Nikky Finney captures a fierce i’m-not-the-one-to-mess-with tone, learned as much from the tough girls, the bad girls, as from rosa parks in Red Velvet:
‘A girl in the crowd, taught not to
shout, shouts, “Oh! She’s so sweet-looking! Oh!
They done messed with the wrong one now.”
You cannot keep messing with a sweet-looking
Black woman knows her way around velvet.’
poems about other black women not to mess with in this book who had their moment of media attention are condoleezza rice and wilma rudolph.
these are poems of the south, stories from louisiana of floods, church bombings in alabama, strom thurmond’s black children in south carolina, a solitary artist in kentucky and the woman who drove across five states to be with her.
these are poems about enduring until one knows what one needs to be known so as not be messed with. in Red Velvet:
‘The Montgomery seamstress waits and waits for
the Cleveland Avenue bus. She climbs aboard,
row five. The fifth row is the first row of the Colored
section. The bus driver, who tried to put her off that day,
had put her off twelve years before. But twelve years
before she was only twenty-eight, still a child to the
heavy work of resistance.’
finney’s velvet is fish. she tells the story of her journey, beginning from the days before she learned the lessons for the day she would buy her own fish whole and grip a knife for the heavy work. her metaphor testifies to the heavy work accomplished to write the way she does.
these are poems about leaving and returning, and standing ground, and about staying when the ground is washed away from underfoot and why leaving isn’t an option. there’s nothing easy about these poems, which is why they should be read.
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