Back then her name was everywhere. As a kid I heard it often, usually evoked on a street corner or from the lips of my older brothers, as if she were some kind of deity. The rat-tat-tat of it—Nikki Giovanni—sent a thrill, and was bandied alongside other names: James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael, Julian Bond, H. Rap Brown, Eldridge Cleaver. Oft-times, black youth in my Cincinnati town anointed them as wise or merely fashionable, forces to be admired, emulated, read, listened to.
I’d no encounter with her words until I heard them spoke at a high school assembly. I was struck by her poetry, true, but also by the student delivering them. They unleashed something in her that felt wild yet empowered. Lines that evoked creation, rebirth, being, culminated with that striking stanza that went:
I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
I cannot be comprehended
except by my permission
In the alchemy of her recitation, that female student expanded before our eyes, as if the poem gave her permission to inhabit her true majesty.
Years before that moment another dawning coincided with the nation’s obsession with The Mod Squad, a television show that, nowadays we’d deem “must-see TV.” The show’s tagline—“one white, one black, one blond,”—was catnip. So were the actors who played those rebels from the wrong side of life who the show branded as “a new kind of cop,” which meant they were the antithesis of tear-gas wielding “pigs” that were popular targets then, as now. They were my idols/ideals: I wondered as a boy whether I’d have an ounce of the cool that was Clarence Williams III, a slim dose of swagger topped with a powerful Afro who spoke his lines as if they’d been written by Shakespeare. Peggy Lipton was the gorgeous Twiggy-like blond damsel who outsmarted the bad guys when she wasn’t being rescued by the other two. And there was Michael Cole, who to me was more than the white guy. I had a crush on him, and in that private, lonely place of my attraction I felt less alone. Week after week, through him I experienced what I couldn’t admit to anyone because the world told me I had no right to those feelings. If burgeoning sexuality had a trigger, what pulled it for me wasn’t porn, or anything remotely prurient. It was Michael Cole’s eyes; by the time I blossomed as a gay man, it was that single feature in other men that determined whether I found them attractive. I was at the beginning of all kinds of consciousness then. Giovanni, and The Mod Squad, came along when we of a certain age were waking up to the sexual and political ways of the world. What we learned we carry still, and that knowledge holds to such an extent that it renders the present moment incomprehensible. Nikki, Clarence, Peggy and Michael are all now at rest. It’s left to us who remain to remember.