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COUNTERCULTURE
Stephanie Byrd: Visionary Poet with Practical Politics
by Terri Jewell
Stephanie Byrd is a Black lesbian poet,
writer and community activist. Her works
include two books of poetry: 25 Years of
Malcontent (published by Good Gay Poets,
Boston) and A Distant Footstep of the
Plain (self-published). She is currently
attending the graduate school for African
Literature and Languages at Cornell
University.
SB: I was bom in 1950 on July 10th in
Richmond, Indiana. My family has lived in
or around Richmond since the War of 1812,
perhaps before then. Part of them came from
Boston because the Northwest Territory was
free territory and they did not wish to be
enslaved again. Other members of my fami
ly escaped from slavery in the South and
came to Indiana where small Black settle
ments had sprung up. These are the people
that I come from.
I was an anti-war activist from 1968
1973.1 met some civil rights activists during
that period. The Black community in Cairo
was boycotting white businesses because of
their refusal to hire Blacks. The white com
munity was responding by driving through
the Black community at night and shooting
through people's windows.
SV: Were you a lesbian then?
SB: Yes. When I was about 6 or 7, one of
the neighbors called me a lesbian. I went to
my grandmother and asked her about it and
she told me that being a lesbian was about
loving women, women loving women.
SV: Your grandmother?
SB: Yes. My grandmother Byrd. And that it
was all right to be a lesbian if I really loved
someone. Since I was in love with my little
next-door neighbor, I went out and told
everyone. My mother was furious! The sec
ond time, I was 12 and I was asked to put
down on a sheet of paper what my goals in
life were. I had put down that my goals were
to be a brain surgeon, a lawyer and a les
bian. I was sent to the office. And they said,
Well, do you know what a lesbian is? And I
said, It’s a person who lives on the Isle of
Lesbos because I had looked it up in the dic
tionary. They let me go, feeling secure that I
really didn't know what I was talking about.
It's funny, a year later I was sent to the office
again for being a Communist.
SV: A Communist?
SB: Yes, because I asked for the
Communist Manifesto in the school library
so we could compare it to the Declaration of
Independence. When I was 17, I tried to
become straight and hooked up with this
guy who turned out to be gay. By the time I
was 19, I realized that none of this was
working, so I just went back to being a les
bian. It was very hard, because at 19 you're
kind of a sexual libertine. Not straight, not
gay,...just in heat. Being a lesbian was just
the best and easiest way for me to be.
SV: When did you start writing?
SB: When I was 17. When I graduated from
high school, I started writing poetry serious
ly and actually had a contest with my gay
boyfriend. We would write a book of poetry
a month; that summer I produced three
books of poetry, all of which I burned.
SV: Why?
SB: I have a tendency to lose control of my
Terri Jewell
Bones say seek my naming in the East / swollen cracked lips tell me to turn home /
grandmothers warn me to turn away the alien ways of / what is white / For when these
things are connected / Winding serpentine in hieroglyphs and / language / a name long
evasive wanderer and prophet / will be written on the stone
-25 Years Of Malcontent
temper and as a result, I would bum my
work as a cleansing act. A ritual.
SV: You don't consider the act of writing
itself a cleansing?
SB: Writing can be cleansing, but there
have been times in my life when even the
writing is not enough to cleanse. And I’ve
burned my work.
SV: So, writing is not always enough to
cleanse... what?
SB: Oh, I call them the Terrors. They are
anxieties and fears that somehow combine
into a feeling so large they seem to consume
me from the inside out.
SV: What has survived of your writing?
SB: There is a book of my poetry called
25 Years of Malcontent which is now out of
print. When I finished, it was the result of
seven years of serious writing. It was
released in 1986 and published by Good
Gay Poets in Boston. As with most first
works, it's somewhat autobiographical.
There is a poem about a white suffragette I
had met in Texas. She told me to be true to
my roots. The advice that she gave me was
very good. The whole time I was in Boston
I don't think I ever really convinced myself
that I was anything but a Black woman
from Indiana.
SV: When did you first go to Boston?
SB: It was 1973.
SV: Were you aware of the Combahee
River Collective then?
SB: In 1974, the women who eventually
evolved into the Combahee River Collective
were the National Black Feminist
Organization of which I was a member. We
would talk about a number of things. I
remember the group being open and a lot of
women coming who were straight and bat
tered. Some of them were successful, some
of them were very poor, some were work
ing-class women. There were incidents
where outsiders would come and discover
that there were Black Lesbians there and
they would flip out with a great deal of hys
teria and arguing and name-calling. But the
thing I remember is these women coming
who had been so battered in their lives that a
support group wasn't going to do it for them.
I heard someone say recently that one of the
best cures for mental illness for Black peo
ple is Black culture, and I wanted the group
to be more committed to the creation and
preservation of Black women's culture. But
that was really difficult to do because the
group soon was not all Black. The group
was very much committed to combating
racism and sexism and anti-Semitism and
class oppression, so any minority woman
had to be included. I had a great deal of dif
ficulty synthesizing the presence and the
issues of the minority women who were not
Black into the issues that involved me. I was
something of a Black Separatist, I suppose.
SV: The group was against separatism and
wanted to work with Black men...
SB: I never heard them say anything about
working with men when I was in the group.
They talked about working with white
women. (In attempting to address) all the
other concerns (of Koreans, Hispanics,
Jews, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.) just turned
into a wave that seemed to obliterate what I
was hoping would become a Black Feminist
support group. I realize now that I was hop
ing that we could do something to address
the needs of some of those women who had
been stabbed or shot or beaten and didn’t
know how to leave their husbands or how to
address life without a man. These women
needed a separatist environment in which to
heal. Maybe later on, this whole multi-eth
nic Feminist vanguard could include them,
but for then, and now, it doesn't. It does not
address the needs of these Black women.
SV: Why are we Black women so afraid of
having our own groups and projects? We
talk about how nice it is to be among our
selves with our own language and our own
ways of doing things, but we just don't do it.
Yet, we are constantly getting away from
that.
SB: Oh, it's much easier to address every
one else's needs rather than your own. Much
easier to go find someone who had a bigger
problem or a different problem, and work
on their problem rather than deal with your
own mess. That's what we have been doing
all along. We think we can't do it by our
selves. And the reason why we can’t do it by
ourselves is because "they" will annihilate
us. We have to get away from this paranoia.
SV: Did it start out being a Black lesbian
group with no one saying that?
SB: When the group started, there were
only three of us who said they were
Lesbians. The other women introduced
themselves by talking about where they
went to graduate school and what their
interests were, but no one else said they
were lesbians. Eventually, some of the other
women came out.
SV: What made you leave the group?
SB: I was heavily into my poetry, doing a
lot of writing and readings. And I wanted to
do more cultural things. In 1976 I decided I
couldn't maintain the separatist poise any
longer, that I would have to become
involved with the gay and lesbian rights
movement.
SV: Why couldn't you maintain a separatist
stance?
SB: I found that despite what the Collective
said about separatism, they were very anti
male. I had met a lot of Black gay men who
had been decent to me and had been broth
erly. I felt the least I could do was return in
kind. So I became more involved in the gay
and lesbian movement but always, always
my focus was on us as Black people. Not
just as Black women but as Black people. I
didn't need a large support group to give me
an identity. My identity was growing out of
my growing as a Black woman artist.
SV: Tell me about your second book.
SB: My second book is self-published, A
Distant Footstep On The Plain. It was the
late 1970's. I had been asked to read some
poetry as International Women's Day at
Cambridge's YWCA. I read a poem called
"On Black Women Dying". It deals with
Black women I have known who have died
and who were murdered in Boston whose
murders were never solved. I read this poem
with the accompaniment of a conga and a
guitar. After that, I got telephone calls to do
it again, so we got together and we per
formed more.
Continued on page 13
10/Southern Voice • February 15,1990