Pat Parker
Texas-born, West Coast-living poet whose sharp, powerful
poetry explored everything she was: Black, a woman, a lesbian,
a daughter, a sister, a feminist, a mother, a friend, and beyond.
No one said it like Pat said it. And it needed to be said.
Pat Parker often performed her poetry at bookstores and coffeeshops. Photo courtesy Sinister Wisdom
“you were a mistake”
my mother told me
ever since i’ve been
trying to make up.
—Goat Child, 1972
Pat Parker was born Jan. 20, 1944, in Houston, Texas. She was the youngest of four daughters born to Marie Louise and Ernest Nathanial Cooks. Mother Marie worked as a domestic servant and father Ernest—also called “Buster”—was a tire retreader. The family lived in poor conditions of the Third Ward.
“Parker grew up on the outskirts of Houston, one step away from the projects,” wrote activist, friend, and fellow poet Judy Grahn in the introduction to “Movement in Black,” a collection of Pat’s poetry published in 1978. “She is one Texan who never brags about her state.”
I used colored toilets
and rode colored buses home
I went to colored churches
with colored preachers
and prayed to a white God
begged forgiveness for Cain
and his sins
and his descendants
us lowly colored sinners
and the message
was simple
was sharp
there is a place for n____rs
but not among good white folk
—jonestown, 1984
In the poem “Goat Child,” Pat wrote her own biography. Indeed, much of her poetry is autobiographical, so her words will join us through the journey of her life. As you’ll read, no one can say it quite how Pat said it.
“‘Goat Child’ was the first deliberately autobiographical poem by a woman that I had ever heard, although there was no reason (try sexism) why a woman’s entire life couldn’t be the storyline of a poem, a modern epic,” Judy marveled. “For people hearing it at the time, the idea that women even had life stories was amazing and nearly unheard of. Parker was making literature out of stuff so buried under American racism and sexism, classism and antilesbianism that it wasn’t even a question of breaking down or reversing a stereotype but of filling up a vacuum where the stereotype would have been if it were not so frightening for most people to even have such thoughts.”
Encouraged in school by her father, Pat was an intelligent and perspicacious child. Both injustices from the outside world and conflicts from within stayed with her into adulthood. Her poems vividly capture her experiences as a black girl, a “tomboy,” growing up within the racism and resource-starved regions of a Texan city.
the goat left this child
me still trying to butt
my way in or out
& i came home dripping
blood & panic rode in
on my shoulders.
her slipped to the store
returned clutching a
box of kotex in a sack
twice as large.
“now you can have babies,
So keep your panties up”
& i couldn’t see the
connection between me &
babies cause i wasn’t
even thinking of marriage
& that always came first.
& him having to admit that
i really was a girl &
all of a sudden no more
football, not even touch
or anything & now getting
angry because i still
didn’t like dolls &
all this time me not knowing
that the real hang up
was something called virginity
which i had already lost
2 years ago to a really
hard up rapist that i
never could tell my parents
about, not really knowing what
had happened but somehow
feeling it would not be
to my advantage.
—Goat Child, 1972
Violence, including sexual violence, would mar much of Pat’s childhood and early adulthood. At age 18 in 1962, she graduated high school and left Texas for Los Angeles, Calif. That same year, she met and married Ed Bullins, a playwright heavily involved in the Black Panther Party and 9 years her senior. Together, they relocated to San Francisco’s Bay Area. Though she would not earn another degree, Pat continued her studies, with a particular focus on writing, at community colleges in both LA and San Francisco.
In English Lit,.
they told me
Kafka was good
because he created
the best nightmares ever—
I think I should
go find that professor
& ask why
we didn’t study
the S.F. Police Dept.
—from “Child of Myself,” 1972
In an interview with the Lansing State Journal in 1979, Pat said she started poetry because Ed “constantly criticized her prose. ‘I knew he didn’t know anything about poetry so I tried that. I found it was a lot of fun and actually fairly easy for me.’”
___
Sharp humor and incisive social commentary are hallmarks of Pat Parker’s poetry, as
seen in excerpts from her collectionsMovements in BlackandPit Stop.
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The couple would separate after four years of marriage. Pat accused Ed of physical abuse, including pushing her down the stairs and causing her to miscarry a pregnancy. For not the first time, Pat was confronted by that vacuum Judy described—a place not yet defined by those who did not fit society’s established roles. While drawn to Ed’s revolutionary advocacy for Black people, Pat observed that little of that revolution sought to uplift Black women.
Brother
I don’t want to hear
about
how my real enemy
is the system.
i’m no genius,
but i do know
that system
you hit me with
is called
a fist.
—from “Child of Myself,” 1972
Pat then married fellow writer Robert F. Parker, though the two soon divorced in 1966. In the late 1960s, Pat began to identify as a lesbian and exclusively pursued relationships with women.
My lover is a woman
& when i hold her—
feel her warmth—
i feel good – feel safe
then/ i never think of
my families’ voices –
never hear my sisters say –
bulldaggers, queers, funny –
come see us, but don’t
bring your friends –
it’s okay with us,
but don’t tell mama
it’d break her heart
never feel my father
turn in his grave
never hear my mother cry
Lord, what kind of child is this?
—My Lover is a Woman, 1973
“The liberation she [Pat] felt finally embracing her sexuality is palpable in her poetry,” noted Rae Alexandra in a profile for Bay Area NPR station KQED. “The boldness of ‘My Lover is a Woman’ ... is still astonishing in 2018. In 1968, hearing it for the first time must have felt like an earthquake.”
Marriage to a man, Pat decided, wasn’t a good fit for her. During all this, however, she found something that was: the West Coast community of women poets, including Judy Grahn. As early as 1963, when she was just 19 years old, Pat began sharing her poetry at readings held at bookstores and coffeeshops. Judy recalled, “We both knew it was impossible for us to enter the world of poetry—and consequently we invented another world of poetry, and became peers, and leaders, and friends.”
This community also included such famous poets as Audre Lorde, who met Pat in 1969 and wrote a foreword to “Movement in Black” in 1978. “On the last night of my first trip to the West Coast in 1969, I walked into a room and met a young Black poet with fire in her eyes, a beer in her hand and a smile/scowl on her face,” Audre remembered. “There were poems in her mouth, on the tables, in the refrigerator, under the bed, and in the way she cast about the apartment, searching for—not answers—but rather, unexpressable questions.”
With Audre, Pat found connection in all the disconnections she felt elsewhere. “We were both Black; we were Lesbians; we were both poets, in a very white, straight, male world, and we sat up all night trading poems,” Audre continued. She and Pat would go on to exchange frequent letters starting in 1974. A collection of their correspondence, “Sister Love,” was published in 2018.
With Judy, Pat founded the Women’s Press Collective with the goal of promoting women and lesbian poets. Pat said, “It was like pioneering.... We were talking to women about women, and, at the same time, letting women know that the experiences they were having were shared by other people.” Pat also continued her activism work and kept the title of “feminist,” too, though that wasn’t always easy.
Friend Judy said, “Daring to call herself a feminist from the beginning, when even other feminists had swallowed the false line that only white middleclass women need apply—what gall, for a movement which had half its own roots in the Black Power and Civil Rights struggles—Parker remained a feminist anyway—lucky for the rest of us.” Pat’s poetry constantly prods at the limits forced on her, stabbing at those “unexpressable questions” that Audre referenced.
Have you ever tried to hide?
In a group
of women
hide
yourself
slide between the floor boards
slide yourself away child
away from this room
& your sister
before she notices
your black self &
her white mind
slide your eyes
down
away from other blacks
afraid – a meeting of eyes
& pain would travel between you –
change like milk to buttermilk
a silent rage.
SISTER! your foot’s smaller,
but it’s still on my neck.
—from “Pitstop,” 1973
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___
In a University of Minnesota profile, Ilene Alexander observed that “Parker’s poetry generally escapes didacticism because of her deft use of humor, insistence on frank language, presentations of events and images long silent, and sharp analysis of injustices. The goal, Parker said in an interview with [fellow poet] Kate Rushin, is to ‘try to put the poetry in the language that we speak, to use that language, take those simple works and make out of them something that is moving, that is powerful, that is there.’”
Indeed, throughout her career, the structure or apparent simplicity of Pat’s poetry was criticized. Missing from the reading of them is that they were often meant to be heard spoken aloud, and recordings of Pat herself performing them reveal their full dimension. “Her work is simple. Anyone can read it, in a bar, if necessary. The poet herself has done so. That’s the point. It’s simple, but deceptively so,” wrote critic Adrian Oktenberg in a review of Pat’s 1985 collection “Jonestown & other madness” for The Women’s Review of Books. “It is easy for sophisticated literary types to take it for granted, and they have. That’s their loss. In Parker’s work, not a word is wasted.”
Within larger society, Pat experienced oppression and marginalization as a Black queer woman. Within lesbian spaces, she experienced alienation as a Black woman. Within Black spaces, she experienced judgement for dating a white woman. Nowhere, it seemed, could contain all that Pat was.
And when we go to a gay bar
& my people shun me because I crossed
the line
& her people look to see what’s
wrong with her – what defect
drove her to me –
And when we walk the streets
of this city – forget and touch
or hold hands and the people
stare, glare, frown, & taunt
at those queers –
I remember
Every word taught me
Every word said to me
Every word done to me
& then I hate –
i look at my lover
& for an instance – doubt –
Then/ i hold her hand tighter
And i can hear my mother cry
Lord, what kind of child is this.
—My Lover is a Woman, 1973
Throughout the 1970s, Pat traveled with other poets and musicians on the “Varied Voices of Black Women” tour. Wendy Stevens, a writer for Off Our Backs, profiled one of Pat’s readings in the May-June 1975 issue. “It takes guts to start out in California and make your way cross country, having made all your contacts by mail, to read your poetry,” she observed. “When Pat Parker, a black lesbian writer, sat and read her poetry to about sixty women at E. Lois ‘Sharon’ Gomillion’s [a D.C.-based Black poet] home—I heard a woman who had taken her message into her own arms and sought to spread it finely to each woman along the way.”
In 1978, Pat began working at the Oakland Feminist’s Women’s Health Center as the medical coordinator and executive director where she advocated for abortion rights and reproductive health, especially for the poor and working class. She would hold this position until 1988.
each week I go to my group
see women
Black women
Beautiful Black Women
& I am in love
with each of them
& this is important
in the loving
in the act of loving
each woman
I have learned a new lesson
I have learned
to love myself.
—Group, 1978
In 1980, Pat began a relationship with Martha “Marty” Dunham. Together, the two co-parented daughters Cassidy Brown and Anastasia Jean. Even with a “day job” at the health center and an active family life, Pat’s poetry remained a vibrant outlet for her most complex thoughts and intense feelings. In 1976, Pat’s older sister Shirley was murdered by her husband. Pat recorded the events and her emotions in the powerful poem titled “Womanslaughter,” from learning the news—
I used to be fearful
of phone calls in the night –
never in the day.
Death, like the vampire
fears the sun
never in the day –
“Hello Patty”
“Hey big sister
what’s happening?
How’s the kids?”
“Patty, Jonesy shot Shirley.
She didn’t make it.”
—to reflecting on the brother-in-law she’d known—
There was a quiet man
He married a quiet wife
Together, they lived
a quiet life.
Not so, not so
her sisters said,
the truth comes out
as she lies dead.
—to burying her sister—“the four strong daughters of Buster Cooks” becoming three—
We came, the three sisters
of Shirley Jones
& took care of her mother.
We picked the right flowers,
contacted insurance companies,
arranged social security payments,
and cremated her.
We came, the three sisters
of Shirley Jones.
We were not strong.
“It is good, they said,
that Buster is dead.
He would surely kill
the quiet man.”
—and through the trial and “justice” in the courtroom.
What was his crime?
He only killed his wife.
But a divorce I say.
Not final, they say:
Her things were his
including her life.
Men cannot rape their wives.
Men cannot kill their wives.
They passion them to death.
On Nov. 18, 1978, 918 people died at the People’s Temple in Guyana on the northern coast of South America. This event would come to be called the Jonestown massacre, after founder and cult leader Jim Jones. Of those who died by apparent suicide at the compound, the majority were Black. Their leader Jim Jones, however, was white. This haunted and enraged Pat.
“I must ask the question,” she wrote in her introduction to “Jonestown & other madness” in 1984. “If 900 white people had gone to a country with a Black minister and ‘committed suicide,’ would we have accepted the answers we were given so easily?” She explored these thoughts more extensively in a poem titled “jonestown.”
Newscasters’ words
slap me in my face
peoples’ tears and grief
emanate from my set
and I remember the lessons
rehear a childhood message
Black folks do not commit suicide
I thought of my uncle Dave
he died in prison
suicide
the authorities said
“Boy just up and hung hisself”
and I remember my mother
her disbelief, her grief
“Them white folks kilt my brother
Dave didn’t commit no suicide”
and the funeral
a bitter quiet funeral
his coffin sealed from sighters
and we all knew
Dave died not by his hands
and some guard decided
that n____r should die
Through the lens of Jonestown, Pat interrogated a system that left Black people vulnerable to myriad abuses and then blamed them for being abused.
An interview with a live one
“You were a member of People’s Temple?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Why did you join?”
“Well, I went there a few times
and then I stopped going, but
the Rev. Jones came by my house
and asked me why I quit coming.
I was really surprised.
No one had ever cared
that much about me before.”
No one had ever cared
that much about me before
and it came home
the messages of my youth
came clear
the Black people
in Jonestown
did not commit suicide
they were murdered
they were murdered in
small southern towns
they were murdered in
big northern cities
they were murdered
as school children
by teachers
who didn’t care
they were murdered
by policemen
who didn’t care
they were murdered
by welfare workers
who didn’t care
they were murdered
by shopkeepers
who didn’t care
they were murdered
by church people
who didn’t care
they were murdered
by politicians
who didn’t care
they didn’t die at Jonestown
they went to Jonestown dead
convinced that America
and Americans
didn’t care
they died
in the schoolrooms
they died
in the streets
they died
in the bars
they died
in the jails
they died
in the churches
they died
in the welfare lines
Jim Jones was not the cause
he was the result
of 400 years
of not caring
Black folks do not
Black folks do not
Black folks do not commit suicide.
Some of the “other madnesses” Pat’s poetry frequently explored were the cultural fears about the queer population of the United States, fears that Pat pokes at with incisive wit.
There are those who think
or perhaps don’t think
that children and lesbians
together can’t make a family
that we create an extension
of perversion.
They think
or perhaps don’t think
that we have different relationships
with our children
that instead of getting up
in the middle of the night
for a 2 AM and 6 AM feeding
we rise up and chant
“you’re gonna be a dyke
you’re gonna be a dyke.”
—legacy, for Anastasia Jean, 1985
you know some people
got a lot of nerve.
sometimes, i don’t believe
the things i see and hear.
Have you met the woman
who’s shocked by 2 women kissing
& in the same breath,
tells you that she’s pregnant?
BUT GAYS SHOULDN’T BE BLATANT.
— For the Straight Folks
Who Don’t Mind Gays
But Wish They Weren’t So BLATANT, 1985
In 1985, Pat wrote to her friend Audre, debating the idea of leaving her job to write full time. “Beware the terror of not producing. Beware the urge to justify your decision. Watch out for the kitchen sink and the plumbing and the painting that always needed being done. But remember the body needs to create too,” Audre wrote back. Pat would leave her position at the Oakland Feminist’s Women’s Health Center in 1988.
She died the following year in Oakland, Calif. on June 19 of breast cancer. She was only 45 years old. She left behind partner Marty and daughters Cassidy and 6-year-old Anastasia. Her work would go on to inspire future artists and poets. New York City’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center founded their library in 1991 and named it—The Pat Parker/Vito Russo Center Library—in honor of Pat and film historian and author Vito Russo.
“Sometimes I wonder whether just writing is enough–I mean as far as creating the revolution,” Pat mused in 1975. Off Our Backs reviewer Wendy went on to say, “I wanted to tell Pat Parker that living and writing was enough. I wanted to tell her that living, writing, and getting up off your chair and reading it to strangers/women alike was plenty.”
“I asked her once about her personal idea of a revolution,” friend Judy said in her “Movement in Black” introduction. “What would she want to see happen. She said, ‘If I could take all my parts with me when I go somewhere, and not have to say to one of them, “No, you stay home tonight, you won’t be welcome,” because I’m going to an all-white party where I can be gay, but not Black. Or I’m going to a Black poetry reading, and half of the poets are antihomosexual, or thousands of situations where something of what I am cannot come with me. The day all the different parts of me can come along, we would have what I would call a revolution.’ It is, as she says in one of her poems, a ‘simple’ dream.”
Writer Lyndie Brimstone acknowledged this simple dream in a “Feminist Review” tribute to Pat in 1990. “A simple dream, perhaps,” she noted, “but who will work for it now Pat Parker has gone? Is it safe, with us?”
Sources:
Pit Stop by Pat Parker
Child of Myself by Pat Parker
Movement in Black by Pat Parker
Jonestown & other madness by Pat Parker
KQED: The Oakland Poet Who Brought Lesbian Feminism to the Fore
Poetry Foundation: Pat Parker
University of Minnesota: Voices from the Gap – Pat Parker
Public Books: From “Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker”
Off Our Backs: Reading her work
The Women’s Review of Books: A Quartet of Voices
Lansing State Journal: April 19, 1979
Feminist Review: A Tribute
Vice: The Radical Poetry of Audre Lorde’s Confidante, Pat Parker
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Community Center: Library
Ms.: On Editing ‘Sister Love’
Wikipedia: Pat Parker, Ed Bullins, Judy Grahn, Jonestown