Ntozake Shange: Poetry, Dance & the Radical Voice of Black Womanhood

Ntozake Shange did not believe poetry had to remain politely on the page. In her work, poems moved through bodies, music entered language, women danced while telling their stories, conventional spelling gave way to speech rhythms, and theater became a place where individual voices could merge into a larger expression of Black womanhood.

Born Paulette Williams on October 18, 1948, in Trenton, New Jersey, Shange became a poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, performer, teacher, and one of the most formally inventive American writers of the late twentieth century. She is best known for for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, the groundbreaking work she called a “choreopoem,” combining poetry, dance, music, movement, and theater into a form that resisted easy classification.

The success of for colored girls made Shange internationally famous, but it represented only one part of an enormous body of work. She wrote poetry collections including Nappy Edges, A Daughter’s Geography, and Wild Beauty, novels including Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, Betsey Brown, and Liliane, numerous plays and performance works, essays, children’s books, and collaborative projects. Throughout them, she returned to Black women’s interior lives, relationships, family, racism, sexuality, violence, creativity, music, history, food, language, migration, and the difficult work of constructing a self in a society determined to impose definitions of its own.

Shange’s importance lies not simply in what she wrote about but in how she wrote it. She changed the appearance of words on the page because she wanted writing to sound more like living speech. She joined poems to movement because the body carried knowledge language could not always express alone. She made Black women the center of their own stories rather than supporting characters in someone else’s.

Her work insisted that those stories deserved the entire stage.

🌿 Growing Up Surrounded by Black Art and Culture

Shange was born into an intellectually and culturally vibrant Black family. Her father, Paul T. Williams, was a surgeon, while her mother, Eloise Williams, worked as an educator and psychiatric social worker. The family spent part of Shange’s childhood in St. Louis before returning to New Jersey.

Art, music, literature, and political thought were part of family life. Shange later recalled growing up in an environment deeply immersed in Black culture rather than being introduced to it as something separate or marginal. Writers, musicians, artists, and intellectuals were treated as part of a living cultural inheritance, and prominent figures passed through the Williams household.

That environment mattered enormously. Shange did not grow up believing that Black culture required validation from the larger white society before it could be meaningful. Black music, poetry, history, speech, beauty, and community already formed a complete world.

This confidence would become foundational to her writing. Shange did not ask whether Black women’s experiences were worthy of literature. She began from the assumption that they were.

🏫 Race and Childhood in St. Louis

Shange also encountered racism directly while growing up. During her family’s years in St. Louis, she attended a predominantly white school as part of the broader process of school integration and experienced the hostility that could accompany being one of relatively few Black students in such an environment.

The contrast between the affirming Black cultural world of her family and the racism she encountered outside it was formative. She knew what it meant to belong to a community rich in history and achievement while simultaneously entering institutions where Black identity could be treated as something inferior or unwelcome.

That contradiction appears throughout her later writing. Shange’s work recognizes racism as an external force, but she is equally interested in the internal resources people use to survive it. Language, music, memory, friendship, family, sensuality, creativity, and self-definition all become forms of resistance.

Survival in Shange’s work is never merely passive. It can involve actively inventing a language in which to live.

📚 Barnard College and a Changing America

Shange entered Barnard College in 1966, arriving during one of the most politically and culturally turbulent periods in modern American history. The civil rights movement, Black Power, opposition to the Vietnam War, second-wave feminism, anticolonial struggles, and student activism were transforming the intellectual world around her.

Barnard became important to Shange not simply because of what she studied but because of the political and feminist conversations she encountered there. She later described the college as a place where she came of age intellectually and artistically, participating in consciousness-raising groups as well as Black student and antiwar movements.

She graduated in 1970 with a degree in American Studies. That interdisciplinary training suited a writer whose later work would repeatedly refuse conventional boundaries. Literature, politics, history, music, gender, race, dance, geography, and popular culture could all exist within the same artistic space.

Shange was already becoming the sort of writer for whom a single category would never be sufficient.

💔 Crisis and Reinvention

Shange’s college years also included profound personal difficulty. Following the breakdown of an early marriage, she experienced severe emotional distress and later spoke and wrote openly about suicide attempts during this period.

The subject would eventually become part of the title of her most famous work, but Shange did not treat survival as a sentimental story in which suffering simply disappears. Instead, she became increasingly interested in the process through which a woman might reconstruct a self after being pushed toward despair.

Writing, feminism, community, dance, and political consciousness all became part of that reconstruction.

Rather than accepting definitions that had been imposed upon her, she began developing a deliberately self-created identity. That process became visible even in the name by which the world would eventually know her.

🦁 Becoming Ntozake Shange

After Barnard, Shange moved to California and pursued graduate study at the University of Southern California, earning a master’s degree in American Studies in 1973.

During this period, she adopted the name Ntozake Shange. She explained the names as carrying meanings roughly associated with a woman who comes into her own things and one who walks like a lion.

The change represented far more than a professional pseudonym. It was part of an effort to reject an identity defined primarily through European and American cultural traditions and to assert connection with African heritage.

Names carry histories.

They also carry expectations.

Choosing her own name allowed Shange to participate consciously in defining herself.

That determination would become one of the central themes of her writing.

💃 Discovering Dance

California also brought dance much more deeply into Shange’s artistic life. She studied and performed with dancers and began developing work in which poetry did not remain separate from physical movement.

This was crucial.

Traditional theater often places the spoken script at the center while movement serves the text. Shange increasingly imagined something different. A gesture could carry meaning equal to a sentence. Music could reshape the emotional force of words. The body could remember what the voice could not easily articulate.

Dance also offered a way of reclaiming the body from the social forces that attempted to regulate it.

For Black women in Shange’s work, the body could be a site of violence and vulnerability, but it could also become a source of pleasure, beauty, sexuality, rhythm, knowledge, and self-possession.

Movement became another language.

🎭 Inventing the Choreopoem

Out of these experiments came the form with which Shange would become permanently associated: the choreopoem.

The word itself combines choreography and poem.

Rather than constructing a conventional play around plot, realistic dialogue, and psychologically developed named characters, Shange brought poetry, music, movement, color, gesture, and collective performance together.

The concept fundamentally changed the relationship between poetry and theater.

A poem could become spatial.

A line could move across a stage.

Multiple voices could answer one another.

Dance could interrupt or complete language.

Individual stories could remain distinct while contributing to a collective experience.

Shange did not simply write a new kind of play.

She created a name for the form she needed because existing terminology could not adequately describe it.

🌈 for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf

The work that emerged from Shange’s poetry and dance experiments became for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf.

The piece developed from performances in California before evolving through productions in New York. It eventually reached the Public Theater and then Broadway in 1976, where it became a major theatrical success.

Seven women identified by colors rather than conventional names speak, move, dance, remember, confess, laugh, grieve, argue, and support one another.

There is no single conventional storyline.

Instead, experiences accumulate.

Love.

Abandonment.

Sexuality.

Friendship.

Racism.

Violence.

Music.

Loss.

Desire.

Humiliation.

Joy.

The individual voices remain distinct, but together they create something larger.

The structure itself becomes an argument about community.

🌈 Women Identified by Color

The women in for colored girls are known by colors—the lady in red, the lady in blue, the lady in yellow, and others.

The choice prevents the work from functioning like conventional realistic drama, where a character is typically introduced through a name and biography.

Color creates another kind of identity.

Each woman is individual, yet she also participates in a spectrum.

The rainbow becomes an organizing visual and emotional image, allowing difference and connection to exist simultaneously.

No single woman represents all Black women.

Instead, multiple experiences stand beside one another.

This refusal to create one representative Black female character became one of the work’s most important innovations.

Shange offered plurality instead.

🎶 Poetry That Had to Be Heard

Reading Shange silently on the page provides only part of the experience.

Her work is intensely sonic.

Speech rhythms matter.

Music matters.

Pauses matter.

Repetition matters.

She frequently abandoned conventional capitalization, punctuation, and spelling because standard written English did not always capture the sound she wanted readers and performers to hear.

These choices were deliberate.

Shange was interested in what happens when written language acknowledges the rhythms of Black speech rather than forcing them into standardized forms associated with institutional correctness.

The page itself becomes performative.

Words lean toward the voice.

Even before an actor speaks them, they suggest breath, tempo, emphasis, and personality.

✏️ Breaking the Rules of Written English

Shange’s unconventional spelling and punctuation sometimes startled readers accustomed to standardized literary prose.

But the apparent irregularity serves artistic purposes.

Language is never neutral.

Rules about which forms of speech are considered “correct” reflect cultural power as well as grammar.

Shange wanted the visual form of language to belong to the people speaking it.

Lowercase letters, altered spellings, slashes, abbreviated words, phonetic constructions, and unexpected spacing could push writing closer to voice and performance.

This does not mean her writing rejected craft.

Quite the opposite.

Shange was extraordinarily attentive to the way words sounded.

Breaking a rule effectively requires knowing what the rule does.

Her typography became part of the music.

🏙️ From Experimental Performance to Broadway

The journey of for colored girls from small performance spaces to Broadway was remarkable.

By September 1976, the choreopoem had opened at the Booth Theatre. It ran hundreds of performances and received a Tony nomination for Best Play, while Trazana Beverley won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play.

The commercial success was historically significant. Shange became only the second Black woman after Lorraine Hansberry to have a play produced on Broadway.

Yet Broadway success also created an unusual tension.

A work born from experimental poetry, feminist consciousness, Black cultural expression, dance, and alternative performance was now being presented inside one of the most established institutions of American commercial theater.

The radical form had entered the mainstream without ceasing to challenge it.

🖤 Putting Black Women at the Center

One of the most revolutionary features of for colored girls is simple enough to be overlooked.

Black women occupy the center.

Their experiences are not filtered primarily through white characters.

They are not merely wives, girlfriends, mothers, maids, victims, or supporting figures in stories about men.

They are the story.

Shange gives them emotional complexity, erotic desire, rage, humor, artistic ambition, foolishness, intelligence, grief, contradictions, friendship, and interiority.

That range matters because representation does not simply mean placing previously excluded people on stage.

It means allowing them the same complexity traditionally reserved for people already treated as universal.

Shange insisted upon that complexity.

💔 Love and Violence

The emotional power of for colored girls also comes from its refusal to romanticize relationships.

Love can be exhilarating.

It can also be dangerous.

Shange’s women talk about betrayal, abandonment, sexual coercion, domestic violence, loneliness, and the ways intimate relationships can reproduce broader systems of domination.

Yet the work never suggests that Black men as a group are simply enemies of Black women.

Instead, it examines conflicts occurring within communities already under racial pressure, refusing the argument that discussing sexism somehow betrays racial solidarity.

This position was controversial.

Shange insisted that Black women should not have to choose between speaking against racism and speaking against sexism.

Silencing either experience would require denying part of reality.

🤝 Sisterhood Without Sentimentality

Community among women becomes one of the work’s central sources of survival.

Yet Shange does not present sisterhood as effortless.

The women arrive with different experiences, wounds, personalities, and perspectives.

What develops is not perfect agreement but recognition.

One woman’s story makes room for another.

Pain can be witnessed rather than hidden.

Joy can be shared rather than treated as trivial.

By the end, survival becomes collective without eliminating individuality.

This balance between the individual and community appears throughout Shange’s writing.

A woman must claim herself.

But claiming the self does not necessarily mean living alone.

🎵 Music Everywhere

Music moves through nearly everything Shange wrote.

Jazz, blues, Latin music, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other traditions provide not merely references but ways of structuring language and experience.

Her childhood had been filled with music, and her writing frequently treats musicians as cultural historians whose sounds preserve emotions and histories that conventional narratives may fail to record.

Improvisation was especially important.

A jazz musician works within structure but also responds to what is happening in the moment.

Shange’s language often behaves similarly.

A phrase repeats and changes.

Voices answer one another.

A rhythm establishes expectations and then breaks them.

The poem moves as though it were listening to itself while being created.

🌎 The Black Arts Movement—and Beyond It

Shange came of age during the Black Arts Movement and shared many of its commitments to Black cultural autonomy, political consciousness, and the rejection of white standards as the sole measure of artistic value.

Yet her work also pushed against limitations she perceived within nationalist cultural politics.

Some Black Arts writing emphasized collective racial identity so strongly that individual women’s experiences, especially experiences involving sexism or intimate violence, could be pushed aside.

Shange refused that trade.

She could write about racism and colonialism while also writing about heartbreak, sexuality, childbirth, domestic violence, female friendship, food, dancing, and private emotional life.

The political and personal were not competing categories.

They were intertwined.

🌴 Latino and Caribbean Influences

Shange’s artistic world was never limited to a simple Black-and-white understanding of American culture.

Living in New York and California brought her into contact with Puerto Rican, Latino, Caribbean, and other artistic communities. Spanish appears throughout portions of her work, while music and cultural references cross national and linguistic boundaries.

She became particularly interested in connections throughout the African diaspora.

Black identity in Shange is not geographically narrow.

Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States form part of a larger cultural geography shaped by migration, colonialism, music, language, memory, and resistance.

Her collection A Daughter’s Geography reflects this expansive sense of place.

Geography is political.

It is also personal.

📚 Nappy Edges

Shange’s 1978 poetry collection Nappy Edges further established her as an important poetic voice independent of the theatrical success of for colored girls.

The title itself declares an interest in Black identity and beauty while resisting standards that have historically treated natural Black hair as something requiring correction or concealment.

Throughout the collection, Shange explores love, sexuality, politics, womanhood, language, race, and the body in a voice that moves easily between lyricism and confrontation.

The poems demonstrate that the choreopoem did not emerge from theater and then become poetic.

Poetry came first.

The theater expanded what Shange already understood poems could do.

🪡 Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo

Shange also became an accomplished novelist.

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, published in book form in the early 1980s, follows three sisters whose different lives explore creativity, sexuality, love, family, art, and Black womanhood.

Sassafrass is a fiber artist and writer, Cypress a dancer, and Indigo a younger sister whose relationship to the world includes imagination, ritual, and cultural inheritance.

The novel refuses conventional boundaries just as Shange’s theater does.

Recipes, letters, poems, instructions, spells, and other forms enter the narrative, creating a book that feels handmade rather than mechanically standardized.

That quality suits its characters.

Creative practice is not decoration in their lives.

It is a way of understanding themselves.

🍲 Food as History and Memory

Food occupies an unusually important place in Shange’s writing.

Recipes appear alongside poems and stories. Cooking becomes an expression of culture, family, migration, improvisation, pleasure, and survival.

In If I Can Cook/You Know God Can, Shange brings food together with history and memoir, exploring how dishes travel with people and how culinary traditions preserve cultural memory across displacement.

This interest fits perfectly within her larger artistic philosophy.

A culture does not live only inside official histories or famous books.

It exists in kitchens.

Songs.

Gestures.

Hair.

Dance steps.

Family sayings.

Ways of seasoning food.

Ways of moving through a room.

Shange treated these forms of knowledge seriously.

👧 Betsey Brown

Shange’s novel Betsey Brown turns toward adolescence and the experience of a Black girl growing up amid the tensions of school integration and family change.

The novel draws upon circumstances Shange understood personally, particularly the disorientation that could come from leaving a familiar Black community and entering predominantly white institutions.

Betsey is not merely a symbol of integration.

She is a girl.

That distinction matters.

Political history enters childhood through classrooms, neighborhoods, friendships, parental expectations, embarrassment, fear, and the desire to belong.

Shange was particularly skilled at bringing large political issues down to human scale.

History may appear in textbooks as legislation and court decisions.

A child experiences it while trying to get through the school day.

🎭 spell #7

Shange continued experimenting with theater after the success of for colored girls.

Works such as spell #7 expanded her investigation of Black identity, performance, stereotype, creativity, and the expectations placed upon Black artists.

Again, she resisted conventional theatrical realism.

Music, masks, poetry, movement, satire, and shifting identities could coexist.

Shange was fascinated by performance because identity itself involves performance.

People learn how they are expected to behave.

Racial stereotypes impose roles.

Gender expectations impose others.

Theater gives a writer the opportunity to expose those roles while simultaneously inventing alternatives.

The stage becomes a place where masks can be worn deliberately—and removed.

🧵 A Writer Across Forms

Trying to classify Shange by genre quickly becomes frustrating.

She was a poet.

Playwright.

Novelist.

Essayist.

Performer.

Children’s writer.

Teacher.

Collaborator.

The categories overlap constantly.

Her novels contain recipes and poems.

Her poetry moves like dance.

Her plays contain lyric sequences.

Her essays carry musical rhythms.

This refusal of boundaries was not simply experimental for experimentation’s sake.

Different experiences require different forms.

If a poem needs movement, let it move.

If a novel needs a recipe, include one.

If standard punctuation interferes with voice, change it.

Shange treated genre as a tool rather than an authority.

🖌️ Black Women as Artists

Many of Shange’s female characters create things.

They dance, write, cook, sew, sing, perform, tell stories, arrange spaces, and transform everyday materials.

This repeated emphasis on creativity is important.

Art in Shange’s work is not restricted to professionally recognized artists.

Creative knowledge can exist in a kitchen, a dance studio, a bedroom, a community gathering, or a family tradition.

That broader definition challenges the hierarchy separating “high art” from ordinary creative life.

It also restores artistic agency to women whose creativity has historically been dismissed as domestic labor or recreation.

A quilt can carry history.

A recipe can preserve migration.

A dance can become testimony.

👩‍👧 Mothers, Daughters and Generations

Shange returned repeatedly to relationships among women across generations.

Mothers and daughters can love one another deeply while misunderstanding each other.

A younger woman may inherit traditions she needs while rejecting expectations she cannot accept.

Older generations preserve knowledge but may also reproduce social constraints.

These relationships allow Shange to explore how culture survives without becoming frozen.

Inheritance does not mean obedience.

A daughter may receive language, food, memory, music, spiritual practices, family stories, and forms of resilience from those who came before her while still insisting upon the right to live differently.

Tradition remains alive because each generation changes it.

🎓 Shange the Teacher

Teaching remained important throughout Shange’s career.

She taught at numerous colleges and universities, bringing her interdisciplinary understanding of literature, performance, women’s studies, African American culture, and creative practice into the classroom.

This role fits naturally with her broader artistic legacy.

Shange did not treat writing as a sealed private activity.

Her work continually reaches outward toward other writers, performers, students, musicians, dancers, and communities.

The collaborative nature of the choreopoem itself depends upon multiple artists bringing language to life.

Teaching extended that process.

A literary tradition survives not only through books but through people showing others what those books make possible.

📦 Preserving the Ntozake Shange Archive

Shange eventually chose Barnard College as the home for her literary archive.

The decision carried particular meaning because Barnard had been central to her formation as a feminist thinker, artist, and politically engaged student.

Her archive includes manuscripts, correspondence, journals, photographs, teaching material, artwork, drafts, performance records, and other material documenting decades of creative life.

Archives make visible something finished books often conceal.

Writing involves revision.

Ideas change.

Words move.

Projects develop through collaboration.

A famous work once existed as uncertain pages covered with decisions.

For future readers and scholars, Shange’s papers preserve not only what she created but traces of how creation happened.

📺 for colored girls Beyond the Original Stage

The influence of for colored girls continued long after its original Broadway run.

The work was adapted for television and repeatedly staged across the United States and internationally. A feature-film adaptation appeared in 2010, introducing the material to another audience, though the cinematic version necessarily transformed a work originally built around the unusual relationship among poetry, bodies, music, and theatrical space.

In 2022, several years after Shange’s death, for colored girls returned to Broadway in a major revival directed and choreographed by Camille A. Brown.

That return demonstrated that the work belonged to more than the historical moment that created it.

New generations continued finding themselves inside it.

📖 Writing for Children

Shange also wrote books for younger readers, extending her interest in Black history, identity, family, and creativity into children’s literature.

Her books include Whitewash, Ellington Was Not a Street, Daddy Says, Float Like a Butterfly, and Coretta Scott.

These works introduce young readers to questions of race, history, family, music, and resilience without abandoning Shange’s characteristic attention to the beauty of language.

Writing for children also connected naturally with her larger commitment to cultural inheritance.

Young readers need stories in which they can encounter people who resemble themselves, histories that acknowledge their communities, and artistic traditions that existed before they arrived.

Representation begins early.

📚 A Vast Body of Work

The enormous success of for colored girls sometimes makes Shange appear to be the author of a single famous work.

Her archive demonstrates how inaccurate that impression is.

Across her career she produced numerous dramatic works, novels, poetry collections, essays, anthologies, children’s books, performances, adaptations, and collaborative projects.

She kept experimenting.

The themes remained connected, but the forms changed.

A writer who had already invented the choreopoem did not spend the rest of her life attempting to reproduce exactly the same success.

Shange continued looking for different structures capable of holding different experiences.

That restlessness is part of her achievement.

🕯️ Ntozake Shange’s Final Years

Shange continued writing, teaching, collaborating, and participating in literary life even as she faced significant health challenges in later years.

Her final publications included Wild Beauty: New and Selected Poems, which appeared in 2017 and allowed readers to see decades of poetic work together.

Ntozake Shange died on October 27, 2018, at the age of seventy.

Her death prompted tributes across poetry, theater, Black studies, feminist scholarship, and the performing arts because her influence crossed all of those fields.

Yet the work did not become static after her death.

Performances continued.

Her archives continued generating scholarship.

New collections of previously unpublished writing appeared.

Students who had never witnessed the cultural moment of the 1970s continued encountering the language and recognizing something immediate.

That is one measure of a living literary legacy.

🌈 The Choreopoem as Legacy

The choreopoem remains perhaps Shange’s most obvious formal contribution.

The word now seems natural enough to describe a performance combining poetry, movement, music, and theatrical elements.

But someone had to imagine that those forms belonged together strongly enough to require a new name.

Shange did.

The importance of the choreopoem goes beyond terminology.

It questions the boundaries separating literary genres.

Why must a poem remain still?

Why must theater depend upon conventional plot?

Why should dance function merely as decoration?

Why must speech follow standardized written English?

Why should a woman’s body onstage be something primarily looked at rather than a source of knowledge and narrative?

Shange’s form answered those questions through performance.

🎶 Language as Music

One of the greatest pleasures of reading Shange is encountering language that knows it possesses a body.

Her sentences have weight and rhythm.

Words collide.

Sounds repeat.

Spellings bend toward pronunciation.

English becomes something performed rather than simply printed.

This quality connects her writing to long traditions of Black musical and oral culture.

The page does not erase the voice.

It waits for it.

That is why Shange remains particularly rewarding when read aloud.

The visual choices that may initially appear unconventional begin making sonic sense.

The language knows where the beat is.

🖤 Black Feminism Without Permission

Shange also remains important because she placed Black women’s experiences at the center without asking permission from either white feminism or male-centered Black political movements.

Her characters experience racism and sexism simultaneously because actual lives do not divide neatly into theoretical categories.

A Black woman does not stop being Black when she encounters sexism.

She does not stop being a woman when she encounters racism.

Shange’s writing insists upon the complexity created by those overlapping realities while also refusing to define Black womanhood entirely through oppression.

Her women suffer.

They also dance.

Flirt.

Cook.

Create.

Desire.

Laugh.

Travel.

Fight.

Remember.

Love one another.

That fullness is essential.

✨ Why Ntozake Shange Still Matters

Ntozake Shange matters because she expanded the possibilities of literary form while expanding the range of lives American literature and theater were willing to place at the center.

She understood that representation involves more than inserting new characters into old structures.

Sometimes the structure itself must change.

A conventional play might not be able to hold what she wanted to express.

So she created the choreopoem.

Standardized spelling might flatten the rhythms she wanted readers to hear.

So she changed the spelling.

A traditional narrative might force women’s experiences into a single storyline.

So she created multiple voices.

Form followed experience rather than forcing experience to obey form.

That artistic freedom remains one of her most important lessons.

🌟 When the Rainbow Was Finally Enuf

The title of Shange’s most famous work begins in despair and ends somewhere very different.

That movement is central to her artistic vision.

Pain is real.

Violence is real.

Racism is real.

Sexism is real.

Heartbreak, loneliness, betrayal, and grief cannot simply be wished away.

But they do not constitute the entirety of a life.

The women in Shange’s work move toward self-recognition, community, creativity, and forms of spiritual and emotional survival that do not depend upon pretending suffering never happened.

That distinction is crucial.

Shange did not offer easy optimism.

She offered transformation.

Her writing repeatedly asks what can happen when a person who has been told she is marginal discovers that she is actually at the center of her own existence.

Language changes.

The body changes.

The stage changes.

The story changes.

Ntozake Shange spent her career making room for that change, and American poetry and theater have never been quite the same since.

senses of heritage

my grandpa waz a doughboy from carolina
the other a garveyite from lakewood
i got talked to abt the race & achievement
bout color & propriety/
nobody spoke to me about the moon

daddy talked abt music & mama bout christians
my sisters/ we
always talked & talked
there waz never quiet
trees were status symbols

i’ve taken to fog/
the moon still surprisin me

-Ntozake Shange