IKnowWhytheCagedBirdSings - (EPUB全文下载)

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This book
is dedicated to
MY SON, GUY JOHNSON,
AND ALL THE STRONG BLACK BIRDS
OF PROMISE
who defy the odds and gods
and sing their songs
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank my mother
, VIVIAN BAXTER,
and my brother
, BAILEY JOHNSON,
who encouraged me to remember. Thanks to the
HARLEM WRITERS’ GUILD
for concern and to
JOHN O. KILLENS
who told me I could write. To
NANA KOBINA NKETSIA IV
who insisted that I must. Lasting gratitude to
GERARD PURCELL
who believed concretely and to
TONY D’AMATO
who understood. Thanks to
ABBEY LINCOLN ROACH
for naming my book. A final thanks to my editor at Random House
, ROBERT LOOMIS,
who gently prodded me back into the lost years.
“What you looking at me for?
I didn’t come to stay …”
I hadn’t so much forgot as I couldn’t bring myself to remember. Other things were more important.
“What you looking at me for?
I didn’t come to stay …”
Whether I could remember the rest of the poem or not was immaterial. The truth of the statement was like a wadded-up handkerchief, sopping wet in my fists, and the sooner they accepted it the quicker I could let my hands open and the air would cool my palms.
“What you looking at me for …?”
The children’s section of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was wiggling and giggling over my well-known forgetfulness.
The dress I wore was lavender taffeta, and each time I breathed it rustled, and now that I was sucking in air to breathe out shame it sounded like crepe paper on the back of hearses.
As I’d watched Momma put ruffles on the hem and cute little tucks around the waist, I knew that once I put it on I’d look like a movie star. (It was silk and that made up for the awful color.) I was going to look like one of the sweet little white girls who were everybody’s dream of what was right with the world. Hanging softly over the black Singer sewing machine, it looked like magic, and when people saw me wearing it they were going to run up to me and say, “Marguerite [sometimes it was ‘dear Marguerite’], forgive us, please, we didn’t know who you were,” and I would answer generously, “No, you couldn’t have known. Of course I forgive you.”
Just thinking about it made me go around with angel’s dust sprinkled over my face for days. But Easter’s early morning sun had shown the dress to be a plain ugly cut-down from a white woman’s once-was-purple throwaway. It was old-lady-long too, but it didn’t hide my skinny legs, which had been greased with Blue Seal Vaseline and powdered with the Arkansas red clay. The ............

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