems. In “Peggy in Killing,” that sense of a different temporal geography, of an unfamiliar reality plane, comes partially from the intensity of her extreme or deranged state. However, it also results from our having been put in direct contact with what does amount to another world through the supernatural agency of the poem's spirit-originator, and from the totally original imaginings from this dimension, imaginings that are partially caught in lines such as:

                    I burn and burn
all inside
turn to dust
blow away out over
they heads when they
finds me cryin' in a sack.

(28)

or

I'm travelin' in my bones
and the Spirit swooshes out
before I gets a chance to say
Amen.

(28)

or her description of the three children's drowning as

'jes takin' them under
puttin' them there
for the water to purify
for they own bloomin'
under the sea.

(32-33)

These predominant qualities of historic truth, voice, and otherworldliness are evident throughout the volume. Sophie, wanting to “know the baptism of words,” counts and spells her way up to literacy as she climbs the stairs, reminding herself, too, of “the period and the commas, the stops and the shorts”: “Say my prayers with a period. / Listen to Missus with a comma.” Aunt Mary, at ten, saw her nine-month-old sister “whupped” to death by their mistress for crying. She begins her long-cadenced recital with

Ah wants de wind in mah sorrow de las' breathin' of mah
lil' sister holy on mah tongue

(71)

and in a poem replete with biblical allusions, makes up her own individuated origins story, dating from her receipt of free papers from her master:

                                                  Dat be mah
birthin'          mah genesis          first day be          earth an'
          star          den          wind an' sea
den bird an' lamb          den man and woman          den
          freedom          den Me!

(71)

The symbolic beauty of Julia carrying life-giving water perfectly under any and all conditions comes through in the simple pride of her saying:

I walks straight into
the mouth of a [dark] doorway,
say, Good evenin' all,
water's here, and I never spill
a drop.

(95-96)

There are some passages where inspiration and achievement lapse, where the voice loses its hard-to-define but palpable authenticity and begins to sound like Dolores Kendrick, poet, perhaps too consciously shaping the material. Some of the poems were, in her words, “made up without the benefit of research,” although it may not be at all true that these are the weaker works or that they were not enriched by the same general fund of supracreativity. “Jo Abandoned,” for example, is a poem where Kendrick operated from more rational control. She uses her real mother's pet name, some of her autobiography, and was “seeing her a lot in doing” the poem. Consequently, Kendrick admits: “I don't know where the voice came in and I interfered or what. I just don't know how that balanced out.” The overall impression is a mixed one, some stellar and some pedestrian passages.

Generally, this is usually the case: the lapses occur in poems that also contain brilliant lines. In “Polly and Platt,” Polly is stretched beyond endurance by the lust and cruelty of her master. A voice asks, parenthetically and, to my mind, quite inappropriately:

(Was it that? Was something out there
punishing Polly for her big spirit
that let her sleep with a crippled
monster, and she, with impunity?)

(69)

Even the diction and grammar of these lines are more studied and contrived. They are followed by effective description, which leads ultimately to a very moving concluding glimpse of the shell Polly becomes after her too-much-maligned spirit deserts her:

she's moving like ash, floating about
in pieces, her head hung like a scarecrow,
and her smile don't jump into your throat
and make you happy,
the way it used to
when she was herself, walking through daisies
giving God His chores.

(70)

Most of Kendrick's commentary on the poems documents the degree to which she was not in complete control of their composition. Jokingly saying that she sometimes felt the women were standing in line crying, “My turn, my turn,” Kendrick mentions Jenny as an example. Jenny brought only short pieces (three of them are in Plums) but would only show up when she wanted to and not when Kendrick called on her for a small poem. With “Prunella's Picnic,” Kendrick did not realize until she had finished writing the poem that Prunella's friend was no longer alive:

[Prunella] was in this kitchen talking to her friend, surviving through talking to her—and she's talking about having a picnic. And I thought, “How can she be having a picnic in the kitchen?” But then it went and it developed. At the end of the poem I looked and I said, “My God, she's dead. Tula is dead.”

One poem, “Miss Maggie's Little Room,” Kendrick thought she could write “all by myself” because, like Miss Maggie, she was a teacher. She completed it in less than an hour and felt very pleased with herself—only to return to it the next day and discover that it was “sheer garbage.” Obviously, she had been “writing about Dolores” and had not allowed Miss Maggie to speak. So, after waiting two or three days, she sat down and started again with just the title at the top of the page: “And before long the whole thing began to come to me as though it was being dictated, a totally different poem than the one I had written in the first place.”

Looking back on the process of Plums, Kendrick has decided that she would not want to write another such book—even though she would accept it if it happened again: “I'm just saying that I'm not going out looking for it. I would not sit in a room at night and conjure these people up and say, ‘Now, I need some more of you to speak to me.’ I would never do that.” Her reason is that the experience was too painful, even though she knew that the women were saying “that they triumphed in the end.” The ordeal of not being “yourself,” of being “something else” in the service of mediumship, was also exhausting enough for her to finally stop the process: “I know that whenever you move into this realm, you are using psychic energy that you didn't even know you had. I didn't know if I had any more left, and I didn't want to find out. So I just let it go.”

Her current endeavor is a volume of poetry hinging on the theme of abandonment. It revolves around the biblical Samaritan woman at the well and a 1930s Washington, D.C., woman who tragically falls down on her luck, with the two women being projected as one and the same. This work is a “totally Dolores book,” written without any perceptible extra-authorial assistance. Kendrick's response to my probing about the two kinds of creative processes yielded the following exchange, with which I will close this discussion of her and The Women of Plums:

DK:
The Women of Plums hit a level of psychic intuition, or psychic revelation, that is not in this work at all. That does not make this work any less, or Plums any more. I think this one is simply dealing with a character the same way a novel deals with a character, and that's a different level of creativity. It may be coming from the same wellspring, but the energies involved are different.
AH:
It's very interesting to me that you put it that way because I have to admit that my automatic predilection would be to want to hierarchize them and say that the psychic, spiritual, revelatory work was somehow “superior” to other kinds of work.
DK:
I wouldn't do that. I don't believe that. I think that at this stage, as a friend of mine says, comparisons are odious. Do you like Paris better than you do Rome? I think you know what I mean, Gloria.
AH:
Yes, I guess I do.
DK:
They are different art forms to begin with—if you want to talk about the craft. But I think that what inspires them or creates them (let me use that term) are different types of energy. And that's all it is—just different. I don't think the one is any higher or better than the other.

After the episode with her mother and the Ouija board, Clifton began “feeling itchy” in her hand. She also started doing what she called “listening/hearing,” and the idea came to her that she should try writing. When she did, she received automatic messages faster. On one occasion, her pen wrote: “Stop this. You're having conversations with me as if I'm alive. I am not alive. Go. Conversation is for live people.” Because of the feel of the spirit, Clifton knew definitely that it was her mother. She says: “You can distinguish. … You know if you're in a room with someone. There's a different feeling with different people.” Once she asked, “What are you? Have you crossed the void? Are you in the great beyond?” using every high-flown euphemism she could think of—and her mother said, “I'm dead.” “Dead!” Lucille replied, “That's cold.” She began reading about spiritual phenomena, seeking information and precedents, and realized that “it wasn't a thing that was calling me to come and do it. It was telling me not to do it.”

Over a period of time, Clifton came to believe that this was, in fact, her mother, whose presence was also being felt by the rest of the family. All six of her children saw and had experiences of some sort with her. Ultimately, they came to know this dead grandmother better than they knew their father's mother, who was living in Wilmington, North Carolina. And, over a period of years, the family, in Clifton's words, “incorporated the nonvisible into our scheme for what is real. It worked for us.”

Thus, from the beginning of her initiation into this spiritual world, when she thought that she was “cracking up and taking my children with me,” Clifton was led to acknowledge that “perhaps these were who they say they are.” At this point, she had also been in contact with other beings than her mother through the medium of automatic writing. Her hands had always seemed to her to have something “interesting,” “powerful,” “mysterious” about them. When she started to pay attention (which she had not always done), she noticed that if “something, someone in spirit that was not alive wished to catch my attention, I would feel it in my arm, like an electric current going down my arm.” Then she would know to take notice, get a pen or whatever, because something wanted her attention. And she would give it, since experience had taught her that a product of value would result, even if it were small. Clifton notes that there was a progression for her from the slow Ouija board, to automatic writing, to not particularly having to write because she could hear—“but writing and hearing were almost like the same thing.” The ability to hear was clearly not imagined: “People can say you're hallucinating, but if you've heard, then you know.” She adds that this is similar to the difference between dreams and visions: If you have had a vision, you know the difference; if you have not, then you don't.

Everyone in the Clifton household—Lucille, her husband Fred (a brilliant philosopher and linguist who founded a Baltimore ashram), and their six children—was somehow attuned to suprarational reality. Because of this fact, Clifton declares in her brief autobiographical statement for Mari Evans's critical anthology, Black Women Writers, that “[M]y family tends to be a spiritual and even perhaps mystical one. That certainly influences my life and my work” (Clifton 1983, 138).

She renders her supernatural experience of her mother in a striking sequence of poems that concludes her volume two-headed woman (1987a; first published 1980). Yet, the differences between her two tellings of the story are vast. Most notably, the poetic text reveals a turmoil and tonal depth that the factuality and humor of her external narrative do not even begin to touch. Secondly, they provide an unusual opportunity to begin to see how this personal experience is transformed through creativity into magnificent—and magical—art. The condensation, unerring essence, and rich resonance of the poems effect the leap from “here” to the “beyond” that characterizes spiritual vision.

Both versions recount the same basic story of a time in life when “a shift of knowing” makes possible the breakthrough to higher levels of awareness and personal power. In a series of “perhaps” that grope to explain what is happening, Clifton hits upon the right one at the end of the poem:

or perhaps
in the palace of time
our lives are a circular stair
and i am turning

(216)

This last word, “turning”—with all of its connotations of cycles, change, karma, and universal flow—appears at significant places in her work. A relevant comparison here is her poem by that title in an ordinary woman (1987a; first published 1974), where she sees herself turning out of “white” and “lady” cages into her “own self / at last,” “like a black fruit / in my own season” (1987a, 143). Now, the turning, the metamorphosis she is about to effect, is even more momentous because it supersedes what the Rastafarians call “earth runnings” for a more divine and cosmic dimension. This process (and process it is) involves an experiential crisis of ontology and belief, but it leads “at last” to new and certain knowledge.

Clifton heralds the change in a poem, “the light that came to lucille clifton.” The use of her own, real name is startling. She had previously incorporated fanciful references to “lucy girl” in earlier poems but had never instated herself with this degree of fullness, formality, and solemnity. In a dramatic move that upsets modesty and convention, the reader is invited to see the person behind the persona, the lady behind the mask. Alicia Ostriker gives a helpful warning to readers who were trained—as she, I, and many others were and still are—“not to mistake the ‘I’ in a poem for a real person”:

The training has its uses, but also its limitations. For most [contemporary women poets], academic distinctions between the self and what we in the classroom call [used to call] the “persona” move to vanishing point. When a woman poet today says “I,” she is likely to mean herself, as intensely as her imagination and her verbal skills permit.

(1986, 12)

In this prefatory poem using her own name, Clifton talks about her shifting summer, “when even her fondest sureties / faded away” and she “could see the peril of an / unexamined life.” However, she closed her eyes, “afraid to look for her / authenticity,” but “a voice from the nondead past started talking.” The poem ends with what can now be recognized as a direct reference to an automatic writing experience:

she closed her ears and it spelled out in her hand
“you might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.”

(1987a, 209)

In the sequence proper, Clifton begins her story as a deponent in a civil and ecclesiastical court, using religious and legal language (and, again, her full, legal name) to “hereby testify” that in a room alone she saw a light and heard the sigh of a voice that contained another world. Asking in the next poem, “who are these strangers / peopleing this light?” she is told, “lucille / we are / the Light.” Not surprisingly, the following poem begins, “mother, i am mad”:

someone calling itself Light
has opened my inside. …
someone of it is answering to
your name.

(215)

Then ensue “perhaps” and possible “explanations.” “[F]riends come” and try to convince her that she is losing her mind. But she is able to say to them:

friends
the ones who talk to me
their words thin as wire
their chorus fine as crystal
their truth direct as stone,
they are present as air.
they are there.

(218)

She eschews arguing with these friends in favor of an interrogative conversation with Joan of Arc, another woman—she calls her “sister sister”—who heard voices and had visions. Clearly, even if no one else does, the two of them know what it is like.

In what is the most tortured of all these poems, “confession,” Clifton kneels on the knees of her soul, admitting to an equivocal “father,” whose name pleadingly begins each stanza, that she is not “equal to the faith required”:

i doubt
i have a woman's certainties;
bodies pulled from me,
pushed into me.
bone flesh is what i know.

(220)

She has heard the angels and discerned how to see them. She has seen his, the father's, mother standing “shoulderless and shoeless” by his side, whispering truths she could not know. She wants to know:

father
what are the actual certainties?
your mother speaks of love.

(220)

Ending in a repetitious, almost stately babel of words, she tries to run from the “surprising presence” with which she has been confronted, but “the angels stream” before her “like a torch.” There is no escaping this truth. Thus, the final, quiet poem of this section sounds like a reprise or a coda:

in populated air
our ancestors continue.
i have seen them.
i have heard
their shimmering voices
singing.

(221)

Thus, Clifton documents her connection with ancestral spirit (conceived as both racial and species antecedents) and arrives at the same place in her poetry as in her life: “incorporating the nonvisible” into her scheme of things.

As a girl (born in Depew, New York, in 1937), Clifton had manifested some psychometric skills (she could, in her words, “feel what things were feeling” and could retrieve lost objects of people she knew) but until 1975 had not been particularly conscious about the extrasensory realm. Since then, her psychic awareness and abilities have increasingly manifested themselves in a range of ways. As a result of being what her dead mother called “a natural channel” (using the term in the mid-1970s before it came into popular parlance), she touch-reads people and their palms, speaks truth about matters from her mouth if she asks to do so and keeps herself from interfering with the message, casts horoscopes, bestows blessings when requested, and generally continues to negotiate the world as a two-headed woman, that is, one who possesses magical power, who can see what is here and visible as well as that which is beyond ordinary vision.

She is singularly matter-of-fact about her gifts. “Being special,” she avers, “has absolutely nothing to do with anything” and is, in fact, “defeating.” As her mother put it when she asked her, a bit pompously perhaps, “What shall I do with this Power?”: “Think about it this way. You have a teapot, a lot of people have a teapot. Don't abuse yours and you won't break it.” At particularly magnetic readings of hers, when the audience was moved to radical action, she has sometimes thought that she could be “dangerous.” But it takes her only five minutes, she says, to remember that she is actually the person who still cannot program her VCR: “So, how important and interesting could I be?”

Speaking more soberly, Clifton reveals that basically that she feels is “lucky” and, paradoxically, that “it's a mixed blessing—because sometimes I might get a feeling that I don't want to have.” And, besides, she maintains that whatever abilities she holds “might be gone tomorrow. I don't know.” In her accepting, down-to-earth fashion, she sees herself as a multiply constituted, various person: “I'm lots of stuff. And so this [spiritual] thing coming in is just a natural, for me, part of what my life is. There are those I see, those I do not see. Fine.” Not surprisingly, she believes that everyone could somehow express “that ineffable thing if they tried, thought about it, and listened.” She continues: “I think that people tend to not listen. It's educated out of you. My luck is that I wasn't that educated.” She admits, too, that this kind of experience, what Toni Morrison terms “discredited knowledge” (1983, 342), is almost totally invalidated. Yet she declares with quiet conviction, “If you allow room in your life for mystery, mystery will come.”

Even though spiritual-mystical themes and materials were always present in Clifton's work, after two-headed woman (1980) they become an even more prominent feature reflected in poems that

1. present mystical experiences (transcendent meditative states, past-life glimpses, seeing auras;
2. deconstruct the current, corrupt hegemonic order as the “other” of a more real and humane, though “invisible,” alternative;
3. racialize, feminize, and mysticize traditional patriarchal Christianity;
4. project her feeling of connectedness with all life—things and beings;
5. affirm hope, higher values, and joy in the midst of destruction and despair;
6. show her sense of herself as part of a large, ongoing process of time and change, to which we all bear responsibility.

Most relevant to our present topic is a final group of poems that reveal Clifton's vivid connection with her spiritual genealogy, including her African past and its geography, and also her soulful attunement to other “sisters.” An early instance is this untitled tribute to heroines Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and her grandmother:

harriet
if i be you
let me not forget
to be the pistol
pointed
to be the madwoman
at the rivers edge
warning
be free or die
and isabell
if i be you
let me in my
sojourning
not forget
to ask my brothers
ain't i a woman too
and grandmother
if i be you
let me not forget to
work hard
trust the Gods
love my children
and wait.

(119)

Another one of these poems is written “to merle,” “skinny manysided tall on the ball / brown downtown woman,” whom she last saw “on the corner of / pyramid and sphinx” ten thousand years ago (171). In her seventh volume of poetry, The Book of Light, Clifton imagines into being a maternal great-grandmother, about whom no historical data exist. She is, as she admits, “trying to reclaim and maybe fix a mythology for that part of my family.” The poem begins with an apostrophe:

woman who shines at the head
of my grandmother's bed,
brilliant woman,

then proceeds to Clifton's musings: “i like to think”

you are the arrow
that pierced our plain skin
and made us fancy women;
my wild witch gran, my magic mama,
and even these gaudy girls.
i like to think you gave us
extraordinary power and to
protect us, you became the name
we were cautioned to forget.

and ends with her instatement of self and lineage:

                                                            woman, i am
lucille, which stands for light,
daughter of thelma, daughter
of georgia, daughter of
dazzling you.

(1993, 13)

This particular project of reclaiming (for self and blood/spiritual family) a mythology (in a space where history and myth are entangled, often indistinguishable categories) is one way to understand what both Clifton and Kendrick are doing in all of this work.

Clifton's communications with her mother have slackened in recent years, and the number of poems about her (never that large, considering her general impact on Clifton's life) has likewise decreased. However, a very pivotal one is “the message of thelma sayles” (1987b). This seems to be the only poem that could easily be read as a direct transcription of her mother's words. Thelma Sayles recalls the factual details of her not particularly happy existence—a husband who “turned away” and recurring fits—and concludes with succinct summary and a passionate injunction to Lucille:

i thrashed and rolled from fit to death.
you are my only daughter.
when you lie awake in the evenings
counting your birthdays
turn the blood that clots on your tongue
into poems. poems.

(1987b, 53)

Thus, the links are drawn between generations of painful female experience and the writing of salvific poetry, a connection that can be seen with Clifton herself and with Kendrick.

Except for this poem, Clifton—unlike Kendrick—does not seem to have channeled the specific words and language of her work; but—like her—she analytically isolates distinct strands and modes of her creative process. Ultimately, what she says clearly shows that her creativity is inseparable from her spirituality. She states outright: “Years of experience have allowed me to trust more and more what comes to me, what I can pick up in the world, and to incorporate that into my reality structure. And I think some of that is where poems come from.” Even though she believes that no one—poet or critic—can really explain the origins of poetry, she jokes, “I wish I did know where poems come from so I could go get some poems. I would like that.” One of her pieces in quilting (1991) nicely states her case. “[W]hen i stand around among poets,” it begins, “i am embarrassed mostly” by their “long white heads, the great bulge in their pants, / their certainties.” She, on the other hand, only pretends to deserve her poetry happening,

but i don't know how to do it,
only sometimes when
something is singing
i listen and so far
i hear.

(1991, 49)

As she explains her process, it is about a spirituality-based attentiveness. She recognizes when something catches her poetic awareness: “I still feel in my arms if I am to pay attention to something. And I do.” If she is in a car (she does not drive), for instance, and feels something, she will look up and around to see what should be noted. My more pointed questioning produced the following exchange:

AH:
Is all of your poetry about channeling?
LC:
No.
AH:
Does it all result from your having felt the tingle of “pay attention”?
LC:
No, no. But it all results from paying attention. I think that always I've had a mind that connected things, that could see connections. Why that is, I have no idea. I think that it all comes from all of it, Gloria. I think I use intellect governed by intuition, and I think I use intuition governed by intellect. It's not all consciously done. No poetry is all consciously done. It comes out of all of what we are.

At the beginning of the interview, Clifton talked about how central the concept of “light” was to her and how, in all of the poems in her Book of Light (then in progress), “there is going to be something that is at least clear.” Light (with a capital L) is her way of designating Spirit, God, the Universe, because, she says, “It is like that. It is like the making clear what has not been clear, being able to see what has not been seen.” At the conclusion of the interview, she returned to her mind's habit of discerning the connections between apparently unlike things. With the two of us working in a kind of apotheosis of harmony that pulled all the pieces together, I remarked that that was the essence of poetic metaphor, the result being light, to which she replied, “And then, you see, the connecting of the nonphysical to the physical is just another step.”

Notes

1. This essay could not have been written without the gracious cooperation of Lucille Clifton and Dolores Kendrick, both of whom I heartily thank for talking with me. I conducted a telephone interview with Kendrick on 29 December 1991 and conversed with Clifton in Santa Cruz, California, in spring 1991. All information about them not otherwise ascribed comes from these exchanges.

2. Lucille Clifton's first four volumes of poetry—good times (1969), good news about the earth (1972), an ordinary woman (1974), and two-headed woman (1980)—are collected in good woman: poems and a memoir, 1969-1980 (1987a).