Her name was Irish. Diasporan Irish but for the sake of privacy, I’ll call her RK. RK lived in a part of Massachusetts I’ve never been back to: Millis – a place where farms were common and the majority of the faces were white like her own. Yet she believed what she had was worthy of being shared with her class of mainly black students – whose ranks represented the African Diaspora. She, RK, had shoulder length, almost fully gray hair and left me alone to work on the blue scholastic math books. It was she who introduced me to John Lennon; that December when I walked into her classroom and watched as her finger repeatedly pressed rewind and play – unleashing my first classroom experience with music – and grief. The only thing I remember of her land was her horse. As an adult, I’m barely 5’2. As a child, of course, I was even shorter and the horse seemed humongous. Its belly was higher than my head – so, like the rest of the kids, I stayed out of its range.
The memory stayed with me although it had been dormant for years by the time I discovered a book of poetry called Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful. I thought ‘hmmm’ and therein begin my association with the written words of Alice Walker. Written in 1985, a year away from my high school graduation, I probably wouldn’t have even known about Walker if it wasn’t for a classmate who brought The Color Purple to school. Hell, I’m not even sure if I knew I was a reader before I snagged the book from her after reading a few chapters of Celie telling her tale. But after I devoured it, I was touched for life.
Maybe it’s the multi-layered meaning of touched that led to my next encounter with horses. I mean, I’d have to be a little touched, as a black woman, to like Patti Smith, right?. But then again, maybe Patti herself is a little touched because who would could imagined, the woman known as the godmother of punk, a disheveled looking white woman with horse mane hair, would one day interview a man with a penchant for playing a rum-sodden, make-up wearing pirate of the Caribbean in Vanity Fair magazine no less.
However, it is not the present that concerns me regarding Patti Smith. It is the past and specifically, Horses.
Unpolished energy. For someone who appreciates the rawness of early hip hop (even while understanding that such rawness isn’t capable of sustaining itself for extended periods of time) it still stirs.
Let 2011 be the year your horses ride free.
