For this post I wanted to read about Paulette L. Williams before “Ntozake Shange.” Much of the work I’ve been doing has been analyzing the effects, consequences, and partnerships that have come with Shange’s art, so I thought it well to go back to lost in language and sound to remember her thought processes before she came into her artistry.
“INITIALLY, I WAS DEMONICALLY TICKED AT THE NOTION that I, Ntozake Shange, a.k.a. Paulette Linda Williams, whose American birth certificate from an alleged Union state, New Jersey, read “colored” in 1948, was asked to write a piece about justice. This was truly laughable, since it is quite clear to me that “justice” as a fact, fantasy, or concept is so removed an actuality in my life, intellectually as well as visceral…
This idea is false. The general ideas roaming American minds — black, white, Asian, Chicano, Texan, urban, empty of truth whichever they are about who and what I come from is “just” for us — are scary as the bullet holes of Huey Long’s assassinations in Baton Rouge and as sad as the Trail of Tears, and I haven’t gotten to “the Negro” yet.(124)”