Authors: Martin Duberman
In retrospect, it wasn’t the sound
Of my mother crying that hurt most,
It was the sound of my father leaving
His marriage, his house, his familiars.
In the debris of ruptured bloodlines,
In the domestic violence of our families,
In the turbulence we call love was bred
The possibility of my dysfunction, and yours.
I tell you of the hatred
That seized the boyhoods
Of my brother and me,
How we fought violently in public,
Drawing blood as if it would
Allow us to see
What was wrong with it,
With him, with me . . .
As a youngster, Essex spent summers with his maternal grandmother, “Miss Emily”—for whom he felt “pure love”—at her home in Columbia, South Carolina. Her late husband had owned a small restaurant in town, but because it attracted a “risqué” crowd it had been declared off-limits to Mantalene and her siblings—except to deliver the peach cobblers Miss Emily made at home (though the kids would sneak by after school for lemonade or soda pop). Among other things, Miss Emily taught Essex to cook and praised him for turning out food that reminded her of her husband’s.
As a growing boy, Essex wasn’t inclined toward athletics: “In the black neighborhood I came from, there was an emphasis on being able to play basketball or football. I, instead, was attracted to gymnastics because of the way the body looked. But I knew instinctively that if I had said, ‘I want to be a gymnast,’ among the fellas I ran with I would have been labeled a sissy.” Essex’s tight, slender frame never grew much beyond five feet six inches. As he later put it, “I was the smallest of the fellas that I ran with when I was growing up. When you’re the smallest, you absorb the blows of other people trying to be ‘manly.’ I guess it’s an awful fact of adolescence. That drove me to writing, I think.”
But though small, Essex was a handsome boy, with a symmetrical face marked by intense, searching eyes and an engulfing smile when he chose to bestow it. His soft, caressing voice could also, especially when speaking on serious matters, ring with passionate conviction. He began writing poetry at age fourteen, while still in high school: “After dinner I would wind up going back to my room and writing in my notebook. I didn’t realize I was writing poetry. I was just writing about the events and thoughts of my day.” But poetry was from the beginning his most congenial medium, though he would later try his
hand at a novel, and some of his adult essays would profoundly influence his generation of black writers.
I was fortunate enough when researching this book to discover a batch of some fifty of Essex’s unpublished early poems (mostly from 1974– 75, during his seventeenth and eighteenth years), which he bundled together under the rubric “Talking with a Friend . . .” The disarmingly casual title was aptly chosen, for though these first efforts have autobiographical value, Essex made scant claim for their literary merit and never included any of them in the chapbooks he began to publish in 1982 at age twenty-five. He even entitled the first poem in the batch “Act I”:
like a baby realizing it has legs to walk with
like a bird realizing its need to spread its wings and fly
so in act I I have filled a need
which in the beginning was only the need to
let thoughts, ideas, and my feelings
come forth, and speak
the language of 17 years of living
In another poem in the series, he spelled out why he’d felt the need this early to turn to verse:
The essence of these poems
is the me
locked inside of me
trying to express
the turmoil
sometimes felt within
sometimes hard to express
but always holding
meaning
In one of these poems, dated May 25, 1974, Essex begins to convey the “differentness” he felt from most other young men, and the value he placed on it:
I cry sometimes
knowing it won’t take nothing away from my blossoming
manhood
You cry don’t you
or
are you just another
one of those
uptight and totally in control
of my emotions type of people
who wouldn’t be able to cope
with themselves
if any emotion was shown . . .
and sometimes
I cry
for you, too . . .
As a teenager, Essex continued to make other cherished self-discoveries:
Walk alone
little boy
never move with
the maddening crowds
Never forget
where you came from
because no one else
ever will . . .
Walk alone little boy
tomorrow
you’ll be a man
In some of the later poems in the series, the maturing Essex reflects back with tender regret on certain aspects of his childhood:
when I was a child, I walked in the woods
on hot July afternoons,
that were cool and dark,
holding secrets,
which sent slight chills up my spine,
when I knew that I would never know
of them completely.
taking mother nature’s children,
like the birds that never sang for me,
and the turtles that always stayed in their shells,
and frogs that croaked in disgust at my probing
fingers,
. . . and soft brown baby rabbits I had found
died,
because my hands and my love was not gentle enough.
. . . crying I ran home to my mother
whose hands were gentle enough love warm
enough to calm my broken heart.
I didn’t know they needed more then I could
give them so that they could live.
In a piece Essex entitled “A Woman Our Mother We Love You . . .” he expressed the lifelong devotion he felt for his mother, the family peacemaker, in lines amply, if awkwardly, expressive:
And you know that whenever we’ve found the
heat in the kitchen too hot, to handle
we’ve come back into the living room
where you are, so that you could help us
sort out, the experience, feeling, or whatever
it was that we confronted on life’s battlefield
and with all of that,
you also give us the encouragement to go back
and try again
Yet Essex’s deeply religious mother, Mantalene, would hardly have been pleased with the January 12, 1975, poem he wrote about church-going:
and the preacher asks the smartly dressed
HOLY ladies
to pass the basket
and give/pleas [
sic
] give
if only a dime/but a dollar
let your SOUL be cleansed
for a dime????????????????
Its for the church
he takes ¾ of what they give
and puts it in a saving account, in his name
the name of the Lord
who likes those who give
so that others may receive . . .
The hurt and disappointment that Essex experienced at the hands of his father is the likely subject of the poignant poem he dated February 23, 1974:
You built my hopes up high
knowing that you wouldn’t
be at the bottom to catch them
when they fell
You promised you would be there
whenever I needed you
but you never came
You promised me I wouldn’t be hurt by you
but the pain is still here
because
you and your promises are gone
The simmering anger that Essex felt for anyone—perhaps including his father—who dared to mock his dreams comes out strongly in the poem he entitled “Revenge,” dated January 21, 1975:
Step on my dreams, and I’ll break your legs
and feet into pieces which will never, ever
fit together again,
You will be crippled.
call me names, and I will still your mind,
Busting it in half with a brick,
which has your name signed on it,