Sailing With Lucille
by J.E. Sills
“may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear”
Blessing the Boats
– Lucille Clifton (1937-2010)
This poem you learn has the power of time travel. It arrives later in your life but stirs up those old Philadelphia days when your little life was happening and those storm clouds that threatened.
It’s the late-1980s, you’re a j-school graduate student and a clerk for a tabloid newspaper–on the lobster shift. So-called after the old English for a lob, a dolt, a loser. A dead-end shift from eleven at night to seven in the morning where you rattle around a cavernous building. But by the time you get the job, a couple folks have gone dayside or the city desk as real reporters. Maybe one or two.
You?
After a night of hustling copy to editors and getting the first editions from the bowels of that landmark building on Broad, after moving through ghostly hallways and after even cop reporters have vacated, you leave for classes. It’s sunup, city streets are just waking. The rhythm of quotidian days eludes you. You’re out of step looking for true bearing. And then your body delivers news of its own: You pregnant.
*
Seven months into the job, a gaggle of interns appear. It’s minority recruitment for Black and Latino students. The pay is good, the opportunities great. In the past some have won full-time jobs at the paper. Why not you? You plan to apply for the next program. In the meantime, there’s preparation. You’re more attuned to classes and read copy that has gone to print, sucking out the facts and rewriting in a notebook. You say to yourself without hubris but feet planted in ancestral terra firma: Now that’s a much better story.
Because you’re a newspaper babe! Mama insisted you kids read The New York Times. Daddy’s tabloid jolted with punchy headlines and graphic photos. You go to high school in New York City during the revolution-will-not-be-televised era. You and friends launch an underground newspaper – The Political Educator – mimeographed monthly with a wink and nod by the neighborhood librarian. In college, you throw yourself into the Black campus newspaper covering news, publishing fiction, and unfurling your curiosity.
*
That summer you watch with yearning as the interns waddle past in an excited clutch. Your baby boy flips and rolls inside as you fill mailboxes and sort faxes. With a belly rub, you remind him of the plan. After deadline, a night desk editor asks to see what you’re doing with all the rewriting news. His face brightens and suggests you apply to the next summer internship.
You do.
*
Now a big boss asks you to his office. You think it’ll be a pat on the back cause you got in. But, no. He tells you to sit in a room that ain’t reading joy. He’s new and sticks on the job long enough to try to discourage you. You just had a baby, he begins by taking a fatherly tone. Do you think it’s wise to give up your clerk job to intern? I won’t hire you as a reporter no matter what. And you can’t go back to being a clerk. Poof. Job gone. You sure? Maybe you should think about it. He sits back waiting for your response, gets distracted by something on his desk.
There is a lot riding on this moment and it’s not like you haven’t thought about it. But what’s the harm in one more day? Okay, I’ll think about it, you say in a tiny voice that surprises you. He seems relieved and stands signaling the end of this awkward interface. His mustached light-brown Black face breaks into a smile. All that is absent is the shooing motion you make to move a child along.
Strong emotions heat your face. For months you go over a pro-con list. You don’t want to be a clerk forever, you need to write. Like you need water. Your son needs to see that kind of motherly fulfillment. Be a whole woman. Your parents in New York consider your case. Say, Go for it. We got you. Your relationship with baby’s father is over but his mother says she’ll help. So why are you watering self-doubt? Asking can you really just strap a baby on your back and voyage on faith? But as you step aside for the boss to open the door, you snap back to your enterprising Black woman self. No, you say. I’m done thinking. I’m going to intern this summer.
True to his word, after a summer of solid reporting, you’re NOT hired. Editors you worked with find you a job across the river. There you have a beat and sometimes write features. It’s a good crew of reporters and editors who teach you some things, but your heart is somewhere else. A year later, you get the call to come back to the Philadelphia Daily News. You bet on yourself. Listened to a voice that spoke from the future about tides and water and moving “beyond the face of fear.”
*
In the thirteen years you’ll spend at this paper working with some of the best editors in the business, you’ll set yourself apart as reporter, writer and then editor. You will report on crime by putting the crack wars in context. You will sit with grieving mothers and angry homeowners wanting to reclaim the streets from their wanton grandchildren. You will record the march of people crunching over crack vials. Scattering addicts in their path who scamper into abandoned houses and backyards of broken furniture to wait the protest out. You will sit with pastors struggling to provide guidance to a flock decimated by violence, ignored by the city and surveilled by police. You allow the people to speak through a newspaper they hate but trust you. They will always be part of you. Like that newsroom, so generously an afterschool program too.
Baby boy grows up among stacks of newspapers and reporters telling lurid crime tales.
*
You meet Lucille Clifton on the page at the last newspaper you’ll ever work. A Christmas gift from a poet-editor. Right off you’re stunned by her words, buoyed by her metaphoric rivers and waters. The winds that are spiritual, ancestral from which you can turn, “certain that it will/ love your back.” She knows about that moment way back and has stood by you for others. Is standing with you right now. She wants nothing but fair winds for you. Tells you to hold fast and then a benediction: “and may you in your innocence/ sail through this to that.”
*
You quit the newspaper business and cast off into a new phase of life writing and teaching the craft to college students. It’s a hustle but you start publishing short fiction and essays in respectable journals. Your work wins support at workshops and residencies around the country and a prestigious writers colony. You even get to sit before the water goddess herself as she tells about life to a packed auditorium. She warns and confides and blesses.
*
Three decades after the day in the boss’s office, you go off to Yaddo with a novel in tow. Your baby is a public education executive and a Yale grad. He’s married, with a boy of his own. You proudly navigate these memories that flow back here. That moment the better-nots whispered but Miss Lucille was saying, Sail on, girl.
J.E. Sills is a former journalist who writes fiction and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Joyland, McSweeney’s, Auburn Avenue, and Upstreet Magazine. Joanne’s writing life has received support from Hedgebrook, Yaddo, Kimbilio Fiction, Diverse Voices Scholarship (Author Accelerator), Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A daughter of the Great Black Migration, Joanne was born and raised in New York City with ancestral roots in East Texas, Appalachia, and Georgia. She completed her first novel, Them Moon Gods, and a children’s book, Aunt Potato. She’s at work on a memoir-mystery about the search for her grandfather’s remains, The Final Grave of Joseph Cain.
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