Chapters (31)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Room in the Dark I
- Fawns of the Diaspora Court Liliane in Paris, While Tabou Combo Whispers “Coq Qualité” in Her Ears
- Room in the Dark II
- “I Usedta Drink, Smoke and Do the Hoochie-Koo,” or What’s a Girl to Do When Her Mother Looks Like Ruth Brown
- Room in the Dark III
- “El Bochinche” es que only Fe Cortijo Knows or All the LeBron Brothers Know If Victor-Jésus María Sang Lili to Her Freedom
- Room in the Dark IV
- And Where Is Garnett Mimms?
- Room in the Dark V
- I Know Where Kansas City Is, But Did Wilbert Harrison Ever Get There?
- Room in the Dark VI
- Zoom Went the Strings of Liliane’s Heart, But Arsenio Rodriguez Could Have Told Her the Music Sounds Just as Sweet When We’re Blind and Still We See
- Room in the Dark VII
- I Know Where the E Train Stops But I’m “Sendin’ Out an S.O.S.” and I’m Not Edwin Starr Either
- Room in the Dark VIII
- “Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby” or Wouldn’t It Be Great If the Lead Singer of The Crests Wasn’t a White Boy and I Could Be My Mother?
- Room in the Dark IX
- Every Time My Lil World Seems Blue, I Just Haveta Look at You and Learn Eye-Hand Coordination
- Room in the Dark X
- “That’s Why I Love Her So and Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, I Want to Know” or Why Jackie Wilson Died in Silence
- Room in the Dark XI
- There’s No Use Cryin’ “Forever” or Hyacinthe Returns from a Very Blue Holiday for Real B(l)ack at Ya
- Room in the Dark XII
- Lollie Struts Her Stuff Thru “The Sea of Love” or the Brides of Frankenstein Catch the Bouquet
- By Ntozake Shange
- Acknowledgments
- Copyright
And when she’d get quiet and her legs sorta swayed by my shoulders like palm leaves, then, I’d start to sing to her thighs again, her navel, the sides of her pussy would glow, be soakin’. She’d speak my language to me again. I’d give her back the pillow and turn Cortigo up high. She’d make like she didn’t understand a lot of what I’d say to her, but if she got on my nerves, I’d put on Ismael Quintano. Mua. She’d either start taking off her clothes or talkin’ to me like she knew I had some goddamn sense. I hadda great sense of her, but that’s not enough to keep her. Not the way I used to have her, regular, wild, relentless and soft as a tropical surf. My Liliane, she said she can’t keep giving in like that. That’s how she put it, being taken to some other tongue. She called it giving in. I called it being mine. She said that was ontologically impossible. Of course, I threw her the pillow again.
But she’s gone….
She-ee-ee’s—go-oh-oh-oh-ne,
My baaa-be lef me,
Be-lieeh-eh-eh-ve me,
She’s gone, gone, goooohne.
Left me at her opening, I guess, La Luta Continua applied to me as well as to South Africa. Anyways, there was this story I toldt her one night after she was sighing—humming the way I could make her talk, that tongue, mi lengua negra. I toldt her this story I wanted to make a photographic novel, à la Duane Michaels, and I wanted her for it. Now, I know I want more than that, but some ideas don’t bode well con una mujer, come mi comba tiente morena, mi dulce negrita, mi negra mohada.
The apartment wasn’t much, wasn’t nothin’ really. There was the proverbial tub in the kitchen and a real live closet for a W.C. More overwhelming was the insecticide from the bodega downstairs. I kept tastin’ plantains, yellow and green ones, cassava, yuca, all kindsa greens, apples, oranges, everything, tastin’ like dead mice or barely crawlin’ cucarachas. Everythin’ for us to eat, poisoned long ’fore smack was runnin’ through our veins, ’fore grass smoke rings swirled through the stairway, way ’fore coke had us all thinkin’ we was the genius of Velazquez, Picasso, Rivera by a multiple of Einsteins. Just the small y el ritmo held my photographs round my baby, kept her protected from the elements, left her in my hands for my eyes.