I arrived at Roscoe’s House of Chicken N Waffles a little before noon to find a line of people halfway down the block. Had Wanda Coleman, the author I was to interview, made a mistake?
In a course I was taking at the University of Vermont on African-American women writers, I had chosen to write a paper on Coleman. In her twenty books of poetry and prose, Coleman’s bold truth comes alive, taking the reader from despair and tragedy to eroticism and humor. As a published author myself, I wanted to know more about her and her writing.
My husband and I had planned a trip to Los Angeles, and I wrote Coleman to ask if I could interview her in person. She agreed and suggested Roscoe’s. Our meeting happened two decades before George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police. According to the U.S. Bureau of Statistics, from June 2015 through March 2016 there were an average of 135 deaths per month nationally, or four per day—more black people killed by police than were lynched in the worst year of Jim Crow.
While I waited in line at Roscoe’s, a woman over six feet tall wearing high-heeled boots approached and looked down at me. I recognized Coleman at once, but her eyebrows lifted when she saw me. I was the only white person in line.
“Do you want to go somewhere else?” she asked.
“No,” I told her. “I’d like to eat here.” Why should we go to an eatery where she was in the minority? I had come for the black experience, and Roscoe's was the place to find it.
Once we were seated, conversation with Coleman was easy. She spoke about her muse and her life as a teenage mother in Watts. Her work is sometimes serious, sometimes playful, and spans a wide range of topics—sex, drugs, prayer, and the art of writing. Her poems, in lower case without punctuation, shine light on emotions and experiences that are very different from mine but that invite me into her work, like “Black Against the Night”:
what’s looked for is many bleeds ago
may never have evah
what you don’t see is what you get/an unrepentant
unresplendence of abortions and too-lates
what’s dangling status post lynching, the overweight, the
hanky-head, the dead on her feet (aka fat forty and
fucked up)
zero in on the left laughing eyeball, the right orb
bloated, purulent with hate
talk about reparations? hahaha
besides. there ain’t cash enuff
Coleman’s father left Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1931 after a young black man was lynched from the church steeple, his body left hanging. When Coleman saw a car driving through town with a California license plate, he flagged it down and offered money for a ride. When he reached southern California, he never left, and neither had his daughter.
The writer's simmering eyes brimmed with intelligence. As the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles, she lived in the land she knew and was generous in sharing it, even with a white New Englander. As different as we were, we had the commonality of passion for the written word. Everything else melted away.
Years later, I was teaching in a writing program when Coleman sent me her book The Riot Inside Me. Tucked inside was a postcard on which she had penned: “Dear Louella Bryant—I see you have blossomed! Congratulations! Wanda C.” She hadn’t forgotten our lunch at Roscoe’s.
In the book Coleman says, “In South Central L.A., people are dying—sitting in their living rooms watching TV and catching stray bullets. There’s no haven,no sanctity.” In the book Coleman tells of L.A. riots prompted by the arrest of Marquette Frye and the brutal beating of Rodney King. At the book’s center is an interview in which Coleman says: “If you ask a young person today, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ the assumption is that you’re going to live long enough to grow up.... You’re not going to be shot by a cop.”
I was grieved to learn that Coleman died in 2013. A posthumous volume of her poetry titled Wicked Enchantment was published in April by Black Sparrow Press.
