Legacies
her grandmother called her from the playground
"yes, ma'am"
"i want chu to learn how to make rolls," said the old
woman proudly
but the little girl didn't want
to learn how because she knew
even if she couldn't say it that
that would mean when the old one died she would be less
dependent on her spirit so.
she said
i don't want to know how to make no rolls"
with her lips poked out
and the old woman wiped her hands on
her apron saying "lord
these children"
and neither of them ever
said what they meant
and i guess nobody ever does
– Nikki Giovanni
Some lyrics strike me as perfect: so balanced, so specific yet widely encompassing, so beautifully phrased; I'm thinking of poems like Larkin's This Be the Verse or Housman's Loveliest of Trees & this poem, which I just love so much.
The situation is simple & the language pared down, but both are rich in implication. We open with the grandmother, but from the eyes of her young granddaughter, out playing: the first person we hear of, right in the second word, is the grandmother, but the very first word, her, tells us we're seeing the old woman from the viewpoint of someone else, & in relation to someone else. The two are connected, but also with a certain distance between them. One has been in the kitchen (she's wearing an apron & is about to bake rolls), the other outside playing. There's a certain formality & respect from the youngster to the elder; again, the first speech we hear is not from the grandmother herself (her call is reported indirectly) but from the child, who addresses the old woman with the dignified title ma'am. What the old lady says is expressed as her desire; she doesn't ask the child if she wants to learn to make rolls, or if she has the time to learn now (she's just out playing, of course she has time!). She just says she wants her to learn how to make rolls.
And she says this proudly. This is one of the most beautiful word choices in the poem; a bit unexpected but all the more perfect for that reason. We can assume, since Giovanni is a writer of the Black American experience, that the people here are also Black Americans, probably Southern, with the background of difficulty & struggle that suggests. Southern cuisine is largely the product of Black workers like the grandmother, & rolls/biscuits are usually a cook's centerpiece, a cause for fame. Food of course is one of the central ways in which families pass on not just cultural but familial traditions, & we're fortunate to live in a time when a fairly new genre, the memoir/history in the form of a cookbook, has achieved prominence. I've heard interviews with Southern Black women who have written such books in which they describe feeling, or hoping to feel, their grandmother's guiding spirit as they try to recreate the dishes she was famed for. We can guess the grandmother is proud of her rolls, proud of her ability to make them, proud of her knowledge, proud of being able to pass on that knowledge, maybe even proud of the child she has chosen as an appropriate recipient of that knowledge. The line breaks are handled with great finesse in this poem. The line in which the grandmother speaks ends with old, often an ambiguous if not downright negative term in youth-obsessed America, but the next two words – woman proudly – stand emphatically alone, on their own line: a proud woman stands before us.
The granddaughter has a complicated emotional reaction that she is too young to articulate, even to herself. She is already aware that her grandmother's age means she is moving towards death (is that why she wants to pass on her knowledge?) & love leads her to dread that moment of parting. Her emotional state is parsed in the heart of the poem: but the little girl didn't want: the child has moved from being her, the one whose viewpoint we're given, whose viewpoint we see from, to being seen as the grandmother would see her: as a little girl. to learn how because she knew: this line is balanced between what the girl is supposed to learn – what can only come from an outside person – & what she knew, that is, what her instinct & internal spirit are telling her. It's significant that knew is in the past tense; this is something she's known or felt for a long time; even if this is the moment when it first rose to the surface, it's been there inside her, this fear of separation from one she loves, waiting to crystallize. Again, the line break is important; we end the line with the emphasis on what she knew, balancing what she is supposed to learn, but we aren't given what she knew even in the next line, which is, instead, a reminder of a child's inability to dissect & articulate her feelings.
It's in the next two lines that we are given what the child knew: that would mean when the old one died she would be less / dependent on her spirit so. . . . Again, note the line break: when the old one dies (the child is very aware of age & death & impending loss), she, the granddaughter, would be less. The loss of the grandmother would be a diminishment, a lessening of the granddaughter. But that implication floats ahead of the words in the next line: less dependent on her spirit. The child is counting on her grandmother continuing with her, guiding her, in spirit. This is obviously a difficult, painful concept to speak out loud, & it's difficult to imagine the old woman accepting it, even if she feels the same way. It's a complicated welter of pride, love, impending loss, pain & fear, uncertainty about what really happens after our physical death. . . .
The narrative then moves from these complicated internal states to outward actions, as the two characters try to express or to hide what is roiling inside them. The granddaughter pokes her lips out in a pouty way & says she doesn't want to learn how to bake the rolls. The old woman balances the poked-out lips by wiping her hands on her apron & saying lord / these children: given the granddaughter's level of talking back here, & the grandmother's fairly mild reaction, does the old woman have some feeling for what we know the girl isn't saying? Is it just a kids these days kind of remark? Is she on some level actually asking the Lord to help either her or the children?
and neither of them ever / said what they meant: So this particular episode was never "talked out" by the two; it remains one of those instances, often painful to the younger one once the elder is gone, in which something was offered but not accepted for complicated reasons that one later regrets. But we can infer from ever that maybe this isn't an isolated example, & the two women, old & young, caught in a complicated web of love & dependence & life-distance, often spoke at cross-purposes like this. The situation remains ambiguous, unresolved: in other words, heartbreakingly true to life. And the splendid final line – and i guess nobody ever does – expands the emotionally complicated moment of speaking at cross-purposes, of knowledge offered & lost, & of love & the dread of losing love, into a sort of moral summation of life.
This last line is the first moment in the poem when the narrator offers some sort of official commentary as opposed to narrative description, & guess is another perfect word choice: it sounds offhand, casual, as if we're being told something by a friend, but it also suggests that the narrator is literally making a guess: she may be as uncertain of what's really going on inside other people as her loving & cross-purposed pair of grandmother & granddaughter. We all walk in uncertainty. What are the legacies the title refers to? The knowledge of how to make rolls, of course, but the word is plural; in addition to the specific recipe involved here, there is the complicated, ultimately inescapable heritage of knowledge offered & not quite accepted, at least at the moment of offering, or not in the way the one offering was hoping; of emotions not quite connecting, fears not quite surfacing, connections inexorable but not quite bridging the gaps between people: you know, the stuff of family life.
I took this poem from The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998.
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