Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – I keep being stunned at the news of the legends departing this earth. They’ve been here our entire lives, and I keep wistfully thinking they will somehow live forever, be with us always.
So I gasped yet again when I heard that Nikki Giovanni, the beloved poet and visionary of the Black Arts Movement, younger sister in the circle of Baldwin and Morrison and a literary star from her early 20s onward, had passed away. How is it possible that she is gone from us?
Years ago, I had the extraordinary chance to meet her. I’d gotten an unexpected message after The Warmth of Other Suns came out. It was presumably from Nikki Giovanni. Because I couldn’t imagine hearing from someone that iconic in that way, I didn’t believe it at first. It was, in fact, her — inviting me to speak at Virginia Tech, where she’d been teaching in the English Department and was spearheading the effort to bring me to campus.
The day I arrived, Nikki Giovanni picked me up from baggage claim at the Roanoke airport in her BMW and drove me to campus herself. She had known every major black figure of the last half century, yet she was frank and unassuming, not one for affectation and celebrity.
She told me to stop calling her Prof. Giovanni before I got there.
“Please, my name is Nikki. I feel old and useless when you say ‘professor.’ Makes me want to put patches on my corduroy jacket and smoke a pipe. Not allowed!”
She had made a home for herself in rural Virginia, near her birthplace of Knoxville, Tenn, where she’d been raised by her grandmother, whose death soon after Giovanni’s college graduation, had inspired her path to writing as she sought to reconcile her grief.
The day of my talk, she drove me to her home, well-loved and lived-in, for a small gathering with faculty. There she held forth on the attacks on black citizens fueling Black Lives Matter and lovingly dished about Maya Angelou and James Baldwin, with whom she left us this treasured clip of their dialogue together.
When she retired from teaching in 2022, she said, “You’re not dead until you’re forgotten,” in which case, she and Toni and Maya and Quincy and James Earle Jones and others we have lost, will surely live forever. | Posted on 11/Dec/2024 05:07:54