SOURCE: "'A Laying on of Hands': Transcending the City in Ntozake's Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf," in Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Susan Merrill Squier, University of Tennessee Press, 1984, pp. 230-248.

Ntozake Shange's choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, presents the paradox of the modern American city as a place where black women experience the trauma of urban life, yet find the strength to transcend the pain.¹ The women depicted by Shange become physically and spiritually whole, thus free, through the psychic/psychological healing power that resides in the ancient, fundamentally religious act called "the laying on of hands." The believer "knows" that touch can heal if the one who touches is empowered by God; thus, touching stabilizes a person physically while freeing the troubled soul to soar spiritually.

Shange uses the physically and morally desolate cityscape as a backdrop before which to reveal her spiritual vision of female strength and survival. In this respect, therefore, colored girls differs from the legion of literary works that depict the lives of urban Afro-Americans.² She neither denies nor romanticizes urban black experiences: the choreopoem graphically describes the complex ways in which the rape victim is further victimized by the "authorities"; it reveals the loneliness and guilt of the woman who decides to have an abortion; it details the betrayal women continue to experience in their relationships with men.³

While none of these problems is uniquely urban, they are exacerbated by the human estrangements that characterize city life. But Ntozake Shange does have a larger vision. One might think of this vision in terms of two concentric circles, with the outer circle temporarily more powerful than the other. The geographical and psychological "settings" represent one circle; the other is a fragile circle promising transcendence. The external circle is clearly discernible from the beginning; the internal is revealed slowly, growing in strength and intensity until it is the dominant one at the end. The second circle, at first a figurative one, becomes a visible, magic enclosure of women who, in joining hands, bless and heal one another while naming their own empowering female god.

Though the presence of the women in the cities cited by Shange may be a matter of exigency, the question of how to find and maintain hope in the face of despair is a crucial one. In spite of the dichotomies established between country and city and though much is made of the romance of country life, humankind has relentlessly gravitated to biblical, literary, and historical cities, the problems and pitfalls notwithstanding. To substitute the word "metropolis" for "city" sheds some light on what seems to be the primal search of all people for a centered, balanced existence. This partial explanation is valid because cities are geographically contained or "centered" entities, as opposed to the random "layout" of the country. Thus, two important ideas surface immediately from the notion of the city as a "contained entity." Paul Tillich, the theologian, offers both: the city as a "centralizing and inclusive place" and the city as a place that accepts both the "strange and the familiar."⁴

First, Tillich, in discussing the "centralizing and inclusive" nature of the city which, he says "influences the character of man's (emphasis mine) spiritual creativity," suggests that

we may take our point of departure from the Greek word metropolis, signifying the mother or central city. Everything that exists has the power to be only insofar as it is centered. This is especially true of human personalities and social groups. The power of being, often called vitality, increases in proportion to the degree of diversity which is united at a center. Therefore, man has more power of being than any animal, and a spiritual man has greater vitality than a man with an underdeveloped spirituality….

In applying this ontology of the metropolis to the spiritual life of man, we find that the big city has two functions. It serves in a centralizing capacity and also in an including capacity, and each is dependent upon the other.⁵

According to Tillich, a "metropolis … is a center city. It is likewise an including city. It includes everything of which it is the center, and encompasses diversity and freedom of individual creativity and competition."⁶

Tillich uses the word "mother" to identify the genesis of the city, but the city he describes, paradoxically, is masculine.⁷ It is an idealized, romanticized, theoretical place where men interact, where ideas flow, where creativity flourishes, and where competition works for the good of all. This vision of the city is one which supports equality of aspiration, mobility of action, and freedom of community that women, in fact, have never known. Tillich and Shange are diametrically opposed to one another in their interpretations of the city; I shall discuss later the ways in which Tillich's idealized city is transformed by Ntozake Shange into a more realistic image. Her poem, "i usedta live in the world," is the psychological turning point in the play and is most indicative of her different view.⁸

"i usedta live in the world" is set in Harlem, the black city within New York City, which figures in Afro-American literature as "Mecca," "the City of Refuge," and in current vernacular as the "Big Apple."⁹ However, Harlem has not lived up to its promise; thus it is no surprise that one of the most powerful poems in for colored girls is located there.

The woman in blue compares the vastness of her former life in the "world" to life in Harlem where her "universe is now six blocks."

          i usedta live in the world
          then i moved to HARLEM
          & my universe is now six blocks
 
          when i walked in the pacific
          i imagined waters ancient from accra/tunis
          cleansin me/feedin me
          now my ankles are coated in grey filth
          from the puddle neath the hydrant
 
          my oceans were life
          what waters i have here sit stagnant
          circlin ol men's bodies
          shit & broken lil whiskey bottles
          left to make me bleed. (28)

She juxtaposes the memory of wading in the Pacific and being washed and nurtured to the filthy water running in the city gutter. The "oceans" were life to her, which suggests the religious reading of the ocean as "Source" or God.¹⁰ In contrast, the city water, instead of cleansing, holds suspended whiskey bottles whose jagged edges threaten her life. The stagnant water also symbolically holds suspended the bodies of old men—the winos, the "flotsam and jetsam" of city humanity. These men and the water circling them form part of the gross external circle mentioned above. They are the reasons why the spiritual self/circle is such a fragile entity, for it is impossible at this point to deal with this self in the face of the threat to basic survival; the broken bottles in the hands of these men are potential murder weapons.

The poem continues, revealing "a tunnel with a train// i can ride any where// remaining a stranger" (29). The image of the tunnel/ train simultaneously suggests two meanings: the momentary enclosure necessary to arrive at a "larger" destiny/destination and the ultimate enclosure of estrangement which is the life of the stranger in the city. The city subways do reach destinations and one can "ride" them "anywhere," but, in fact, the lady in blue "rides" the subway and finds herself trapped by a twelve-year-old boy who makes sexual advances. She responds,

           NO MAN YA CANT GO WIT ME/I DON'T EVEN
           KNOW YOU/ NO/ I DON'T WANNA KISS YOU/
           YOU AINT BUT 12 YRS OLD/ NO MAN/ PLEASE
           PLEASE PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE/ TOMORROW/ YEAH/ (29)

Her hysterical response and the extorted promise of a meeting tomorrow capture the fear women in the city have for their lives. Granted that the boy may not be a fully grown sexual being, but he most likely possesses a gun or a knife, clearly approved extensions of male sexuality and power. The ambiguous words, "NO/ PLEASE/ I CAN'T USE IT," suggest that this neophyte of a man, having been temporarily stalled, attempts to give or sell some trinket to the woman. This offer further belittles and objectifies the woman, who mourns the loss of her freedom metaphorically rendered in her "imagined waters." Commenting on her current life, she says, "i come in at dusk// stay close to the curb," clearly common-sense tactics for survival in the city.

The twelve-year-old on the subway becomes an urban "everyman" whose violence is contained by the "tunnel" image now suggested in the "straight up brick walls" of the city tenements. The "young man fulla his power" emerges in relief against the limp, powerless "women hangin outta windows//like ol silk stockings." The lady in blue continues:¹¹

           wdnt be good
           not good at all
           to meet a tall short black brown young man fulla his power
           in the dark
           in my universe of six blocks
           straight up brick walls
           women hangin outta windows
           like of silk stockings. (29)

The helter-skelter, impersonally violent life in Harlem is compared to a more gentle existence when:

    I usedta live in the world
    really be in the world
    free & sweet talkin
    good morning & thank-you & nice day. (30)

The poem concludes, and the woman, no longer trusting, courteous, outgoing, reveals that her six-block universe is a cruel, hopeless, inhuman dead end, a closed tunnel ending the promise of freedom in the city. Life in Harlem is a cruel hoax:

          i cant be nice to nobody
          nice is such a rip-off
          reglar beauty & a smile in the street
          is just a set-up
 
          i usedta be in the world
          a woman in the world
          i hadda right to the world
          then i moved to harlem
          for the set-up
          a universe
          six blocks of cruelty
          piled up on itself
          a tunnel
          closin (30-31)

The city described by Shange offers none of the characteristics idealized by Tillich. Rather than encompass diversity, it reflects the fear of racial and sexual diversity. "Individual creativity" is perverted into desperate schemes for survival. "Competition" becomes the "dog-eat-dog" syndrome, rather than the mythologized earn-and-share, secular spirituality of the marketplace. Few can discover a spiritual center in this environment. For Shange, the city must be demystified and demythologized so that the price of human survival there can be truly estimated. The paradox is that the women embody the essence of the metropolis, even though they (as black women) are doubly absent from the "defining" language.

Paul Tillich's second point is that the metropolis supports both the strange and the familiar:

The anti-provincial experience furnished by the metropolis is typified by encounters with that which is strange. Meeting the strange can have two consequences. It can produce hate against the strange, and usually against the stranger, because its existence threatens the self-certainty of the familiar. Or it can afford the courage to question the familiar. In the metropolis, it is impossible to remove the strange and the stranger, because every neighbor is mostly a stranger. Thus the second alternative of questioning the familiar ordinarily prevails….

Since the strange leads to questions and undermines familiar tradition, it serves to elevate reason to ultimate significance. If all traditions are questionable, nothing but reason is left as the way to new spiritual content. There lies the connection between the metropolis and critical rationality—between the metropolis and the intelligentsia as a social group. The importance of the encounter with the strange for all forms of the spiritual life cannot be overestimated.¹²

For Tillich, the "strange" and the "familiar" are separate forces that collide with one another, providing the change necessary for a dynamic spiritual life. For Ntozake Shange, the strange and the familiar are the double face of a single entity colliding with itself and with its societal counterpart. The strange/stranger is housed within the individual self and in the neighbor next door; the "familiar" has an unrecognizable "face." The orderly process by which "the strange leads to questions and undermines familiar tradition" and finally elevates "reason to ultimate significance" is absent, for, as Shange shows, the path to spiritual transcendence for the urban dispossessed is a decidedly irrational one.

The family is the traditional, familiar entity which provides the sanctuary from which the strange is questioned. Contrary to form, Shange's "family" revealed in "a nite with beau willie brown," shows how the strange and the familiar coexist as one. For example, violence is at once "strange" and "familiar," as are the ignorance, poverty, and promiscuity that preclude any possibility of Willie and his "wife," Crystal, belonging to Tillich's "intelligentsia." Willie and Crystal are the "underside," the "sewer" side of the metropolis.

"a nite with beau willie brown" is set geographically in the prototypical ghetto (Harlem is suggested to me) and psychologically in Vietnam, whereas "i usedta live in the world" is split between the geographical Harlem and a psychological place on the Pacific Ocean. The mounting tension in the play as a whole climaxes in "beau willie" because there are no pleasant mythic memories (as in the "imagined waters" of the Pacific); there are only the nightmare memories of Vietnam. Vietnam, in this context, clearly embodies the strange and the familiar simultaneously: a strange place and people, but familiar violence. The madness at the core of America is reflected in the Vietnam experience and in the fact that Beau Willie is "shellshocked" long before he reaches Vietnam. He is a young version of the old men in "i usedta live in the world." They are static, trapped in stagnant water, and Willie is like Fred Daniels in Richard Wright's short story, "The Man Who Lived Underground," who is almost swept away by the torrent of sewer water into which he has dropped while running from the police.¹³ One knows instinctively that Willie will not live long enough to grow static, for the aftermath of Vietnam finds him speeding to destruction. Beau Willie is the perennial stranger in American life for whom the familiar only provides additional trauma.

Tillich's familiar seems obvious in the family structure represented by Willie, Crystal, and their children Naomi Kenya and Kwame Beau Willie Brown. But Shange creates a monster in Beau Willie. He is hardly the comfortable image of the next-door-neighbor-as-stranger. Willie is ruined by the war experience, which is clearly the last in a series of psychological events that have crippled him. He is the dominant figure in the poem, but he is bound to his woman Crystal. He is a dope addict; he is paranoid. The lady in red speaks for him:

there was no air/the sheets made ripples under his body like crumpled paper napkins in a summer park/ & lil specks of somethin from tween his toes or the biscuits from the day before ran in the sweat that tucked the sheet into his limbs like he was an ol frozen bundle of chicken/ & he'd get up to make coffee, drink wine, drink water/he wished one of his friends who knew where he waz wd come by with some blow or some shit/ anythin/ there was no air/ he'd see the spotlights in the alleyways downstairs movin in the air/ cross his wall over his face/ & get under the covers & wait for an all clear or till he cd hear traffic again/ (43-44)

The words "there was no air" suggest that Willie's external and internal environment are closing in on him. Both are hostile elements because he is shell-shocked from his war experience and reacts to his urban world as if he were still under fire, as he clearly is. He is obsessed with Crystal who has been

           his girl since she waz thirteen/ when he caught her
           on the stairway/
 
           he came home crazy as hell/he tried to get veterans benefits
           to go to school & they kept right on puttin him in
           remedial classes/ he cdnt read wortha damn/ so beau
           cused the teachers of holdin him back & got himself
           a gypsy cab to drive/ but his cab kept breakin
           down/ & the cops was always messin with him/ plus not
     getting much bread/
 
           & crystal went & got pregnant again/ beau most beat
           her to death when she tol him/ (44)

Like Richard Wright's Fred Daniels, Willie is harassed by the police. His attempt to make a living driving a cab backfires. He has no money. As I mentioned above, he is the perennial stranger; his city is the cruel, demeaning world of social ignorance, illiteracy, promiscuity, and unemployment.

Beau Willie's madness increases as the poem progresses. His "war" is complicated and Crystal is the object of his anger and hostility because her ambivalence about marrying him calls his manhood into question. For Beau, Crystal is clearly crazy because

                                 … he just wanted
     to marry her/ that's what/he wanted to marry
             her/ &
     have a family/ but the bitch was crazy/ beau
             willie
     waz sittin in this hotel in his drawers drinkin
     coffee & wine in the heat of the day spillin shit all
     over hisself/laughin/bout how he was gonna
             get crystal
     to take him back/ & let him be a man in the
             house/ & she
     wdnt even have to go to work no more/he got dressed
     all up in his ivory shirt & checkered pants to go see
     crystal & get this mess all cleared up/
     he knocked on the door to crystal's rooms/ & she
     didn't answer/ he beat on the door & crystal & naomi
     started cryin/ beau gotta shoutin again how he wanted
     to marry her/ & waz she always gonna be a whore/ or
     did she wanna a husband/ (46)

The poem comes to a monstrous end as Beau breaks down the door and pleads with Crystal for another chance, coaxing her to let him hold the children. Using them as hostages and holding them out of the fifth story window, Beau extorts the promise of marriage from Crystal. He urges her to "say to alla the neighbors// you gonna marry me/" (48), but she is too stunned to speak above a whisper:¹⁴

     i stood by beau in the window/ with naomi reachin
     for me/ kwame screaming mommy mommy from the fifth
     story/ but i cd only whisper/ & he dropped em (48)

Though Willie is the focus of the poem, the story is, in fact, Crystal's story. Shange uses the portrait of male violence to comment on the ways in which women are robbed of life. Willie's monstrous act strips Crystal of her identity as a woman and a mother. Just as Willie is an extension of the twelve-year-old boy, she is truly the sister of the woman who tells her story in "i usedta live in the world." She is also the symbolic sister of all the women who speak in and identify with the play. The extremity of her life mirrors the worst that can happen to a woman's dreams and aspirations. Through Crystal's story Shange reveals the inner circle mentioned above. Having broken down the city and its female inhabitants to their most elemental level, and, having redefined the conventional interpretations of the strange and the familiar offered by Tillich, Shange re-creates a picture more faithful to the irrational forces that have traditionally shaped female lives and female spirituality.

The name Crystal is interesting, for Willie is truly addicted to her as if she were indeed heroin. He cannot live with or without her and what should be the sanctuary of a love relationship instead "inspires" him to brutality. On the other hand, Crystal's name suggests the clarity and purity of the vision of the city of God:

Then he showed me the river of the water of life, sparkling like crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the city's streets.¹⁵

To understand the dual role that Crystal plays is to understand the quantum leap from "a nite with beau willie brown" to the last poem, "a layin on of hands," for her reality is grounded both in the gross world of Willie and the ghetto and in the spiritual vision of the women she represents. Her tragedy insures the transcendence of the women for her tears are like the waters of the biblical river.

The fragile inner circle that represents the spiritual is first apparent in the title and is alluded to throughout the choreopoem. The promise of transition from despair to hope is revealed in the words of lady in brown, "& this is for colored girls who have considered suicide// but moved to the ends of their own rainbows" (3). The first "community" mentioned in the play is one composed of "colored girls who have considered suicide." Suicide, whether physical, psychological, or spiritual, is a dominant factor in modern life; therefore, it is significant that this is the point around which the "new" community is rebuilt, for gathering together to deny suicide is a life-affirming, spiritual act. Shange says, "One day I was driving home after a class, and I saw a huge rainbow over Oakland. I realized that women could survive if we decide that we have as much right and as much purpose for being here as the air and mountains do."¹⁶ Preparation for the "layin on of hands" and the discovery of God at the end of the play begins here. Women should have the freedom to live and must claim it. The rainbow suggests the mythic covenant between God and Noah, symbolizing hope and life; it foreshadows the end when the declaration, "i found god in myself," explains why the "rainbow is enuf."

To claim the right "to be" is to confront antilife forces. This self-affirmation is the first step toward spiritual affirmation. The rainbow represents the promise of a whole life, and Shange reveals her unique vision, for she draws a new covenant when she alters the gender of God, finding "her" in self, and declaring love for "her." This "mother" god will certainly heal her battered daughters. For this reason, too, Crystal's loss of her children is significant; the rules of patriarchy which allow mother and children to be held hostage must be rewritten.¹⁷

The sisterhood revealed at the conclusion of the play is foreshadowed in several poems about stunted male/female relationships. The poem, "pyramid," discusses the competitiveness of dating in which women are pitted against one another—primarily because men are in short supply. The man in "pyramid" "plays the field," thereby compromising the friendships of three women, but the poem ends on a positive note as the women console one another:

          she held her head on her lap
          the laps of her sisters soakin up tears
          each understandin how much love stood between them
          how much love between them
          love between them
          love like sisters (33)

Here the women affirm the power of touch ("she held her head on her lap") and the power of sisterly love. The ambiguous use of the pronoun "her" in the first line addresses the merger of the individual woman into collective "woman," whose psyche cannot be divided by competition.

The lady in orange turns her love song into a "requiem" for her old self because she can no longer avoid her own face; she needs to "die" to be "reborn" into spiritual life and to claim her own identity:

          so this is a requium for myself/ cuz i
          have died in a real way/ not wid aqua coffins & du-wop cadillacs/
          i used to joke abt when i waz messin round/ but a real dead
          lovin is here for you now/ cuz i don't know anymore/ how
          to avoid my own face wet with my tears/ cuz i had convinced
          myself colored girls had no right to sorrow/ & i lived
          & loved that way & kept sorrow on the curb/ allegedly
          for you/but i did it for myself/
          i cdnt stand it
          i cdnt stand being sorry & colored at the same time
          it's so redundant in the modern world (34)

In "no more love poems #3," the lady in blue deals with the accusation that black women are too emotional:

          we deal wit emotion too much
          so why don't we go on ahead & be white then/…
 
          I'll find a way to make myself
          come without you/ no fingers or other objects just thot
          which isnt spiritual evolution cuz its empty & godliness
          is plenty ripe & fertile/ (35)

The definition of godliness as "plenty ripe & fertile" is a crucial turning point in female consciousness. Shange here addresses the central contradiction in Tillich's identification of the metropolis as "mother or central city," but defining its primary function as the repository of reason, when reason is the one attribute women are accused of lacking. The fecundity of women's emotions with their life-giving and life-sustaining properties is juxtaposed to "thot (though)// which isn't spiritual evolution cuz its empty." The words "plenty ripe & fertile" echo at the end of the play, for the bonding of the women suggests the female fertility cults of old.

In "no more love poems #4," the lady in yellow makes the essential link between worldly and spiritual love:

          but bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical
          dilemma/ i havent conquered yet/ do you see the point
          my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of
          soul & gender/ my love is too delicate to have thrown
          back on my face (36)

At the end of these poems, the ladies celebrate the beauty and energy of their love, lifting it above romantic trivialization. To disavow the "separation of// soul & gender" prefigures the female god, both as human woman claiming her place and as "god the mother." Of the many lines the women sing to describe the significance of their love, the most telling is chanted by the lady in purple: "my love is too sanctified to have thrown back on my face" (36), which places absolute value on human love and prefigures the sanctified holy love implicit in the laying on of hands.

Crystal, then, is the woman whose specific tragedy is an adumbration of all female tragedy. She is the victim who is overwhelmed, at least momentarily, by the fury of the madman. Through Crystal, each woman discovers the hope in herself, with "all the gods comin into me// laying me open to myself" (49). Each woman now understands what the lady in red means when she says "i waz missin somethin" (49). The lady in blue declares that what is missing is "not a man" (50). And the lady in purple is clear that it is neither her mother, nor motherhood that is missing:

          not my mama/ holdin me tight/ sayin
          I'm always gonna be her girl
          not a layin on of bosom & womb
          a layin on of hands
          the holiness of myself released (50)

The lady in red considers suicide:

          I sat up one night walkin a boardin house
          screaming/ cryin/ the ghost of another woman
          who waz missin what i was missin
          i wanted to jump outta my bones
          & be done wit myself
          leave me alone
          & go on in the wind
          it was too much (50)

She is split into two beings, but this confrontation with self (strange and the familiar) is the point at which healing and renewal begins:

          i fell into a numbness
          til the only tree i cd see
          took me up in her branches
          held me in the breeze
          made me dawn dew
          that chill at daybreak
          the sun wrapped me up swingin rose light everywhere
          the sky laid over me like a million men
          i waz cold/ i waz burnin up/ a child
          & endlessly weavin garments for the moon
          wit my tears (50)

The concrete landscape of the city with its occasional tree—unremarkable, lone, bare, struggling for survival in an environment indifferent or hostile to it—unfolds here. The lady in red "fell into a numbness" that, paradoxically, is relieved through the life-giving properties of the tree. Adrienne Rich suggests that the tree "is a female symbol," and is sacred.¹⁸ Shange's tree is the sacred "mother," and her branches loving, cradling arms. The tree connects symbolically with Crystal as the final arbiter for the women, an idea that is enhanced by these words from Revelation, "On either side of the river stood a tree of life …, the leaves of the tree[s] serve for the healing of nations" (22:2).

The sun embraces the lady in red and "the sky laid over [her] like a million men." Shange alludes to the classical notion of the sky as male principle and the break with "earthly" men makes realignment with nature's balance possible. Through the images of hot and cold, she re-creates the fever associated with childhood, and prepares the way for rebirth. Female affinity and empathy with the moon are suggested in the image of one "endlessly weavin garments for the moon// with my tears." All the cosmic forces come together here as a unifying and healing whole.

The lines from the end of "no more love poems #4" provide a context for the discovery of God. The lady in yellow says:

                        do you see the point
          my spirit is too ancient to understand the
               separation of
          soul & gender/ (36)

These lines suggest that body (gender) and soul cannot be separated; thus the woman knows wholeness. The final words of the lady in red contain the triumph of all the women, for she is finally and fully centered as she says, "i found god in myself/ & i loved her fiercely." The identification of God as female is one of the most problematic points in the play, for it redefines the image of God. But Shange truly understands what it means to be created in the image of God, for discovery of self is discovery of God. This is a declaration of freedom from a patriarchial god who supports the men from whom the women have split.

The poem, "a layin on of hands," suggests a specially formed community which has grown from the brokenness of life in the city. Crystal reminds me of Revelation, but the connection between her transcendence and that found in colored girls is that Shange's triumphant city is not the product of an apocalyptic vision, but is the result of new sight, for the physical metropolis remains unchanged. As Denise Levertov in her poem, "City Psalm," says,

          Nothing was changed, all was revealed otherwise;
          not that horror was not, not that the killings did not continue,
          not that I thought there was to be no more despair,
          but that as if transparent all disclosed
          an otherness that was blesséd, that was bliss.
          I saw Paradise in the dust of the street.

¹⁹

Levertov's image of the "transparent all" echoes the moment of crystal purity, which is the moment of revelation that "disclosed/ an otherness. "It is "in the dust of the street" that Shange's women suffer and grow in knowledge of the "strangeness of the familiar." It is their immersion in this paradoxical reality which forces them to confront themselves and which prepares them to have a dynamic spiritual vision. The women simply could not have been reborn had they not been cleansed and bound together by these unique experiences. They are not ghouls, children of horror, the joke, animals, or crazy people. They no longer need "somebody/anybody" to sing their song. They are no longer scattered half-notes.²⁰ But they differ radically from the idealized city beings hypothesized by Tillich. Through the life-enhancing hope of the rainbow, they form a covenant with a woman-God. They are "new" and now sing their own "righteous gospel." The laying on of hands is validated in the "holiness of myself released" (50). The women enter into a tightly wrought circle, symbolic of their spiritual vision and their earthly solidarity. This is the second, "inner" circle mentioned above, which is in tension throughout the play with the external circle. Here, the power and meaning of the inner circle are fully revealed. And the lady in brown dedicates the moment:

          this is for colored girls who have considered
          suicide/but are movin to the ends of their own
          rainbows (51)

Notes

1. Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf (New York: Macmillan, 1977). All citations are from this edition and are given in the text parenthetically. Shange does not use punctuation in a conventional way. Thus, the double slash (//) is used in my text to indicate the end of line of poetry since Shange uses the single (/) throughout the choreopoem as a poetic device.

The term "choreopoem" is used in my text as a synonym for the word "play." This is Shange's word and is found on the title page of her book. It reflects Shange's intent that the play be understood as a choral recitation of poems upon which limited dramatic form has been imposed.

2. The cities have been repositories of promise for blacks migrating from rural to urban America. They have sought economic and political freedom, psychological and cultural autonomy. During the first two decades of the twentieth-century southern black people, seeking to escape white violence and economic disaster, migrated to the North. The traditional myth of opportunity in the North was enhanced by national preparations for World War I and the hope for employment in the emerging defense industries. The promise of safety and a better economic life is usually seized upon by analysts as the sole interest of the emigrating black masses, but Alain Locke, editor of the anthology The New Negro (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 6, suggests in the title essay that the black peasant was inspired by a newly emerging and more complex vision:

The tide of Negro migration, northward and cityward, is not to be fully explained as a blind flood started by the demands of war industry coupled with the shutting off of foreign migration, or by the pressure of poor crops coupled with increased social terrorism in certain sections of the South and Southwest. Neither labor demand, the boll-weevil nor the Ku Klux Klan is a basic factor, however contributory any or all of them may have been. The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions. With each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement toward the larger and more democratic chance—in the Negro's case a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern.

These migration patterns continued until the 1970s, when many black people, inspired by the gains of the civil rights movement, retraced the steps of their ancestors back to the South. However, since the original migrations were to the North, life in northern cities is the focus of many 20th-century Afro-American writers. Authors such as James Weldon Johnson. Rudolph Fisher, Wallace Thurman, Jessie Fauset, to name a few early writers of the decade, and more modern, perhaps better-known writers such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright. James Baldwin, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks depict the Afro-American urban experience.

3. The first two poems mentioned here are "latent rapists' [sic] (12-16), "abortion cycle #1" (16-17). Most of the poems in for colored girls deal in some way with betrayal, but this is the specific theme of "no assistance" (10), and "somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff" (39-41).

4. Paul J. Tillich, "The Metropolis: Centralizing and Inclusive," and "The Strange and the Familiar in the Metropolis," in The Metropolis in Modern Life, ed. Robert Moore Fisher (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 346-47. Shange identifies the "familiar" cities, but establishes the women as "strangers." For example, the characters in the play do not have "proper names," except in poems where she creates a story within a story; the women are "named" by the colors they wear, suggesting anonymity. They are placed outside the cities: the lady in red, "I'm outside baltimore"; the lady in blue, "I'm outside manhattan," etc.

5. Ibid., 346.

6. Ibid., 346-47.

7. Tillich's lalanguage is exclusively masculine. His central image is power; his primary example of power is the pope and the Roman Catholic Church.

8. The preceding poems interweave fascinating pictures of city landscape with the emerging consciousness of the women as they grow from late adolescence in, for example, "graduation nite" (4-7), to adult complexity in the poem entitled "one" (24-28), in which a lonely urban woman takes a stranger home to bed, but must finally face the fact that the chance encounter is not satisfying and that she is lonelier than ever at its conclusion.

9. A mentor to many of the young black artists flocking to Harlem in the twenties, described it as "one of the most beautiful and healthful sections of the city." He ended his commentary on Harlem with the following words:

I believe that the Negro's advantages and opportunities are greater in Harlem than in any other place in the country, and that Harlem will become the intellectual, the cultural, and the financial center for Negroes of the United States, and will exert a vital influence upon all Negro people.

James Weldon Johnson, "Harlem: The Culture Capital," in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 311. Johnson's words proved not to be prophetic. The promise of Harlem in the 1920s as a place where the urban dream of American blacks would come true failed and Harlem's prominence has eroded in the last two decades. It is interesting that Johnson's ideas are a secular echo of Tillich's and ironic that the diversity of the city described by Tillich is not fully realized as whites flee from areas into which black people move thereby compromising the vitality of place and creating ghettoes. Johnson's dream, therefore, cannot be realized because "the intellectual, the cultural, and the financial" are defined and controlled by white people, who remove these elements when they leave.

10. I am thinking, here, of the connection made by Jonathan Edwards, in his meditation number 77 on "Rivers" from Images or Shadows of Divine Things, "There is a wonderful analogy between what is seen in rivers, their gathering from innumerable small branches beginning at a great distance one from another in different regions … yet all gathering more and more together the nearer they come to their common end and ultimate issue, and all at length discharging themselves at one mouth into the same ocean. Here is livelily represented how all things tend to one, even to God, the boundless ocean" (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, I, ed. Gottesman, Holland, Kalstone, et al., [New York: Norton, 1979], 261).

11. In the stage directions, the other women silently enter here; their presence is a symbolic commentary on the universality of the problem.

12. Tillich, 347.

13. Richard Wright, "The Man Who Lived Underground," in Black Voices, ed. Abraham Chapman (New York: New American Library, 1968), 114-60. Shange's image of old men suspended in stagnant water is reminiscent of Wright's character who finds—literally and figuratively—all of life's potential amenities rotted or dead floating by in the sewer water. Just as I suggested that Willie and Crystal are the "sewer" side of the metropolis, so Fred Daniels's world is that of the sewer, a metaphorical commentary on the quality of Afro-American life in the city.

14. The starkness of Beau Willie's infanticide has led critics to accuse Ntozake Shange of hating men. It is my opinion that she graphically, but compassionately, depicts the inhumanity of a system that in its racist, biased indifference to life, stunts a man's aspirations, makes him a murderer, and reduces him to insanity. His time in Vietnam is the most important factor to consider in his treatment of Crystal and the children. This point is endorsed by one of the most powerful dramatic productions of the postwar Vietnam veteran's life. This play is Emily Mann's Still Life, in which Mark, the veteran, in talking of his projection of violence, identifies his wife, Cheryl, as the war casualty.

15. Revelation 22:1, New English Bible (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971). Crystal's name also suggests the paradox of experience for the Afro-American mother that is captured in Langston Hughes's poem, "Mother to Son," in Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology, ed. Kinnamon and Barksdale (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 518.

          Well, son. I'll tell you:
          Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
          It's had tacks in it,
          And splinters,
          And boards torn up,
          And places with no carpet on the floor—Bare.
          But all the time
          I'se been a-climbin' on,
          And reachin' landin's,
          And turnin' corners,
          And sometimes goin' in the dark
          Where there ain't been no light.
          So boy, don't you turn back.
          Don't you set down on the steps
          'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
          Don't you fall now—
          For I'se still goin', honey.
          I'se still climbin',
          And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

16. Carol P. Christ, Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest (Boston: Beacon, 1980), 99, as quoted from Ntozake Shange, for colored girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf (original Broadway cast recording) (New York: Buddha Records, 1976), jacket notes. One of the most sensitive, cogent, and pertinent discussions of the choreopoem appears in Carol Christ's essay, '"i found god in myself … & i loved her fiercely': Ntozake Shange." Christ's analysis of for colored girls stresses the processes of self-discovery, self-healing, and spiritual transcendence. In Christ's interpretation, the truth of the "colored girls'" growth into personhood and faith overshadows the bitter commentary and misinterpretation that characterize most criticism, which is that the play "trashes" black men, and reveals things about black people that would be better left unsaid or certainly not said in public. Christ, however, does not deal with the significance of the city in the play.

17. The basis for my thoughts on patriarchy comes from Adrienne Rich, "The Kingdom of the Fathers," in Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976), 56-83.

18. Ibid., 100.

19. Denise Levertov, "City Psalm," The Sorrow Dance (New York: New Directions, 1966), 72.

         The Killings continue, each second
         pain and misfortune extend themselves
         in the genetic chain, injustice is done knowingly, and the air
         bears the dust of decayed hopes,
         yet breathing those fumes, walking the thronged
         pavements among crippled lives, jackhammers
         raging, a parking lot painfully agleam
         in the May sun, I have seen
         not behind but within, within the
         dull grief, blown grit, hideous
         concrete facades, another grief, a gleam
         as of dew, an abode of mercy,
         have heard not behind but within noise
         a humming that drifted into a quiet smile.
         Nothing was changed, all was revealed otherwise;
         not that horror was not, not that the killings did not continue,
         not that I thought there was to be no more despair,
         but that as if transparent all disclosed
         an otherness that was blesséd, that was bliss.
         I saw Paradise in the dust of the street.

20. The images in these three sentences are taken from the first poem in for colored girls entitled, "dark phases" (1-2).