A candle for queen Ida.

in a jook joint on no map but the map of memory the private possession of a few and one of them ... sometimes asks where was that? somewhere back in the woods ...--davenport (1991, 26)

In Los Angeles, in 1982, I was invited to hear a white women's jazz band. I was reticent about going mainly because of my musical background. That is, I grew up in northeast Georgia at a time and in an environment where serious music and dancing were valued, daily activities. Before I was ten years old, I had heard (on vinyl) Eddie Harris, Dave Brubeck, Ketty Lester, Mahalia Jackson, Roy Hamilton, Jimmy Reed, and others. However, trusting my friends Jean and Bella, I went, reluctantly, and heard the band Alive! The group was excellent; the singer, Rhiannon, was incredibly powerful, and I had (to understate) a most wonderful experience. Rhiannon's performance of "Wild Women Don't Get the Blues" was so compelling that I went to hear the group a second time.

The next night, I was totally thrilled when Rhiannon sang, pointing at me, "Wild Women ... like doris--are the only ones / who will learn how to fly!" As soon as possible, I got their album and learned that Ida Cox wrote "Wild Women," but it was twenty years before I learned that my "theme song" was written, performed, and recorded by Ida Cox in 1924, that Ida Prather Cox (1896-1967) was from Toccoa, Georgia, sixteen miles north of Cornelia, my hometown, that Cox and I are working-class "Affrilachians," (1) and that Cox and I are both poets.

Ida Cox was a major songwriter, a song stylist, and an important creator during the black women's blues era (the 1920-30s). (2) She recorded at least eighty-seven songs for Paramount between 1923 and 1929 and another eleven for Vocalion and Okeh in 1939 and 1940, and she was titled, in Paramount's publicity, the "Uncrowned Queen of the Blues" (Santelli 1993, 105). Each of the classic era blues singers has some justifiable claim to fame and blues royalty, but Ida Cox is unique in that she wrote "almost 100 songs in her lifetime" (Reitz 1981). (3) That, alone, is an impressive achievement. As a contemporary of Sippie Wallace, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and others, Cox is mentioned in several blues studies, (4) but I found no major book or articles solely dedicated to her life and work. (5) I do have a collection of five compact discs of songs recorded by Ida Cox between 1923 and 1940 with liner notes and lyrics to most of the songs (Cowley 1999). Also, in my vinyl archives, I discovered a reissued Ida Cox album,f' Lacking secondary sources, I immersed myself in these "primary" materials, the sound and textures of Ida Cox's voice, the inventiveness of her lyrics.

Listening to the first disc, I was initially overwhelmed. The songs were redundant, predictable variations on heterosexual relationships, on loving well or poorly; being treated well or badly; leaving or staying; good luck, bad luck; two-timing men and back-stabbing women; death, retaliation (including death); moving on, staying, coming back--and all of it all over again and again. I was appalled--what could I say about any of this? Plus, since my ears (and sensitivities) are tuned to the smooth sound of contemporary recordings, I had trouble even paying attention. I was at first completely bored. Then, suddenly, I was totally attentive, and the same elements that I thought redundant became intriguing. Enlightenment, revelation, enjoyment, and engagement followed. Each time I replayed a song, I heard something delightful and pleasing and found something else to say about Ida Cox's music.

This article's purpose is to celebrate, acknowledge, honor, and I hope, illuminate the artistry of Ida P. Cox. The title, "a candle," refers to my ritual of lighting votive candles to honor people and events (Jimi Hendrix, Nina Simone, full moon, winter solstice, payday). This article is a "candle" of appreciation, analysis, and description of Cox as a singer-lyricist-poet. When possible, I have concentrated on songs that Cox wrote. When that is not possible (or clearly discernible), my focus is her styling--her choice and presentation of the songs.

On Document's five-compact disc collection, most of the songs are rerecorded, but not "digitally remastered" (volumes 1-4), so the sound is tinny, with audible, distracting scratches and other imperfections. Despite this, the music still sounds good. On most of the songs recorded between 1923 and 1927, Ida is accompanied by Lovie Austin on piano or by Austin and her band, the Blues Serenaders. Austin's soft, syncopated touch complements Ida's voice and lyrics, as do the Blues Serenaders (especially the cornet and clarinet). And Cox's voice, her quiet, clear articulation, is most distinctive.

And if I don't please you, break my neck for tryin'.

--"Bama Bound Blues"

One of my earliest memories is listening to blues on radio station WLAC from Tennessee, one of the few stations that reached our mountains. Every night, during the 1950s, a group of us listened for our favorite songs. Consequently, I decided that blues singers deliberately slur words so that we must buy the records and listen repeatedly to understand. This is not true with Cox. She enunciates her words deliberately and clearly, providing a visceral and intellectual experience, as in "Ida Cox's Lawdy, Lawdy Blues." Singing "I'd rather see my coffin come rolling in my door, Lord Lord / Rather see my coffin come rolling in my door," Cox pronounces each word, including "door." (7) (For most southerners and blues singers, the usual pronunciation is "doe." Not because we cannot do better but because we do not want to.) In "Mama Doo Shee Blues," Cox dramatically articulates "Lord, I've been drunk for the last six weeks" to emphasize her point. (8) That line (and the next--"And it surely is a misery") jumps out of the song. In "Those Married Man Blues," Cox drolly emphasizes: "The law gave him to her / but he gives himself to me." Her phrasing elicits a responsive echo from the trombone and cornet, heightening the irony. Even on "Any Woman's Blues," Cox's first recording (1923), she sings as if she has had elocution lessons so that each word in this tongue twister is clear: "His voice sounds like chimes / I mean the organ kind. / And every time he speaks, / it's music to my mind."

The assertiveness and self-definition in classic women's blues have become popular topics, including analysis of themes and lyrics as overtly and deliberately feminist (see Wallace 1982; Braxton and McLaughlin 1990). Much of that analysis applies to Cox's style--a style that emphatically asserts interesting content and good delivery. Cox's style also suggests an alternate reality/interpretation, wherein women--some women-simply live their lives with an autonomy, an independence, that is the norm. Cox may have had hard times, but in most of her songs, she sounds like she is having a good time, even in the lexicographical tune "Blues Ain't Nothin' Else But." The song defines the blues as "your lover on your mind," "a woman wanting to see her man," and "a slow achin' heart disease / just like consumption, it kills you by degrees" (Macleod 2002, 97). The last line summarizes, "Oh, the blues ain't nothing but a good woman feeling bad." Nevertheless, Cox's tone is not miserable but content, maybe at knowing (and sharing) these facts. No doubt, some songs provided a group catharsis; they also provide assertive advice and philosophy that could be called the "independent heterosexual woman's guide to relationships."

"Blue Monday Blues," for example, is about a "triflin' man," who in current slang is a "playah" or a "dawg." This man is two-timing, and maybe three- or four-timing, the women; the narrator is one of those women, as she acknowledges.

   Sometimes I cry, I weep and moan
   I know the man I love ain't mine all alone
   He's mine today, he's yours tomorrow. (84)

The next stanza ponders "how three or four womens all crazy 'bout somebody else's man." Hearing the question causes thoughtfulness since "he's yours, he's mine, somebody else's too" (85). Any woman listening would have to consider ending such a relationship. Although no advice is explicitly given, the song asks, "Are we so stupid?" Between Cox's level-headed delivery and Austin's piano, the answer would have to be "No."

"How Can I Miss You When I've Got Dead Aim" provides advice on issues such as living with a man, getting another man, getting over a man, and getting even.

   Don't let your man know he can make you blue
   For if you do, he'll make a fool out of you.
   How can you miss it, honey, when you've got dead aim?

   Where one man won't, another one will.
   Strut your stuff girls, until you get your fill.
   ...

   If your man quits you, don't wear no black.
   Find the girl that bit you for him, and bite her back.

   If you kill my dog, I'm gonna kill your cat;
   I'm gettin' even with the world and there's nothing to that.
   How can I miss it, honey, when I've got dead aim? (109-110)

Along with her smooth voice, precise delivery, and common-sense advice, Ida Cox can also tell a good story. As a vaudeville performer who also worked the TOBA (Theater Owner's Booking Association) circuit, she must have been a good actress, comedian, and singer. (She must have been a good businesswoman, too, traveling with her own band and company, Raisin' Cain.) And although Cox allegedly left north Georgia when she was about fourteen years old, she was there long enough to absorb some of the culture.

A Chinese-American friend of mine will quickly declare "The Chinese invented it!" about anything, from pasta to Ford trucks. (Once, she claimed rap music as a Chinese-American invention.) I could be guilty of similar thinking about northeast Georgia and Ida Cox, but with slightly more cause. Of course, both vaudeville and the blues involve hyperbole, but a combination of Cox's lyrics and her delivery, in a few songs, substantiate for me this loose description of a hybrid--"Affrilachian Blues."

In southern Appalachia, until the mid-1960s, we depended on each other for entertainment: music, stories, lies. At that, we had a preference for tales of death and life after death (ghosts and haints), the more exaggerated, the better. One writer notes that for many blues fans, Cox is "best remembered for her gloomy graveyard songs" (Santelli 1993, 106). But for mountain people, those songs would not necessarily have been gloomy. They functioned like black-and-white grade-B movies (with Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff, and Bela Lugosi) and provided a pleasant "what if" group thrill, at least until the mid-1960s and television. Cox wrote and recorded three versions of "Graveyard Dream Blues," involving a woman who dreams her lover is dead and goes to the graveyard to have the gravedigger tell her that her man has "said his last goodbye." This hybrid blues has it all: a dream, a spooky visit to a graveyard, and death. All three are highly valued in ballads in Appalachia.

Cox recorded at least seven blues about dead lovers, one dead because the woman shot him ("Graveyard Bound Blues"). Although Cox did not write all of these songs, her delivery makes them hers, and possibly her early background and environment dictated the choice. What does all of this highly theoretical and debatable discussion mean? Simply that Ida Cox is truly versatile, successfully and simultaneously performing on several levels and in at least three "cultures."

Two songs particularly fit in the Appalachian ballad-blues category. "Worried in Mind Blues" (written by fellow Affrilachian, Lovie Austin) is a compressed narrative about a woman who left her husband and two children to run off with her husband's "pal." Subsequently, the new man cheated on her regularly: "Every time I turn my back, / he's with another gal" (Macleod 2002, 97). A short narrative, only four stanzas, it has the woman praying for forgiveness and wanting to go home, lock her door, and "leave no more." Of all the songs on the Ida Cox: Complete Recorded Works set, this one is delivered with the most melancholy, dragged-out lines. Cox almost whines, in a facsimile of crying, and the band "cries" and drags along with her. The song can be heard as a condensed ballad, with the additional ten to twenty stanzas omitted. (These stanzas would give details of the harrowing times and experiences the woman encountered after she ran away, with tear-jerking specifics about the pitiful abandoned children and aggrieved, grieving husband.)

"Confidential Blues" is similar to "Worried in Mind Blues" in narrative structure and theme. Here, the narrator goes to Europe with a man, expecting to marry him, but he drops her because "along came somebody and told him all of my past life" (92). It is unclear whether the song refers to one man or to two. It seems that she was "shackin'" with the first man, then later was with the second man in Europe, and that the second man dumped her. As with "Worried in Mind," the specifics are left to the hearers' imagination, and completing the tale would involve many stanzas--ballad style.

"Seven Day Blues" and "So Soon This Morning Blues" are short stories with a beginning, middle, and end. Both are tragic in content but performed with humorous intent and impact. "Seven Day Blues" is a lament that describes a week of remembrance, sorrow, and drunkenness. The cycle starts on Monday as the woman wakes up "'fore day" only to "think about my daddy, who's many miles away." Consequently, "Every Tuesday morning, whiskey is all I crave / The blues and booze are gonna carry me to my grave" (118). In midweek, she tries to pull out of it, but instead, "Wednesday and Thursday, I try to wear the blues away. / But when you get 'era 'bout your daddy, they've really come to stay." Friday is worse, since her man left on a Friday, and on Saturday, she wakes up trying to find her man but cannot, so the cycle repeats itself.

"So Soon This Morning Blues" is an "action-narrative." This time, the man told her he loved "the girl next door / Packed his trunk, said, 'I can't use you no more' " (91). instead of crying and drinking, the woman killed him and turned herself in:

   I went to the courthouse, my hat in my hand,
   "Good mornin', judge, I've killed my man ....
   I asked the lawyer to plead my case this morning, this morning....
   The lawyer said he felt sorry for me.
   But for one hundred dollars he would set me free ....
   I'm dead broke now, but I'm satisfied this morning, this
      morning
   There's only one way to keep a good woman down ....
   Put her on an island and keep her water-bound. (91)

And that, good people, is another good mountain story, as well as a good blues. And, because of Cox's intonation, this song is also humorous.

When you lose your money, don't lose your mind

When you lose your good man, please don't mess with mine

--"Fore Day Creep"

According to some music historians and theorists, there is a distinction between city and country blues (and other divisions of these categories, like Affrilachian blues). Similarly, they observe that many blues singers had their start in vaudeville or in church, while implying that the former was perhaps necessary but sometimes regrettable. Perhaps since Ida Cox worked in vaudeville, the humor in her delivery is more pronounced. To some listeners, it might border on slapstick, but Cox's stylistic humor is also sophisticated, subtle, and cerebral and has contemporary applicability and appeal.

From couplets to entire songs, Cox is a gifted comic lyricist-poet. From mildly amusing lines in "Chicago Bound Blues" to the full-out laughter of "One Hour Momma," Cox uses varieties of humor to make her points and keep her audiences involved.

"Chicago Bound Blues" features a woman whose lover has gone to Chicago, leaving her in the South. Because of her situation, she predicts news headlines "in tomorrow's Black Dispatch news / Woman dead down home with the Chicago Blues" (Macleod 2002, 88). Cox's exaggeratedly sad phrasing, or how she sings the lines, undercuts the literal meaning while emphasizing the absurdity of such a headline. It sounds as if Cox, or her singer persona, can take herself seriously only up to a point. Then comes a line or subtle inflection of "not really" or "You have got to be joking (--because I am.)"

The song "Come Right In" is also a good example of this approach. It begins, "I feel so lonely round this town, / I don't know what to do." It addresses anyone in hearing distance but moreover, "any old brown" (88). The second stanza invites anybody to visit, since she's all alone and lonely, but then, Cox (uncharacteristically, for these recordings) shouts "Spank that thing, Lovie, spank it!" And Lovie spanks it, giving a sense that she, the piano, and Cox are all laughing together. The preceding lyrics were a put-on or a come-on, leading to "But I'll tell you Daddy, if you wanna make me smile, / Shimmy about an hour, stop and rest a little while" (89). It was not or is not loneliness, nor so much "horniness," but, as Marvin Gaye put it, a need for "sexual healing."

A heavy, lugubrious aura pervades "Death Letter Blues," as a woman relates getting a letter that her man is dying; he does, and she follows him to the "buryin' ground" and watches "the pallbearers slowly let him down." Meanwhile, the band second-lines Cox's voice until the end: "Momma loves you, sweet Papa, but i just can't take your place" (100).

In another song, "My Mean Man Blues," a man's "got a temper like the rising sun" and so,

   He takes my money and blacks my eyes for fun.
   But I still love him, I don't know why.
   If I ever lose him, I know I'll die.
   My man, my man, treats me like a dog. (100-101)

This abuse proves the woman's claim that he is the "meanest man in the world." Anyone who beats someone for fun is mean, but the song, as performed, sounds like it, too, is in fun rather than in the ultra-serious mode that too many critics attribute to the blues.

Then there is "Misery Blues." Once again, a cold-hearted man leaves a sad, tearful woman; he says, "The more you cry the further I'm going away." Which leads the woman to observe:

   A man is like a car that you have to overhaul.
   A man is like a car that you have to overhaul.
   Give him three or four weeks and you can't get along at all.

   I gave him everything from a diamond on down.
   I gave him everything from a diamond on down.
   The next thing I give him will be six feet of ground. (101)

I imagine Cox's audience--male and female--laughing appreciatively at the end of this song, as I did. (And on repeated hearings, I kept smiling, because the last line is such a surprise, a relief, and a "good riddance," too.) "Southern Woman's Blues" ends with a sexual innuendo that also must have provoked laughter: "I'm going back South where I can get my hambone boiled. / These northern men are 'bout to let my poor hambone spoil" (108).

The interesting thing about Cox's delivery is that even when she castigates a really gone-bad "daddy," her tone stays light, rarely angry or seriously vindictive. "Worn Down Daddy Blues" is exemplary because of Cox's descriptive language and pointed similes--and of course, her nuanced delivery. This blues announces, "I'm through with you, and I hope you don't feel hurt" (124). However, anyone might be a little hurt by hearing, "you are like an old horseshoe that's had its day. / You're like an old shoe I must throw away." Other reasons are that he is like "an old ship that's sprung a leak / You ain't young no more and your lovin' is weak." Additionally, he has no money, he is "down and broke" and finally is "an old has-been like a worn out joke" (124). The man whose limitations have been so clearly (and poetically) described would, I would think, have to feel at least hurt if not totally enraged, humiliated, and demoralized. But Cox sings the song so pleasantly that the hearer's response is total amusement. As we used to say, "That's cold!"--while laughing in appreciation of such talent.

"Wild Women Don't Have the Blues" is one of the greatest, most influential of Cox's songs, for many reasons, particularly the lyrics. It is also one of her best-known, most popular, and "contemporary" songs. For different reasons altogether, Cox's "One Hour Momma" should be equally as popular. This song was recorded in 1939 for Vocalion. The Document liner notes observe that the song is a "boast of sexual prowess" (Cowley 1999). However, "One Hour Momma" is actually a statement of requirements provided in a teasingly seductive manner with careful phrasing and timing. It is also hilarious. With her "All-Star Band" (including James P. Johnson on piano, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Christian, and Hot Lips Page), Ida Cox at fifty showcases her talents and reveals that she is still a "Queen." Her voice is mellow and her pacing--perfect perfect. To allow for the full impact of the song, its complete text follows, as I transcribed it.

One Hour Momma

   I've always heard that haste makes waste
   so I believe in taking my time;
   the highest mountain can't be raced
   it's something you must slowly climb.
   I want a slow and easy man
   he needn't ever take the lead
   'cause I work on that longtime plan
   and I ain't a-looking for no speed.

   I'm a one-hour Momma
   so no one-minute Poppa
   ain't the kind of man for me.
   Set your 'larm clock Poppa,
   one hour that's proper
   then love me like I like to be.

   I don't want no lame excuses
   'bout my loving being so good
   that you couldn't wait no longer
   now I hope I'm understood.

   I'm a one-hour Momma
   So no one-minute Poppa
   ain't the kind of man for me.

   I can't stand no greenhorn lover
   like a rookie going to war
   with a load of big artillery
   but don't know what it's for.
   He's got to bring me references
   with a great long pedigree
   and must prove he's got endurance
   or he don't mean that to me.
   I can't stand no crowing rooster
   what just hits a lick or two
   action is the only booster
   of just what my man can do.

   I don't want no imitation
   my requirements ain't no joke.
   'Cause I've got pure indignation
   for a guy what's lost his stroke.

   I'm a one-hour Momma
   so no one-minute Poppa
   ain't the kind of man for me.
   Set your 'larm clock Poppa,
   one hour that's proper
   then love me like I like to be.

   I may want love for one hour
   then decide to make it two
   Takes an hour 'fore I get started
   Maybe three 'fore I'm through.

   I'm a one-hour Momma,
   so no one-minute Poppa
   ain't the kind of man for me.

My maternal granddaddy, John Gibson (1897-1982), and his family were from Rabun County, in northeast Georgia. My youngest sister, Audrey, owns a prized and coveted photo of Daddy John and his brother Will taken around 1919 or 1920; they are both quite young and good looking. Daddy John cradles a fiddle; Uncle Will holds a banjo. They were traveling musicians, and they look the part. Both of them wear hats, pin-striped suits with thick upturned cuffs, and ties. They are seated outdoors in ladder-back chairs and look quite solemn. John and Will were very good musicians, I have been told, and popular "rounders" in the area, even after they were both married. I like to think that it is probable, and possible, that John and Will heard Ida Cox live, just as I heard Cox's song live.

But by the time that I was born, Daddy John had "got religion," so I never heard him play. Still, in jook joints, small bars, clubs, and dance halls in northeast Georgia, I heard their musical descendants; each town had a band, and I saw and heard James Rice (from Toccoa) pick his guitar with his teeth. There was an abundance of musical talent in our hills and mountains, some perhaps still waiting rediscovery, as with me and Ida Cox. Ultimately, I hope that this "candle" will lead many others back to appreciatively hearing the music of Queen Ida.

(1.) Affrilachian is a word invented by Frank X. Walker (2000) to describe people who are both Appalachian and African American. I heard Frank read a wonderful poem with that title at the Alternate ROOTS's annual meeting in 1993 or 1904. His collection of poems by the same title was published in 2000. I learned these particulars about Ida Cox because of my participation in an Appalchian Studies Conference, which Fred Hay, also from Toccoa, attended as well. Because Fred and I met, maybe fated by the spirit of Ida Cox, at the Appalachian Studies Conference in Helen, Georgia, in March 2001, I agreed, when he asked me to, to write this article. I agreed because Cox is my (metaphorically and artistically speaking) almost-kin foremother, in the Affrilachian blood connection, dirt and blood deep. Since, moreover, I have a particular interest in that most unique, fascinating (and frequently misunderstood/distorted/exploited) phenomenon, Black Women's Culture, I said yes when Fred asked.

(2.) Some of the basic information about Ida Cox comes from Robert Santelli (1993).

(3.) Reitz's notes also provide interesting materials about Cox's life and career.

(4.) Ida Cox is mentioned in Davis (1999) and Harrison (1988). However, both writers seem to read Cox's lyrics via their sociopolitical interpretations but otherwise, ironically, marginalize Cox and her work, even while her lyrics are used to foreground the lives and works of other blues singers. Harrison includes several pages devoted to Cox in a chapter titled "Other Blues Singers" (225-247), yet she titled chapter three "'Wild Women Don't Have the Blues': Blues from the Black Woman's Perspective."

(5.) I am convinced that I have overlooked the work or that I am not looking in the right places. This article's deadline precluded my searching further, but I intend to keep searching. If no such work exists, then I will have to write it. I want to write it.

(6.) The set is Ida Cox: Complete Recorded Works, 1923 1938, in Chronological Order. The reissued album is titled Wild Women Don't Have the Blues, vol., 1, Foremothers.

(7.) The primary source for the lyrics to Cox's songs, excluding "One Hour Momma," is Document Blues--9, compiled by R. R. Macleod (2002), which Fred Hay so graciously sent to me. However, listening to Document's five-volume set repeatedly and nonstop has provided me with an ear for the lyrics and an additional realm of knowledge about the music.

(8.) According to blues pianist Sammy Price, as quoted in Harrison (1988, 227), Price liked Cox's music because she had "good melodic lines, words that make sense, decent diction, or decent diction colloquially.... [Y]ou didn't miss anything that Ida sang."

DISCOGRAPHY 

Cox, Ida. ida Cox: Complete recorded works, 1923-1938, in chronological order. Document Records DOCD-5651 (1999). 5 compact discs.

--. Wild women don't have the blues, vol. 1, Foremothers. Women's Heritage Series. Rosetta Records RR 1304 (1981). LP. (Reissue of Blues for Rampart Street. Riverside Records RLP 9374 [1961].)

REFERENCES

Braxton, Joanne M., and Andree Nicola McLaughlin, eds. 1990. Wild women in the whirlwind: Afra-American culture and the contemporary literary renaissance. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Cowley, John H. 1999. Liner notes, Ida Cox: Complete recorded works in chronological order, vols. 1-5. Vol. 5 (1939-1940). Document Records DOCD-5651.

davenport, doris. 1991. voodoo chile slight return: poems. Charlotte, N.C.: Soquee Street Press.

Davis, Angela Y. 1999. Blues legacies and black feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Vintage Books.

Harrison, Daphne Duval. 1988. Black pearls: Blues queens of the 1920s. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Macleod, R. R., comp. 2002. Document blues--9. Edinburgh: PAT Publications.

Reitz, Rosetta. 1981. Liner notes, Wild women don't have the blues, vol. 1, Foremothers. Women's Heritage Series. Rosetta Records RR 1304. (Reissue of Blues for Rampart Street. Riverside Records RLP 9374 [1961].)

Santelli, Robert. 1993. The big book of blues: A biographical encyclopedia. New York: Penguin.

Walker, Frank X. 2000. Affrilachia. Lexington, Ky.: Old Cove Press.

Wallace, Michelle. 1982. Slave codes and liner notes. In All the women are white, all the blacks are me,, but some of us are brave: Black women's studies, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, 129-140. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press.

DORIS DAVENPORT is a performance poet and writer. She earned a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Southern California. She has published four books of poetry, book reviews, articles and essays on diverse and eclectic subjects. Her most recent book of poems is madness like morning glories (Louisiana State University Press, 2005).