I've been invited to deliver the keynote address to the South Carolina Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in Columbia this week. There was a part of me that wanted to turn the invitation down. I am not a poet who wants or needs to be in every conversation. I do believe poetry has the power to enrich every conversation, and therefore, if you invite me to the arena, then you invite poetry to the table. That part of me that is smarter and braver, less concerned with what I don't know, more with what I do, quickly realized that the invitation was no mistake.
I didn't ask the brave clear-voice president, who first extended the invitation, to explain herself. Such invitations have come my way before (The Black Physicists Association invited me in 2002!) and even though the invitations might seem a bit odd and out of the ordinary at first, I try to look at them in a whole way. I am wondrously interested in the connections between my heart and head, poetry, and from whom the invitation happens to come.
Psychiatry is the study and treatment of mental illness, emotional disturbances, and abnormal behavior.
One of my many mothers in this life, Miss Ruthie, an old friend of my grandmothers who would sit on the porch with her, said once without great fanfare and hardly above a whisper, head leaned back in the warm sun of summer, "Black women hold up the walls of the crazy houses and Black men hold down the floors of the prison houses." Their twin chairs never stopped rocking. My eyes rolled up high into my head but my head did not move. I was sitting there just beyond them trying not to listen and yet straining trying to hear. In their conversations and unabridged porch talk great keys to the universe were often dangled.
Later in my life the essential thinker and writer, James Baldwin, would write an essay (1964) entitled "The White Problem." He would take another angle on psychiatry, teaching me," We {Black people} were the first psychiatrists." I grew up thinking about this two-headedness as it relates to Black people, how we think about our state of being, our marvelous physical brains, and the great and unheralded tapestry of our underappreciated minds and manners?
All month I've been working on the talk. The work on it has been driving me crazier than usual. I start out in one direction and then suddenly the subject and my poet interests take a complete U turn. Some piece of history appears and I want to include it. Five minutes later, I jump out of that car and take off on a different road, as it relates to psychology, psychiatry, trauma, and the illnesses of the mind, Black folk, and America. While researching what I want to talk about on Friday, I notice how the collective pain of my people, swoops down on me like a great firestorm leaving me immobile and completely scorched. There is so much pain in what I want and need to talk about – in every direction - no matter which way I lean.
Somewhere in my talk I would like to mention the name of Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller (1872–1953), the son of enslaved persons, considered the first Black psychiatrist in America. Dr. Fuller did early and profound researcher on Alzheimer's disease. He was also married to one of my favorite artists, the great black woman sculptor Meta Warwick Fuller (sculptor and poet). Dr. Fuller was never given his brilliant due as a psychiatrist and researcher.
I also want to include some words about Sandra Bland, the 28 year old Black woman pulled over in Texas in 2015 during a routine traffic stop by police officer Brian Encinia, thrown in jail, and later found hanged. Her death ruled a suicide. Encinia was found guilty of perjury by the grand jury but they declined to issue any indictment for murder. There is a video that shows a police officer initially breaking the law. She would never have been in that jail cell had he been following the laws of the land. How does her mother keep going? How do other Black mothers keep going?
Tamir Rice
Tamir Rice
Tamir Rice
Tamir Rice
Somewhere in my remarks I want to mention "The Weeping Time," that moment in American history that America won't remember, March 2–3, 1859, in Savannah, Georgia, when 436 enslaved persons were sold at a racetrack in Savannah, Georgia. It was the largest sale of enslaved persons in the United States. Black mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, first cousins and uncles, sweethearts and aunts, sold away from each other like furniture from an already sold house. These enslaved human beings, and their familial bonds, were put on the auction block so that their "owner" Pierce Butler could pay his gambling debts. The two-day sale was later called "The Weeping Time" because from the beginning of the sale to the end, two straight days, the torrential rain did not let up. It was called "The Weeping Time" because enslaved Black families were split apart, separated, shattered forever. Can so horrific and grief-stricken, so cataclysmic a moment in 436 lives spread, with great wings, 150 years forward, into the psyche and mental health of Black people living now who might know nothing of March 2–3, 1859, literally. Ask that question to the legendary Afrocentric psychiatrist, Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, who just passed away on January 2nd. From her great writing desk in the sky, she would tell you Yes.
I think I should include a few lines from that great Lucille Clifton poem "Reply?"
A poem that answers the question posed by Dr. Alvin Borgquest to Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, our great Black intellectual leader of the 20th century, as Borgquest searched for whether or not Black people ever shed tears? Might Clifton's answer be one poet's way of refusing their suggestion of our collective inhumanity or general mental illness? Could Borgquest's question itself be classified as abnormal behavior as it relates to the query of a supposedly learned man?
"he do/she do…/they do" (excerpt of Miss Clifton's response)
What about the 13 Black women who were finally believed after they were terrorized by Oklahoma City Police Officer Daniel Holtzclaw? Holtzclaw told the women that he raped and sodomized them in particular because they were women that nobody cared about. Is this the moment where Miss Ruthie's porch wisdom enters? Are these 13 women the representatives of all the other daughters, sisters, mothers, aunts, grandmothers, whom no one ever believed, who went to their graves with their terror never revealed, unhealed?
I'd like to include a little bit about Dr. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, considered by many to be the "father" of American Psychiatry. Rush described Negroes as suffering from an affliction known as "Negritude" which was thought to be a mild case of leprosy and Negritude's only cure was to become white. (Good luck with that cure!) The irony of Dr. Rush's medical observations was that he was a leading mental health reformer and co-founder of the first anti-slavery society in America. Is this where Baldwin's words matter? Is this where we have to understand our brothers and sisters and guide "the afflicted" to the light?
In 1851, Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a prominent Louisiana physician, and one of the leading authorities in his time on the medical care of enslaved Negroes, "discovered" that most incurable disease "Drapetomania" which Cartwright ludicrously wrote caused Negroes to run away. Perhaps this is what Walter Scott suffered from when Michael Slager, the North Charleston police officer, raised his gun and shot Mr. Scott 5 times, killing him as he ran.
I could mention Price Cobb and William Grier, Black psychiatrists and their ground-breaking book Black Rage, published after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and others. The book is a psychological exploration of Black life in modern America. A book that sat on my father's bookshelf right next to Alex Haley's Roots and the biography of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
I'm not sure I'll be able to talk about the $5 dollar report. The New York Times reported, "If you are Black, you're far more likely to see your electricity cut, more likely to be sued over debt, and more likely to land in jail because of a parking ticket. About one-quarter of African-American families had less than $5 in reserve. Low-income whites had $375" (Kiel, The New York Times, January 3, 2016)
Having less than $5 in reserve can make you sick or crazy or both.
I will make time to mention Ben "Pitchfork" Tillman, Governor of South Carolina, 1890 -1894, chief architect of the State Constitution of 1895 – that great South Carolina document that made white rule the state's supreme law for the next 70 years. In a typical Tillman speech, through clenched teeth, he would hiss and howl, " We will have to butcher the Negro some day and when the struggle comes – it will be horrible." Tillman was founder of today's Clemson University. I won't have time to mention the present day emotional trauma I personally feel every time I jog past his 30 foot bronze statue there on the South Carolina state house lawn?
I will make time to include Michelle Alexander's blazing 400 year old truth that "Mass incarceration operates as a tightly network system of laws, policies, customs and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race."
And the two old Black women discussing the mental and physical health of Black people there on the porch, in the sun, in Newberry, S.C., when I was a girl, were right, and James Baldwin was right too. I'll start there and just keep it moving. I can report, at this time, the title has been submitted: "Until the killing of a black man—a black mother's son—becomes as important as the killing of a white man—a white mother's son—we who believe in freedom cannot rest." Ella Baker
—Nikky