Introduction

In the spring of 2022, I traveled to New York with my two of my friends, Tarana Burke and Yaba Blay, and Tarana’s adult child, Kaia Burke, to see Ntozake Shange’s classic play: for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, on Broadway, directed by Camille Brown. For our generation and that of our mothers, for colored girls is what could be called an urtext, an anchoring work of art that captures twentieth-century Black women’s lives. Filing into the theater, we each privately recalled the other times we had seen for colored girls, or performed it ourselves. We quietly anticipated Shange’s potent passages, repeated them along with the actors, lines like, “I found god in myself and I loved her fiercely” and “somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff…” We cried and laughed and chatted happily afterward, as we had before. The show was a palimpsest, reaching back to 1976, and reaching forward in time to the vexing yet beautiful web of Black women’s lives.

Ntozake Shange is singular. Tender, tough, and so very brilliant, Shange ruptured and re-created literary forms, using innovative spelling and grammar to capture the sound and sensibility of Black women’s speechways. She insisted on the lushness of Black women’s interior lives while never shying away from the brutality of the world in relation to them. A consummate artist, she brought her powerful verse to life with music and dance and innovated the choreopoem as a theatrical form. Transforming the conventions of the Greek chorus, Shange’s plays spoke to collective Black female experience. She offered ample space for individual testimony within community.

Shange was prolific. Shange was the second Black woman to have a play on Broadway (1976), only after Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun. Most of her work remains in print today, including  for colored girls, novels such as Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, and Betsey Brown, numerous books of poetry, and children’s books. Sing a Black Girl’s Song, published this month by Legacy Lit, now arrives as a distinct addition to Shange’s impressive cannon. This curated collection of Shange’s previously unpublished writing spans roughly forty years. It includes poems from her early years as well as from the last two decades of her life. There are also several plays, including her 2003 Lavender Lizards and Lilac Landmines: Layla’s Dream, which was produced while she was a scholar in residence at the University of Florida. Shange’s personal story also emerges in this new book through several never-before-seen essays about her childhood, her experiences in therapy, and her life as an artist and activist.

Shange was born in 1948 in Trenton, New Jersey, as Paulette Linda Williams to surgeon Paul T. Williams and educator and social worker Eloise O. Williams. Sing a Black Girl’s Song opens with Shange’s tender recollections of her mother and their social milieu—a sophisticated and erudite Black world, filled with art and aspiration. When she was eight years old, the family moved to St. Louis, Missouri.

When Shange was thirteen years old, her family returned to New Jersey, and she later graduated from Trenton High School. The earliest piece in Sing a Black Girl’s Song is a poem published in 1966 while she was a high school student. Even at that young age, she already had a pervasive literary voice. Shange matriculated at Barnard College of Columbia University, where her papers are now collected. During her college years, she briefly married and, after the marriage was dissolved, struggled with depression. The poems written in the early 1970s reveal a woman who was undergoing a transformation, wading through grief toward self-creation. In some writings, she still refers to herself as Paulette Williams, in others she has adopted Ntozake Shange—and often Zake, tosake, tozake, or tz for short—the first name meaning, “she who comes with her own things” in Zulu and the surname meaning “walks like a lion.”

She graduated from Barnard in 1970. In the midst of the Black Arts Movement into which she came of age, Shange composed poems consistent with the political urgency of that moment, but far more intimate than what many of her peers produced at the time. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black Arts Movement artists approached their work with an explicit political Black nationalist sensibility, frequently creating pieces that focused on collective Black liberation rather than the interior individual experience. Their emphasis was on “we” rather than “I.” Shange shared much of that sensibility but she blended critiques of racism, imperialism, slavery, Jim Crow, and economic exploitation with particular attention to emotion and feeling. Love, heartbreak, injustice, desire, self-discovery, devastation, and political awakening all pulse across the pages. Shange also immersed herself in the Nuyorican Poets scene, an early 1970s community of Puerto Rican and other Latine artists. The impact of that experience is evident in her interest in Afro-Latine history and culture and her frequent use of Spanish words and phrases in her work.

Shange earned a master’s degree in American Studies from UCLA in 1973. Her academic rigor is apparent in the writing. Diligent attention to historic detail, a passionate interest in the Black diaspora, and keen awareness of literary form reveal how much she was an intellectual artist in addition to one who could be profane, deeply spiritual, and joyfully vulgar. Her consistent celebration of vernacular Black culture as the root of great art instructed everyone in her midst to choose beauty over bullshit and substance over status. She understood herself as someone who was breaking English since it had been used to break Black people, and remaking it as an act of love to all oppressed people. Most of all, these writings reveal Shange as someone who was always writing herself to freedom. Readers will also encounter her extensive knowledge of jazz and dance, and the joy she took in being in community with musicians and dancers, as well as fellow writers. Shange lived fully, a renaissance woman par excellence.

From 1976, when for colored girls was first staged, to her death in 2018, Shange was a much celebrated and awarded writer. She raised her daughter, Savannah Shange, now a professor of anthropology and critical ethnic studies, and remained politically and intellectually engaged, writing creatively as well as critically, and participating in theatrical productions of her work in various cities. Shange was a mainstay in artistic communities, treating young artists with warmth and encouragement. I witnessed this firsthand when Shange attended the annual Celebration of Black Writing at the Art Sanctuary in Philadelphia. Shange, though an elder who inspired awe, disarmed everyone with her friendliness. The archive shows this as well. She read the work of many other writers, including those much younger than she was, and she commented thoughtfully on them. Unsurprisingly, she has had a major influence on younger generations of writers. As playwright and inaugural resident of the Ntozake Shange Social Justice Theater Residency at Barnard, Erika Dickerson-Despenza wrote, Shange is a “literary mother” with a legacy that must be preserved.

Sing a Black Girl’s Song is a testimony to Ntozake Shange’s journey. That there is so much of her unpublished that is of superior quality is stunning. That much of it is autobiographical is breathtaking. She left behind the framework for gorgeous biography. And her self-reflection is, generally speaking, a model for how to do the work of living well. For the many readers who love her writing, it is unquestionably a bounty. It is worth noting, however, that this volume, though extensive, does not include every unpublished work. Rather, it is curated to give a substantive overview of Shange’s unpublished work. Where possible, the years in which individual pieces were written are included. Where the exact date isn’t available, context clues were used to place it so that readers can read through the book in both a thematic and chronological sequence. Because Shange often wrote by hand I have redacted sentences that include words that were illegible, noted with brackets, as well as incomplete type, noted with ellipses there. Spelling errors and typos were corrected where there was a danger that a reader might mistake the meaning if the error was left intact, but I have maintained many of the small mistakes that allow the reader to experience the rush of ideas and excitement Shange felt as she put words to page, and to acknowledge many of these were works in progress. I have included footnotes where she mentioned people and contexts that might not be readily understood to contemporary readers, and where knowing who she spoke of is important to gather meaning. Likewise, I have provided translations for words and phrases in Spanish, and with the specific dialects (Puerto Rican, Cuban, or Mexican) referenced in mind. Shange’s Spanish was both vernacular and precise in terms of historic reference.

Before each section, I have written brief introductory notes for historical or social context that illuminate specific entry points to the work. Readers should be prepared that difficult themes and offensive language appear in some of the pieces. The decision to include this material was driven by Shange’s courageous effort to reveal the anguish as well as the beauty of Black women’s lives. She didn’t shy away from the underside as it were, and to honor her it seemed essential to approach this work with a similar ethos.

By and large, I step back so that Shange might tell her story. In some ways, this collection has the shape of a self-authored bildungsroman. I approached this project as a posthumous editor, simply giving shape to what can be described as a eulogy of her ownself, taking us along with her from cradle to grave.

On October 27, 2018, a tweet came from the Ntozake Shange Twitter account. It read, “To our extended family and friends, it is with sorrow that we inform you that our loved one, Ntozake Shange, passed away peacefully in her sleep in the early morning of October 27, 2018. Memorial information/details will follow at a later date. The family of Ntozake Shange.” The message sent shock waves through generations who had found sustenance in her art. Immediately a chorus of Shange quotations went up across social media, reminding us that her words live even as her body has departed. Memorials were held in New York and Washington, DC. Articles praised her influence. People of all stripes remembered their encounters with her and her brilliance. But the most mournful and celebratory elegies came from Black women. As playwright Lynn Nottage put it, “Our warrior poet/dramatist has passed away.” She died fighting for us. But through her words, she lives. She lives in the actors who don the colors of the rainbow to embody her characters nearly fifty years after they were written, with themes that are no less powerful today than they were then. She lives every time we laugh, reading about how the precocious girl-child Indigo wants a fine china tea party for her fifteen dolls who have begun to menstruate. She lives every time someone cooks her mouthwatering recipe for “Zaki’s Famous Feijoada Brazilian Hominy” or “Chicken Fried Steak” for a loved one. Shange famously wrote, in for colored girls, “Somebody, anybody, sing a black girl’s song.” Sitting with my friends, Tarana and Yaba, watching that classic work brought to the stage again so beautifully, something became abundantly clear: Shange’s words resonate as much today as they did a half century ago. Witness here how she answers her own supplication, for herself and for Black girls everywhere. Sing, Zake, sing.