Owen
Invited me
to Brooklyn visit him
linking writing our poems
our lives.
In memory of American poet, novelist, and playwright Owen Dodson ((November 28, 1914 – June 21, 1983) whom I met at a conference of writers of color in Syracuse, New York in the late 1970s. Sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Loni Ding, filmmaker, educator and activist had invited me. Owen was retired chair of the drama department at Howard University. But I didn’t know who he was. Here was this Black man who walked with the aid of a walker. Here was a writer who read his poems which entranced me. Another Black writer, as we waited in line for lunch, told me my poems were devastating.
Some time during the conference, we writers, black, brown, and yellow, from all parts of America, were told that “we” had to wait our turn. A black writer boldly asserting that the wheel of colors and race had rank, that brown and yellow were not primary, that brown and yellow had to wait.
But Owen and I progressed in our too-brief a meeting, when conferees gathered on the pristine lawn for a midnight reading. He, Black, and I, yellow, talked and exchanged our words, a few details of our lives. I gave Owen a copy of my first (only, then) book of poetry, Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park. He gave me a copy of his novel, Come Home Early, Child and his poetry book, Powerful Long Ladder. Unfortunately, I never made the visit to Brooklyn.
Owen Dodson died in 1983.
That year I traveled on the first U.S. Women Writers Tour to China with Tillie Olsen, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, Valerie Miner, Tess Gallagher, and others. I was the only woman writer of Chinese descent in the delegation. If Tillie hadn’t invited me, saying that there were no Chinese women in the delegation, the tour would have missed the perspective of a yellow woman of America of a land where her parents were born.
Nellie Wong
October 13, 2024
Van Vechten, Carl, 1880-1964. Dodson, Owen. Box 224. 1942 June 18. https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2023454.