Trying to Be Nice

"I was always what you call a nice child," says Poet Ntozake Shange. "I did everything nice. I was the nicest and the most correct. I did my homework. I was always on time. I never got into fights. People now ask me, 'Where did all this rage come from?' And I just smile and say it's been there all the time, but I was just trying to be nice."

When she was 19, newly separated from her law-student husband, she tried to kill herself. She put her head in a gas oven, but her aunt pulled her out. Since then she has drunk a can of Drano, slashed her wrists, taken an overdose of Valium and driven her Volvo into the Pacific. Finally, at 27, she has written a "choreopoem" titled For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf (TIME, June 14). She felt it would be criticized as "too emotional, too colored and too female." Instead, it is the sleeper hit of the off-Broadway season and will probably move to Broadway in the fall.

Shange's choreopoem presents seven brightly dressed black women, including the author herself, on a barren stage. Barefoot, they weave and bob around like sisters at a revival meeting. Each one has a tale to tell--about rape or abortion, about being duped by a scheming man, about being poor and miserable in the streets of Harlem. "There are certain kinds of emotional pain that make me feel horrible," Shange told TIME's Jean Vallely. "I ache. I feel like I have these terrible hot rods in my arm. When I'm in that particular pain and despair I don't have any hope, any sense of the morning. I want to get out of my body. Like in my poem, which says I want to jump right out of my bones and be done with myself. I meant that literally. Death could not be worse."

Like a Lion. She pauses and sips a glass of white wine. She chain-smokes. She is a handsome woman with big brown eyes, hair closely cropped and a straw hat on top of a patterned scarf. There are two long earrings in each ear, and one nostril is pierced. Five years ago, to cast off her middle-class upbringing, she outfitted herself with Zulu names. Ntozake literally means "She who comes with her own thing," and Shange means "One who walks like a lion." She was born Paulette Williams, and "named after my father because he wanted a boy." Her father is a wealthy surgeon in Lawrenceville, N.J., her mother a psychiatric social worker. They gave her violin lessons, and there were poetry readings at dinner. "I thought writing stories and Sunday afternoon music was what you grew up to do," says Shange. When she was eight and the family lived in St. Louis, she was bused to a previously all-white school. "I was not prepared for it. I was rich and somewhat protected. Now I was being harassed and chased around by these white kids. My parents were busy being proud."

She went to Barnard, then earned a master's degree at the University of Southern California, but the money from home stopped when she was 21, and so she learned more directly what ghetto life is like. One of the most powerful poems in Colored Girls, a tale of a sadistic black man and his defiant mistress, is called A Nite with Beau Willie Brown and was written in a Harlem boardinghouse. Explains Shange: "It was hot. I was broke. I didn't have enough money for a subway token. I was miserable. The man in the next room was beating up his old lady. It went on for hours and hours. She was screaming. He was laughing. Every time he hit her I would think, yeah, man, well that had already happened to me. So I sat down and wrote Beau Willie. All my anger came out."

As Shange grew as a poet, she invited several black women to join her in dancing and acting out her poems. The group put together the poetry-dance numbers of Colored Girls and began performing in bars in San Francisco and New York. In Manhattan, Theater Impresario Joe Papp saw the act and booked it into his Public Theater. Shange is now at work on more poetry, notably a new theater piece commissioned by Papp. Says she: "It's a study of cruelty. It is about abused visions, misused love." Most important, she thinks she is finally winning the personal battle expressed poignantly in Colored Girls: "Ever since I realized there waz someone callt/ a colored girl an evil woman a bitch or a nag/ i been tryin not to be that & leave bitterness/ in somebody else's cup."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.