Denigration
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Denigration*
Did we surprise our teachers who had niggling doubts about the picayune brains of small black children who reminded them of clean pickaninnies on a box of laundry soap? How muddy is the Mississippi compared to the third-longest river of the darkest continent? In the land of the Ibo, the Hausa, and the Yoruba, what is the price per barrel of nigrescence? Though slaves, who were wealth, survived on niggardly provisions, should inheritors of wealth fault the poor enigma for lacking a dictionary? Does the mayor demand a recount of every bullet or does city hall simply neglect the black alderman’s district? If I disagree with your beliefs, do you chalk it up to my negligible powers of discrimination, supposing I’m just trifling and not worth considering? Does my niggling concern with trivial matters negate my ability to negotiate in good faith? Though Maroons, who were unruly Africans, not loose horses or lazy sailors, were called renegades in Spanish, will I turn any blacker if I renege on this deal? [End Page 143]
Harryette Mullen, a native of Alabama, grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. She is author of seven books of poems: Tree Tall Woman, Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, Muse & Drudge, Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), Blues Baby (2002), and Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse and Drudge (2006). The recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2005, she is a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. (She is featured in a special section in Callaloo 19.3, Summer 1996, pp. 637–689)
Footnotes
* Reprinted from Sleeping with the Dictionary (Berkeley: U of California P, 2002) with permission of the University of California Press and Harryette Mullen.
