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A Hook Up Haiku Nineteen Seventy: "Brother be, I'll sister thee," Maya sang to me.
(The Loss is Huge, Huger than the Leap of Fate she took to co-invent her place on the planet. But that's a whole nother chapter for a whole nother tome. It suffices to say, simply & Hugely: Maya's gone.)
She was 41. I was 32. It was the fall of 1970. Sacramento (ca) City College. (We'd exchanged glances and nods at "cause"-inflected rallies, arts events and sundry moments in the late Sixties. But whether in New York or Los Angeles, no other "moment" would be like this one.)
Her exact words were:
"Eugene, be my brother forever!"
A tall order from a tall woman, it came during our first full contact. Right after Maya Angelou had slung her songified language at - and plied to - an sro throng for more than an hour. Initially I was smacked aback by this uncaged bird, this leggy goddess, this poet, actress, dancer, and former cast member of Porgy and Bess and - with James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Cicely Tyson, et al - the New York production of Genet's The Blacks. But I quickly readied for her request-into-perpetuity, thinking, "brother?" "forever?" ... Shiddddd... nuttin but sumpn to do. After all, hadn't I just done time - 6o's-style - in East St. Louis (aka "East Boogie"), Illinois? Followed by a year's stop-off at Oberlin College (Ohio) as writer-in-residence, where I'd met poets Russell Atkins, Norman Jordan and James Kilgore in nearby Cleveland? And Calvin Hernton - who would replace me at Oberlin, and later date Angelou in the 1980s? Hadn't I, among other Black Arts Movement (bam) self-assignments, spent the last years of the '60s frequently delivering elegiac/eulogistic poems and polemics for fallen warriors, many felled under questionable circumstances? (And when there was even a fraction of an iota of a suspicion about causes of the "fall" of one of our comrades - e.g., Henry Dumas (1934-1968) - hadn't we chalked it up to "healthy paranoia"?) Hadn't I - as a faculty member at Southern Illinois University's Experiment in Higher Education in East St. Louis - worked with colleagues, artists and students like Dumas, Katherine Dunham, Edward Crosby, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Jackson,...