Post # 8

For my last post, I want to briefly speak to the last suggested prompt offered, to nominate a short excerpt of Shange’s work for the “Shange Mixtape”. One of the Shange pieces that resonated with me the most was Sassafrass, Cyrpress & Indigo and I think that the book, in really concise and revelatory ways, reveals some of Shange’s central themes such as: creation, the creation of new worlds, the magic of music and the moon and “women”, community and communion and the ghosts that play in the shadows of our words.

Pages 27-34 constitute a really helpful excerpt. The excerpt would not need to be that long but the narrative encapsulated between those pages feel really full of the central concepts that I pulled from the book. Page 27 begins with a chapter in which Indigo is learning to pray with her fiddle. She “invit[es] the moon in” and lets the “holy ghost” pour out of her creation, as she makes life, goes wild. And her mother is exhausted by it, it is too much and too off kilter, too loud and unwieldy. Indigo may need to go elsewhere to create her music.

Later in the pages, she meets the Junior Geechee Captains Spats and Crunch and shows them another world with her music, blows them away, scares them a littl, even. Shange writes then “Indigo’s specialities were other worlds” with the places she goes and sees in her music. Her nickname in the group becomes “digo” meaning to say– to speak into the silence– and if that isn’t a lot to unpack, I don’t know what is. So I think that that excerpt, cushioned by a little context of the book’s narrative, would be a really helpful entrance to the larger themes within some of Shange’s work.

Cite:

Shange, Ntozake. Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo. St. Martins, 210.