Poem for Tuesday

Haircut
By Elizabeth Alexander

I get off the IRT in front of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture after riding an early 
Amtrak from Philly to get a hair cut at what used to be the Harlem "Y" barbershop. It gets me in at ten to 
ten. Waiting, I eat fish cakes at the Pam Pam and listen to the ladies call out orders: bacon-biscuit twice, 
scrambled scrambled fried, over easy, grits, country sausage on the side. Hugh is late. He shampoos me, 
says "I can't remember, Girlfriend, are you tender-headed?" From the chair I notice the mural behind me 
in the mirror. I know those overlapped sepia shadows, a Renaissance rainforest, Aaron Douglas! Hugh tells 
me he didn't use primer and the chlorine eats the colors every day. He clips and combs and I tell him how 
my favorite Douglas is called "Building More Stately Mansions," and he tells me how fly I'd look in a Salt 'n' 
Pepa 'do, how he trained in Japan.
Clip clip, clip clip. I imagine a whoosh each time my hair lands on the floor and the noises of small brown 
mammals. I remember, my father! He used to get his hair cut here, learned to swim in the caustic water, 
played pool and basketball. He cuts his own hair now. My grandfather worked seventy-five years in 
Harlem building more stately mansions. I was born two blocks away and then we moved.
None of that seems to relate to today. This is not my turf, despite the other grandfather and great-aunt who 
sewed hearts back into black chests after Saturday night stabbings on this exact corner, the great-uncle who 
made a mosaic down the street, both grandmothers. What am I always listening for in Harlem? A voice 
that says, "This is your place, too," as faintly as the shadows in the mural? The accents are unfamiliar; all 
my New York kin are dead. I never knew Fats Waller but what do I do with knowing he used to play with a 
ham and a bottle of gin atop his piano; never went to Olivia's House of Beauty but I know Olivia, who lives 
in St. Thomas, now, and who exactly am I, anyway, finding myself in these ghostly, Douglas shadows while 
real ghosts walk around me, talk about my stuff in the subway, yell at me not to butt the line, beg me, beg 
me, for my money?
What is black culture? I read the writing on the wall on the side of the "Y" as I always have: "Harlem Plays 
the Best Ball in the World." I look in the mirror and see my face in the mural with a new haircut. I am a 
New York girl; I am a New York woman; I am a flygirl with a new hair cut in New York City in a mural 
that is dying every day.

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pointed out this essay on the arrogance of poetry by Mark Halliday. Not only do I disagree with a great deal of what he says, but I'm giggling because he was one of my professors at the University of Pennsylvania (where, incidentally, he did not get tenure, though he taught one heck of a poetry writing workshop). I did not think he was a particularly great poet, particularly given that we had Daniel Hoffman on the faculty and Elizabeth Alexander was in one of my other workshops hence you get another poem of hers today.

I had lunch with my mother yesterday and demonstrated my dorkiness by naming all the sails on the model ships in Legal Seafood. Also had phenomenal Indian fish stew. Later I took older son to fencing and sat outside in the 65-degree weather reading H.M.S. Surprise and, when it got too dark to read, went in and watched how much my son has improved in three weeks. Life is good.

There's more, but I have to go drive both children to friends' houses as they have no school since the Maryland primary is today. Am off to vote for Edwards and resign myself to Kerry. , we have unfinished business and I shall be back by 11, so be here!