Captivity by Toi Derricotte

First published: 1989

Type of work: Poetry

The Poems

Toi Derricotte’s third published poetry collection, Captivity, is divided into four sections: “Blackbottom,” “Red Angel,” “The Testimony of Sister Maureen,” and “The Terrible Bright Air.” The first section’s opening poem, “The Minks,” describes the animals her uncle raised for sale in five hundred cages in the backyard of the house she lived in on Norwood Steet as a child. Derricotte describes in painstaking detail the effects of such captivity on essentially wild animals: Sometimes, they paced compulsively; sometimes, the mothers snapped the necks of their kits; often, they hid in their wooden houses. In the fall, the minks were slaughtered for their skins, which returned to the yard pinned by their mouths to metal hangers. In front of company, Derricotte’s uncle would take out the skins and blow on them, parting the hairs to show their bright “underlife.” The poet uses this image to end the poem in a lovely simile comparing the “underlife” to people’s souls, shining and manifesting their inner life. Written in forty lines of uneven length with no stanza separations and no rhymes, the poem reads like a story, yet, because of its brevity, personification of the animals, and striking similes, it retains the condensation and impact of fine poetry.

The second poem, “Blackbottom,” is the poem for which the section is named. Black Bottom is an old African American neighborhood close to Detroit that developed during the 1920’s through the 1940’s. Although Black Bottom is usually described as a crime-and poverty-ridden area, it was also a vibrant center of racial and cultural identity, well known to Derricotte, who grew up in Detroit and graduated from Wayne State University.

The poem describes a middle-class African American family who left the area for a nice suburb, Conant Gardens, in northeast Detroit. They return to Black Bottom’s streets to immerse themselves in the sights, sounds, and smells of their old neighborhood, knowing that on Monday they will be safe at their jobs and schools back in their new, middle-class home. The old neighborhood excites them and makes them proud. They realize they have lost something, for hearing the music of the streets makes them realize:

We had lost our voice in the suburbs, in Conant Gardens,   where each brick house delineated a fence of silence,we had lost the right to sing in the streets and damn creation.

The remainder of the first section’s poems deal with Derricotte’s youth. They include poems for her mother and father, a poem about the house on Norwood Street, fires in childhood, her high school, and the concluding poem of “Blackbottom,” “The Struggle,” a meditation on her confusion about the racial aspirations of her family.

The poems in the second section, “Red Angel,” deal with a later period of Derricotte’s life. They cover adult topics such as making love, marriage, friendship, and the problems that occur in adult life. The last three poems in the section include one about Derricotte’s mother and two about her father. The poems are still composed of varied-length lines with no apparent form, except for “Squeaky Bed,” which is divided into three stanzas, and “Touching/Not Touching: My Mother,” which is divided into two sections rather than stanzas.

“The Testimony of Sister Maureen,” the third section of the book, is based on the story of a teaching nun with the Sisters of St. Joseph who was tried in court for manslaughter in the death of her newborn son in 1976. She was found not guilty. The poem, narrated in the first person, is surreal, beginning in the clerestory of the nun’s convent, where she is advised by another woman to confess the identity of her lover. In the second part of the poem, the nun describes the changes she undergoes, her skin growing black and the miracle of God burning in her bones. More formal elements shape this poem: The stanzas are divided into seven sections, the narrator uses italics to comment on key scenes, and the spacing of words on the page becomes more varied and innovative as the poem reaches its final epiphany.

The fourth and final section of Captivity contains poems about children, school, Allan Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, black female corpses, and, finally, a stunning poem titled “A Note on My Son’s Face,” which turns into a meditation on skin color. The poems make more explicit use of formal elements in this last section, as in “For the Dishwasher at Boothman’s,” which is divided into three-and four-line stanzas and concluded with two couplets for emphasis. The poems about Ginsberg and Whitman use long lines in the style of the poets themselves, and “On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses” is divided into nine four-line stanzas.

Critical Context

Derricotte’s book was well received by the critical community. It received a Pushcart Prize, as well as an award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and it helped the poet secure her second fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The work confirmed Derricotte’s ability to engage in considerations of race that are both nuanced and striking. The concluding poem in Captivity, “A Note on My Son’s Face,” is a meditation on the different shades of color her son and her grandson are and her own ambivalence over her son’s dark color. The grandson is apparently lighter and welcomed as such, but the poet feels like begging the darker children who have come before for forgiveness. This is not a simple poem; Derricotte describes a picture of a lynching seen in a book and how the fear of having black skin is reinforced by such pictures. Many of her themes come together in this poem: color, identity, victimization, and shame. The last two lines of the poem are chilling: “The worst is true./ everything you did not want to know.” They are an appropriate ending for a book called Captivity, a collection of poems that explore so many subtle implications of that word.

Bibliography

Davidson, Phebe. Conversations with the World: American Women Poets and Their Work. Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England: Trilogy Books, 1998. Treats five American women poets in depth, including Toi Derricotte. Includes wide-ranging interviews with each poet about their life, work, and aspirations.

Derricotte, Toi. The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Starting as journal entries when the author moved into an all-white neighborhood in the late 1970’s, this autobiography turns into an examination of what it means to be a light-skinned black woman in a racially divided society. Also works out coming to terms with her own attitudes toward color.

Gilbert, Derrick, ed. Catch the Fire!!! A Cross-Generational Anthology of African-American Poetry. Knoxville, Tenn.: Riverhead Trade, 1998. A celebration of contemporary African American poetry, this book introduces a whole new generation and places Toi Derricotte in the context of the fellow poets of her own generation.

Hernton, Calvin C. “Black Women Poets: The Oral Tradition.” In The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers: Adventures in Sex, Literature, and Real Life. New York: Anchor, 1990. Feminist analysis of the triple burdens of sex, racism, and capitalism used to exploit African American women poets.

Rowell, Charles H. “Beyond Our Lives: An Interview with Toi Derricotte.” Callaloo 14, no. 3 (Summer, 1991): 654-664. Useful interview with the poet discussing Captivity and other works.