Nikki Giovanni’s Appalachian Ties

Abstract

Nikki Giovanni’s Appalachian Ties Virginia C. Fowler (bio) Certain aspects of Nikki Giovanni’s biography are not unique to her but common to several generations of African-Americans. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, she moved with her family to Cincinnati, Ohio (“Gateway to the South”). In 1943, when she was only two months old, she and her family were a part of what we now call the Great Migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North. Like many others, Giovanni’s parents migrated north to pursue better job opportunities and to escape the racial conditions of the South. In Knoxville, Giovanni’s father could find only low-paying, menial jobs, despite the fact that he had a college education. In Knoxville, his children’s lives would be constricted by segregation’s many rules and regulations. In Cincinnati, where he had moved with his mother when he was himself only a child (a part of an earlier wave of black migration from the South), Gus Giovanni was offered a job at a home for black boys, as well as opportunities for future, better-paying professional employment. Like many other children whose parents migrated to the North but left family in the South, Giovanni and her sister and cousins all returned to Knoxville for summer vacations; moreover, Giovanni lived with her grandparents in Knoxville from the time she was fourteen until she was seventeen, when she left Austin High School and went to Fisk University as an early entrant. Her grandparents’ home at 400 Mulvaney Street becomes in Giovanni’s work the enduring symbol of safety, happiness, warmth, and security. Even after its literal destruction, it remains, at least imaginatively, her refuge from a hostile world. Importantly, most of the values inscribed throughout Giovanni’s poetry are associated with her maternal grandparents. More powerfully than their home at 400 Mulvaney, which was ultimately destroyed in the wake of “urban renewal,” her grandparents live on in her poetry as ancestral figures offering wisdom, comfort, and love. As this brief summary of some of the biographical details of [End Page 42] Giovanni’s life suggests, both because of her parents’ roots in the South and because of her ties to her grandparents, Giovanni may have grown up in the North (although Cincinnati is in reality and not just in name the “Gateway to the South”), but many of the values instilled in her as a child were southern and Appalachian. Like many other African-American writers of her generation, however (for example, Toni Morrison), Giovanni tends to identify these values sometimes as “Southern,” but more often simply as “Black.” When she wants to celebrate black women, for example, her images are most often of southern black women. Although white Americans rarely acknowledge it, many elements of southern culture have some of their deepest roots in Africa. The abiding presence and importance of the past, the significance, even sacredness, of place, the centrality of food and food rituals, the importance of oral tradition—these were central to West African cultures. Similarly, quilts and quilting, which I have suggested are central tropes in Giovanni’s poetry, also have African roots. While African-American and feminist historians have made significant corrections to the traditional white, male version of southern history, few would venture to assert—as Nikki Giovanni repeatedly does in her lectures—that southern culture, at least in terms of these values, is black. In an early essay, Nikki Giovanni writes about the process by which black American culture becomes white in regard to music: “The blues didn’t start with Dixieland or work songs or Gospel or anything but us. . . . Dvorak’s ‘Fifth,’ commonly called ‘The New World Symphony,’ is nothing but our music” (Gemini, 117). Similarly, in her recent poem “When Gamble and Huff Ruled,” she states, “I dislike other people for taking our music our muse and our rap to sell their cars and bread and toothpaste and deodorant and sneakers but never seeming to have enough to give back to the people who created it” (Love, 51). Not only is it the case that “Black people don’t get paid for anything that we do,” Giovanni argues in a...