Hold Tight Gently (7 page)

Yet as Essex and other black gay people well knew, social and cultural circles in D.C. were mostly divided along racial grounds. One of
the best-known hangouts for black gay artists was (Valerie) Papaya Mann’s brownstone in Northeast D.C.—a salon-like setting reminiscent of 1920s Harlem Renaissance gathering spots in New York City, of which A’Lelia Walker’s and Carl Van Vechten’s were probably the most famous. Papaya herself had come out in the midseventies and immediately gotten involved in D.C. lesbian and gay life, organizing a variety of social events and becoming a central figure in Sapphire Sapphos, Washington’s first organization for African American lesbians. It was at Papaya’s that Essex first met his future good friends Chris Prince and Garth Tate and then, through them, any number of other black gay singers, writers, painters, and filmmakers.

One of the early (1979–80) products of these gatherings was the publication of the short-lived but handsomely produced bimonthly
Nethula Journal of Contemporary Literature
(the name “Nethula” had come to Essex in a dream). He co-founded
Nethula
with two young women, Kathy Anderson, whom he’d known at the University of Maryland, and Cynthia Lou Williams. Essex served not only as the journal’s publisher, but also as its graphic designer—he’d learned offset printing and typesetting at one of his part-time jobs, and showed a striking gift for it. With wonderful paper stock, stunning cover design, and challenging content, both poetry and prose,
Nethula
was a state-of-the-art publication devoted largely to the work of the newest generation of black artists. Both Sterling Brown and E. Ethelbert Miller of the older group of black writers were among the journal’s five contributing editors. Miller especially—a poet on staff at the Howard University library—served as an important bridge between the generations.

In 1980, Miller arranged for Essex and the black lesbian poet and filmmaker Michelle Parkerson to share a bill together at the citywide Ascension Poetry Reading Series at Howard University’s Founders Library, which Miller coordinated. Michelle had graduated from Temple University, was then working at the local NBC television affiliate, and had just completed her first film,
But Then, She’s Betty Carter
. The two had never met before and the connection proved immediate and consequential for both. As Michelle recalls the evening of their joint reading, “I was just struck by this young brother, whose poems were incredible . . . beautifully sensual and homoerotically brave, which was right where I was at with my own work.” After the event concluded, Michelle approached Essex: “Hey, where you been all
my life?” she laughingly asked, and told him how much she loved his work. Essex felt the same about hers and the two became fast friends. In the mid-1980s Michelle wrote a poem, “Highwire,” that celebrated the friendship:

                        
We poise above teetering earth

                        
Defying limitation

                        
Mere lines suspend us

                        
We do not know fear

                        
A precision for danger

                        
Instructs our hand

                        
Chaperones the passions

                        
Propelling us:

                        
Partners

                        
Skin to skin

                        
Flung vast beyond gender

                        
The sweaty grip of Spirit

                        
is all that joins us

                        
Sequined

                        
Caped

                        
We test precarious

                        
air.

The two had much in common. Both came from the Anacostia section of Southeast Washington, both were living in the “gayborhood” of Adams Morgan, and both were gay writers who (in Michelle’s words) “loved to push edges.” Anacostia sat beyond the army/marine barracks at the southern edge of Capitol Hill and was mostly black and poor. As Essex would later put it, “the city doesn’t think kindly of Anacostia. . . . [It’s] viewed as a jungle of sorts, breeding crime, poverty and other social ails and traumas no-one really wants to discuss.” But Southeast D.C. had been the home of Frederick Douglass, and a number of black artists had lived there. Essex felt a strong attachment to the area, which he made clear in a later poem, “My Funny Valentine/for Southeast”:

                        
Green Dolphin Street is Kind of Blue.

                        
Cool cats lean on the Avenue.

                        
They keep swing and bop alive.

                        
They brew rhythms, cook blues

                        
In mumbo sauce . . .

                        
Some people can’t see Southeast

                        
For the Harlem it is.

                        
They hear go go and call it noise,

                        
Fear its criminal,

                        
But it’s the best of our blood

                        
Dignified without violins.

In addition to Michelle, Essex began to work with other writers he was meeting at Papaya’s and elsewhere, including Gideon Ferebee Jr. and Larry Duckett (Larry would for a time become a close friend and performance partner). What followed within a few years in the early eighties was a proliferation of contacts, multitasking (Essex, for one, became poet, graphic artist, organizer, set designer, and actor), artist collectives, publications (the first,
MOJA
, would last for only a few issues but led to a host of others, including
ARISE
,
BGM
,
Women in the Life
, and the
Au Courant
group in Philly), performance sites, and personnel—all of which helped spawn the widely shared sense that an outburst of creative energy was in play strong enough to warrant being called a second Harlem Renaissance, “second” in relation to time, not quality, and this time around, moreover, centrally,
overtly
gay. “Every week,” as photographer and writer Ron Simmons tells it, “there would be an opening, or a reading, or an exhibition—it was incredible.” The multiplicity of events from roughly 1980 to 1985 made for animated high spirits, a heady, intoxicating buzz—and a hectic, hazy chronology:

—in 1980 Essex became a founding member of the performance poetry group Station to Station. Its first performance, at D.C.’s Gala Hispanic Theatre, was also the first time Wayson heard Essex read publicly. The poem he chose was “Balloons,” his intense take on the serial killer John Wayne Gacy. It left Wayson feeling “awed by the audacity and freakishness of the subject matter”:

                        
In black plastic bags

                        
tied at the top

                        
they were buried.

                        
Their faces

                        
swollen with death

                        
rise in my dreams.

                        
I was seventeen

                        
when I read of them:

                        
young boys, young men

                        
lured to a house in Texas.

                        
Their penises were filled

                        
with excited blood:

                        
first hard then soft they became

                        
as Death with its blistered lips

                        
kissed them one by one . . .

—in late December 1981, Essex made his first appearance on the late Grace Cavalieri’s WPFW radio show
The Poet and the Poem
(he would appear again in 1985 and for a third time, with Wayson, in 1986).

—
Nethula
continued to publish for a while longer, with Essex assuring the poet (and future biographer of Audre Lorde) Alexis de Veaux that it would no longer be as “thematic” as the initial number. He told her, too, that he was “pleasantly stunned” to read her piece on “Sister Love” in
Essence
: “I could feel the courage it took to name and say what is real on this human journey we are all making. . . . You made me proud. . . . I seem to be realizing how important coalescing is going to be among our variousness [
sic
] in order to make change and survive. This is no place to rest. There must be ‘freedom . . . for all of us.’ The synthesizing of politics and culture, and who we are . . .”
¹²

—Essex now began to self-publish his poetry chapbooks. After a number of commercial publishers told him that they liked his work but “you’re a poet and a young one and come back some time later,” Essex decided, “with no concern about accusations of vanity and the like . . . to get my words out . . . to take a chance on myself. Trust my own judgment a little more. Become self-sufficient.” He felt that the first step “in self-empowerment and control of your image is to do it yourself; from that point of view there is less of a chance of your message being distorted or diluted.” He decided to call his venture Be Bop Books—“because there is so much music in my life now.” In 1982 he
published
Diamonds Was in the Kitty
and
Some of the People We Love Are Terrorists
; the following year he issued four hundred copies of
Plums
. In 1985 would come the more ambitious
Earth Life
, which the
Washington Post
would favorably review, Essex telling its reporter that he drew most of his subjects “from personal experience,” and citing Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Billie Holiday as his “influences.” In 1986 he’d publish
Conditions
, his most substantial work to date; the critic Donald Hutera would praise it as “rarely didactic . . . not experimental . . . more of a tender-tough confessee . . . he pares down his words and phrases carefully, for maximum rhythmic impact.”

—starting in 1982, Essex and Larry Duckett found a group they called Cinque (named after the West African Joseph Cinqué, the legendary hero who led a successful mutiny on the slave ship
Amistad
in 1839). The following year Essex invited Wayson to join them, adding music to their poetry performances. The trio started to perform publicly, including at the black gay bar Bachelor’s Mill. Cinque’s performances blended jazz, pop, and words, which Essex named “choral poetry—a kind of melodic and intelligent rap music.” As Wayson describes it, the three “would recite in unison or would weave their voices together, dividing the lines or stanzas between voices, the pattern varied to suit the particular poem.” All the words were memorized in advance of a performance, the three men meeting at least twice a week for two to three hours and then, as a performance date approached, increasing rehearsal time to three to four times a week. They recorded all rehearsals and listened intently to the recordings in order to critique their own process. This strenuous schedule was eased by smoking a joint or two before each rehearsal.

In “Brass Rail” (named after a black gay bar)—which Essex called his “breakthrough piece” (and which would later appear in Marlon Riggs’ film
Tongues Untied
)—“one voice starts at the end of the poem and another at the beginning, so that they cross, repeating a line in the middle.” They were using the speaking voice as an instrument of musicality, employing the “ecstatic call-and-response of the Baptist church to convey the erotic urgency of a night in the black gay bar”:

                        
I saw you last night.

                        
Many occupants are never found

                        
in the basement.

                        
Many canoes overturn

                        
of the Brass Rail.

                        
Your dark, diva’s face.

                        
a leg

                        
lushing and laughing.

                        
I hear the sea,

                        
your voice

                        
screaming,

                        
falling from the air,

                        
dancing with the boys on the edge of funk,

                        
twilight.

Another main feature of the performance style that began with Cinqué and continued throughout their work during this period was (in Wayson’s words) “the idea of considering the natural spoken inflection as musical pitches and trying to match between the voices, so it sounded like one person speaking.” This gave the sound richness and resonance; in some pieces they actually sang, providing a continuum between normal speech and music.