A Love Letter to Eugene B. Redmond
Poet, Professor, Mentor, Friend
From Georgene Bess Montgomery, Ph.D.
Poet, Professor, Mentor, Friend
From Georgene Bess Montgomery, Ph.D.
Dear Eugene B. Redmond,
I once promised you that I would dedicate my first book to you. I didn’t. That broken promise has always haunted me because it would have been a loving dedication and public acknowledgement of the important role you have played and continue to play in my life and the profound impact you have on me and my literary scholarship, a testament to your generosity. Ever the professor, you taught me so much, shared so much of yourself, your wisdom, and your vast knowledge of literature with me. You opened worlds and doors for me. As with so many others, you gave me books and bid me to read. You gave me a pen and bid me to write. You opened doors and bid me to enter.
My rolodex is filled with the names of literary luminaries, filmmakers, poets, playwrights, and actors I met because of you, including Quincy Troupe, Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Nunez, John Edgar Wideman, Usini Eugene Perkins, Mari Evans, Avery Brooks, Danny Glover, Sonia Sanchez, Malkia M’Buzi Moore, Malaika Adero, Askia Toure, Haki Madhabuti, Jim Brown, Jayne Cortez, Paul Carter Harrison. Because of you, I attended the National Black Writers Conference and met J. California Cooper, Arthur Flowers, Terry McMillan, heard Alice Walker lovingly advise us to “each one, teach one” while the pugilistic Ishmael Reed lobbed angry lyrical cannons at Black women writers. Even more significantly, you assigned me, and several more of your mentees, to report on the National Black Writers Conference. I had the awe-inspiring task of capturing in words the epic literary duel between Alice Walker and Ishmael Reed.
I remember clearly the first time I met you. Having earned an M.A. degree in English during which I didn’t study any Black literary texts, I excitedly drove to Atlanta from Statesboro, GA for the 1990 National Black Arts Festival Literary Celebration, ready to feast on the cornucopia of amazing poets, writers, literary scholars, actors, filmmakers, playwrights, and booksellers. I clutched tightly the literary celebration schedule in my hand as if it were my Bible. I eagerly attended every session, determined to feed my starving mind as I dined at the table of literary excellence. I bought books and had them autographed. From the back of the filled-to-capacity room, I asked you a question. Impressed by my question and perhaps charmed by my Southern country accent, you invited me to join you and several others, including First World/Medu Bookstore owner Nia Damali, for lunch at a nearby Chinese restaurant. Although I didn’t like Chinese food, I quickly accepted, wanting to continue my feasting. That was the beginning of our 35-year friendship, a friendship that is unique in its particulars but still mirrors the friendships that you share with so many others. Significantly, you introduced me to Janice Liddell, then chair of the Department of English at Clark Atlanta University, who hired me and began my tenure as an assistant professor at CAU. You are a friend to literary, film, and music luminaries, mentor to burgeoning poets, writers, students, literary scholars, and me, then a bright-eyed, newly minted college professor, eager to learn, and now a full professor and department chair, still eager to learn, still reading and writing, now opening doors for others and bidding them to enter.
I am deeply honored that a scholar of your caliber saw in me a hunger for knowledge, and became, without me having to ask, my mentor. I am profoundly blessed to call you my friend. You are, after all, THE renown, sought-after scholar, friend to literary giants like Toni Morrison, Mari Evans, and Maya Angelou, Eugene B. Redmond--Professor Emerita, Southern Illinois-Edwardsville. Poet extraordinaire and author of eight brilliant books of poetry. You keep the memory and literary works of Henry Dumas, the brilliant, young African American author of Ark of Bones, who was shot and killed by the police “under mysterious circumstances” alive, read, and appreciated by a worldwide audience. Your 1976 seminal text Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, A Critical History set the literary world on fire because of its historic, comprehensive, and groundbreaking analysis of Black poetry. With Drumvoices, you introduced to the world the strident voices of Black poets who voiced how the caged bird feels, defined being gifted and Black, sung the blues, and wrote about Black pain, Black joy, Black love, Black rage, and Black celebration for beating the odds, against all odds. That same year you were named Poet Laureate of East St. Louis, an acknowledgement of your poetic genius and an honor you earned and richly deserved. As a poet who studied, experimented with, and taught different poetic styles, you created the phenomenal 49-word poetic form Kwansaba.
You founded the Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club to mentor aspiring writers and help hone their writing, reading, and editing skills. Understanding the need for us to publish our work, you created Drumvoices Revue, a literary magazine, where you provided opportunities for both young and seasoned scholars to publish and share their voices with the world. In asking me to serve as the MC for the 1990 NBAF’s Nation of Poets, you introduced me to a whole new world of literary excellence. Because of you, I sat next to and at the proverbial feet of phenomenal poets like Mari Evans, Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni.
For so many of us, you are our literary godfather. With the wave of your pen, you opened the world of Black books, Black films, Black plays, and Black voices. You created the Kwansaba, created the soular system, taught us the art of edutainment, how to wield words like swords and caresses, to write the blues, and showed us how to bear witness with our words. From your profound understanding of Black culture, born of travel, study, and paying close attention, you gave us the Six Organizing Principles of Music and Social Behaviors— Call and Response, the Metronome Sense, Polyrhythmic and Polyphonic, a Predominance of Percussive Performance, Syncopation, and Improvisation.
On the occasion of your 80th Bornday celebration, your guests read their especially written Kwansabas in your honor. Though not a poet, I accepted the assignment and wrote
27 Years in 49 Words
A Poem for Eugene B. Redmond
George’s Gene, a wonder of a man
A spell binding word griot who usher’d
Me into Soular Systems/Third Eye/Contact
Made me high with your rhythmic rhymes
Double clutch’d my mind to higher planes
Drummed voice sync’d with my heart’s beat
I opened my mouth and spoke you
And I soular slid into a Nation of Poets
Ever the photographer, you took picture after picture after picture, documenting the literary scene and its participants, capturing history and telling stories that were often detailed in the local newspapers. We were honored to be your photographed subjects. Your extensive photograph collection was curated for exhibit by Howard Ramsey, a then junior faculty member who recognized the value of your collection, which memorialized so many of us. That collection is now a part of the Eugene B. Redmond Library at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, created to honor and celebrate the literary genius that you are. Your life’s work allows us to see the Black genius, the Black beauty, the Black creative that is Black people. Your ever-present camera taught us the necessity of capturing our history in the making, of documenting our story as it is being told, of being the writers of our own story, our own history, our own selves.
For all of your poems, your literary vision, your poetic brilliance, your photographs, your capturing of history, your mentorship, and our decades-long friendship, I write you this love letter, written on behalf of the many poets, writers, scholars whom you have befriended and mentored, all over the world.
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