Color’s Cure
Virginia’s poet laureate offers much-needed inspiration

I kept thinking of black and white as Rita Dove, who is black, captivated an audience of at least 100 students and older adults, mostly white, including her husband, at the Midlothian Campus of John Tyler Community College.

Dove was the keynote speaker at the 10th Annual Women’s Literary Program. A first-timer, I attended because I desperately needed a break from work. My morning started slow, the same way every morning had since the completion of my first book, Izzy’s Fire, a few months earlier.

I was exhausted from spending the previous seven years researching the dark events of the Holocaust. Now, between signings and marketing the book, I was also frantically developing freelance pieces for financial survival. Yet,once again, I was thinking of beginning a book.

“Are you crazy?” I asked myself.

“Definitely,” I answered.

I just had to find a way to see brightness again through another literary venue. Besides that, people kept asking a recurring question: “What’s your next book about?” I decided to collect some of the columns I’ve been writing for Richmond Magazine since 1998 into a book and go for broke.

I was discussing that possibility with Sally Huband, a dear friend, when I jokingly said I’d title it Reflections of a Purple Zebra. It made sense to me immediately. My column is named “Reflections,” and I’ve always loved zebras and admired the fact that their stripes, like human fingerprints, are individual and never duplicated. I’m convinced that had I been born a zebra, my stripes would have been purple, my favorite color.

Attempting a second book was a “fur piece” to jump, as my late father would have said in his country way. However, I thrive on challenges and believed the hurdles weren’t that high. Wrong answer. No matter how much I tried, the intense fire I needed to keep the book project alive kept fizzling out. Suddenly all my work became drudgery. While I’ve griped about long hours and low pay before, I’ve doggedly kept writing, believing that personal satisfaction oftentimes balanced the monetary sacrifices I’ve had to make.

Working alone has a great benefit. I only work with one—how can I say this—one rear end, the one looking back at me in the bathroom mirror every morning. The professional world being full of, uh, rear ends, this had always motivated me to remain my own boss. However, years of balancing freelance jobs barely left me enough strength to walk this spring.

And then along came Rita Dove, former U.S. poet laureate, current poet laureate of Virginia and Commonwealth English professor at the University of Virginia, with eyes flashing and fingernails brightly painted, wearing a sexy, three-ruffled beige skirt and a black, white and beige sleeveless top with a scoop neck that showed off her gold and onyx necklace and the quarter-sized gold medallions dancing from her ears.

Her blouse was pulled over the skirt, which bunched out in the back, like she might have been wearing a slip, but I wasn’t sure. She didn’t seem the slightest bit worried about that or that her tummy pooched out in front as she swayed and rocked, using her hands to punctuate the word scenes she was painting with her voice.

I unconsciously lifted my pen and began capturing the moment. I jotted notes about the deep scar off center at her left temple, the little gap between her otherwise even white teeth, her luminous brown eyes, ringed with smoky color and mascara, her hair in tiny rivulets—so perfect I couldn’t decide whether it was natural or a wig, and even the smallpox vaccination on her left arm, like the matching one I had gotten as a child.

She seemed electric, emanating pulses of energy that fell on me like rain on a parched desert. What touched me deeply, though, was the way Dove described her own struggles. She told of shallow times when she felt empty, much like the funk I was currently experiencing. She spoke of leaving poems untouched for months on end and later going back to breathe life into them. She paced as she talked, taking in the whole roomful of people with her wide-eyed gaze, understanding that we, the writer enfants, needed the lesson she was imparting. She said that, in the end, the reward of getting our words down on paper was worth what had to be endured.

It struck me that, besides being inspired, I was actually experiencing history. More than 40 years ago, my father was determined that I, the last of his four children, wouldn’t go to school with any blacks, and God help any interracial couple in Richmond, Va., during the 1960s. I laughed inwardly with joy. What a leap, to go from graduating from an all-white high school to coming full circle in the same county and having the opportunity of seeing—not to speak of admiring—a black woman who had come a “fur piece” by anybody’s measuring stick.

Dove mesmerized me with her expressive hands. I couldn’t resist asking why she painted blue, red, green, gold and purple diagonal stripes on her fingernails, leaving half of each nail its natural buff color. With a laugh, she explained it was a carryover from her teen years, and because she “loved color” so much, she just kept doing it. She also explained that it took years to finally decide she wasn’t crazy for adhering to her inner voice or for working on several projects simultaneously. She even said she keeps her literary works in different colored folders, a practice I also follow.

It suddenly became clearer to me why I had to write about purple zebras. In fact, I was wearing a purple sweater, which Dove referred to, when she explained the “need” to have color in her life.
Naturally I bought one of Dove’s books, Mother Love. She picked up her pen, thought for a moment and then wrote, “For Nancy, who likes color as much as I do.”
I hugged Dove afterward and told her I believed I would write about her one day. I didn’t know then that she would eventually become the subject of this column and thus, part of my next book, but I did know she wasn’t black or white.

Maybe a rainbow.

November 2005