A Crucifix for DeRidder

or The Governor of Ollie Street Returns

By Ahmos ZuBolton II

he came back at us

screaming, hollering

told us stories of something in his eyes

something peeping thru the deep

and dark of him

we didn't believe him

thought him a make-believe griot,

called him blind in one eye

stoned in the other, said he was a punch-drunk boxer

fighting ghosts

he wanted a sword in headlines

published the morning after

so he jumped from a window

like it was his life

his final cure a gravity

which killed him

Source: Open Places, No. 29 (Spring 1980)

Dear Rudy,

I thought you'd like to know:   Our old friend Ahmos died this past week.  Adella called to say that he'd been buried in Deridder.  He died in D.C, but his daughter Amber was with him, and cared for him in his last illness.  I remember the Copastetic Bookstore with many good memories.  Ahmos had a great capacity for friendship.  There is a service for him at The Community Bookstore this Thursday.    Adella asked me to be on the program.  I hope to write something fitting.

Lee

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

 
Miss Walker, Miss Walker, your true love is dead
He sent you a letter to turn back your head


Ahmos Zu-Bolton was the author of A NIGGERED AMEN (1978) and AIN'T NO SPRING CHICKEN (1998). Yep. Little Zu was born in 1935. So he leaves us in his 70th year.

Here is what I wrote about him in my memoir FATHERING WORDS:

"He carried a bag of magazines or maybe it was just a pouch filled with goober dust, cat eyes and rabbit feet. The man was southern in the way he walked, dressed, and spoke. If it were earlier in the century, it would be a perfect example of the Great Migration. Here was the type of guy Langston Hughes would meet while in high school in Cleveland, the guy who spoke in the rhythms poets wanted to capture on the page.
Henderson had introduced me to the blues and African American folklore. Ahmos Zu-Bolton introduced me to himself."

- posted by Ethelbert Miller @ 4:43 PM

Sad news entering the middle of the week. I just learned that the poet Ahmos Zu-Bolton died in D.C. Amber (his daughter) called me this morning and told me. Ahmos was a wonderful character and a major influence on my life and work. We met around 1974. It was just after he had rejected a few of my poems for his Hoo-Doo magazine.

In the note he sent back he told me the work was not hoo-doo poetry. I still have no idea what that was or is. I do know that Ahmos was an excellent editor and a man walking around with ideas and spreading folklore; or maybe it was what Sterling A. Brown called lies. I can see Ahmos coming into the African American Resource Center at Howard in 1974. He was working at a community center in Maryland and wanted to borrow a few films. Once we started talking, something connected our lives together.

I think we were both in love with the same woman. Her name was poetry. I invited Ahmos to what was the second Ascension Poetry Reading. It was held at Dingane's Den located on 18th Street. Here Ahmos met many of the DC black poets that were writing at that time. People like Adesanya Alakoye and Amma Khalil. Shortly after Ahmos came to work at Howard. He took my two old jobs. He became assistant director at the African American Resource Center and research associate with the Institute for the Arts and Humanites (under the leadership of Dr. Stephen Henderson).

On good days one could find Ahmos and I typing poems back and forth on our typewriters in the Resource Center. I created my character Bo Willie around him . . . and I guess I started writing longer poems because of his style. Ahmos was writing science fiction poetry in the early 1970s. He also introduced me to the work of the following writers: May Miller, Wanda Coleman, Ai, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lorenzo Thomas and the list goes on.

It was Ahmos who organized HO0-DOO festivals. It was Ahmos who was always writing grants and trying to get funds. He got the D.C. Arts Commission to help pay for the first anthology of DC Black poetry. That was our anthology SYNERGY that we published back in the day. The word taken from my reading of too much Buckminister Fuller.

I could go on and on about Ahmos and the stories would slap me on the back and laugh until sunset. I'll stop for a moment right now and invite his spirit to drop by and tell the rest of the tale a little later.

Source: http://www.eethelbertmiller1.blogspot.com/

My name is Charles White and Ahmos Zu-bolton was my father in law. I am a poet who learned a lot from him. I met him for the first time in the year 1995 while I was at Xavier University. At first I  did not know who he was or much about his work, but as time went on and I spoke to the man and read more of his work, his genius began to speak to me. Me and my wife moved to Columbia, Mo in the summer of 2001 and stayed with her mother and Ahmos for about three months during that time, me and Ahmos talked a lot about politics and poetry. 

He helped me develop my style and offered me constructive criticism when needed. He told me his stories about Howard and Galveston and some of the famous people he published. He encouraged me to read my poetry in front of an audience and offered me opportunities to read when he could. Before he left Columbia for the last time he expressed to me that he had put me on the list for a poetry festival that was coming up in late winter/early spring. 

Finally the most significant thing that tied me and him together as poets was that we were both Mississippi/ Louisiana poets and loved the south.

Words are weeping and syllables and sentences are standing at attention as the lips of a great griot are closed to future generations.

Please post this on your web site as a tribute to a great writer and a great mentor

Thanks