This is the last piece.
It's about my father.
My father was the reason I write.
And I'm an only child.
So my mother was the disciplinarian.
She was the person that took me to church
and spanked me and checked my grades.
And my father was the dreamer.
My father and I used to be in the kitchen every day.
And I would just tell him everything.
And when I decided that I wanted to be a newspaper reporter,
my mother said, you can't do that because only white men
do that, which I found out later was true.
[LAUGHTER]
And then I would go to the kitchen
and my father would whisper, never loud enough for my mother
to hear, you do anything you want.
You know, so my father was the person I just
spilled everything to him.
And so when my father died my mother
and I looked at each other like, and you would be who?
And we're still-- my mother's just not-- she's not
very emotionally giving.
My mother's all business like, you know.
And my father was the scoundrel and so
I wound up being the scoundrel.
So this is a part-- and one of the things
he did, when we were in the kitchen,
he would teach me how to cook.
And that was our sort of excuse for being in the kitchen.
I'm going to teach her how to-- teach
the girl how to cook something.
And the first thing my father ever taught me to cook
was something called hot water cornbread.
Uh, huh.
There's always somebody who's like, uh, huh.
Hot water cornbread is delicious.
But anyway, it's real simple to make.
So this is a poem about my dad and cooking and missing
him and everything.
The recipe for hot water cornbread is simple.
Cornmeal, hot water.
Mix till sluggish, then dollop in a sizzling skillet.
When you smell the burning begin, flip it.
When you smell the burning begin again, dump it onto a plate.
You've got to wait for the burning and get it just right.
Before the bread cools down, smeared
with sweet salted butter, and smash it with your fingers,
crumble it up in a bowl of collard greens or buttermilk.
Forget that I'm telling you, it's
the first thing I ever cooked, that my daddy was
laughing and breathing and no bullet in his head
would be talking.
Mix it until it looks like quicksand, he'd say.
Till it moves like a slow song sounds.
We'd sit there in the kitchen in the half dark,
licking our fingers and laughing at my mother, who was probably
scrubbing something with bleach or watching "Bonanza"
or thinking how stupid it was to be burning that nasty old bread
in that cast iron skillet.
She always used whole milk and eggs
and baked her cornbread until it was plump and sugary.
And she granted me hopeless as a homemaker,
too damned interested in sitting in the kitchen in the half
dark, learning nothing at all from a man who had other women
and stayed out late on Saturday night.
When I told her that I fixed my first-ever pan of hot water
cornbread and that my daddy had branded it glorious,
she sniffed and kept mopping the floor over and over
in the same space.
So here's how you do it.
Take out a bowl, like the one we had with blue flowers and only
one crack.
You put the cornmeal in it.
Then you turn on the hot water and you
let it run while you tell the secret about the boy who kissed
your cheek after school, or about how you really
want to be a reporter instead of a teacher or a nurse like mama
said.
And the water keeps running while Daddy says,
you will be a wonderful writer.
And you will be famous someday.
And when you get famous, if I wrote you a letter
and sent you some money, would you write about me?
He is laughing and breathing and no bullet in his head.
So you let the water run into this mix
until it moves like mud moves at the bottom of a river, which
is another thing Daddy said.
And even though I'd never even seen a river,
I knew exactly what he meant.
Then you turn the fire way up under the skillet
and you pour in this mix that moves
like mud moves at the bottom of a river like quicksand,
like a slow song sounds.
That stuff pops something awful when it first
hits that blazing skillet.
And sometimes Daddy and I would dance to those angry pop
sounds.
He'd let me rest my feet on top of his
while we waltzed around the kitchen.
And my mother huffed and puffed on the other side of the door.
When you are famous, Daddy asked me,
will you write about dancing in the kitchen with your father?
I say everything I write will be about you.
Then you will be famous too.
And we'd dip and swirl and spin.
But then he stops and sniffs the air.
The thing you have to remember about hot water cornbread
is to wait for the burning so you know when you flip it.
And then again, so you know when it's crusty and done.
Then eat it the way we did, with our fingers, our feet still
tingling from dancing.
But remember that sometimes the burning takes such a long time
and in that time, sometimes poems are born.
[APPLAUSE]
Please join us-- please join us in the lobby.
There is carrot cake and lemonade and the university--