When I listed recommendations for one-night reads a couple of years ago, I mentioned Toi Derricotte’s Tender. I said it was a long poem, or a series of interlinked shorter poems, about slavery and its awful aftermath.
I can still remember when and where I first read it.
The Wise Woman was attending a three-hour seminar. I was her driver. While she was busy, I ducked into a coffeeshop and started reading a book from the public library.
What I remember is the astonishment, how time passed without my being aware of it.
My notion that I had read a single long poem might surprise the author. But Tender, which is in seven sections, seems like a whole in the way Song of Myself is one poem, not many.
The first section of Tender is about Elmina Castle, where enslaved Africans were held before the crossing to the Americas.
Where mothers were held, we walk now
as tourists, looking for cokes, film, the bathroom.
She had thought that the African-American tourists might bond with the African guides. She found, instead, a rift:
those were rooms through which our ancestors
had passed, while the Africans’ had not.
The poem works out how violence divides and harms. It shows how violence continues, passed from generation to generation, how it routinely continues publicly, through social and political institutions, and how it can continue privately, from parent to child. In the section called “When my father was beating me,” a prose poem, she writes:
I beat my dolls for years, pounded and pounded and nobody seemed to notice.
The poem talks of hatred and the ways of healing from hatred. There’s much more, but this will give you a sense of what it’s about.
I’ve spent evenings in front of a TV watching things I don’t remember. I remember that evening vividly.
When I go the library, I check the poetry section.
You never know.
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