Poet/activist Returns Home to West Oakland

Saturday, November 20, 2010




Oakland Mayor
Ron Dellums.
His uncle, C.L. Dellums,
headed the Western Sector
of the Pullman Porters Union in Oakland,
the first black union in America.






Sons of Ayodele perform Trashman by Marvin X









Poet/Playwright Returns Home to West Oakland

Performs at Black Dot Cafe

OnSaturday, November 20, Marvin X. Jackmon,
poet/playwright/essayist/producer/organizer/teacher, returned to his
childhood neighborhood in West Oakland where he attended Prescott
elementary and Lowell junior high school.

On Saturday afternoonhe had a conversation with actors in the Lower Bottom Playaz who have
been performing his first play Flowers for the Trashman, 1965, San
Francisco State University Drama Department production while he was an
undergrad.

He told the young actors he was flunking an Englishliterature class taught by legendary Medievalist professor/author John
Gardner. Gardner asked him what he wanted to do pass the class. The poet
said write. The professor said write what. Write a play. Gardner said
write it! Flowers for the Trashman was the product. The play became a
classic of the Black Arts Movement and established Marvin X as one of
founders of the most radical movement in American literature. BAM forced
America to include ethnic and gender literature in the academic
curriculum. See the Black Arts Movement by James Smithurst, University
of North Carolina Press.

The poet described his childhood in WestOakland, Harlem of the West. While I was growing up, West Oakland was
the Harlem of the West. I grew up on 7th and Campbell, in my parents
florist shop. West Oakland was booming with a vital economic and
cultural community on 7th Street, with shops, restaurants, cafes, clubs,
associations. It was the end of the railroad line, home of the first
black union, the Pullman Porters, led by C. L. Dellums, uncle of
Oakland's Mayor Ronald Dellums.

My mother and father were Racepeople, the name accorded to those who had racial consciousness in the
20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. They were activists in many social organizations,
especially the NAACP. Before the family moved to Oakland, his parents
edited the Fresno Voice, the first black newspaper in the Central
Valley. His maternal great grandfather, E. Murrill, was mentioned in
1943 edition of the Fresno Bee Newspaper. He was so well known the
newspaper noted that whites and blacks attended his funeral. His
maternal relatives were pioneers to the West coast.

During thewar, his parents left Fresno and came to Oakland. There my parents
opened a florist shop while my mother worked at the Navy Supply Center
as a clerk. The Army base at the end of 7th Street employed many blacks
who migrated to the Bay Area during WWII. Seventh Street was bumper to
bumper cars, especially on the weekends. The street was crowded with
people enjoying Negro life and culture. See Marvin's autobiography
Somethin' Proper, Black Bird Press, 1998.

The poet told of hisintroduction to drama at New Century Recreation Center on 5th Street at
McFeely School where he attended elementary school. He recalled a dance
teacher at New Century was Ruth Beckford, queen choreographer in the Bay
Area. She was one of the most beautiful women of my childhood with her
short natural hair, African body and black velvet skin.
I adored her whenever I could catch a glance of her. So fine, so fine.

Whiledoing a play at Mosswood Park, the poet said he was in the sandbox when
a little white girl called him a nigger for the first time and told him
to get out of the sandbox. In those days, we didn't go to Mosswood Park
often and definitely did go to Lake Merritt, only on holidays such as
the 4th of July. A nigguh would get his ass kicked by white boys if
caught at Lake Merritt.

Pine Street, where the Black Dot Cafe islocated, was the ho stroll, from 7th to 16th by the Southern Pacific
train station. There was a hotel near the train station where you could
rent a room for a few minutes. Although the area where Black Dot is
located is gentrified, someone in the audience informed the poet the
hotel is still there.

As a child, the poet used to play up anddown the streets in the vicinity of Black Dot Cafe, and later he used to
sell black newspapers and magazines in the area, including Jet, Ebony,
Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Currier, Detroit Black Dispatch, et al. As a
child, he also wrote in the Children's Section of the Oakland Tribune.

Asper the play, the setting is a jail cell with the lead character the
poet as a young college student with his ghetto friend. They had an
encounter with the police coming from a dance and end up in jail for
failing the tone test with the police. In jail, the story evolves into a
narrative of the father/son relationship, although most critics focus
on the rage expressed by Joe, the militant college student who goes off
on the white man in the cell. This rage made it a classic of the Black
Arts Movement nationwide and worldwide. The play was produced in Europe
as well. It appeared in Black Dialogue Magazine and the 60s classic
anthology Black Fire, edited by Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka.

Inconversation with the actors, they told the poet how the play affected
them as fatherless young men, suffering the estrangement and abandonment
by their fathers. For them, the play was/is a play within a play, thus
giving a level of consciousness as they performed the ritual and were
transformed by it. The poet told them this is the purpose of drama, to
transform.

He said on one level, the drama reveals his failure asa father since when it was written he had fathered two sons by the age
of twenty-one. The play ends with his lines "I want to talk with my
sons. I want to talk with my sons." The poet noted that he had been able
to talk with one of his two sons, but not with the other who is now
almost 50 years old. This son still has feelings of abandonment and
neglect. The poet told the young men and women we must break the cycle
of such trauma. Otherwise it shall go on forever. Such is the purpose
of Flowers for the Trashman, a man-hood training ritual drama to
transform lives.

He spoke on the function of ritual drama totransform. This play Flowers for the Trashman is a manhood training
ritual so that young men are changed by witnessing it. They will get
over some of their hatred and trauma with fathers, for soon they shall
be fathers and how shall they behave? Shall their sons hate them, shall
they hate their sons, when shall it end?

Truth is, we were notbrought over here to have healthy relationships, father/son,
mother/daughter. We were brought here for our labor, to be slaves and
later wage slaves, coming down to the present. In a 1968 interview with
the poet, James Baldwin told him, "For a black father to raise a black
son is a miracle. And I applaud the men who are able to do this. It's a
wonder we all haven't gone stark raving mad!"

--Marvin X
11/20/10
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