Black Poetry: Three for the Children

Abstract

Black Poetry:Three for the Children Alice Fannin Lucille Clifton, Mari Evans, and Nikki Giovanni, contemporary Black poets, have published recent books of poetry especially for children. Because each book differs in purpose and intended audience, each is ultimately unique. Yet all have a common denominator—a content focussing on Black children's experiences and a tone affirming Black strength, pride, and love. Each of the three, despite a few flaws, accomplishes its purpose well and should be enjoyable to children regardless of race. In The Black B C's (1970) Lucille Clifton, in the tradition of the New English Primer, teaches an alphabet of Black culture and history in short four-line verses for each letter, accompanying each with a historical prose account of the subject. The best verses have powerful images, with a strong, chant-like rhythm and a serious—yet not bitter—tone. Clifton ranges from such subjects as the Middle Passage, Sojourner Truth, and the Underground Railroad to King as "a preacher's son" who "looked at men / and saw them one." The parallel between King and Christ might escape children, but the paradox of the many as one should intrigue. Of freedom, she points out that "whoever can give it / can take it away." The facts in the prose observations—that the first man ever to stand at the North Pole was black, and that the only known male survivor of the Alamo was Black—present a longer and more distinguished history than most of us have been introduced to. Some verses fail except as introductions to the prose: "Books" is a cliche; "Explorers" and "Inventors" are flat and unimaginative. As a rhyming alphabet book, the book answers its purpose, teaching Black children lessons about a long and distinguished history and offering all children affirmative images of Blacks. Of the three, Mari Evans's Singing Black (1976) is the most remarkable. Evans uses the familiar rhymes and rhythms of the English Mother Goose and a content often reminiscent of R. L. Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses to create verse about Black children's lives, at the same time producing a particularly American Mother Goose. There are counting rhymes, admonitions about everyday experiences—eating well, sharing, working together—all in the old favorite forms, though aimed at a more mature audience than much of Mother Goose. Instead of "Sing a Slong of Sixpence," one rhyme begins "Sing a song of brothers / Whistle all day long," brothers who are Black, proud, beautiful and strong. There are echoes of Stevenson's content in poems about the wind, about travel and about growing up, but the wit and wisdom are original. Of the twenty-two poems, some fail, seeming less concerned with poetry than admonition. Although the content is particularly relevant to Black children, most children between the ages of three and seven will enjoy them; at least they are more American in experience and setting than going to London to look at the queen. Nikki Giovanni's Spin A Soft Black Song (1971) aiming at poetry, not verse, contains the most complex images and ideas of the three. Describing Black children's lives from infancy to ten years, the poems use the experiences, the vocabulary, and the speech patterns of children in the inner city. According to Giovanni, to say things the way children say them when they are very young is, in adult language, "the profundity of the noble savage" ("Introduction"). Many of the poems offer a child's perspective on the tiresome rules grownups devise for children, but the child's original, ingenious and ingenuous verbal response reduces them to humor—even the ridiculous ("trips," "one of the problems of play," and "parents never understand"); others affirm the possibility of growing up strong and wise, despite oppression ("10 years old," "the drum"). Some contain complex ideas, perhaps totally comprehensible only by adult readers. In "stars," a child speaker has just learned that "stars are a mass of gases that burned / out a long time ago only we don't know / that because we still see the glow." Innocently the child asks a big brother who has said that he "burned out a long time...