The Tan Chanteuse.

Reviewed by

Heather Ross Miller Washington and Lee University 

Carole Boston Weatherford, an energetic and musical poet, bold and honest in approach, is nevertheless not the sort of noisy reveler we associate with a loud jamboree. But both her poems and her children's story are remarkably forthright celebrations, a colorful assembly of African American tradition, pride, and love.

She tells us stories with every poem, and she uses the drive and direction of music, dance, and vision to reinforce the stories within the poems. Her strength is in her natural narrative sense, as well as in her delicate ear. This holds true for Juneteenth Jamboree as much as for The Tan Chaateuse. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, we can say one book reflects and complements the other.

Cassandra, the protagonist of Juneteenth, is a young girl newly moved to Texas. She comes to understand the joyful history behind June 19th, a day celebrated by her family and new neighbors as the day the news of freedom first reached the enslaved people there. As her family prepares holiday food and as everyone gathers for the parade and picnic, Cassandra learns what pride in her heritage truly means. Such simple and colorful pleasures as balloons and corn-husk dolls, music, and folk dancing Cassandra learns to claim as hers.

It is from these same simple yet powerful elements that Weatherford draws material for poems. Cassandra, the young girl with the heavily prophetic name, the captive Trojan princess, reappears in the stories of Oleta and Queen Ijo, as well as in the tributes to such icons of African American womanhood as Marian Anderson, Josephine Baker, and the primitive artist of power and vision Minnie Evans, the gatekeeper of Airlie Gardens.

These are Cassandra's heroes, though she does not know their names just yet. But when she grows up to read Weatherford's poems, she will rejoice in their strength and courage, their music, dance, drawings, and imagination. For Weatherford, like Dove and Hurston before her, celebrates black women. She is aware of the restrictions and oppressions of gender as much as those of race. Black women endure and emerge in these poems. Black men certainly suffer and spring to anger along with them, but the women are the ones with stories, songs, dances, and memories. The women are the ones who dare to share the glories of god and who, like Minnie Evans, become the gatekeepers of an entire people's precious heritage.

With quiet yet insistent pressure, Weatherford takes us through the lives of these people. The brilliance of Marian Anderson performing in the opera houses of Europe as well as at the feet of the Lincoln Memorial brings home the definition of freedom.

Chandeliers chimed to her arpeggios, chords like prisms hovering brilliante, crescendoing on the Continent and crossing the Atlantic. Adagio, adagio ...

Provincial curtain lifted, Easter morning.... Dark diva poised at Lincoln's feet.

These are the heartbeats of liberty and triumph done with simple, almost whisper-like strokes. Weatherford's words echo - arpeggio, adagio, the crescendo collecting its strength to lift the heavy curtain of segregation - and with her final stroke the plain phrase Easter morning provides a benediction of life and glory. The dark diva with her powerful song lifts all spirits, keeps no grudges, shows the way to forgiveness.

The title poem, a sonnet, lilts and struts, becomes a working personification as well as onomatopoeia with a vengeance, sparking the sauce and force of Josephine Baker in its bones:

Although she chirped in French at cabarets - Negresse en deshabille center stage ... St. Louis' blues would haunt her all her days.

With the although, Weatherford turns Josephine Baker's story and makes of it a lesson in origins. The haunting blues emerge from the ancient sorrow of slavery as well as from the natural talents exploited by a free black woman on stage in France, adulated, encouraged.

The cover photograph of Baker shows a coquette in sandals and "Banana shirt shirring," a skirt that fans out "like a paddle wheel / propelled by her repeated pirouettes." She points stage left and smiles, a dancer of jokes and good humor, a professional who knows how to win, a black woman who uses yet overcomes "the blackface minstrel."

These poems of hard-won triumph reach their apogee in the long narrative "Charleston Baskets." The elderly Oleta sets up her wares in a 1990s marketplace close to the site of the old slave block. When a small basket she made as a child spills from those she piles for sale, Oleta remembers herself learning again "while her grandma / passes down the craft, sketches tales of rice paddies."

Weatherford positions the present times, the commercialization of backwater and saltmarsh into motels and parking lots, with the old times:

Holding a fanned basket, her hands dyed indigo, great gran tossed rice into the air, watched the wind carry the light husks, and the heavier grains fall earthward back into the basket.

Oleta prizes these memories, these stories polished like jewels and passed along from woman to woman.

Queen Ijo, known to her friends as Willa Mae, once charmed carnival crowds with her snakes:

Turban of serpents coiled around her head, scaly boas dangling from tawny shoulders ... Queen Ijo belted out broken-heart blues.

She alone could find truth among the collections of freaks, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, and fire-eaters. Weatherford, with charm and unflinching focus, blends the old archetypes: temptation, strong woman, snake, and a man who, for all his claims to superior creation, is no more than a toy. For all we know, the Garden of Eden was a carnival with "plush bears and snow globes."

But whatever the archetypes, the visions, these are women of real flesh and blood. They have lived through and earned their places. Likewise, young Cassandra of Juneteenth Jamboree possesses the same art and strength and independence as do Anderson, Baker, Oleta. Like Minnie Evans, the painter and gatekeeper of brilliant garden symmetry, birds of paradise, and deep-red whorls of hibiscus - the black woman who absorbed "the secret life of plants," then went home to sketch the Promised Land - Cassandra will celebrate who she is and marvel at the long road it took to get there.

Let me also note the brilliant symmetry and color of Yvonne Buchanan's illustrations for the children's book. She matches Weatherford's story faithfully, and often ventures off the page to give us that extra dimension, the colors and rhythms of weather: a sunny happy day, green fish in a fountain, earrings dangling against a woman's cheek. Buchanan completes the promises glimpsed by an artist like Minnie Evans.

These are worthy achievements, refreshing and encouraging to all women, all Americans. Carole Boston Weatherford and Yvonne Buchanan are gatekeepers. They are also celebrators, designers of the best in jamboree.