Hand Me My Griot Clothes: The Autobiography of Junior Baby

African American Review, Spring, 1996 by Shirley Lumpkin

Chanting his signature refrain, "Hand me my griot clothes," Peter J. Harris's character/speaker/poet Junior Baby insists, through the ten poem-chapters of his autobiography, that his life and art must be "full of general style humane wit occasional blues / & insistent toleration for most other folks / not to mention bold face memories / worth retelling." Blending Guinean writer Camara Laye's definition of griot with the approach of the African American vernacular aesthetic practiced by Langston Hughes and Al Young, among many, Peter J. Harris has written a set of poems about postmodern, urban African American men.

Each poem is presented as Junior Baby's taped, "singsong" dictation, his response to the call of particular, but typical, events in 1980s and 1990s African American "hoods." Seeing TV coverage of two Black garbage men who returned the $4,000 in cash they found to the owner or young black men walking down the street, hearing a woman crying in the next-door hotel room or hip hop sampling on his nephew's car radio, overhearing two young black men in the metro talking about using an Uzi to rob Sears, or talking with a group of women in an elevator - to name but a few events - moves Junior Baby to start his tape recorder and record another poem-chapter of his vernacular wit, occasional blues, historical remembrances, and calls to live by the ethical values of a beautiful and powerful black manhood and humanhood.

Harris's Junior Baby raises his voice in celebration of the African American community's love, human connection, and creativity of body and spirit - what Junior Baby calls the "Romance between us" - and in sorrowful criticism of the violence, pain, and disintegration in urban Black America. Using his "open and loving set of eyes," Junior Baby records as many "ties that bind" the community together as instances of fracturing oppression, prejudice, and "either/or" thinking. His purpose in responding is to wear his "griot clothes," to use his verbal arts to teach, to heal, and to create beautiful African American art. Harris's purpose seems to be the same.

Junior Baby's contemporary vernacular creates witty and humorous pictures, such as a "hefty bag[-]sized brother" on the subway wearing "red / green polka dots" on his blue socks to match the "green / tan / purple & red ones / blinking across the face of his black shirt" and humane thoughts about style, the "chewing words of violence" practiced by some young men, the fathers' wisdom addressed to sons in the form of the aphoristic folk saying "You can't have your cake and eat it too," and the homeless brother on the street corner who refuses to eat pork. Harris's Junior Baby poems succeed in painting a vivid portrait of a contemporary African American urban community. What Harris accentuates in this portrait is Junior Baby's positive, energetic, African American, male 1980s and 1990s perspective. Harris's Junior Baby is what bell hooks might call "a site of resistance," an antidote to the despair and nihilism that both she and Cornel West identify as one of the gravest threats to the health and survival of the African American community today, and particularly to the urban Black male community. While Junior Baby emphasizes the history of oppression, discrimination, and prejudice African Americans share - for example, in his serious punning play on the connections between middle passage and middle men - Junior Baby also celebrates the possibilities for black men to be "Breathtaking" griot fathers whose words come from the perspective of a mature black man's moral reasoning, experiences, and desire to demonstrate and teach right(eous) behavior.

In every turn of phrase on the page, Junior Baby is squarely in the tradition of the "Daddys," "the men of Parklands in the Southeast" - the tradition of African American fathers to whom Peter J. Harris dedicates the book. As such an African American man, Junior Baby focuses his world and words on women, the care of children, family, parents, love, African American culture, and concern about how to teach and serve his biological sons and daughters and his community's sons and daughters. The poems often become chants, series of modulated repetitions designed to envelop black sons in words and transform them, move them into their "beautiful Breathtaking Nigger manhood."

One of Junior Baby's other constant - or, as he says, "insistent" - messages is "toleration." Since Harris and Junior Baby believe division in the African American community, internal prejudice, to be just as dangerous as external oppression, Junior Baby sings of embracing homosexual brothers, sisters who straighten their hair, sisters who braid theirs, and multi-cultured men like himself who express themselves in the styles of their multiple heritages (Junior Baby describes putting his silk suit next to his dashiki and his blue suede wingtips next to his Ashanti sandals and loving hip hop, James Brown, Chaka Khan, and Rufus). Through Junior Baby, Harris emphasizes the need to see and accept the many-faceted beauties, the multiplicity of what is African American and what is male.