Two Poems
The Rise and Fall of Bill Robinson
Sixty thousand people passed his casket
after he died in 1949, thousands more
lined the streets, but now most know him
only from Shirley Temple clips,
old, white-headed, seeming Uncle Tom.
This is the problem of recordings;
what remains becomes what was.
Lost are the live performances,
his prime and his star turns on Broadway.
Lost is his role as the drum major
leading the Harlem Hellfighters
down Fifth Avenue after World War II.
Lost is the gold-plated revolver
put on the table at the restaurant and
the insistence, “You’ll serve me now.”
A few phrases like “copasetic” remain,
but even the nickname itself, “Bojangles,”
now mainly evokes a fast-food restaurant
because its white founders liked a song
by a white band written by a white singer
who met a white hobo in jail who was
using the name to hide his identity.
He did his famous “stair dance”
with a young girl, and what was lost
was a sense of what it meant,
ascending and descending and
ascending again, all the while
tapping out rhythms at his own pace,
according to his own steps, the stairs
a physical fact and a metaphor
that went beyond metaphor,
the heel and toe, the foot striking
the treads and risers, making music,
the body the instrument, the body
the music, the body the person,
insisting here I am. I am a man
whose step makes the world thrum.
White Nights, Baryshnikov, and a Jeune Homme
I saw “White Nights” on its release,
and even as young and naïve as I was,
I recognized it as Cold War junk food,
80s propaganda with a soundtrack
of Lionel Richie and Phil Collins.
And yet
and yet,
in my mind I can still see the veined arm
of Mikhail Baryshnikov and remember
my astonishment at the opening scene
as he dances Le Jeune Homme et Le Mort.
I had no idea who he was, this man
with an odd name, oddly spelled,
and since the only ballet I knew
was The Nutcracker of recitals,
I thought ballet was girls in tutus
spinning like carwash brushes and
boys in pants so tight it was a joke.
I sat there in that Indiana Cineplex,
holding a box of Junior Mints,
unprepared for those first minutes:
a half-naked man, a noose, a suicide.
It left me unsettled, and perhaps
I have been unsettled ever since.
It was the first time I allowed myself
to recognize the beauty of a man.
I had appreciated the good looks
of Paul Newman and Robert Redford,
but they were cowboys and con men,
their handsomeness made permissible
as part of a genre. This was different.
I didn’t want to be him or be with him;
but I wanted to look at him. I wanted
to watch. And watch. And watch.
The rest of the movie was something
involving the bad guys of Russia,
it had Gregory Hines and his sad eyes,
but tap, although fun, was no revelation.
It had other terrific actresses
whose work I would admire later,
Isabella Rossellini and Helen Mirren,
but none of that was important then
and yet
and yet
all of it was; it gave permission
to watch. I had come, I thought, for stars
and easy storylines. I’m sure there were
guns and chases and probably explosions,
all of which served as an excuse, a cover
making the opening acceptable, smuggling
its contraband, audaciously, in plain sight,
a wondrous body doing wondrous things.
Joe Mills is a faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills has published six collections of poetry. His book “This Miraculous Turning” was awarded the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for its exploration of race and family.
Artwork by Simone Hadebe