but also a delicious pun on lesbian lovemaking.
Some of the most moving poems in this collec-
tion are subtle, beautiful performance pieces from
Gomez’s play Bones and Ash: A Gilda Story (2001),
which was performed by the Urban Bush Women
company in 13 U.S. cities. Gilda’s “Songs” in this
poetry collection interrogate the experience of
slavery (“Rest, which is for them. / Sleep, which is
for us”), sexuality (“when my mouth is open to let
ideas out and you in, / that is desire”), and female
power (“I am not a woman ripe for splitting open
/ but a tightly wrapped package of everything we
need to know”).
Gomez’s poem “El Beso” interrogates the un-
published poems and letters of Angelina Weld
Grimke, the “evidence of unruly passion and wild
sadness,” that hints at her love for other women,
while the poet draws analogies between the
abolition of slavery and another kind of neces-
sary abolition: the censure and denial of lesbian
relationships.
Like her poetry and fiction, Gomez’s essays are
marked by lyricism and insight. Both the Middle
Passage–evoking “A Swimming Lesson” and “I Lost
It at the Movies” (Gomez’s “coming out” story) are
included in Forty-Three Septembers: Essays (1993).
Infusing the personal essay with an acute political
awareness, she describes coming out as “a reinter-
pretation of the traditional coming-of-age story,”
adding that for black lesbians and gay men, it not
only is a “reconciliation of gay lifestyles with Black
identity” but also has striking parallels with slave
narratives, in that it is “usually a tale of triumph
over repressive conditions in which the narrator
emerges with a stronger, more positive identity.” In
“A Swimming Lesson” Grandmother Lydia passed
on to the young Jewelle “a skill she herself had not
quite mastered”:
The sea has been a fearful place for us. It swal-
lowed us whole when there was no other es-
cape from the holds of slave ships, and did so
again more recently with the flimsy refugee
flotillas from Haiti. To me, for whom the dark
recesses of a tenement hallway were the most
unknowable things encountered in my firstnine years, the ocean was a mystery of terrify-
ing proportions. In teaching me to swim, Lydia
took away that fear.Gomez’s other works include a comic novel about
1960s black activists facing middle age and a col-
laborative performance piece based on the life of
JAMES BALDWIN.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hall, Lynda. “Lorde and Gomez Queer(y)ing Bound-
aries and Acting in Passion(ate) Plays ‘Wherever
We Found Space.’ ” Callaloo 23, no. 1 (2000): 394–
421.
Gomez, Jewelle. “A Cultural Legacy Denied and Dis-
covered: Black Lesbians in Fiction by Women.” In
Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by
Barbara Smith, 110–123. New York: Kitchen Table
Press, 1983.
Howard, John. “Selected Strands of Identity.” (Review
of Forty-Three Septembers) Callaloo 17, no. 4 (Au-
tumn 1994): 1276–1278.
Lynda KoolishGordone, Charles (1925–1995)
A playwright, director, actor, film producer, and
educator, Charles Gordone was born Charles Ed-
ward Fleming in Cleveland, Ohio. His father, Wil-
liam Fleming, was a garage mechanic; his mother,
Camille Morgan Fleming, was a former dancer in
Harlem’s Cotton Club during the Duke Ellington
era. Before his parents became dedicated Seventh
Day Adventists and before she became a speech
teacher in Cleveland, Ohio, Gordone’s mother,
who was light enough to pass for white, worked
as a circus acrobat. Gordone described himself as
being of “Negro, French, Italian, Irish and Ameri-
can-Indian descent” (Oliver and Sills, 383). He
changed his name to Gordone as a result of his
mother’s marriage to William J. Gordon. Educated
in the Elkhart public school system where he grew
up, after graduating from high school Gordone
relocated to Los Angeles, California, where, off
and on, he attended University of California–LosGordone, Charles 209