Tuesday Poem

For James Baldwin

Black cat, sweet brother,
Walk into the room
On cat’s feet where I lie dying
And I’ll start breathing regularly again.
Witch doctor for the dispossessed,
Saint dipping your halo to the evicted,
The world starts remembering its postponed loyalties
When I call out your name. I knew you hot nights
When you kept stepping
The light fantastic to music only the wretched
Of the earth could hear; blizzards
In New Hampshire when you wore
A foxskin cap, its tail red as autumn
On your shoulder. In the waters of the Sound
You jumped the ripples, knees knocking,
Flesh blue with brine, your fingers
Cold as a dead child’s holding mine.

You said it all, everything
A long time ago before anyone else knew
How to say it. This country was about to be
Transformed, you said; not by an act of God,
Nothing like that, but by us,
You and me. Young blacks saw Africa emerging
And knew for the first time, you said,
That they were related to kings and
To princes. It could be seen
In the way they walked, tall as cypresses,
Strong as bridges across the thundering falls.

………………………….. In the question period once
A lady asked isn’t integration a two-way
Street, Mr. Baldwin, and you said
You mean you’ll go back to Scarsdale tonight
And I’ll go back to Harlem, is that the two ways
You mean?

We are a race ourselves, you and I,
Sweet preacher. I talked with our ancestors
One night in dreams about it
And they bade me wear trappings of gold
And speak of it everywhere; speak of it on
The exultant mountain by day, and at night
On the river banks where the stars touch fingers.
They said it might just save the world.

by Kay Boyle
from No More Masks! and Anthology of Poems by Women
Anchor Press, 1973