Phylicia Rashad (24:01)
Because you need to beat this. It's such beautiful, beautiful poetry written by a woman who was a mother of three. She was recently divorced from my father and she had given up all of the social trappings of the dentist's wife. She had given all of that up. And what she was focused on was her writings and us. She would read to us in the morning something she had written. She'd get up early every morning at three o' clock in the morning from three to six. These were her golden hours because the world was asleep, the phone would not ring and no one was knocking on their door and we were asleep, right? And this is when she would write and she'd share some of the things she had written. And if you can imagine, you know, we little birds, because we were like little birds, she'd give it to us and we'd give it right back. She'd give it to us and we'd give it right back. And we run around chirping and saying things we couldn't possibly understand. The universe bears no ill to me. I bear no ill to it. The universe. And one of the. When this, this long form poem, which by the way was reprinted in honor of her 100th birthday, it was republished by Clemson University Press. And the peer review reads like a love letter. And they talk about her original rhythms and pacing and the power of the poetry of it all. Literally, what happens in this book is someone, a person, and it was really her. But she didn't identify it in that way. A person had grown weary of materialism and wanted to know something else about self and decided, well, maybe, let me think, maybe I could become something else. Thought about becoming a frog, leaping around naked all day. No, that wouldn't work. Somebody would come and eat me. She said no after that, thought about all these things. And then in the book she says she looked up and saw a diamond studded sky and there was an elm tree. She would climb up on this branch, sit on this branch and contemplate this diamond studded sky until wings were sprouted and that soar up there. That was a thought. So this person literally sits on the limb contemplating. Somebody walks by and says, man, what you need is a job. That's what someone once said to her about her writing poetry. Because, you know, you just don't do that. What kind of career is that? Are you gonna be successful writing poetry? They used to say all those poor children thinking about us, they'll never amount to anything. She fits. She feeds them figs and Coca Cola, you know, doesn't say stuff like that. You know, a nice Southern community where people are successful and nice. Okay, so this being sits here contemplating the sun and begins to have the experience of navigating, navigating space and the winds that come and knock you back and forth. And it's. You have to read it to really get the full context and sense of it. Because it isn't just about fantasy. It's about conquering one's own doubt and fear and anger and old things that you hold on to and letting go of so that you can come to this place where you are free inside yourself. It was something to grow up with. One who was writing this. Ah. And John Biggers created the illustrations for this book. And I think not until Debbie exhibited them at Dada had they been shown publicly. The. The drawings themselves, they're in the book, but the drawings themselves, they were very good friends, she and John Biggers. They had known each other since childhood. It was something to grow up with a mother. It wasn't always comfortable, wasn't always easy, but it sure was an adventure. And so we learned something. We learned to think of ourselves in other ways. She'd bring all of our friends in. You know, we're outside playing. And this when I'm like 7, 6 and 7 years old, she teach us core speech. She'd take the furniture in the living room, and she'd move it out of the way. She'd push it all against the walls. And she'd teach us Katherine Dunham combinations because she had cousins who danced with Katherine Dunham in that dance troupe. And she'd have us going across the floor doing these little combinations, say, okay, mom, here we go. This is how we grew. She was my first piano teacher. It was my mother who came to my school when I was in the second grade and taught the class, lift every voice and sing. It was like that. And it wasn't easy for her as a woman with three children being creative, it was not easy. And we watched that, but we watched her continue with persistence. We watched her. And then for her 100th birthday, to have this book that she had written when she was much younger be republished at an academic institution. And that's what I wanted, because I wanted this. I wanted her work to have its place in letters. It's standing in letters. So it wasn't enough to just have a publisher create a nice little, you know, book that you put on the coffee table, little art book that meant nothing to me. I wanted this book to have its place in standing in letters. And we find out now that Yale University has copies of her stuff. And we found in University of Wisconsin an original copy of Hawke. The work is there. Wow.
