My memoir began emerging years before as I deepened my craft as a poet, unearthing the stories that needed to be told, in a Masters of Fine Arts writing program at Stonecoast at University of Southern Maine. This entry describes some of that process.

If the desire to be honest is greater than the desire to be good or bad”
Fritz Kunkel

Catherine tilts her head back and looks at me over the top of her reading glasses where we sit in a group of writers, crowded around a long table in an old summer house dining room. “You’re talking about the black woman Rena who cared for you when you were a little girl like she’s some old Aunt Jemima. Your poem talks all about how you loved her, and how good she was to you. You have got to remember, she was an employee and she was doing her job.  What’s missing in this poem is her.  Did you know anything about her?”

I am startled by my rising tears. I want to tell her she doesn’t understand. Rena cared about me. I was her special little girl. It wasn’t just a job.

Catherine speaks carefully, “It sounds like she was doing a really good job. But she didn’t love you. She was being paid.” Catherine suddenly stops speaking. She looks down at the table, before she lifts her eyes, weary and wet. “When I read your piece, I substituted in my mother’s name. You are writing about my mother. When she came home she was worn out from taking care of white children. She didn’t have anything left for us.”  Everyone else disappears; we are two women facing each other, looking into each other.

We are both in our mid-fifties, no make-up, our hair graying, hers long and braided close to her head, mine short and wavy. Catherine continues, “Don’t you see, when you went to see her as an old woman, you were still wanting, still looking for her to care for you. But you knew that. You heard the people on the street say, ‘What you doing here, white lady?’”

Was Catherine right? Was I justifying a visit to Rena, thinking she would want to see me all grown up. Even hearing the words I choose I hear the yearning of a child to be seen. Did I still want her to comfort me, want her warm voice to curl around me like it did when I was a girl? ‘Oh, chile, everythin’s gonna be alright.’  But when I came to visit Rena was an old woman, bent over with arthritis, on a porch swing with her great-grandchildren on the black side of town.  Thirty years after I left the village in Ohio, had I become another ‘nice’ white lady who had no idea about Rena’s life but who still wanted something from her?

Truth-telling, raw cut-to-the-bone truth-telling. This painful moment with Catherine, confronting myself, took place in the Writing about Race Workshop. The seminar leaders were the powerful writers and teachers, Tim Seibles, Patricia Smith, and Richard Hoffman, and our class discussions and writings were often charged and intense. That moment illustrates what became the highest priority in my writing — truth-telling. My mentors challenged me to focus on deeper levels of honesty in my writing at the same time as discovering the elements of craft to make my work more alive.

I had worked with Tim Seibles for the six months before the seminar. He’d told me to read the essay “A Mystifying Silence: Big and Black” by Major Jackson from American Poetry Review (Sept/Oct 2007) whose words electrified me and compelled a stream of writing:

In a country whose professed strength is best observed in its plurality of cultures, what seems odd to me (and this I find most appalling about contemporary American poetry) is the dearth of poems written by white poets that address racial issues, that chronicle our struggle as a democracy to find tranquility and harmony as a nation containing many nations. Why is this?         

The mystifying silence around race highlights white American poets’ unsettling and conspicuous unresponsiveness and ambivalence towards a very important aspect of social life in America.            

The next morning I woke up in the dark to a frigid January morning, shaken and stirred.  I went downstairs, stoked the woodstove, wrapped myself in a blanket and wrote ten pages of drafts and notes for poems that would consume the work of the next semester. I remembered the nights of the race riots in 1967. I remembered my black godparents and two best friends. I remembered when my liberal father pulled me out of school until I obeyed him and ended my relationship with a young black man. In exploring memoires of the small Ohio village where I’d grown up, the shadow of the plantation and the white man’s “right” hung over me like a pall.

Working with Tim Seibles, I read June Jordan’s gutsy poems to encourage boldness in writing about issues of race. Tim was rigorous on revision, compression, cutting and making my word choices more precise. He told me, build intensity and focus, until the poem “starts to resonate and throb.” He said, cut the lead in or explanation, “jump right in at the strong moment in the story.” He pointed out the primary underlying theme was showing the blindness of white privilege. He cautioned me.

We think we are finished with a poem too soon. Our culture is so much about distraction. It’s so easy to not go to the full depth. The struggle is to say what is often left unsaid. A good poem grabs you. You want to write poems crafted on the intensity of feeling that keeps you at the edge but still manage to keep the car on the road!

After receiving my last packet, Tim tried to reach me by phone because he was so excited by my child’s perspective on the race riots in 1967. He wanted to make sure I was reading James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. “His combination of intellectual precision and emotional honesty seems to be exactly what you’re after.” I studied Baldwin’s craft to begin to understand prose sentences. I was electrified by his short story “Going to Meet the Man,” and how the telling was intensified by his rapidly changing sentence lengths and voice, combined with precise details to build and sustain chilling tensions and stunning insights.

In the Writing about Race workshop, participants dared to cross lines and speak truths. Being in that class was like wearing truth detector glasses. When we saw our blind spots, we’d often erupt into riotous laughter. When three white women wrote of imagining having ‘brown’ babies with their black lovers. Patricia Smith responded, “That is romanticizing color! Who the hell thinks about their baby’s color as the first thing they mention?”

When we discussed my poem that started with the line my white father spoke: “I’m not a racist, but I never want you out as a couple, only in odd numbered groups.’ Catherine, said, “That is me you are describing! That is how I was with my kids. I was so afraid of my kids getting hurt I was on them all the time about ‘be careful, don’t trust those white people.’ My daughter went off to camp and wrote home so happy about all her new friends and that she was having such a good time. But at the end she wrote, PS. Don’t be angry mom, but they are white.’”

I laughed. “I thought only ‘nice’ white people said “I’m not a racist, but…!”

She laughed, “My mother also said, ‘no couples, only groups of friends when you go out.”

At the end of the workshop she told me, “Now that I know what you are trying to do, I can trust you, but when I read your poem about missing the sound of the black woman’s voice who raised you, I did not trust you as a writer.”  After the residency, Catherine and I kept writing to each other. The permission we’d given each other for truth-telling in the seminar continued. She felt something was off with my writing.

“It’s as if you are circling around what is the most important story to write.  I don’t think that important story is about the black woman who took care of you or any other black person.  I think it’s your father and the location of your mother during your most difficult times.  Those other stories about black people and your relationship to them are spin-offs.”

I felt sick when she said that. My father. I didn’t want to go near writing about him. I’d done years and years of therapy to deal with him. I didn’t want to feel that pain again. Catherine said, “That’s the story you have to write.”