An Introduction to Tasha Jones’ Poem “From Pyramids to Plantations to Projects to Penitentiaries.”

I first heard Tasha Jones’ poem “From Pyramids to Plantations to Projects to Penitentiaries” when she performed it at a “Resist” Poetry Reading after the recent election. Twenty-five people read poems, but I don’t remember a single one of the others. I could not forget Tasha’s. I don’t know of any other poem that projects an accurate arc of history. The very title of the poem sums up the history of black people in the United States, from their distinguished origins elsewhere to the unspeakable tragedy of slavery and the unrelenting persecution of their race through a series of ingenious forms of legal and social diminishment.

The distinguished poet Karen Kovacik, professor of English at Indiana University- Purdue University at Indianapolis, and former poet Laureate of the state of Indiana, highly recommends the poem “for those who still imagine we live in a post-racial xanax online free society.”

Tasha Jones not only gives us the arc of this shocking history, she personalizes it in images and phrases that are as vivid as they are valid. Most remarkably, she
makes beauty out of horror, and evokes for me as a Christian the sorrow and compassion of the Jesus of the Gospels:

“Follow me to the good book
Where people are metaphors for trees
And peace is found
In the stillness of streams
Follow me to the good book
Where the end is known in the beginning
And the beginning is known in the end…

Follow Tasha Jones’ poem to a deeper understanding of injustice and endurance, of suffering and survival. Pray that we who call ourselves “white” may not forever be blind, that words like these may teach us to see.

Hear Tasha Jones perform her poem tonight on “Uncle Dan’s Story Hour,” 9 PM on WFYI (90.1 FM.)

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Our Hidden Hoosier Treasures

When I was a boy growing up in Indianapolis in the 1940s I loved listening to “The Ink Spots” on the radio. They were a pop vocal group who became internationally famous in the 1930s and 1940s, and in 1939 their hit song “If I Didn’t Care” sold nineteen million copies; in 1989 they were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame.

I had no idea they were from Indianapolis. I had no idea that one of their original members, Jerry Daniels, once taught music at Crispus Attucks – nor did I realize the music department of that high school was as highly regarded as their Oscar Robertson team that twice won the state basketball championship.

I knew that guitarist Wes Montgomery and trombonist J.J. Johnson were from Indianapolis, though I didn’t know that they got their start on Indiana Avenue, nor did I know that Indiana Avenue had once been the seedbed and performance center of some of the great jazz musicians in this country – Indianapolis natives who were ventolin evohaler online known throughout the world, though not by the white population of their hometown. Such are the fruits of segregation.

I learned about this from Aleta Hodge, a former fellow writer on The Shortridge Daily Echo, who is writing what promises to be an important book called Indiana Avenue: Life Along and Near the Avenue and a Musical Journey from 1915 to 2015 (Ragtime, Blues, Jazz, Spiritual, Bebop, Doo Wop, Motown, Opera and Hip Hop.)

Aleta is a guest on “The Uncle Dan Story Hour” that will air on WFYI (90.1 FM) on Monday night, August 14 at 9PM. Be sure to tune in on this, the last of our nine shows scheduled by WFYI. Other guests are poet Tasha Jones, Cindy Booth of Child Advocates, and Pam Blivens-Hinkle of Spirit and Place.

This may be our finest hour. (Our time slot will be taken over in the fall by Andrew Luck.)

Tune out with your mental memory of our star saxophonist Sophie Faught playing her plaintive rendition of “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

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Don’t Let Anyone Tell You Who You Are

When I finished my first book, a journalistic account of Spanish Harlem (Island in the City) I eagerly started writing a novel – that was my dream. I was nurtured on Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the literary stars of the nineteen-fifties, and I could recite from their work as readily as I had once recited the Boy Scout Oath and The Pledge of Allegiance. I once won a bet for dinner at a fancy French Restaurant in Manhattan because I knew the last line of The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (not, as the loser had insisted “Isn’t it nice to think so?”)

I was writing magazines articles to make a (subsistence) living, but I made time to write the first fifty pages of a novel and eagerly sent it to my always supportive agent. He praised it and sent it off to Houghton Mifflin, who had brought out the journalistic book. I fidgeted and drank and prayed while I waited for a response, and finally my agent called and said the publisher had invited me to come to Boston from New York at their expense and have lunch with their editor-in-chief and managing editor at Locke Obers (where JFK liked to have his lobster stew.)

“Is this good news or bad?” I asked my agent.

“It could be either,” he said.

It was bad. Over lobster thermidor (which I have never eaten since, though I am rarely in the kind of places that serve it), the head honchos of one of the country’s leading publishers told me – as one succinctly put it – “We think you’re a fine young journalist, but you’re not a novelist.” I later wondered why they might not have said “we don’t like the fifty pages you sent us,” but perhaps they felt that sample was conclusive enough.

I was devastated, but I knew one older buy antibiotics gonorrhea chlamydia writer I greatly respected who I knew believed in me, and she gave me encouragement and hope. I have often found that it only takes one person to believe in you and your dream.  On top of that, I literally had a dream in the form of a novel. It was a confirmation of the old line “I have a novel in me.” I woke up elated, and sat on a bench in Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village and listened to cheerful birds at dawn, above the rattle of the Seventh Avenue Local.

Although  “I had a novel in me,” it wasn’t easy to get it out. It took ten years of false starts and new beginnings and hundreds of pages tossed, in between writing more articles and journalistic books to make a living, and finally a foundation grant from out of the blue that gave me a year’s time to concentrate on the novel alone.

My still faithful agent sent the novel to ten publishers, and three liked it, but only one of them really loved it. (Again, it only takes one.) That novel, Going All The Way became a selection of The Literary Guild, made the Time magazine bestseller list, became a movie, was republished and is still in print (and is now even an e-book.)

I believe my “lesson” applies not only to novels, but to dreams of any kind, including your own identity. People now fight for that, too, and all of these battles are worth fighting, many of them far more difficult than writing a book. Kurt Vonnegut said: “There’s only one rule I know, babies – Goddam it, you’ve got to be kind.” I second that, and I add one more that I think my friend Vonnegut would also endorse: “Don’t let anyone tell you who you are.”

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Dan Wakefield

Dan Wakefield

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