Garden (Gratitude Poem #27)

Garden

For Doc Gloria I. Joseph

After Audre Lorde’s “Restoration”

and Michelle Cliff's Turtle Crawle

imagine having

your own

god

reach in your pocket

and there she is

future fabulous

sand cracked and smooth

god bless

she who rebuilds in replica

home must be small enough

to fit in your hand

wide enough to carry you away

beautiful enough

you dare not forget

where you put it

that which cannot be

exchanged explained

expands over skin

somewhere it is always Wednesday

anything can happen

bury dog days to come

and lose them

draw bone clean water up

soak whatever you cannot keep

in secret strength

what is not for sale

what is not for you

to see grow fickle

tickle your forehead into triumph

true down to your gut

your own god

imagine

and laugh.

After almost a year of email correspondence Doc Joseph made it plain.  

"Dear Alexis,  Once again, greetings from a beautiful,sunny warm St. Croix, the island that you will soon be visiting because,  --   your spirit calls you here, I call you to visit, and Audre's spirit beckons you. You now have three wonderful reasons to visit."

Such clarity! It made me question the reasons that I had NOT planned my visit to St. Croix.  Money, time, fear.  And as is true in the love story of Black Feminism the spirit of a young black feminist, a black feminist elder and a black feminist ancestor cannot be stopped by perceived scarcity.   The power of three made me free!  And Dr. Joseph deciding that a complete stranger could visit for 2 weeks was a big deal! During my second week in St. Croix Doc Joseph started telling the elders who kept asking if I was her granddaughter, "yes she is and she'd better behave like it!" and that she wished it could have been three weeks instead.  And actually  Doc Joseph, raised in Yonkers by parents from St. Croix, looks and sounds a lot like my tall opinionated paternal grandmother Lydia May (Gibbs) Gumbs who was raised in Perth Amboy New Jersey by a father from St. Thomas (a neighboring Virgin Island).

I loved working in Doc Joseph's garden with her, witnessing her morning water aerobics, learning about her Ndebele inspired paintings on the outside of her house, hunting down roadside avocado and roti, and especially hearing the amazing stories about the armed takeover of Cornell for Black Studies, the founding impetus for Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa, the bee collective, a very exclusive society called the Crones (the two founding members made two rules, "all new members must be over 65 and agree with us"--there have been no new members), and of course hearing the many many stories about Audre Lorde's life in St. Croix and across Europe and the clarity of her last days. 

So from watching Al Sharpton's Politics Nation to debating the impact of metaphysics on US Open Tennis results on the beach, surviving loss of all phone lines, and WAPA power outages, to sifting through letters, articles, unpublished interviews and decades old master's theses and dissertations about Lorde's work I feel privileged to have been invited as family into the life of a black feminist elder living in the present with the power of memory.    If Black Feminism is a religion, this was a pilgrimage, and Doc Joseph is the guru, oracle, riddle-bearer in the wilderness. 

P.S.  Here is one  Cruzan riddle:

 Q: What is the plural of mongoose?

FA (false answers):  Mongeese?  Mongooses?  Mongii? 

RA (real answer):  No!  Mongoose 'dem.