I know I brag, brag bragyammer on like a big starstruck goon about all the cool people I get to see in my travels, but if I could just get y’all to indulge me once again as I tell you about seeing author, poet and activist and living legend Nikki Giovanni speak at my alma mater ...
Man.
I mean, how do people attain such clarity!?? You couldn’t even believe it as she was talking. And what really sucks is that events like that are so hard to cover, because there’s no way to capture the brilliance of it in any way even close to how it actually went down. She was talking about her children’s book Rosa, which was obviously about Rosa Parks and how the bus incident really went down as opposed to how it’s taught in the history books. One of the best parts was when she was talking about how the day she came into Atlanta to accept the Coretta Scott King Award for the book, James Tate, the infamous bus driver that started it all, died. Well, journalists, as is our wont, were pestering her to give them a sound bite about how she felt about it, and after she got fed up with the pestering, she said, “Welp, another one bites the dust,” just to be an ass. Naturally, the journos went to the Tate widow with her pithiness, to which the Tate widow replied:
And Ms. Giovanni said:
See? How can you capture that kind of brilliance into a 10-inch story!??
