When I Met Ntozake Shange ... (Last Installment in This Series)

During my college years, the Women’s Liberation Movement, as it was often called, made headway surely but slowly. Most of the celebrities whose portraits I was asked to sketch were men. In the graduate creative writing courses that I took, there was considerable discussion about a breakthrough in feminism, in the portrayal of race, and in the very meaning of literature as a performance art: a breakthrough that was taking New York by storm! The author of the work was Ntozake Shange. The work was for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf.

Faculty who had witnessed the work at the New Federal Theatre or at the New York Shakespeare Festival praised it as utterly new. The theatrical event had begun in improvisations in San Francisco clubs and had taken form in the inventive mind of the young Shange, as she responded to the many movements that were sweeping the country. She created choreopoems that were arresting portrayals of black experiences with politics, with sex, with spirit, and with womanhood.

We graduate students were eager to meet Shange, but, for whatever reasons, she was not brought to campus. Here, I might be permitted a digression. When I finished my PhD and was hired at a university to do the job that I am still doing many years later, I was a newly minted professor serving on a departmental committee entrusted to invite well-known authors to speak to our campus. In committee, I mentioned that, in my creative writing workshop at my alma mater, I had been deeply moved by the first book of poetry by an author who had visited our class and had exhibited such charisma and such talent and such professionalism that she surely would become famous one day. Having never heard of her, my colleagues quickly moved on to consider other writers instead. The poet that I had recommended was Alice Walker. In less than a year, Walker published The Color Purple. Her fees rightly became too high for a departmental budget allocation.

My Portrait of Ntozake Shange

After a few years in my new job, I rejoiced at the announcement that Ntozake Shange was coming for a reading at my university. I was given the wonderful opportunity to draw a portrait of her for the publicity posters. To this day, I regard my art as the best portrait I ever drew.

I was also given the joyful duty to serve as one of two faculty members who would introduce Shange to the audience.

On the evening of Shange’s talk, I was so honored to meet Shange that my heart was racing. When I stood at the podium alongside the other member of the faculty, my knees were shaking so much that I thought I would pass out and fall. Too nervous for words, I thought my only choice was to read my introduction as fast as was humanly possible. I zoomed through my sentences at breakneck speed. My colleague leaned toward me and whispered, “Slow down.”

I would not slow down. I flew through my oh-so-carefully-prepared words. My colleague leaned closer and said, audibly, over the microphone, so that everyone in the hall could hear, “Slow DOWN!”

By then, I was almost to my last sentence. While I begrudgingly pronounced it more slowly, my fellow faculty member elbowed me out of the way. I was supposed to remain standing there during the other professor’s part of the introduction, but I knew I was too jittery for that! I gratefully took a seat in the front row and relished the unbelievable realization that I was sitting within a few feet of Shange.

When Shange took the podium, she wove a spell over her audience. We were alternately hypnotized by her voice and surprised by her ideas. So many adjectives came to mind: charming, engaging, challenging, artistic, poetic, musical!     

Shange’s talk was as transformative as her choreopoems had been. I felt suddenly aware of how much everyone had been missing for so many years when only male celebrities had stood at podiums declaiming their achievements to audiences of men and women.