Tennessean By Birth

I’m a native Tennessean. I was born there. During the age of segregation. When you couldn’t go to the same amusement park. Or the same movie theater. When the white guys would cruise up and down the streets and call out to you. When the black guys were afraid of being lynched. But we went to church each Sunday. And we sang a precious song. And we found a way not to survive. Anything can survive. But to thrive. And believe. And hope.

Nikki Giovanni

When Nikki Giovanni reads “Tennessean By Birth” aloud, its cadences quickly make apparent that it is an anthem, a rousing and uplifting song of identity: her identity as an African-American Tennessean. The poem’s opening stanza, quoted above, encapsulates the elements that have shaped that identity: the speaker has experienced racial discrimination, oppression, and the threat of violence, but she has also triumphed over them through a communal devotion to the spiritual and a reliance on the power of music. The ugly realities of racism have ultimately been unable to prevent Black Americans from thriving, believing, and hoping. The stanza—and the whole poem—is a testament to Nikki Giovanni’s lifelong values and beliefs as a person and a writer. In a career spanning more than four decades, Giovanni has never hesitated to speak the truth as she sees it, nor has she faltered in her belief that she as an individual, and Black Americans more generally, can and will prevail against the forces that may assail her or them.

Although Giovanni’s poetry has quite naturally developed over the course of her long career, its continuities are far more significant than its apparent discontinuities. And the wellspring of those continuities is located in the values and beliefs Giovanni absorbed from her African-American Southern and Appalachian heritages and, above all, from her maternal grandmother, whom she has frequently referenced as her most important influence. She has stated that her love of storytelling is the most “Southern” thing about her, while her sense of independence and individuality is the most “Appalachian.”¹ In truth, many readers of her poetry are more apt to see her as an urban poet, primarily because of the rhythms of her poetry and, to a lesser extent, its diction; others view her as an urban poet because of her early emergence as a part of the Black Arts Movement. Yet “urban” is no more diametrically opposed to “Southern” or “Appalachian” than hip hop is to the spirituals, as Giovanni and others have demonstrated.

Though she is indeed a “Tennessean By Birth,” Nikki Giovanni was a part of that unprecedented historical phenomenon known as the Great Migration. Just two months after she was born (on June 7, 1943), her parents gathered their meager belongings, their three-year old, Gary Ann, and their newborn baby and moved from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Cincinnati, Ohio, in the hopes that there they could build a better life for themselves and their daughters. They joined, in short, the waves of the Great Migration that had begun early in the twentieth century and continued well into the 1970s. As Isabel Wilkerson has so meticulously shown, the African-American migrants from the South left their “imprint . . . everywhere in urban life” and gave rise to “the language and music of urban America that sprang from the blues that came with the migrants and dominates our airwaves to this day.”²

Nikki Giovanni’s nuclear family actually continued the pattern of migration begun a generation before by both her maternal and paternal ancestors. Her maternal grandparents, who played a significant role in her life, migrated from the southwestern Georgia town of Albany to Knoxville, Tennessee, when their three daughters were still toddlers. Her maternal grandfather, John Brown Watson, came from an extended family of landowners, builders, and merchants. He graduated from W. E. B. Du Bois’s alma mater, Fisk University, a liberal arts college for young black men and women in Nashville, Tennessee. There John Brown, nicknamed “Book,” studied classics, with the unrealized dream of one day becoming a diplomat. After graduating in 1905, he...