Why Poet Lucille Clifton Is My Matron Saint

I WAS WRAPPING up some research in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University when I requested a box of Lucille Clifton’s personal writings. I had not come to study Clifton. I was researching anti-lynching activism in Georgia, specifically a 1936 lynching photograph. But by the end of the week, I began turning to Clifton’s personal writing as an oasis. “Resolve to try to fear less and trust more and be healthy,” she wrote in her red Writer’s Digest Daily Diary on December 31, 1979. Clifton was a published children’s book author, memoirist, activist, and the poet laureate of Maryland when she wrote those words. She was also 43, the same age I was that September day. Her body of work, which includes Two-Headed Woman and Blessing the Boats, crossed oceans, told family stories, and revealed both the sting of injustice and the heart of what’s holy.

The day after Clifton resolved to “fear less and trust more and be healthy,” she wrote in her journal that she returned to a house with “no central heat; bad plumbing; and foreclosure.” A few weeks later, the house was auctioned off to the highest bidder. She sat down and wrote something anyway.

I began thinking of Clifton as my matron saint when my youngest child was born within months of Clifton’s passing in 2010. I relate deeply to the ways she worked writing into her life. “Writing wasn’t scheduled, but stitched together from the scraps of minutes spared throughout the day,” wrote Black feminist scholar Marina Magloire of Clifton’s habits. Clifton’s earthy poems about Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and resurrection power keep me hanging onto the small threads of faith I still have. I take it as a sign that her birth year, 1936, is the same as the year of the photo I’m studying. As a Black woman, Clifton faced myriad reasons to be fearful and sick of it all. One of her most famous poems ends with this line: “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.” Life gets the final word.

Early in our marriage, my husband, Michael, arranged seven words from a magnetic poetry kit into two lines. “Paper, white as death / Ink, black as grace.” From the great clutter of words piled on the front of our refrigerator, he composed a creative manifesto. There’s something terrifying about that great emptiness of a blank page — white as death — or a new year, or a sudden loss of home, an identity, or a loved one. Clifton wrote through her losses. It was an act of grace, a kind of resistance.

“One resistance is the retention of memory,” wrote poet and historian Honorée Fanonne Jeffers in “Go Back and Fetch It,” a 2020 essay on Clifton. Jeffers, who is working on Clifton’s biography, wrote that memory is “a refusal to forget, despite white Americans’ attempts to erase Black history.” Clifton did not live to return to her lost home, but in a small act of redemption, The Clifton House is once again a space for artists to write. In 2019, Sidney Clifton, one of Lucille Clifton’s daughters, inquired about buying back her family home. It turns out the owners had just listed it for sale the day that she called.