Full of Grace

Jackson grew up on the eastern edge of the Englewood neighborhood. Her home is on Wentworth Avenue, a street that once was the community’s core until the city of Chicago put a highway right down the middle of the neighborhood, “the Damn Ryan” Expressway, as her father called it. On her block is a church and swaths of now-empty land. It used to be a lively, jumping area until the 14-lane interstate came.

“The highway killed my neighborhood,” says Jackson, whose family is struggling to find new digs for her mom, who lives on the second floor, and the nieces and nephews who live on the first floor. “It used to be so nice ... “

These neighborhood memories inform Jackson’s work — both poetry and fiction. She is known for her 1974 book of poetry, Voo Doo/Love Magic (Third World Press). Northwestern University Press nominated her 1998 collection of poems, And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New (TriQuarterly Books), for several literary awards. Her 1980 play Shango Diaspora: An African-American Myth of Womanhood and Love was performed at Chicago’s ETA Creative Arts Foundation theater, a professional, popular performance space on Chicago’s South Side that celebrates and showcases plays and other productions by, about or including African Americans. Her colorful language speaks directly to the diversity of the Black experience in America, from playing hide-and-go-seek in the ‘hood to learning how to deal with white professors who made racial jokes.

A “cradle Catholic,” Jackson was born in Greenville, Miss., and as a child she moved with her family to Chicago, where she attended Catholic elementary school. In high school she graduated third in her Loretto Academy class, earning a scholarship to Northwestern. Her mother, a housekeeper, cook and teacher’s aide, and her father, who worked for the postal service, were glad for her to get an education.

It was 1968. She was 17. She thought she would be premed, but math classes kicked her butt. She learned how to co-exist with white students, many of whom made her feel that Blacks shouldn’t be allowed at Northwestern. She joined For Members Only, the Black student alliance, changed majors and took every African or African American studies class she could.

That’s how she met the man who changed her life: Hoyt Fuller, an editor, critic and leading figure of the Black Arts Movement. He was a visiting professor at Northwestern and the editor of Negro Digest/Black World, a Johnson Publishing Co. magazine that preceded today’s Ebony magazine. Fuller, after reading some of Jackson’s poems, invited Jackson to showcase her talents among her peers of color at OBAC (pronounced O-bah-Cee), or Organization of Black American Culture, on the South Side.

“We were creating literature about, by and for Black people,” says Jackson, who while at Northwestern worked the graveyard shift as a blood analyst at Rush Presbyterian St. Luke’s Hospital (Rush University Medical Center today) and pilfered the hospital’s old, perforated computer paper to handwrite her early works. Jackson earned $25 for her first published poem, which ran in Black World in 1971.

“There was a great freedom in that purpose,” Jackson says of writing with the OBAC cohort, “and I felt free to be myself, and that was a contrast to what it was like being a Black student at Northwestern. I went to the University in ’68, and that was the beginning of Black students going to predominantly white schools in anything but ones and twos. It was a very alien culture to me.”

Haki R. Madhubuti, owner of Chicago’s Third World Press and author of several celebrated books and essays, witnessed Jackson blossom with other writers, such as poets Carolyn Rodgers and Sterling Plumpp, in OBAC. Madhubuti, now a professor of English and director-emeritus of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University, worked with OBAC in its early years.

 “Hoyt Fuller was probably the first Black intellectual that many of us had ever been in contact with,” says Madhubuti. “As a student, as a young person coming into the midst of Mr. Fuller and myself and others, Angela was able to always hold her own. She was exceptional in many ways, but her poetry was extraordinary for her age.”

Madhubuti, a poet himself, later went on to publish one of Jackson’s collections of poetry. He also offered to publish Jackson’s latest book. It’s not easy switching from poetry to fiction, he says.

“When you look at the poetry community, very seldom do you see poets make that jump into fiction,” he says. “She’s in for the long haul, and she’ll be with us forever. She’s a major force in literature — period — and a great force in African American literature.”