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
Somebody from East St. Louis shot Sawyer Malveaux III four times in the head a few years later. Everybody went to the funeral in Kansas City, even girls who’d been afraid to look him in the eye and their parents who prayed he’d straighten up and marry their girl, or just go to hell.
Sawyer was born into hell. Sawyer was the sixth generation of Creoles who decided not to turn their backs on their darker brothers. Sawyer was a brother. And Sawyer died.
While the other rich lil colored boys were hippies, Panthers, or in Canada, Sawyer died just like the little hoodlum boys I grew up with who lost all they sense or all they bones in Vietnam or Oakland. Sawyer wasn’t all he coulda been, maybe. But like Papa used to say, he was definitely one of us. At the wake, his hair was done up like Sly Stone. The Malveaux family had his sister committed when she returned from Cornell one summer with a twelve-inch Creole Afro. She was never pretty. She didn’t know Sawyer was a being more beautiful than she could hope. She didn’t know Sawyer’s rush was to be stunning. To stun any living thing. Pauvre Hyacinthe, delicate, mongrel-blooded, tragic mulatto didn’t claim her birthright. She was a sixth-generation Malveaux. In our incestuous milieu the world was hers, but she let something or somebody define the territory. So, the lesson is Sawyer’s dead and she’s alive, if you can call tending Sawyer’s mausoleum, all marble and pink granite, living. Hyacinthe (French pronunciation) lives on her trust and defiantly plants orchids in Missouri soil. There is no need for this. My drawings of Sawyer reveal such splendor, such irrepressible fervor to burst open, shower the planet with his scent. Hyacinthe never understood her name. But she does live in Kansas City, I guess. That’s where Sawyer lives now, too.
Goin’ to Kansas City
Kansas City here I come
I’m going to Kansas City
Kansas City here I come
They got some crazy lil
Women there and I’m
Gonna get me one
—WILBERT HARRISON
Room in the Dark VI
——— I can’t have therapy today.
——— That’s the time we should work most intensely.
——— Listen, stop fuckin’ around. I can’t have no goddamned therapy this morning. I’m telling you. I don’t think I can do anything today.
——— You already have done something. You came here.
——— He killed her. She’s dead.
——— Who’s dead?
——— My friend, Roxie. She’s dead. He killed her this morning. Real early this mornin’…It was on the news. “Woman found strangled in bedroom, while child looked on.”…I can’t believe this. I just can’t have therapy today, that’s all.
——— I am very sorry to hear this, Liliane. I am.
———
——— Would you like to lie down or sit over in the chair by the window, perhaps.