She came from ‘a line/of black and going on women/who got used to making it through murdered sons/and who grief kept on pushing’.
But even in a city damaged by poverty and violence, its communities condemned by ‘many moynihans’, there’s the possibility of ‘love and hope’ – and that, Clifton said, is ‘what I want to write’. She sees Buffalo spread out across a landscape ‘potted as if by war’, made of weeds, boarded-up buildings, ‘the slivers of window abandoned/in the streets’. She complained that ‘i am accused of tending to the past/as if i made it’, when in fact, ‘this past was waiting for me/when i came,/a monstrous unnamed baby,/and i took it with my mother’s itch/took it to breast/and named it/History.’ Nourishing this child, Clifton transforms an antagonistic relationship into one of complex intimacy.Ĭlifton was born in 1936 in Depew, New York, but spent much of her life in Buffalo: ‘plain as bread/round as a cake/an ordinary woman’. Preserving the knowledge of her kin was central to Clifton’s practice, a way of ensuring that the historical past survived as poetic telling. Timmie’s working line, passing and repassing her warmth and power into the white sheet, also marks a line of descent: she is Clifton’s kin by blood or affection. Timmie’s fugitive lyric, which draws on the languages of African diasporic and indigenous people, would help us to understand America if only we could hear it. Like many accounts of Black folksong from the early 20th century, Clifton’s poem describes for an absent audience the effects of a song that can’t be captured.
Timmie’s iron passes back and forth the sheets over which she labours are transformed into the white page on which her experience is preserved: L ucille Clifton’s poem ‘study the masters’ remembers Aunt Timmie, whose iron ‘smoothed the sheets the master poet slept on’.
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