Shirley Bradley LeFlore: Word Warrior

There’s a man singing under my skin

Like a gourd song
With a clear voice
Singing the silk of a hummingbird
Deepthroat in the silverblades of holygrass

There’s a man singing under my skin

Excerpt from “The Musician” by Shirley Bradley LeFlore

Throughout most of my publishing career, I have had the privilege to be surrounded by some exceptional poets, and Shirley Bradley LeFlore was one of them. “The Musician” (as excerpted above), and the line, “There’s a man singing under my skin” is one of my favorite by Shirley. But it was only one of the many reasons why Shirley and I became friends.  She was kind, interesting, adventurous, talented and tough as nails. So when Lyah LeFlore called to tell me that her mom had passed away, it took my breath away. I knew she was very ill and that it was a matter of time, but when I got the call, I was left breathless. She was my mentor and my friend, a collaborator and a mother to me. We worked together on literary projects, and I published two of her books, Brassbones and Rainbows and Rivers of Women, The Play. While I continue to mourn her passing, and I will always remember her as a “word warrior.”

Shirley was an activist, performer, teacher, psychologist and mentor committed to using her skills as a writer not only to entertain, but also to educate and address historical, social and political issues in much of her poetry. Born and raised in St. Louis, Shirley was part of a literary tradition of African American women writers whose roots are firmly planted in the principles of feminism as well as a politicized ethnic identity. Her work has been published in literary journals and anthologies, and she has performed throughout the United States. She has also recorded CDs, and has appeared in numerous radio and television programs. In fact, few people know that Shirley was a key participant of the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements during the 1960s and 1970s working closely with and establishing personal relationships with the likes of Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks. No stranger to the poetry community, Shirley was well-known, well-liked and well-respected, yet beyond this community, people knew very little about her and her work.

Part of the reason she was not widely recognized is because Shirley spent the better part of her nearly six decade career “doing” by focusing on teaching and giving. Rather than concentrating on self-promotion, she made what I believe was an unconscious effort to make a difference through personal connections that in the long run have had a tremendous impact on many people’s lives, including my own. So while she consistently wrote and performed great poetry over the years, she was unable to fully focus on writing and compiling what would have amounted to several poetry collections. Instead, raising a family, working on her degrees, teaching and working as a full-time performing artist, and doing things, getting things done were her priorities.

Growing up in St. Louis, a city that has a long history of African American artistic excellence, Shirley was exposed to “an intelligent home” that encouraged her to “listen to different things.” Besides creating and performing plays and dances in the backyard, she often listened to her mother recite poetry, or hung out in the kitchen while her grandparents, aunts and uncles shared stories about their family, or delved into spirited conversations about the political and social issues of the day. Her love for literature grew while attending public school, where she discovered the likes of Daniel Defoe (the author of Robinson Crusoe) and poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes. In time, Shirley found herself writing poetry as a mode of inquiry and response. It would become a means of sounding out and awakening the spirit of her community through ideas and art.

he comes w / Afrosonic feet / wordwalking
like a baritone saxamony sonnet movin
underskin / be-boppin / boogiebluzinin
the free-word order / giant-talkin tongue

Excerpt from “Poets Muse” by Shirley Bradley LeFlore

One can only imagine that while Shirley sat in the kitchen listening to her family members trade stories, a new kind of music wafted throughout her home. It was the 1950s and St. Louis blues was being joined by a new sound: R&B, which evolved out of the jump blues of the late 1940s — with St. Louisans Ike and Tina Turner at the forefront. Throw in jazz innovator Miles Davis at the beginning of his career in nearby East St. Louis and those weekly church services Shirley had to attend every Sunday, and it’s no surprise how music became an important foundation to her incredibly powerful poetry.

But perhaps one of the most important components of Shirley’s poetry is that “doing” part I mentioned earlier, which fermented during the social activism of the 1950s. When a revitalized NAACP in St. Louis, under Ernest Calloway’s presidency, launched a mass offensive against the entire edifice of Jim Crow and de facto racism with vigorous civil disobedience campaigns, a teenaged Shirley joined the NAACP Youth Group and participated in sit-ins and marches. As “Civil Rights” segued to “Black Power” in the mid-to-late 1960s, the black political landscape became more fractured and conflict-ridden, one that quickly evolved into a battleground of competing ideologies. In the midst of this revolution, St. Louis quickly was transformed into a meeting point between the Black Arts Movement of the South and the Midwest.

In my recent tribute to Michael Castro, I talked about how Shirley was such an integral part of Michael’s life, as well as in St. Louis:

When 2Leaf Press published Shirley’s poetry collection, Brassbones and Rainbows in 2013, Michael wrote a blurb caption for her book, which reads:

 

“Shirley Bradley LeFlore has been regarded as a great performance poet and served her community, as few poets do, as unofficial spiritual minister, presiding at weddings, funerals and other significant life events. Here in her first full collection are essential poems to turn to and return to like valued friends. A book to be celebrated and treasured.”

 

As few poets do. This was the key to Michael, that being a poet is more than just writing verse and self-promotion, that the very act of poetry itself is a political act of activism, and that even action can and should speak louder than words. People in the poetry world connect through the work, through the words, and often have very clear ideas of what a poet is and is not . . . .While Shirley opined why it was taking Michael so long to write the blurb caption for her book, after I finally saw it, I realized why: he was thinking, trying to get to the root of what it was about Shirley he admired so much as a fellow humanist poet, and it was the “do,” the doing that they both did for their communities, and often did together. This was the connection he was trying to convey in just a few brief sentences.

By the late 1960s, Shirley jumped into the thick of it as a member of the Black Artists Group (BAG), an artistic collective committed to a collaborative interweaving of diverse artistic mediums. This collective, which consisted of musicians, writers and artists such as Oliver Lake, Hamiet Bluiett, J.D. Parran and Malinké Elliott, contributed to the cultural richness of St. Louis and created a strong model for inter-artistic cooperation and arts-driven social activism. She was also very active in the theater and literary arts communities as well. By the time BAG petered out in 1972, Shirley was already pursuing her Bachelor’s degree in Behavioral Science and Language Arts, and would later receive her Masters degree in Psychology in 1981. In time, she would combine science and writing into a curriculum that would build her reputation as a Professor of Psychology who uniquely utilized language arts; and as a Professor of English and Creative Writing specializing in African American and women’s literature at numerous colleges and universities in Missouri. She would also travel around the country, especially to New York, to perform, lecture and hold workshops. For a change of pace, in 1990 Shirley moved to New York to teach in New York City, New Jersey and Vermont. Although she returned to St. Louis in 1996 to continue teaching, she frequently visited New York.

Actually, it was during one of those visits in New York that I met Shirley in 1997 at Steve Cannon’s Gathering of the Tribes in Loisada. She was promoting the CD, Spirit Stage, a musical-poetry collaboration she recorded with J.D. Parran, Warren Smith, Stephen Haynes, Bill Ware, Brad Jones, Joan Bouise, Tony Cedras and Kelvyn Bell. In fact that night, she performed “Put’cha Haints on Me” with J.D. and blew the house down! After we were introduced me to Shirley, we took an immediate liking to each other and it sparked the beginning of our literary collaboration: phati’tude Literary Magazine, phatLiterature, A TV Program (for which she co-produced and co-hosted two episodes) and 2Leaf Press. When I called and told her I was starting 2Leaf Press and asked her if she would be interested in me publishing her books, the first thing Shirley said to me was, “What took you so long? I’ve been waiting for you to publish my books. You’re the only one who can do it.” I had the distinct privilege of publishing her debut poetry collection, Brassbones & Rainbows, and the publication of Rivers of Women, The Play which features Michael J. Bracey’s photographs and Lyah’s insight of her mother’s work and about the direction of the play. The last time I published Shirley’s work was in Black Lives Have Always Mattered, edited by Abiodun Oyewole, in 2017.

An underlying characteristic of much of Shirley’s work consists of socially conscious verse influenced by feminist activism. Like many nascent feminists of the times such as Maya Angelou, Joy Harjo, Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, Shirley always understood that in order to thrive  — not just survive  — women must learn how to adapt to society’s ever-changing rhythms without sacrificing their own identities in the process. And with the effortless musicality of her language, Shirley never assumed a static definition of the African American woman, but rather, always challenged readers to think about what it means to be “American,” “black,” and “woman” at different historical moments in our lives.

Shirley wrote with an imagination of the senses and used wonderful metaphorical language, which is probably why she has always spent an incredible amount of time culling her poems. Her verses flow in an easy going, smooth and soothing Southern American dialect mixed with African American Vernacular English, with words serving as musical notes.

Blending realism with lyricism, interspersed with humor, Shirley would take it one step further by accurately depicting the lives of common, everyday people (most of them women) with vivid imagery. Her poetry, which is often filled with allusions to black culture and music, were surprisingly synaptic. Her work was drawn from a lifetime of living that affirms the strength and fragility of the long-term ties of kinship, as well as the joys and pleasures set against the real possibility of disappointment and loss. More importantly, Shirley’s poems are generally suffused by a keen sense of the ideal and by a profound love of humanity, especially toward African Americans.

The work is not just about the poems, music and performance, it is also about family. She raised three daughters, primarily on her own, and in the process, taught them about the beauty of life through art, literature and music. The doting of her grandchildren, her close relationships with relatives and dear friends were a large part of her life that connected to her poetry. One could never exist without the other. When you get down to the core of Shirley’s essence, she was a storyteller, or rather, a story singer. She used language to continue our oldest tradition of gifting the tale, sharing the fabric of verse through sound, creating poetic lines into phrases of jazz and blues, from the lyrical to the polemical. For Shirley, the “personal,” the “political” and the “poetical” were indissolubly linked, and her body of work, the story of her life can be read as a series of urgent dispatches from the front; a breathing living artifice that jumps off the page, begging to be sung out loud more than once. This is evident in her signature poem, “Rivers of Women,” her homage to blackness and womanhood, which she delivered in a way that would leave any one else breathless.

I HAVE KNOWN WOMEN / RIVERS OF WOMEN
blu / blck / tan / high / yella / blu-vein women / rivercrossing women / waters
deep as the nile / mississippi as mud / seaboard and island ocean
women / women who ride the waves and balance the tide / swimming
women / waterwalking women / treading waters / floating / going w /
the flow women / backstroking / jellyfishing / mud crawling
women / i know women who drown / sinking women who sleep
at the bottom of the waters

I HAVE KNOWN WOMEN
flying women-hawkeye and eaglewing who spread / stir the nest /
strike the wind and soar / women who strap mercury around their
ankles / making airborne feet / flying women who fly off the handle /
up against brick walls and breakwing / women who fly non-stop
w / earlobes / elbows / toenails and tongues like flying saucers / fly
by night women swiftwing and blind as a bat at high noon /
straighten up and fly right women / women with magic
underwing / i know women of wonder w / moon eyes

Excerpt from “Rivers of Women” by Shirley Bradley LeFlore

Perhaps Shirley’ greatest feat is that she never allowed competition, bitterness or resentment get in the way of her being. The literary world can be a doggy-dog world and she did all she could to side-step the mud. She was comfortable in her own skin, and lived her life accordingly. Shirley once expressed to me that while it was great to receive accolades for her work and achievements, fame had a price. “I would rather,” she said “be known for the good work I did, then being known just to be known.”

Shirley, you done good. I will miss you forever, but your spirit and words will last for an eternity

Gabrielle David