Barbara Christian, David Henderson and "De Mayor of Harlem"

When I was nineteen my family moved from the Midwest to California and, shortly thereafter, fell apart. At the time, I was a freshman at the Midwestern university where my father had taught for twenty-one years and my parents had not bothered to tell me that, contrary to the experience of most college freshman who leave home, "home" was about to leave me. In any event, I eventually learned that my parents were moving, with my younger brothers, to California and that my childhood home was being sold, and I decided to go with them.

In the course of my peripatetic undergraduate education, I briefly touched down at UC Berkeley where, among other classes, I took a course in African-American poetry taught by an amazing woman by the name of Barbara Christian. At the time that I met her, in 1975, she was a thirty-year-old Asst. Professor in the newly-created Department of African-American studies. She and her husband, David Henderson, a prominent poet in his own right, had been fixtures on the African-American poetry scene in New York in the Sixties. Their paths had diverged, however, and Barbara and their daughter had relocated to Berkeley while David remained in New York.

At the time, I was a confused kid from the Midwest who had moved to California with his parents the year before and had sought shelter from a disintegrating family and the strange and weird Beserkeley streets in the refuge of the classroom, and, in particular, in the words and images of African American poets. It was an odd curricular choice, on its face, for a nineteen year old white Midwesterner with only vague and inchoate notions of what he wanted to do with his life. In retrospect, however, I believe that it was one of the most important classes that I ever took in college and one which truly lived up to the Liberal Arts ideal of making me a better person, a better citizen... not to mention helping me to find my own voice as a writer.

In the spring of 1975, I was the only white student in her class. Most of the black kids had afros and the racial politics of the day were, to say the least, pretty strained. The Black Panthers HQ was located just down the Avenue in Oakland, and Huey Newton had been arrested the year before and charged with killing a prostitute. That term Patty Hearst, in her radical persona as "Tania," had participated in an armed robbery of a Crocker Bank branch with a self-styled radical group, the Symbionese Liberation Army. Hearst had been kidnapped by the SLA a year before,out of the Berkeley apartment that she shared with her boyfriend (also, fiancée and former teacher), Steven Weed. She had quickly morphed, however, from spoiled heiress to radical freedom fighter. In the radical lexicon of the times, Huey Newton was being framed by "the man" while Patty Hearst had joined "the revolution."

To her credit, Barbara drew me out of my shell and welcomed my comments on the work of the poets whom we were studying, even as most of my black classmates didn't accept me at all and wondered (often aloud) what I was doing there. I connected deeply with the work of many of these poets, and can recall some of their verses by heart all of these years later. In retrospect, what I related to most, what I had in common with these poets, was the struggle of someone who had been silenced to give birth to their own voice. It was, looking back, the beginning of my journey to find my own voice as a writer.

One of the writers whose work we studied was David Henderson, a founder of Umbra and a major voice whose collection of poems giving his view of what New York City was like then, circa 1962 to 1966, De Mayor of Harlem (Dutton, 1970), thunders across time to this day.

Many years later, after I had come to New York and started to establish myself as a writer in my own right, I was reading one of my poems at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on East Third. I had just finished reading a short poem and was ordering a drink at the bar when the dude sitting on a stool just to the right of me told me how much he liked my poem. I thanked him, and asked him his name. "I'm David Henderson," he said.