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Wilfred D. Samuels
White, Paulette Childress (1948– )
Although Paulette Childress White’s dream was to
become an artist, she attended art school for only
one year and later became a poet, short fiction
writer, and educator instead. A native of Detroit,
Michigan, White was born on December 1, 1948,
to Norris and Effie Storey Childress. After high
school, she married Bennie White, Jr., a postal em-
ployee and artist, with whom she had five boys:
Pierre, Oronde, Kojo, Kala, and Paul. In 1986, she
earned a B.A. in English from Wayne State Univer-
sity, where she also received a Ph.D. in 1998. White
has been a visiting writer in several arts programs,
including the Creative Writers in the Schools Pro-
gram for the Michigan Council of the Arts (1980–
90), the Detroit Council of the Arts Summer Youth
Program (1986–90), the Broadside Press Writers
in Residence Program (1993), and the Saginaw
Valley State University (1994). White has taught
at Wayne State University (1987–97) and Henry
Ford Community College in Dearborn, Michigan,
where she developed its first African-American
literature course.
Although responsibilities related to raising a
family and attending graduate school hindered
her opportunities to publish, White, in 1972, at
age 30, published her first poem in Deep Rivers.
White’s talents were “discovered” by NAOMI LONG
MADGETT during one of her poetry workshops.
At Madgett’s encouragement, White published
her first collection of poetry, Love Poem to a Black
Junkie (1975), with Detroit’s Lotus Press. The-
matically, Love Poem to a Black Junkie addresses,
in part, BLACK NATIONALISM and the poet’s redis-
covery of Africa. Lotus Press also published The
Watermelon Dress: Portrait of a Woman (1984), a
highly autobiographical narrative poem in four
parts: “Old Calico,” “Being Fitted,” “Days in the
Dress,” and “Beyond the Watermelon Dress: Notes
on the Composition.” With a compelling use of il-
lustrations throughout the work, the poem traces
White’s development as a closeted artist and an
unfulfilled woman, from adolescence through the
most painful, difficult, and challenging times of
a first marriage and motherhood to the eventual
awareness of selfhood and discovery of “her own
/ green wonder.” Speaking of why she writes and
paints, White comments, “I write from a sense of
irony, because I want to make sense of my experi-
ence of life.... I write and paint because I have a
need to give substance to my ideas, feelings, and
experiences, and because I believe it is good and
important work” (White, 508).
White’s short fiction has appeared in numerous
anthologies, academic textbooks, and journals, in-
cluding CALLALOO, The Michigan Quarterly Review,
and The Harbor Review. Her first short story, “Alice,”
published in ESSENCE (January 1977), explores the
need for reconciliation between women, and her
second short story “The Bird Cage,” which ap-
peared in Redbook (June 1978), centers on the dis-
content women sometimes feel in their prescribed
roles. Of her first two stories, critics have noted
similarities to GWENDOLYN BROOKS’s novel MAU D
MARTHA (1953) (Washington, 37). Like Brooks,
White’s characters are superbly drawn, particularly
her young black women of the inner city. Although
these characters are all articulate, working-class
housewives who dream of becoming artists, they
often must face the constraints of their roles as wife
and mother, which alienate them even further from
their husbands and cause anger, which they often
repress and deny. Madgett observes that White
often writes of women who share a common bond,
a sisterhood born out of a painful existence. This
theme resounds through White’s poem “Humbled
Rocks,” as well as in the short stories “Dear Aku”
(Harbor Review, 1986) and “Getting the Facts of
Life” (Rites of Passage, 1994). Overall, in her works,
White’s lyricism and metaphorical and alliterative546 White, Paulette Childress