I’m of the order
of that bad New Orleans
sister, Marie.
And, I’ve been known
to have her power.The speaker unabashedly signifies on con-
ventional phallocentric Christian beliefs, while
simultaneously empowering herself as high priest-
ess-juju queen.
Equally important, black music—BLUES, jazz,
rap—saturates Webster Fabio’s work, forming its
backdrop and heartbeat. In her poems she sets out
not merely to invoke or intertextualize with song
lyrics (“walk on by”), titles, and specific musicians
but also to preserve their significance, meaning,
sound, and language. She argues, through the ver-
nacular speakers in many of her poems, that “the
Black mother tongue is Soul language, / telling
it like it is / socking it to you, letting it all hang
out.” Webster Fabio’s self-identified role and task
as poet is most evident in Rainbow Signs (1973),
a seven-volume collection that she published and
distributed. The collection is distinguished by
Webster Fabio’s symbolic use of a different color
for each volume. Together she used the book col-
ors (“turning from blue, mauve, to pink”), volume
titles (Soul Is: Soul Aint, Boss Soul, Black Back: Back
Black, Juju / Alchemy of the Blues, My Own thing,
Jujus & Jubilees and Together / to the Tune of Col-
trane’s Equinox); and, above all, the poems them-
selves not only to celebrate all aspects of black
culture but also to provide what she, as poet, saw
as her task and legacy: the preservation of black
culture through words, music, mythology, and
language. Webster Fabio also produced albums
that bore the titles of some of her books, for ex-
ample, Boss Soul, on which she experiments with
blues and rap forms.
Love as theme, particularly of culture and ex-
tended and immediate family, is sensitively written
into all of Webster Fabio’s poems. In the introduc-
tion to “My Own Thing,” the volume with the red
cover, perhaps to signify passion and love, Web-
ster Fabio writes, “Love gives motion, if not direc-
tion; knowledge if not meaning. It is a move back
toward the soul of self and forward toward quest
for a future; a move toward an enlarged sphere of
influence and, at the same time, a move toward
the achievements of self control. This volume is
about love—the reverie; memory; life force.” The
poems in this volume are candidly autobiographi-
cal, sensitive, moving, even painful. In it she speaks
as former wife, mother, friend, and sister. For ex-
ample, in “Estrangement,” dedicated to her sisters,
the poet writes,At times,
you and I both
are strangers
when we meet
and not ourselves
at all.But she resolves:So,
we must remember
to pause in our
presences long enough
to let false shadows
fade and fall;
Then,
we must reach out
and touch whoever
we are, nakedly.Comparing herself to “a bit of / driftwood— /
sanded, beaten, / reshaped,” Webster Fabio declares
in “My Own Thing,”but,
like it,
I have now
become
my own thing...
with a balanced,
graceful line—
hard, rough,
still radiating life—
I have, too
retained
the spark
the grain.178 Fabio, Sarah Webster