What Nikki Giovanni Wouldn’t Write About
Writing about the loss of public figures is something I rarely do, because my muddled thoughts typically take more time to process than the news cycle allows. But the death of Nikki Giovanni on Monday, at 81, felt different. That night, after putting my son to bed, I searched for her name in my Gmail account, looking for correspondence involving an essay I had once assigned to her. The words I turned out to be looking for were in a letter she wrote me four years ago: “My job, however, I have always felt, is to move on.”
Since almost the beginning of my career, I have relied on poets in moments that seemed to defy definition or analysis. Back in 2015, as a new editor at espnW, I had few connections with sportswriters, but I knew that if I turned to the poets whose work I admired, these experts in words and meanings might help us enlarge those whom we call athletes. Poets assist us in understanding the things that are confusing or hurtful or unpredictable, and I depended on them to do so—whether in a poem I commissioned about Muhammad Ali’s death or the five women poets I assigned to write about the women’s marches that followed Donald Trump’s 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton and subsequent inauguration.
And when, in 2019, Serena Williams was once again ruling the tennis courts after experiencing life-threatening complications post-childbirth, I turned once again to the superpower of poetry—this time to Giovanni. I had been in college when I first read her poem “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)”: “I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal / I cannot be comprehended / except by my permission,” she had written in 1968, the year Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. I felt her work. She knew Black women needed to be reminded of their brilliance. She always managed to show us how we could use irony and pride to soothe ourselves when we were harmed. I was confident that Giovanni would be able to write something we still did not yet understand about Serena. So I cold-emailed her partner, Virginia Fowler, to ask if Giovanni would contribute to ESPN’s platform The Undefeated. To my surprise, Fowler said Giovanni had agreed to speak with me on the telephone. She wanted to write about Serena by focusing on Venus Williams as a big sister, because she had also idolized her own big sister, Gary Ann.
Giovanni’s essay helped readers remember that Serena was human, had a life, struggled because of her fame and the pressure she felt as a Black athlete. “Little Alexis Olympia is lucky,” she wrote of Serena’s daughter, “to have Aunt Venus to show her running down the rabbit hole to meet the Queen isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
I’d like to believe that only a poet would think to weave an allusion to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into a sports story to help us see the actual person, not just the athlete. Giovanni was addressing the criticism Serena faced as a Black woman with a full body and a strong personality in a predominantly white sport. She showed us Serena as a mother; her words helped us see the GOAT in a different way. “You can learn to speak two languages,” Giovanni wrote. “You can take the body that used to stand on an auction block and put it on the cover of Vanity Fair naked, pregnant, proud.” She reminded me that we need Black women poets in a world that often doesn’t understand us. She knew to write about Serena through Venus to reveal the complex lives all athletes lead—especially Black women.
[Read: Nikki Giovanni’s wondrous celebrations of Black life]
Though Fowler always served as Giovanni’s digital intermediary, the poet never felt distant to me. I remember that speaking with her was easy, as if we were longtime friends. She never made me feel that I should have been honored or cowed because I was working with one of the most highly acclaimed poets in the United States. Instead, she politely accepted my edits and suggestions. She even thanked me for asking her to write. I can only imagine how gracious she was to the hundreds of students in her classes at Virginia Tech, where Giovanni taught until 2022.
It wasn’t until she declined an assignment in 2020, however, that I started to understand how she viewed her place in the canon of writers. At the height of the protest movement over the killing of George Floyd, I asked her to revisit a conversation she’d had with James Baldwin in London in November 1971. After initially agreeing to write the essay, she wrote me a letter, which Fowler attached in an email, in which she explained why she had changed her mind.
As excited as I was to be working with Nikki Giovanni—a friend of Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou—it was this rejection, or rather the reasoning behind it, that made me feel like a real editor. She was offering a lesson in how to think of the work that met the moment. “I think Jimmy’s voice is extremely important and I keep seeing other writers whistling the same tune,” she wrote. “The writing about Race in America would probably be very different without Jimmy.” But she didn’t want to go back to Baldwin during an upheaval that seemed to demand a different response—one that didn’t need to be editorialized. “Jimmy and his generation wanted to explain to white americans what they were doing wrong,” she continued, “but Black Lives Matter simply want to go forward.”
On the surface, her letter could be read as a repudiation of thinkers who belonged to a different generation—perhaps in favor of her own. But Giovanni, already in her late 70s, was making a broader point. She noted that Black Lives Matter did not have an office, a phone number, or a leader, and she called that a smart decision. At the time, I didn’t recognize what she was trying to tell me: I, too, should move on. She wanted to help me see that the civil-rights movement doesn’t belong to any one artist or generation. In her own subtle way, she was reminding her editor not to get hung up on big names and bylines, but to focus instead on the stories that move us forward. “Now when a Black man is killed,” she wrote, it’s “not Malcolm or Martin but George Floyd who they thought no one would know or care about.”
Despite her prominence, Giovanni never saw herself or her generation as having ownership of the movement. Rather, she saw her knowledge and experience as something she wanted to pass along, so that others might be able to speak after she was gone. Giovanni spent her whole life in conversation with the present. I needed to find and reread her letter to understand that movements are just that. They can’t stop. Although she is no longer here, her words and actions and beliefs remain, and they tell us that we must keep writing, thinking, and mentoring. There is no time to wallow. As she wrote in that letter: “I’m a big fan of the blues not because they are sad, they’re not, but because they give us a rhythm to keep moving.”