Hold Tight Gently (5 page)

                        
In retrospect, it wasn’t the sound

                        
Of my mother crying that hurt most,

                        
It was the sound of my father leaving

                        
His marriage, his house, his familiars.

                        
In the debris of ruptured bloodlines,

                        
In the domestic violence of our families,

                        
In the turbulence we call love was bred

                        
The possibility of my dysfunction, and yours.

                        
I tell you of the hatred

                        
That seized the boyhoods

                        
Of my brother and me,

                        
How we fought violently in public,

                        
Drawing blood as if it would

                        
Allow us to see

                        
What was wrong with it,

                        
With him, with me . . .

As a youngster, Essex spent summers with his maternal grandmother, “Miss Emily”—for whom he felt “pure love”—at her home in Columbia, South Carolina. Her late husband had owned a small restaurant in town, but because it attracted a “risqué” crowd it had been declared off-limits to Mantalene and her siblings—except to deliver the peach cobblers Miss Emily made at home (though the kids would sneak by after school for lemonade or soda pop). Among other things, Miss Emily taught Essex to cook and praised him for turning out food that reminded her of her husband’s.

As a growing boy, Essex wasn’t inclined toward athletics: “In the black neighborhood I came from, there was an emphasis on being able to play basketball or football. I, instead, was attracted to gymnastics because of the way the body looked. But I knew instinctively that if I had said, ‘I want to be a gymnast,’ among the fellas I ran with I would have been labeled a sissy.” Essex’s tight, slender frame never grew much beyond five feet six inches. As he later put it, “I was the smallest of the fellas that I ran with when I was growing up. When you’re the smallest, you absorb the blows of other people trying to be ‘manly.’ I guess it’s an awful fact of adolescence. That drove me to writing, I think.”

But though small, Essex was a handsome boy, with a symmetrical face marked by intense, searching eyes and an engulfing smile when he chose to bestow it. His soft, caressing voice could also, especially when speaking on serious matters, ring with passionate conviction. He began writing poetry at age fourteen, while still in high school: “After dinner I would wind up going back to my room and writing in my notebook. I didn’t realize I was writing poetry. I was just writing about the events and thoughts of my day.” But poetry was from the beginning his most congenial medium, though he would later try his
hand at a novel, and some of his adult essays would profoundly influence his generation of black writers.

I was fortunate enough when researching this book to discover a batch of some fifty of Essex’s unpublished early poems (mostly from 1974– 75, during his seventeenth and eighteenth years), which he bundled together under the rubric “Talking with a Friend . . .” The disarmingly casual title was aptly chosen, for though these first efforts have autobiographical value, Essex made scant claim for their literary merit and never included any of them in the chapbooks he began to publish in 1982 at age twenty-five. He even entitled the first poem in the batch “Act I”:

                        
like a baby realizing it has legs to walk with

                        
like a bird realizing its need to spread its wings and fly

                        
so in act I I have filled a need

                        
which in the beginning was only the need to

                        
let thoughts, ideas, and my feelings

                        
come forth, and speak

                        
the language of 17 years of living

In another poem in the series, he spelled out why he’d felt the need this early to turn to verse:

                        
The essence of these poems

                        
is the me

                        
locked inside of me

                        
trying to express

                        
the turmoil

                        
sometimes felt within

                        
sometimes hard to express

                        
but always holding

                        
meaning

In one of these poems, dated May 25, 1974, Essex begins to convey the “differentness” he felt from most other young men, and the value he placed on it:

                        
I cry sometimes

                        
knowing it won’t take nothing away from my blossoming

                        
manhood

                        
You cry don’t you

                        
or

                        
are you just another

                        
one of those

                        
uptight and totally in control

                        
of my emotions type of people

                        
who wouldn’t be able to cope

                        
with themselves

                        
if any emotion was shown . . .

                        
and sometimes

                        
I cry

                        
for you, too . . .

As a teenager, Essex continued to make other cherished self-discoveries:

                        
Walk alone

                        
little boy

                        
never move with

                        
the maddening crowds

                        
Never forget

                        
where you came from

                        
because no one else

                        
ever will . . .

                        
Walk alone little boy

                        
tomorrow

                        
you’ll be a man

In some of the later poems in the series, the maturing Essex reflects back with tender regret on certain aspects of his childhood:

                        
when I was a child, I walked in the woods

                        
on hot July afternoons,

                        
that were cool and dark,

                        
holding secrets,

                        
which sent slight chills up my spine,

                        
when I knew that I would never know

                        
of them completely.

                        
taking mother nature’s children,

                        
like the birds that never sang for me,

                        
and the turtles that always stayed in their shells,

                        
and frogs that croaked in disgust at my probing

                        
fingers,

                        
. . . and soft brown baby rabbits I had found

                        
died,

                        
because my hands and my love was not gentle enough.

                        
. . . crying I ran home to my mother

                        
whose hands were gentle enough love warm

                        
enough to calm my broken heart.

                        
I didn’t know they needed more then I could

                        
give them so that they could live.

In a piece Essex entitled “A Woman Our Mother We Love You . . .” he expressed the lifelong devotion he felt for his mother, the family peacemaker, in lines amply, if awkwardly, expressive:

                        
And you know that whenever we’ve found the

                        
heat in the kitchen too hot, to handle

                        
we’ve come back into the living room

                        
where you are, so that you could help us

                        
sort out, the experience, feeling, or whatever

                        
it was that we confronted on life’s battlefield

                        
and with all of that,

                        
you also give us the encouragement to go back

                        
and try again

Yet Essex’s deeply religious mother, Mantalene, would hardly have been pleased with the January 12, 1975, poem he wrote about church-going:

                        
and the preacher asks the smartly dressed

                        
HOLY ladies

                        
to pass the basket

                        
and give/pleas [
sic
] give

                        
if only a dime/but a dollar

                        
let your SOUL be cleansed

                        
for a dime????????????????

                        
Its for the church

                        
he takes ¾ of what they give

                        
and puts it in a saving account, in his name

                        
the name of the Lord

                        
who likes those who give

                        
so that others may receive . . .

The hurt and disappointment that Essex experienced at the hands of his father is the likely subject of the poignant poem he dated February 23, 1974:

                        
You built my hopes up high

                        
knowing that you wouldn’t

                        
be at the bottom to catch them

                        
when they fell

                        
You promised you would be there

                        
whenever I needed you

                        
but you never came

                        
You promised me I wouldn’t be hurt by you

                        
but the pain is still here

                        
because

                        
you and your promises are gone

The simmering anger that Essex felt for anyone—perhaps including his father—who dared to mock his dreams comes out strongly in the poem he entitled “Revenge,” dated January 21, 1975:

                        
Step on my dreams, and I’ll break your legs

                        
and feet into pieces which will never, ever

                        
fit together again,

                        
You will be crippled.

                        
call me names, and I will still your mind,

                        
Busting it in half with a brick,

                        
which has your name signed on it,