Harold Lee Rush interviews author Rhonda Denise Johnson http://rhondadenisejohnson.com/crossroads/interview.html
Author Archive
The Making of a Novel and an Author Leave a comment
Imoye ~ A Collection of 6 Poems Leave a comment
In the Yoruba language imo means knowledge and oye means understanding. When two words began or end with a vowel it is customary to contract them into one word just as in the english language the words it and is are contracted to form the word it’s. So imo and oye together form the word imoye.
Read and listen
http://visionswithvoices.com/imoye
Prince Alarming~ Sequel to Sleeping Beauty Leave a comment
F.U.Q. Frequently Unasked Questions (Part 1 of 2) Leave a comment
In our hectic daily lives the questions we don’t stop to ask can often be more important than the ones we do ask. Many times, we don’t ask some questions because we don’t think there is an answer, or the answers don’t have an immediate practical relation to our current emergency, or the answers just seem too complex or they require us to open doors to the dark recesses of our minds where the boogie man resides. Whatever the reason, while you’re here now might be a good time to start asking these questions for yourself. What follows is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all the important questions. Think of it as a springboard from which you may come up with questions I never thought of.
1. Who am I?
How much of what you think, feel, believe and do is actually you and how much of it is unexamined indoctrination? We tell ourselves that everybody can’t be wrong if they all think the same thing. In fact, history shows us that when everybody thinks something it usually is wrong. Everybody once thought the world was flat. Fear of ridicule, fear of consequences, even the fear of being right keeps people from examining the status quo or questioning what everybody thinks is “common sense.” Did I say fear of being right? I did. It’s uncomfortable to be right when all your friends are wrong. Like Harry Potter’s Alvis Dumbledore sad “People will forgive you for being wrong before they forgive you for being right.” So we go along to get along. But is that really who we are? Are we afraid to give birth to a Self who may have to stand alone?
2. Why am I where I am?
If we find ourselves in a place, on a job or with a person where we are unhappy, why do we remain there? We say we’ve invested too much to quit now. Okay, if five years is too much to have invested, why compound the waste by investing ten more? If we are in a place where we should not be that means we are not in the place where we should be. This doesn’t mean we should jump up and quit every time things don’t go our way. It means when we are generally and chronically unhappy in a place we need to know why this is so and take steps to change our circumstances. No one else will change them for us.
3. Could I think differently?
We may think we are too old. Too set in our ways. Too accustomed to things the way they are. We may have surrounded ourselves with people who would think ill of us if we voiced a divergent view from theirs. Let me tell you something, if you put chains on a man’s body, you have not made him a slave. To make him a slave, put the chains on his mind. Does anyone have our minds enslaved so that we are afraid to let new thoughts take root? Are we enslaved by material things, not knowing that gold-plated chains are still chains?
4. Why am I feeling this way right now?
We sometimes have those days when all we want to do is throw ourselves on our beds and cry. We sometimes have days when we feel like we’re on top of the world and nothing can hold us back. Sometimes something happens to trigger these feelings. We may know the immediate trigger, but a trigger is not a cause. We must ask ourselves if that trigger justifies the intensity of what we feel. If it doesn’t then perhaps something else is the cause. The cause of intense feelings is often chemical. Our brains secrete certain chemicals that we experience or perceive as feelings. Dopamine is a chemical secreted by the brain that reinforces behavior by giving us a good feeling when we are rewarded for doing things. Ever wonder why chocolate is so popular on Valentine’s Day? Well, guess what? Chocolate increases feelings of sexiness. Certain types of music or atmospheres cause the brain to secrete serotonin, which gives us a feeling of well being and joy. Then there are foods such as red meant, coffee, sugar and alcohol, which give us an initial high but then bring us down low.
Bottom line is we don’t have to just go with whatever we are feeling at the time. The world is full of people who want to control us. They do this through food, mass media, music, feng shui and peer pressure. None of these things is intrinsically bad, but when people use these venues to manipulate our feelings then tell us to just go with our feelings, we can still step back away from those feelings and examine where they may have come from. This is the essence and beauty of being an intelligent individual.
5. What will happen if I ignore this craving?
The human body is equipped with certain cravings. The hunger drive, the survival drive, the sex drive, the social drive all ensure that we will seek the things we need to sustain our lives. Even with these drive we often define being a “real” man as depriving our bodies of the things it needs. But more often we go the other way and allow our needs and cravings to rule us. Why do I crave chocolate? I won’t die if I don’t eat any chocolate. I could go for years without eating chocolate. Yet, when the sight of it enters my line of vision and the smell of it enters my nostrils, the thought enters my mind that I gotta have it. I slip into an old pair of jeans and they actually feel comfortable. I can tighten my belt a couple of holes. I feel good. I want to reward myself with a Chip Ahoy chocolate chip cookie. STOP! Nothing’s going to happen if I don’t have a cookie. You’ll die. Oh really? You’ll go crazy. No I won’t You’ll starve. For lack of a cookie? The mind will tell you all sorts of things to make you think you need that cookie. Just remember this, if you don’t eat it, NOTHING’S GOING TO HAPPEN.
6. Why should I take what this person did personally?
One day a guy I knew at college looked down his nose at me and sniffed. I’d said hello and he just looked down his long nose at me and sniffed. I wanted to take my hello back. I spent the rest of the day wondering what was that all about? I considered that I had not done anything to him so why was he looking down at me? And I’d taken a shower so why was he sniffing at me? Saw something he didn’t like, huh? Something beneath him? Well, I couldn’t take it so I asked him. Turns out, he had a bad cold. He wasn’t sniffing at me. He was trying to breathe.
Taking what people do personally can ruin a good day. Nine times out of ten what they do has nothing to do with us. I am not the center of anyone else’s emotional world. So why am I so vain that I think this song is about me?
7. Is there another way to interpret this situation?
My mother loves to say that there are three sides to every story: your side, my side and the truth. Anxiety is often a symptom of a lack of imagination. When we get locked into a rut, it’s easier for the brain to run all our thoughts through that rut than to climb out of it and see what else is possible. Maybe we’ll just climb out of one rut only to fall into another. But at least the two ruts will give us a perspective on one another we would not have if we had only experienced one rut. Why not stay in the rut we know? Because truth is not afraid to explore. Truth is not afraid to ask questions. We may find that our original interpretation of a situation is closer to the truth than any of the others we’ve looked at, but at least we have looked at them and can give something of an intelligent answer to anyone who asks why we stuck to the original interpretation.
Crocogators Go West 1 comment
Spotlight on The Harlem Renaissance Leave a comment
Beginning roughly 1917 a cultural explosion burst out of Harlem, New York. It was called The New Negro Movement. Yes, we 21st century African Americans disdain the term “Negro,” but that is what they called themselves, and these cultural geniuses were the sovereign lords of their own progressive vision.
Why is this important to us today? Why is any people’s history important to them? If we forget the ancestors from whom we came, we will be like trees without roots, tossed to and fro by the definitions that others ascribe to us. When we let others tell us who we are and how we came to be where we are, what they tell us will always be for their benefit and never for our own benefit. So we must know that there is more to us than slaves, thugs and ballplayers. We must write our own story. And to do that, we must know that writing is something that we do. Writing is not something we copied off of Massa, but it is a natural expression of who we are.
Today, we will look at a group of men and women and examine the creative synergy they created when they decided to take up their pens. This is not meant to be an exhaustive study. It is an overviews, meant to introduce young writers to a handful of those who stood at the vanguard of the traditions and heritage in which we write. My hope is that after reading this, the reader/writer will feel spurred to further study by in depth biographers, such as Arnold Rampersand.
Who was the New Negro?
The Harlem Renaissance began almost thirty years after the end of the so-called “Radical Reconstruction.” For about twelve years after the end of the Civil War, former slaves where able to breathe relatively freely. While many continued to languish in poverty and the squalid conditions of share-cropping, a significant segment, which W.E.B. Du Bois identified as the ”talented tenth,” flourished in various areas of life. They bought land. They were elected to public office. They started businesses. They built schools. They patented the inventions of their own hands. They progressed in ways that scared the hell out of southern Whites. These Whites went to Washington and told then president Rutherford Hayes that if he did not do something, the Blacks would “own the south.” So he signed what came to be known as the Compromise of 1879 and a reign of terror began. The Ku Klux Klan was born. Jim Crow laws were enacted. Blacks who owned land and businesses were lynched.
So it would seem that African Americans lost all the things they had gained in those twelve years. They were back to square one. That’s where the New Negro stepped in. Tired of moving backwards and sideways, these men and woman decided to use their gift with words to move forward. The renaissance also included musicians, painters and other artists, but for the purpose of this paper, we will focus on the writers.
Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
Alain Locke
(September 13 1885-June 9, 1954)
At age 22, Locke became the first African American Rhodes Scholar. This writer, philosopher and educator was the mastermind behind the Harlem Renaissance, and his book, The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, gave the movement its original name. It may be safe to say that without Alain Locke there would have been no Harlem Renaissance. At least, there may not have been such a strong confluence among the Black writers of that period. The period lasted until roughly 1934, when the Great Depression forced the writers and their philanthropic patrons to focus on mere survival. Locke was one of those patrons.
Georgia Douglas Johnson
(September 10 1880-May 14, 1966)
This poet and song writer held weekly “salons” for prominent figures in the Harlem Renaissance. In her house—called the “House“—politics and personal opinions flowed freely among the New Negroes. Doubtless, these conversations served as inspirations for more than a few of the literary creations of the participants.
In 2009, Johnson was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
Langston Hughes
(February 1, 1902-May 22. 1967)
Though best known for his poetry and Jesse B. Semple stories, Hughes was among the grassroots creators of the literary form known as jazz poetry. Like the Hiphoppers of today, they were doing it back then too. In 1925, Hughes worked as the personal assistant of historian Carter G. Woodson at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
In 1930, Hughes published a novel, Not Without Laughter, which depicts the life of a young Black boy. One of Hughes best known poems is “A Dream Deferred:”
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Angelina Weld Grimké
(February 27, 1880-June 10, 1958)
Grimké was a pioneer of creative protest. Long before the famed marches on Washington, she penned Rachel, a play that protests lynching and other forms of racial violence. One of her most memorable poems was “The Eyes of My Regret:”
Always at dusk, the same tearless experience,
The same dragging of feet up the same well-worn path
To the same well-worn rock;
The same crimson or gold dropping away of the sun
The same tints, – rose, saffron, violet, lavender, grey
Meeting, mingling, mixing mistily;
Before me the same blue black cedar rising jaggedly to
a point;
Over it, the same slow unlidding of twin stars,
Two eyes, unfathomable, soul-searing,
Watching, watching, watching me;
The same two eyes that draw me forth, against my will
dusk after dusk;
The same two eyes that keep me sitting late into the
night, chin on knees
Keep me there lonely, rigid, tearless, numbly
miserable –
The eyes of my Regret.
Clause McKay
(September 15, 1889-May 22, 1948)
Scholar Molefi Kete Asante included McKay in his 2002 list of 100 Greatest African Americans. Born in Jamaica, McKay was a prolific writer whose influence continues for generations.
64 years after his physical demise, the genius of McKay resurfaced to haunt the literary and intellectual world. In 2009, Jean-Christophe Cloutier uncovered the manuscript of a satire set in 1936. Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem was buried in the Samuel Roth Papers, an archive at Columbia University, and in 2012, with the help of professor Brent Hayes Edwards, Cloutier authenticated that McKay did write this manuscript in 1941. With a title like that, one can only imagine at its contents.
Nella Larson
(April 13. 1891-March 30, 1964)
Larson was not as prolific a writer as other luminaries in the Harlem Renaissance. But she received much critical acclaim for her two novels, Quicksand and Passing. Interest in her work renewed during the late 20th century, when her interracial themes resonated with the then angst over racial identity.
Jean Toomer
(December 26, 1884-March 30 1967)
Toomer was a major player in the Harlem Renaissance. His first and most critically acclaimed work, Cane, was considered to be important not only to the Harlem Renaissance but also to that segment of American society known as the Lost Generation—described in Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises as the generation that served in World War 1.
The Great Depression during the 1930s made it difficult for writers to get published, but Toomer did not stop writing. He remained as prolific as ever and his unpublished manuscripts are now held in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. One might ask, why Yale and not one of the many Historically Black Universities and Colleges.
Anne Spencer
(February 6, 1882-July 27, 1975)
Her work was included in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and the Norton Anthology of American Poets. Her life of 93 years spanned centuries and eras, allowing her to host everyone from George Washington Carver to Thurgood Marshall, from W.E.B. Du Bois to Martin Luther King, Jr. Her home in Lynchburg, VA, where she lived for 72 years, is now a museum that commemorates her contribution to literature.
Arna Bontemps
(October 13, 1902-June 4, 1973)
As Head Librarian at Fisk University for over 25 years, Bontemps put together such works as the Langston Hughes Renaissance Collection and other archives of African-American literature and culture.
Bontemps was a novelist and a playwright. He was one of the few African-American writers who put together an anthology of the stories of the slaves titled Great Slave Narratives.
Zora Neale Hurston
(January 7, 1891-January 28, 1960)
Although the Great Depression of the 1930s dried up much of the philanthropic spirit that financed the artistic endeavors of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston published her most well known work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937. Anthropologist and folklorist, she published Mules and Men in 1935 as the culmination of four years of anthropological research in the southern states. In 1938, Hurston published the results of her travels in Jamaica and Haiti, Tell My Horse.
Hurston was very much a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance. She had works published in Alain Locke’s anthology, The New Negro. In 1920, she got together with Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman to form a group called the Niggerett. They published a literary magazine called Fire!!
Wallace Thurman
(August 16, 1902-December 22, 1934)
The magazine, Fire!! was aimed towards younger Blacks. In this joint venture with Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, Thurman criticized the old guard Black leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois for their efforts to integrate with Whites and use art to prove their worthiness to Whites by White standards. Yet, even the “New Negro” wasn’t ready to embrace such a radical stance, and the magazine folded after one issue.
In his most notable novel, The Blacker the Berry, Thurman addresses that age-old boogieman of color discrimination within the Black community.
James Weldon Johnson
(June 17, 1871-June 26, 1938)
Born during that most progressive period called Radical Reconstruction, Johnson saw first hand what African Americans can do when not encumbered by White racism. He is most well known as the composer of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which came to be known as the Black National Anthem.
True to his African heritage, Johnson was the master of all trades. He was a professor at New York University and then at Fisk. He served as diplomat in both Venezuela and Nicaragua. Poet, songwriter, novelist, playwright, civil rights activist, lawyer—he did it all.
Lift every voice and sing
Til Earth and Heaven ring
Ring with the harmony of liberty
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea
Sing a song
Full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
Sing a song
Full of the hope that the present has brought us
Facing the rising sun
Of our new day begun
Let us march on
Til victory is won
Countee Cullen
(May 30, 1903-January 9, 1946 )
Long before James Brown urged African Americans to “Say it loud. I‘m Black and I‘m proud,” Countee Cullen wrote Color, a collection of poems that celebrates the beauty of Blackness. He was a prolific writer of poems, essays and even a play, but this collection stood out as a bright star in the celestial atmosphere of the Harlem Renaissance. From Color we have the poem “Incident.”
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, ‘Nigger.’
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.
As African Americans, and as Africans period, we have always used some form of art—writing, music, dance, drama, painting, sculpture—to express the depth of our despair and the height of our euphoria. The pen, they say, is mightier than the sword. That is only true when people respect what is written. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance are respected because of their honesty. They had White patrons who financed their travels here and there and White publishers who accepted their work. Yet, they never sold out to what they thought others wanted them to write. With such a heritage, can we do anything less in the 21st century?
Las Angelinas Leave a comment
I heard her important sounding boots on the pavement
I didn’t turn around
But I knew it was a her
It was a her sounding sound
An important her
Compared to the soft patter of my Sketchers
It sounded like the approach of doom
somebody was going to be in big trouble
Not me
I kept walking
Umbrella in one hand
Aqua Fina in the other
It was just a silly nonsensical angelina thing
Drinking water and wearing tennis shoes in the rain
But it made me feel more important to the sky
More important to the itinerary of water
Than clunky heels
And troubled minds
Copyright 1998 by Rhonda Denise Johnson
Invasion of the Indefinite Pronouns Leave a comment
I am tired of writing “he or she”, “his or hers.” It’s just awkward, and when a paragraph or sentence contains several indefinite pronouns, it sounds downright silly after the third or fourth repetition. Why do we do this? We are trying to tell the truth using a language that was designed to reinforce the lie, and it‘s going to take more than patching up with this linguistic band-aid. Although up to the very recent past, I have capitulated to this politically correct invasion upon my prose, from now on, starting May the twenty-third, two thousand thirteen, I will just say “she” or “her.” Let male writers say “he” or “his” and be done with it. Our writing will flow oh so much smoother.
Now some folks will have a problem with this. I propose that said folks take the same energy they would use to browbeat me and use it to create a gender neutral indefinite pronoun. Why not? What constitutes a word anyway? Words aren‘t words by divine right. They aren‘t passed down from the gods. How did the words “laser” and “internet” work their way into the English lexicon? Is a word anything more than a string of phonemes that a significant number of people has decided to use to symbolize some concept, thing or action? If so, what constitutes a “significant number?” Or is there an esoteric council that must canonize said string of phonemes? If so, how do we bring this matter to their attention in a way they cannot ignore?
An I the only writer who is tired of say “he or she?” Are there other writers who would be willing to help create and use a gender neutral indefinite pronoun?
On the Wings of a Wild God Leave a comment
Copyright 1999
The religious people put a saddle on God.
Bit, bridle, reins and spurs
Kicked His sides
To shuttle to and fro
Along the track of human certitude.
He roared
And stamped a quake into the Earth.
Many people died.
Thy said, “As a horse, you’re a failure.
Perhaps you don’t exist.
The religious people urge me to get on the track
Lest I fall prey to dangerous freedoms.
Slipping off the narrow spine
Of their decrepit horse,
I grasp for the reins.
I yearn for a rule.
I’ve committed a great sin.
What can I buy?
I hurry to scurry
But I do not find Him.
Until I am still,
With nothing that I can do
And not a fig leaf to my name.
Only a core of hot anger
And cold knowledge—
Pain clouds raining in between
He, untamed and unfettered,
Touches me.
He goes where religions illicit morality cannot.
I mount up on His wings.
In the wind
His free mane whips away my tears
One by one.
Rhonda Denise Johnson 