Hauling Up Gold From the Abyss: An Interview with Will Alexander
- Hauling up Gold from the Abyss: An Interview with Will Alexander
Will Alexander, Poet and Essayist: A Special Section
This interview was conducted in Los Angeles on November 29, 1997.
Will, I’d like to begin by getting some basic biographical information, such as when and where you were born, where you grew up. Who were your parents? How do you think your family and community might have influenced you in your early years? Your book, The Stratospheric Canticles, is dedicated to your parents, Birdie and Will Alexander. How did you come to be interested in books and writing?
I was born in Los Angeles, and what’s interesting for me is that Black writers of Afro-American persuasion are so often touted as being either Southerners or Harlemites, and I’m neither. I’m an absolute Westerner.
Did your folks come from the South though?
They did, but they had been here for so long that they had—
They’re Angelenos?
Yes. They were actually Angelenos.
But where did they come from?
My dad was born in New Orleans. My mom was born in a small town in Texas. Marshall, Texas. I myself went to the South as a child once, and that was it. I never really had much contact, although my uncle’s quite an activist in politics back there, and has been for many, many years. In fact he’s still active. He’s part of—he’s in the State Legislature. [The two elder Alexanders, Will and Avery, have passed away since this interview was conducted.]
What’s his name?
Avery Alexander. He was a boxer as a younger man and led some very powerful rallies that helped to defeat David Duke. He led large rallies against David [End Page 391] Duke and he has national stature as a labor leader, a labor organizer. So the family—in fact I brought an essay I wrote on my dad that just got published [Apex of the M#6]—the family started buying property and land in 1897, and they were not hesitant about keeping the white people off of their land. I was told that my great-great grandfather would keep his pistol out [to warn racist intruders]: “Get off my property or I’ll shoot you.” So it’s basically a very, very independent family on my dad’s side, and my mother was even independent of her own very independent family. She transcended the independence of her family. She worked very hard, and she had magic in her. She was able to work with her intuition, and it was astoundingly accurate. She would say something, and it actually would happen.
She was clairvoyant?
She was clairvoyant, absolutely. So I would say that’s where my poetry connects with clairvoyance, and from my dad I think I get a long-term stability.
Do you know when they came out here and why?
It was during the time of, as they say, the Second Great War, a war that also liberated Black people from the South, because the racially segregated South as everybody well knows was an inspiration for Hitler’s Germany. I’ve always had a bad feeling about the whole area. My family felt the same way. They wanted to get out of their situation, so they met up and somehow forged a life here on the West Coast, like so many who migrated during the time of the war to places like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.
Was your father in the war?
Yes, he was. He was a sailor. His ship was hit by a bomb, but it didn’t sink. They were lucky. I mean, it blunted the ship but didn’t actually hit, out in the Pacific. He’d been to Japan and to the Pacific islands, and also to Jamaica. He was interested in the situation of seeing Black people in power, doing things, whereas, when he comes back to the States, it’s just the opposite. So his views were very independent, and I grew up looking at life...
