It’s a cold day in New Orleans. 25 degrees this morning. Two
days into Mardi Gras season. I’m walking down Canal Street, holding a King Cake
in one hand and a big cup of chicory coffee in the other. My rental car is
waiting in a lot near Basin Street. African American Shakespear, Shake, is
waiting in tiny Violet, Louisiana, a dozen miles down the Mississippi.
My last time here, Shake offered to drive me around the
Ninth Ward, to see what it was after Katrina, the catastrophe now almost ten
years in the past. Ten years is a short time in the life of a city, but a long
time in the life of a poet and a poetry scene. So is a week, and during my last
week here, over a year ago, we never got to take that ride.
Now I’m driving my little low-mileage silver sedan down
Rampart Street, past Louis Armstrong Park (Congo Square), along the boundary
between Tremé and the French Quarter. Yesterday, when I asked Shake how to get
to his house, he said, “Just get on Rampart and keep going.” And I do, down St.
Claude Avenue (where for twelve years Shake has hosted the poetry open mic at
Sweet Lorraine’s Jazz Club) over the canal bridge and into the Lower Ninth
Ward. St. Claude is dotted with low-rise commercial buildings. Down the streets
that traverse it, shotgun shacks run in rows to a man-made basin on the north
end and on the south, the Mississippi, by way of Holy Cross. The streets are
serene. It’s easy to believe they aren’t mean. But then it’s 10 a. m. and, at
least for New Orleanians, too cold to stay outdoors.
Out beyond the Ninth Ward lie neighborhoods with names like
Arabi, and then, beyond them, the ever-more-rural towns of St. Bernard Parish:
Chalmette, Meraux, and Violet, where Shake and I will meet, just a few miles
above bayou country, near the site of the Battle of New Orleans. I am surprised
to find Shake living this far out, among the cows and roads canopied with live
oaks. He is a spoken-word icon of Black New Orleans, a man who made his poetry
name in some of the city’s hardest places. And here he is living in what looks
to me like Crackerland.
I pull up to what should be Shake’s address, a dull brown single-wide
trailer on a lone block between St. Bernard Highway and a Mississippi River
levee. I’m here early, and Shake is still groggy when he answers the phone. A
minute later he appears in the doorway. Shake is a tall, powerfully built man
of 40. He’s a little heavier than when I saw him the year before. I walk up the
creaky wooden steps, we bro hug, and I lay my king cake on his kitchen table.
The long kitchen/living room has seen better days. The
ducts, Shake tells me, aren’t working right. He’s got a space heater set up
near the couch, across from an entertainment center and shrine to his successes
as a poet and educator, a table topped with newspaper clippings under glass. He
disappears into the back room for a few minutes, and returns wearing a tee
shirt that reads “South Bronx Jobs Corps.” On a tour stop in the Bronx, he took
time to work with kids there, as he does so often in New Orleans. Shake has
already told me he’s been unemployed for a while, the reason he hasn’t been
able to get his truck up and running.
The first time we met a Sweet Lorraine’s, he afterward drove
me back to my hotel in the Central Business District. That night he appeared
strong, energetic and optimistic about poetry and his place in its world. I
remember he was wearing a Dillard University shirt. He arrived like a celebrity,
all the older businessmen gathered in the club yelling “Shake!” as he walked
through the door, two young girls from Alabama and Mississippi, who showed up
for the open mic (the entire audience), hanging on his words, and the small
circle who gathered on the sidewalk after the reading performing for him, and listening
to his stories about time spent in the movie biz.
Maybe it’s the setting and the intimacy of a one-on-one
interview, but Shake now seems a more somber man. He sits leaning forward in
the middle of a gold, crushed velvet couch. When I ask him to tell me about
himself, he begins from the true beginning. He was born to a young single
mother in St. Bernard Parish, who decided that the best thing for him would be
for her father and his wife to raise young Shelton, named for a father who was
no longer in the picture. Shelton’s adoptive mother and father ran a major
black nightspot on Claiborne Street in New Orleans. He had a good home, and
lived, unusually for an African American boy in Greater New Orleans in the
1970s and early 1980s, in a predominantly white parish, an experience that’s
allowed him to be comfortable with friends and acquaintances of all races. (As
late as 2000, the parish was 88 per cent white. Today St. Bernard is more racially
diverse—thanks in large part to losing nearly half its population in the wake
of Katrina—but it remains a 73 per cent white suburb of a city that is 60 per
cent black.)
Complicating matters for Shake was the continuing presence
of his birth mother, who revealed her blood relation to him when he was just
five years old. When he asked about his father, she told him he wasn’t worth
talking about. For decades the absence of his father, the mystery, would drive
Shelton to prove himself worthy, to become “someone great.” When he was eight
years old, his family transferred him to a predominantly black New Orleans
school, to an entirely new environment, away from the school where he had been
a popular student known for his freestyle rapping, and where he had run for
Class Treasurer and won. Shelton made the adjustment, and continued honing his
rap skills, while developing into a fine athlete, eventually winning a
scholarship to Northwestern Louisiana State. Unfortunately, a major injury
ended his career and sent him on to his next proving ground, the U. S. Marines.
While he was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, Shelton
fortuitously discovered that his father had served as a Marine on the same
base, and that he had gone on to own a hotel, and that, as his birth mother had
claimed, he was a womanizer who had fathered other children in different parts
of the country. He discovered too that his father had died at 44. He would
never get to know him. After leaving the Marines, and separating from his wife,
Shelton went back to New Orleans, and took his elder son (now 22 and out of the
house) with him.
When he arrived, an old friend asked him to cut some rap
tracks for an album. One day, however, the friend’s brother was gunned down on
the street, and Shake was left without a partner. At a crossroads, he thought
back on a movie he’d seen in Virginia, the movie “Slam,” starring spoken-word
legend Saul Williams, and it occurred to him that poetry might be a ticket. A
little while after writing his first poem, “Patience,” on a piece of cardboard,
he signed up for an open mic on Julia Street (in what is now being called the
Arts District). He signed as “African American Shakespear,” and proceeded to
blow the room away. Then, unfortunately, he ran into a phenomenon of some
spoken-word venues around New Orleans, the open mic freeze-out. Encouraged by
the reception he got, he returned to the same venue three weeks in a row, and
signed his name first or second on the list each time, and not once was called
to the stage. The regulars were apparently feeling threatened. Shake never went
back.
Instead he started to go the lesser-known venues, where, as
he says, “the big-timers didn’t want to go.” As time went on, he developed a
following that swelled crowds at these smaller spots. He was entering the realm
of local spoken-word icons like Sunni Patterson, with whom he’d sometimes share
the stage. One night the previous host of the Sweet Lorraine’s open mic got
into a fight with the club’s owner. At the time the politics of other predominantly
black venues—“Other cats bullying the venues,” hosts keeping certain stars off
the mic so as not to have certain other poets overshadowed—were getting to
Shake. He was even considering moving from New Orleans, to keep his career as a
poet going. (Shake makes a point to tell me that if he’d known of white venues,
he might have gone to these, but division between local predominantly white
poetry readings and predominantly black spoken-word performances, and his own
lack of awareness of the entire New Orleans scene, were such that he didn’t.)
So when the owner of Sweet Lorraine’s approached him, he thought for a moment
about other peoples’ maybe misconstruing his intentions in becoming host, but
took the job, recalling his adoption, saying to himself, “Now They’re not going
to have another poet’s that’s gonna come through this city that’s gonna’s say
they don’t have a place.” (To this day he saves as records and mementos the sign-up
sheets from all the open mics he’s hosted, including those salvaged from the
wreckage of Katrina.)
Eventually Shake joined forces with other premiere New
Orleans spoken word artists—Patterson, Asali Devan, GF Soldier, L. Edwards, Lionel King, and Asia Rainey—on the 2005 New Orleans Slam Team, which
established New Orleans as a presence on the national scene (Chancelier “Xero”
Skidmore, from nearby Baton Rouge, had a few years prior, gained fame as an
individual competitor). That same year, of course, Katrina hit, devastating the
city, but at the same time introducing Shake to a national media audience
through Def Poetry Jam and Spike Lee’s HBO documentary When the Levees Broke. (A clip of which appears below.) He could
now book himself into venues around the country and, for a time, work in
Hollywood. He had indeed made a career out of spoken word.
Back on the home front, however, things had changed. A lot
of the established venues were gone, and Shake had to reestablish Sweet
Lorraine’s open mic. When he did, the new crop of New Orleans slammers came to
him when they needed a venue to qualify for nationals. He obliged, but, by his
account, was not given his due or included in the team’s plans as member or
slam master, the equivalent of coach. Their plans ultimately included the
creation of a second city team, now known as Slam New Orleans or Team SNO, a
multi-racial team which has since taken the spot as THE New Orleans national
team, winning nationals in both 2012 and 2013. Though he doesn’t put it quite
this way, he understands that some people no longer want him to be a leader in New
Orleans slam. You can hear the pain and bitterness in Shakespear’s voice as he
shares the history, and see in his story how slam can eat its elders (who are
generally still quite young). Slam is a teen’s or twenty-something’s game, and
he is running into generational succession and, very likely, some jealousy.
Still, he keeps on at Sweet Lorraine’s, and, as one might
expect of any serious writer, he keeps practicing his art. He shows me the
worked-over manuscript of an impressive poem called “I’m Here Now,” a verse of
which goes
People
always hated
Since I
was a lil child
My only
concern was
Making
my parents proud
Love
overpowered Hate
I’m
Here Now
I’m
Here Now
To hear him perform the whole poem, even here in his modest
parlor, is to be impressed with the power and sincerity of his lines and his
voice. Also impressive is his professed love for writing, his need and passion.
A devout Christian, he confesses, “It helps me fight some of those old demons
that take on your conscience. When I write these poems, they’re for my own
personal release. If I can recite a poem to my God who brought me through all
these things, I can be content. I have some of my best free-style moments
reciting only to Him. I’ll never be able to record them on paper, because they
won’t come out right. When He knows it coming directly from me to Him, then it’s
a greater pleasure. I have pleasure knowing that I can take the pain away, and
it’s going to be to the pleasure of the Most High. I don’t want to have to go
write, to say I’m gonna go win some competition. That’s not to say I’m not
going to slam. I slam, because I’ve seen what slam can bring to different
cities and states.”
What Shake has written for public consumption he has written
for the stage. Some of his craft will translate to the page, but he may have to
transform the rest; at least to some degree, add to his versifier’s bag of
tricks, IF, that is, he wants to venture beyond the powerful, but not
all-powerful, world or spoken-word and slam. I think of where that path can
lead. I think of the Nuyorican poet Willie Perdomo, who has gone from a childhood
in East Harlem and early fame as a spoken-word artist at the Nuyorican Poets’ Café
and on Def Poetry Jam, to life as the author of multiple award-winning books
and a job as instructor at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Like
Perdomo, Shake has been a spoken-word star, but he could leave home again, so
to speak; chronicle his compelling story, culture, self; publish, maybe get
that MFA Perdomo now has, and join the circuit of poets who are invited to
speak and teach for serious money and to constant acclaim all over the country.
Shake, though, has anchored himself in his community. He
stays on at Sweet Lorraine’s, maintaining a truly open mic. He has worked with
students in alternative schools all over his city and in other cities. His desire
for recognition burns, but the spirit of altruism emanates from him. He likes
it when people on the street recognize him as “The Poet,” and especially when
they say they can hear the truth in what he’s saying about New Orleans and the
world. When I suggest that he’s put in his time as a sustainer of the local
scene, and that he might now be able to move on, he replies, “I want to keep it
going, and give people a place to tell their stories. I want to walk away saying
I meant a great deal to the poetry community. I don’t want to say anybody ran
me off.” Lately, some weeks at Sweet Lorraine’s, he’s found himself doing ten
or eleven poems, basically a feature, to supplement the sparsely attended open
mics, at a venue where, during the filming of When the Levees Broke, he would hold Spike Lee “at bay for hours,” just
so the director could hear some of the other great talent. So Shake has done
his community work, and has gotten back a lot of satisfaction and fellowship,
along with a good deal of ingratitude and resentment. He might have to move on,
and I ask whether or not these days he ever gets over to readings outside the
spoken-word circuit. He says no, seeming to take a moment and wonder silently
why he hasn’t. I ask if he thinks he ever will. He says maybe. The time might
be now.
