Mom’s Mabley Plays a Word
Game
or How to
Get From Joke to Paid
Joke a laugh
from a tear
with this worn toothless grin.
Give a laugh to depression struck
folks separated by color and a balcony.
Poke some
fun at some broken folks.
Reset them like bones that ain’t knit right.
If they laughing it won’t hurt too bad
straighten what’s grown crooked.
Pole tax
like pole cats ain’t never come at you
straight or
mean nobody no good but
in a land set to be wrong
change can
come from talk, right?
Pale becomes
a starved body showing the world
it’s hunger. Men become pale when you
tell them they can’t make it in your bed
cause you quiver only in they dreams.
Pall sheets
covered them million heads
brought to God by the 1918 flu.
The same year my hunger for comedy
stopped me
from being an Aiken girl.
Pail of
reeking rags in crusty hands. A beggar’s money
is in the cleaning of scraps used to clean.
He chuckles
at my best funnings all day.
He earns the
nickel and my dollar tip.
Paid is
Charlie Chaplin turning tramp induced giggles
into $10,000 a week. Paid is Jackie Mabley
flipping an
old broad into a check that lasts
beyond needs, beyond the laughs.
Losing
Loretta Aiken
Moms
Mabley tells the mythology of her name
I left
Brevard , North Carolina for Cleveland .
Holy house
missionaries who took in
my brother
then me, led us to their church.
Was but 17
when vaudeville
strangled
godly hymns in my heart,
tore loose
raging laughter,
made my
troubles fall away
like an old
man’s hair.
By 1918, my
choices were to
live like my
dead parents,
sell what
some men stole years ago,
or turn
tricks on stage. Jokes
was my
magic. Turned the burning
of living
into money I could keep
but my
brother laid laws.
Flashing
lights for me meant
I couldn’t
keep my name.
Didn’t wanna
cause more shame to the Aiken
side of me
and besides a woman wasn’t meant
to keep what
she was born with no how.
Jack Mabley,
father of my Bonnie.
never gave
me the whole heart he promised
so why not
snatch his whole name.
Dressed in
my granny’s house coats, floppy hats,
cloppity
shoes I came to tell the serious
funny
stuff. At 20, I told truths mumbled by women
too old to
make a man swell with pride or desire.
Wearing the
fragile armor of age I won battles pretty girls
didn’t even
know they could fight.
Loretta was
a sweet girl with a sorrowful tale.
Jackie is a
woman with more possibilities
than a
mosquito in the Dismal Swamp
or a virgin
in a whorehouse.
Jack
Johnson Speeds to Death
Moms
Mabley ponders power
I knocked
out the notion of race supremacy
one
“great white hope” at a time.
Jack
Johnson
I followed
you from time I was barefoot
in Brevard.
When you were not a picture
but a punch
told by a radio announcer.
We heard you
punish each white boy.
Enlightening
each one to how race
can
determine how much you suffer in life.
Every Negro
in town high stepped
with
joy-tipped fear knowing your win
could loose
rebs into punctuating our yards
with crosses
fired by their blazing shame.
Birth of a
Nation was their an answer
to your
unquestionable might.
Don’t know
what you held in your gloves
but you
plowed and reaped power in darkness
for that
I’ll love you like you was my daddy-
like you
knocked out the sheriff
who decided
I was nothing but a little
dark thing
to pee and scream inside.
Yeah, White
women thorned your roses
but no
Colored woman need blues cut
deep enough
for a girl to die from.
I still
loves you, our enemies win if I don’t-
love you for
all the fighter man you were
and all the
man you’d never be.
Jet
Arrives with a Monster Inside
Moms
Mabley thinks of her own son
My Gregory
could have been you.
You were 14,
will never be more than 14.
That night
didn’t nobody cry out,
This boy
is 14! We are humans.
We don’t
beat death into kids.
I guess
somebody coulda but screams
of
righteousness get drowned by the
whispers of
demons. Oh Emmett!
We ain’t
human to them. We just leaves
made to
dangle and kick from branches of trees.
If justice
ain’t a bitch then I ain’t crying.
I weep a
mother’s tears over her never straightening
your tie at
your graduation or telling a woman
to go back
to you after you or she done acted the fool.
I weep as
rainbows dull to the shades of
your final
picture. You laying broken faced
your momma
stoic color everything I see.
What will
turns a mother cut short from mothering
into a maker
of change? Yeah, things changing but
I been told
I still have to do a show tonight.
Folks come
for me to douse their wounds with rage
fermented
sweet like Southern Comfort. I tip a
bottle to
the microphone for them who ain’t here.
With each
stitch I leave them with
I wonder if
my boy made it home
without a
cop, mob, crazed soul killing him.
I’m the
funniest woman in the world
cause I need
to laugh myself.
Watching
Mary Walk
Through
The Front Door
|
Upon Mary McLeod Bethune entering the White
House, when a white guard addressed her as
"auntie." She stopped and asked him in her
most earnest tone, "Which one of my brothers'
children are you?"
|
This friend
from the same southern nowheres
where I grew
into laughter
from the
soil of being ruint.
This
gorgeous dark cloud
called ugly,
dreaded bulldagger
just like
me.
Heard a
negro man say
“she ain’t
ugly. she just
don’t favor
nobody.”
Well
brother, I favor her
just fine.
Want a whole world
of her lips,
voice, the smile
that cracks
hate off men blackened
hard toward the softest of us.
Wonder which
hell trial built her
Ain’t have
to be the same piece of satan
that turned
me from north carolina school girl
into “the
funniest woman in the world”
‘cause a
brick from a house
is as hard to chew
as a brick
from a shack.
That’s a
truth dark as Mary’s hat.
If I was
back in church I’d sing
all kind of
hallelujahs. Instead,
I sit in my
living room
looking at
Life. The broad
backside of
Mary McLeod
Bethune
walking up
to the front door
to parley
with the President
and First
Lady.
Think they
hear
the
contention behind
each pause,
tremble, each
forced but
necessary smile?
Toni Asante Lightfoot is a native of Washington, D.C. now
living in exile in Chicago. There she teaches in several
schools, after school programs, and is currently the
coordinator of WordsAlive! a program that teaches teachers how
to teach poetry to 1st through 5th graders across content
areas. Lightfoot has been published in several anthologies and
lent her poems and voice to several CD projects. She can be
heard as the voice of the only deaf poet on HBO's Def
Poetry Jam. Check out the Tia Chucha Press Anthology
Dream of a Word on which she was co-editor.