In the third section, “Flowers for Etheridge,” is about my father’s blues because Etheridge’s Knight life was my father’s in many ways. The hip-hop poems are driven by the quote, “With the rhythm it takes a dance to. What we have to dance underwater without getting wet,” because as people of color it is in the music. We can feel it. We can be grace under fire or go underwater as the line says.
One of the premises of the novel is that during the 1863 draft riots in New York City, all of the Blacks in “the city” (Manhattan) were driven out of the city to an island off the coast of Manhattan, an island called Edgemere. So when the book opens, it is 1866, and Blind Tom is the only black person, as far as we know, who still remains in the city. A clandestine, he is under the care of Eliza Bethune, his former manager’s wife. (The manager was killed during the riots.) So that’s the premise.
My grandfather, who was my father for the first five years of my life, spoke Cherokee to me as a baby. It was my first language, and I feel the first words we hear in the beginnings of our human existence shape our lifelong relationship with language. In some ways, even though I have forgotten how to speak Cherokee fluently, I feel as if I think in that language, and my poems possess the sound and rhythmic qualities I heard as a child.
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