Starting off Black August, I was thinking of the versus we had the fortune of witnessing earlier this year between Jill Scott and Erykah Badu, and how it rejected any kind of competitiveness under capitalism in lieu of a tidalectic exchange between two black women based in generosity, friendship. I hadn’t seen it yet, but I found currents between this exchange and one that occurred over 50 years ago between Nikki Giovanni and Lena Horne on the wonderful program Black Journal whose episodes were just made public. Giovanni sits opposite of Horne and begins the exchange/conversation with Horne with this poem:
I knew nothing of Lena Horne really, until recently watching Cabin in the Sky with my father. In an essay entitled The Mulatta on Film: From Hollywood to the Mexican Revolution, Cedric Robinson traces the ways in which the figure of the Mulatta, a sexualized threat of race mixture in the intended purity of the white social order surged after the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, until 1919, where she did not appear again until the ’40s. But even as they returned, the threat of their sexuality was “muted,” their Mulatta-ness not figuring into the plot. I was interested in this article and seeing the ways that Horne might engage with colorism and this trope in her exchange with Giovanni, but she sort of only gestures towards it: “I was made to look like someone not me. I was made to look like— I had to learn to sing and I was not allowed to imitate R&B records because they weren’t played very much and I was raised by middle class people who didn’t believe in singing the blues. And I was made to look like Heady Lamar.”
The major power of this exchange between the two for me lay in Horne’s telling of how young people are the ones who radicalized her. She says, “Since Greesnboro, as recent as that, and sit-ins, I was able to flee my establishment— stereotype because young people had freed me. And I think that since I always have been what I am inside that I’ve been able to survive. Because they didn’t really kill anything black in me.”
On Angela Davis, who at the time was still incarcerated she says: “What I’m so afraid of is that this is actually a calculated genocidal move in many instances because the threat— the kind of strength that these young people have, which may not always be comparable to the kind that our ancestors had, is so positive and so fearless that it frightens people and I don’t want to see this continue but sometimes I worry that it’s a concentrated, thought out effort to not have a young generation so strong and so beautiful.”
A hilarious bit has her talking about the time she struck a white man in Los Angeles:
“That probably was the first time I felt less lonely by the isolation that was imposed on me by the very nature of its and definitive isolation from my own people, from white people, this middle thing that I was in, had kept me very much alone spiritually too. And I got insulted, I had frequently done so, guy made me mad and I struck him violently, because I am violent in a way.—“
Giovanni playfully interjects: “You trying to say violence purges the soul?”
“No, he just made me mad and sometimes your madness just mounts into beautiful madness and I struck him and I got tons of mail and letters and telegrams from black people that said, “Hey thank you, how wonderful,” and I said, “My god, I’m not alone!” And that was in the ‘50s. And I had lived a long time without that feeling. And there’s so many young black people now that I see doing things that are revolutionizing me and the world.”
I love the way they look at each other throughout. Watch here.