Losing Loretta Aiken
Moms Mabley tells the mythology of her name

By Toni Asante Lightfoot

I left Brevard, North Carolina for Cleveland.
Holy house missionaries who took in
my brother then me, led us to their church.
Was but 17 when vaudeville
strangled godly hymns in my heart,
tore loose raging laughter,
made my troubles fall away
like an old man’s hair.

By 1918, my choices were to sell what was taken
by men years ago, live like my dead
parents, or turn tricks on stage. Jokes
was my magic. Turned the burning of living
into money I could keep but my brother laid laws.
Flashing lights for me meant
I couldn’t keep my name.

Didn’t wanna cause more shame to the Aiken
side of me and besides a woman wasn’t meant
to keep what she was born with no how.
Jack Mabley, father of my Bonnie.
never gave me the whole heart he promised
so why not snatch his whole name.
I mean, Jack wasn’t making no real moves
off of what I could use.

Dressed in my granny’s house coats, floppy hats,
cloppity shoes I came to tell the serious
funny stuff. At 20, I told truths mumbled by women
too old to make a man swell with pride or desire.
Wearing the armor of age I won battles pretty girls
didn’t even know they could fight.

Loretta was a sweet girl with a sorrowful tale.
Jackie is a woman with more possibilities
            than a virgin in a whorehouse.




Copyright © Toni Asante Lightfoot. From Handmade Fire: The Anthology of Malika's Kitchen Chicago and London (November 2005). Used by permission of the author

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Toni Asante Lightfoot is a native of Washington, D.C. now living in exile in Chicago. There she teaches in several schools, afterschool programs, and is currently the coordinator of WordsAlive! a program that teaches teachers how to teach poetry to 1st through 5th graders across content areas. Lightfoot has been published in several anthologies and lended her poems and voice to several CD projects. She can be heard as the voice of the only deaf poet on HBO's Def Poetry Jam. Check out the Tia Chucha Press Anthology Dream of a Word on which she was co-editor.


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