pen to paper. Is Sechita, a Southern creole carnival hoochie-coochie dancer, or an Egyptian queen destined to
dance for her court? If she is both then she is, in fact, as Zake writes, “the recordin’ of history.”
Her words can only be written by a (Black) woman writer who is also a dancer. In Nappy Edges, published
right after for colored girls, Zake says “no gust of wind tickle me.” Here she speaks of a Black dancer’s
woman-body, not an anorexic ballerina, but a Yoruba descendant woman-body that has a butt and some thighs
and enjoys the relationship between the two:
...a triangle where the ridge of their
Jeans/meet/in the top of the thigh
Where the leg warmers open up in preparation
For a demi-plie/if I were one of them
I wd always know/I’m sure/when one of the moments
when the heat swells from inside me/
& I am walkin or thinkin with my hips
Forward some kinda soothing of this burnin
Up/wd seem more important/but since my legs
Grow like petals/one thigh on the other/I
Have never a chilled moment in the
Crevice of my pelvis/no gusts of wind
Tickle me/ . . .
Dance, Eros, woman, body and blackness massage each other, here, in a way that the lack of one of these
components would yield a totally different chiaroscuro of black and white. The whole is definitely more than
the sum of its parts.
Besides Zake’s readings at Berkeley women’s hangouts like The Bacchanal, she also read at San
Francisco’s Minnie’s Can Do on Haight Street, a bar where the Black “community” (read just regular folks)
mingled with the Black literati and avant-garde performing artists. This was the place where Zake liked to
read the most. She read her poetry there perched on her bar stool in front of the mic next to the piano, with her
current black book of recently scribbled poems, inscribed in her infamous lowercase, cryptically invented
vernacular English with melodic phrases of Spanish and French.
This image of the poet was often made complete with a glass of chardonnay sitting next to her on the piano.
She would flip nervously through the pages, take a puff of a cigarette, light upon a particularly resonating
eye-catching poem, take a sigh, and begin her drone-like pitch, which combined a well-read erudition with a
street-wise audacity that voiced a woman’s point of view. She was interested in what bell hooks calls “self-
discovery” for Black women. She spoke from a Black woman’s perspective when it wasn’t that popular or
trendy — when the revolution was about Black solidarity that meant support the “brothers” and don’t talk
back; but she dared to, even then.
Sometimes on the agreed-upon poem I would emerge, in generic costume or whatever I happened to be
wearing that night, whirling, and undulating to imagined drums or saxophone, and Zake’s real voiced imagery.
Sometimes it was purely spontaneous. She would instruct, “Listen and start whenever you feel it.” I remember
improv dancing in 1974 at Minnie’s to her “I’m a poet who,” which eventually became a for colored girls tour-
de-force for the “Lady in Orange” on Broadway:
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african Voices