Nikki Giovanni “Adulthood"

“I usta wonder who I’d be when I was a little girl in Indianapolis sitting on doctors porches with post-dawn pre-debs (wondering would my aunt drag me to church sunday) i was meaningless and i wondered if life would give me a chance to mean i found a new life in the withdrawal from all things not like my image when I was a teenager I usta sit on front steps conversing the gym teachers son with embryonic eyes about the essential essence of the universe (and other bullshit stuff) recognizing the basic powerlessness of me. but then I went to college where i learned that just because everything i was was unreal i could be real and not just real through withdrawal into emotional crosshairs of colored bourgeoisie intellectual pretensions but from involvement with things approaching reality i could possibly have a life so catatonic emotions and time wasting sex games were replaced with functioning commitments to logic and necessity and the gray area was slowly darkened into a black thing for a while progress was being made along with a certain degree of happiness cause i wrote a book and found a love and organized a theatre and even gave some lectures on Black history and began to believe all good people could get together and win without bloodshed then hammaskjold was killed and diem was killed and kennedy was killed and malcolm was killed and evers was killed and schwerner, chaney and goodman were killed and liuzzo was killed and stokely fled the country and le roi was arrested and rap was arrested and pollard, thompson and cooper were killed and king was killed and kennedy was killed and i sometimes wonder why i didn’t become a debutante sitting on porches, going to church all the time, wondering is my eye make-up on straight or a withdrawn discoursing on the stars and moon instead of a for real Black person who must now feel and inflict pain”