Time is Only a Suggestion
TRANSMISSION 6: On being late to Nikki Giovanni's class
Nikki must’ve gotten to choose where she held her classes. Or, at least, you’d imagine she could choose given who she was and what she meant to the world of poetry and literature and civil rights and Virginia Tech. You’d also imagine she got to choose that particular classroom because it was filled with windows and sat in a particularly beautiful corner of the Virginia Tech campus blessed by a particular gathering of tall, wide, grandmotherly trees.
It was also so particularly far away from my apartment in Blacksburg that I’d have to hoof it across a whole criss-crossed, meandering acreage of campus to get there.
And I, inevitably, was late — just once.
The poetry workshop class with Nikki Giovanni was the most-coveted of all classes in Virginia Tech’s English Department. I know this because I did not get into Nikki Giovanni’s poetry workshop class and had to be “force added” to her class. That this was approved was, as I was told at the time (by whom, I can’t remember), a rarity of an occurrence. At the time I did not appreciate how fortuitous an event this was. For I was, and am still, a white boy from the toe knuckle of southwestern Virginia.
That meant “Nikki Giovanni” was a name I could conjure, but was attached to no face and no deed. I didn’t know a lick of poetry from Nikki save for one piece, “We are Virginia Tech,” the one she wrote two years before I arrived at Tech, after a disturbed, lonely student lost his mind, switched his heart off, and shot down 32 people in the biggest mass shooting in America’s history (a record which has, horribly, twice been broken).
Nikki would start her classes rattling off whatever was on her mind at the time. She’d often talk about “my friend Maya” (pause for recognition) “Angelou,” or some head of state or celebrity, or some talk she’d just gone and done, or some flight she was about to take to go somewhere to say something to some folks about poetry. Twenty minutes after this session of off-the-domeness our workshop would suddenly begin.
It took me several years after graduation to realize that the point of our class wasn’t in the workshop. It was in that 20 minute reverie.
It was during that time that she taught us what it meant to walk through the world as a poet, to take up space, and to not just let your words do your talking for you, but to have words to say about your words and do your own damn talking. In that 20 minutes she’d talk shit and she’d sing praises and ask us questions and showed us the tattoo on her forearm that read “Thug Life.” In that 20 minutes we weren’t students and she wasn’t a teacher. She was a poet and we were poets, and we were taking up space together.
And one day I was late to that class and interrupted that reverie.
When I apologized, red-faced from the hoofin’ and embarrassment, Nikki did not skip a beat. She simply said, “Oh, that’s alright. Time is only a suggestion.”
That’s it. She kept on rolling. And I sat down and slipped into the stream of consciousness pouring out from her. She didn’t care that I was late. It was my money, it was my time, and what I did with it was up to me—as it is for all of us. I was late, but I was there, and that was that.
Time is only a suggestion.
I replay this phrase in my mind sometimes monthly, sometimes weekly, or daily, but always, usually, regularly.
Time is only a suggestion.
Yet in recent days, with what feels like World War III on the horizon, with uncertainty around the future of civic freedoms in America, with the prices of everything rising at the same rate this freelance writer’s bank account spirals below nothing, that phrase had escaped my mind.
Until I heard that Nikki died.
I had been meaning to write to her, to email her and tell her I finally got around to putting together a full manuscript of poetry all these years later. But I never found the words. Time is only a suggestion. I wanted to tell her how much she meant to me—to remind her how, after I read my first poem in her class, she’d said “Wow” and looked at me like I was doing exactly what I was meant to be doing. Time is only a suggestion. I wanted to send her my work, to show her the voice I’d grown into. Not the one I was ripping off when I was 19. Not the ones I tried on after graduating. Not the dozen or so ghosts of throaty perhapses I never let hit the page during all those years I’d given up writing. But my voice. This voice. Time is only a suggestion.
But this is the thing about Nikki (if I may be so bold as to suppose I knew anything, really, about Nikki Giovanni): if I’d sent that letter, she wouldn’t have remembered me at all; wouldn’t have remembered a thing about our class or that moment I was late or the story she was telling or what she said.
But in her not remembering, she’d read my words with absolute attention, with absolute care, with absolute reverie, and reply with some quick, easy, joy-filled quip like, “Well, took you long enough. But I’m glad you got there.”
It did, Nikki, it surely did.
But, then again, someone did tell me once that time is only a suggestion.