BOND: When you talked about moving to Knoxville to go to school you said your parents had given up one child for integration and that was your good luck. Good luck how?

GIOVANNI: I grew closer to my grandmother. And I -- we were living --of course, I'm sixty so we are still a part of the extended family. But I would never have gotten to know Grandmother and Grandfather in the way that I did had I not lived with them, had I not been the only grandchild there.

BOND: What about the change between the semi-integrated situation you're leaving in Ohio and the segregated system you're finding in Knoxville?

GIOVANNI: Cost and benefits. I had a segregated -- and of course, Grandmother, my God, the day -- oh God, I'm laughing but it was very sad to me . The day that the children were bombed -- this was in '63 -- the day that the children were bombed in Birmingham, there was a mass meeting in Knoxville. I could tell you eighty million stories about this, but there was a mass meeting in Knoxville. My grandmother, actually was three years younger than I am now, right. Grandmother goes to the mass meeting. Of course she's sitting down front because she's one of the community leaders and there are others in Knoxville, but she was sitting down front. And they decided to have a march, right? Grandmother is the first person on her feet. She said, "John Brown and I are too old to march. But my granddaughter Nikki's here and she will march for us." But I hadn't gone because the children were not invited at that point. You remember. It was only a when we got to Birmingham -- as we got into the Birmingham campaign the children became so prominent. So Grandmother came home and she said, "Hah! Got good news for you." I'm looking at her because I'm not a fool. I knew what had happened. I thought whatever she's got it cannot be good news for me. She said, "I was the first person. I told them that John Brown and I are too old to march but you'd be there for us." She said, "I'm gonna get you up in the morning and fix breakfast and we'll be up in a cab to watch you."

I think I would have been a very different person without knowing that woman in that way.

BOND: So that was a benefit?

GIOVANNI: Oh, my God yes, because -- well Grandmother --grandparents are so different from parents in both their expectation and in how they approach you. Grandmother's like, "Isn't this wonderful?" and I did -- I mean I had to go picket because it was -- whatever was uptown -- in Knoxville, Tennessee that was Gay Street. Whatever was on Gay Street was not as formidable to me as me telling Grandmother I couldn't do it. But you know Julian, when you look at the civil rights movement you're still looking at grandparents and grandchildren because that parent who was saying to all of us, I think -- I'm not speaking for you in any way -- but the parents were saying, "I don't want you hurt. I sent you to school to get an education. Don't do that. Let somebody else do that." It was the grandparents -- it's like, "Yeah, let the boys say what -- " It was the grandparent. Another aside if I may for just two seconds --

BOND: Sure.

GIOVANNI: I'm a big sports fan. In looking at the NBA, just for example, if you look at the NBA right now. Again you've got this phenomenon of grandparents rearing grandsons who've gone on to be superstars. And I know that there's something to that grand -- that grandparent experience that's very different. We have so many parents who for -- and I'm not -- have nothing against that -- but for a variety of reasons, drugs or no jobs, or any number of things, have not been able to rear their children. They've taken them back to their grandparents. You look at all these superstars. You're looking mostly at grandsons. It's a phenomenon. I wish I was a sociologist. I would study it. I'm a poet so I'm just interested.

BOND: Yeah, it's a phenomenon that also has cost and benefits.

GIOVANNI: But real good costs.

BOND: But -- but Nikki Giovanni, the poet whom the world knows, and Yolanda Giovanni, the school girl whom school mates and teachers know, these are different people. I mean, they're the same but they're different people. So I guess what we're interested in is how you got from that, to this, and when did you begin to think about writing poetry. I know you talked about declamations and speech making and so on. When did that begin to seem to you to be something you could do all the time?

GIOVANNI: Well, it's something I'm still thinking about.

BOND: Or how did you begin to think about it?

GIOVANNI: In college because I think I put strange things together, I mean you know that. I'm always looking for how do you mix oil and water, you know, one of those kind of things. In college obviously you're going to get to poetry because that's the only form that allows you to do that with any kind of consistency. And so I was at Fisk, and I mean, what is Fisk if not the arts? I know Fisk has labs and stuff. Fisk is an art school. I always enjoyed the writing. But also I enjoyed the process of the newspaper, the literary magazines. It's always the story. I'm an Appalachian. I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, by the way, and eastern Tennessee is known for its storytelling. I'm always proud to say it because I think she's a swell person, you know -- probably the almost famous storyteller out of eastern Tennessee is Dolly Parton. She tells stories through song. James Agee, you know. But I tell stories through poetry. Once you realize what's driving that engine is a story, then you think, "Okay then, what stories do I want to tell?" My editor is Kelli Martin who is a wonderful young lady always talks about, "Well, what is the mission of this book?" And I hadn't really thought about books as having missions. But I think when I looked at my work each book does have a mission. It's trying to tell us stories. Trying to get an idea and a thought across. And so --

BOND: But back before then, you know, for someone to say "I'm a poet" seems extraordinary to me. I've written poetry years and years ago. Years and years ago.

GIOVANNI: Look at that guy shake that thing. I'll always remember that. That's a lovely poem.

BOND: But when I was at -- when I was in college, Langston Hughes was the only living poet I knew. What -- who are models for you at Fisk and even before, when you thought about poetry as a life?

GIOVANNI: Well sure. Well, there's Gwen. I'm not a big fan of "role model" as a term, but Gwen Brooks, of course, who is a great poet and quite an honor for me to know, and actually Gwen was born -- oh no, I was born on Gwen's birthday -- but we're all June 7th babies. And of course there was Langston. But I was taught by Leslie Collins who was not a major renaissance poet, but he's a minor renaissance poet. I was taught by Robert Hayden who was an English teacher at Fisk. I was taught by Aaron Douglas, my art professor at Fisk. I mean, Fisk was so rich with -- again with the arts. And, of course, Fisk had the -- we had a lot of speakers coming in and things. So it's always around it.

But I don't -- I'm always hesitant when people talk about role models because most of life is not about what you see, but what you dream. And we were talking about Emma Stokes or Miss Delaney or my grandmother or any number of other -- Mrs. Black, you don't know and we haven't discussed -- who was in the church, the O'Neill sisters and things like that that make me cry. But the main thing is that people kept saying, "There's something more to be done." They probably did a little better job of saying it. It would be like, "Well, and what do you think?" So I always thought that my job was to think beyond what was known which means that I don't know I guess consciously when I started reading Alfred North Whitehead -- so that's what sixth, seventh grade? Something like that -- I didn't understand a lot about higher mathematics yet I thought, "Okay, if I'm reading Whitehead because I like space and I like -- we have to do something with math, right?" So I'm missing a lot about the physics but I'm getting the idea. You're going to take what you know and you're going to keep going forward.

If that's the case you going to come up with something different. This is what I'm trying to say. So it's not -- it's not a role model. It's not what has been done. It's what hasn't been done. I guess if I credited all those -- and essentially they are women -- if I credited all those women in my life, what they showed me was that, "Yeah, so you make a mistake. Big deal. You tried to do something." So if I took one thing from Knoxville, Tennessee -- in fact, I took more than one -- but if I took one thing it's like "Yeah, so you made a mistake, big deal."

BOND: This project is called Explorations in Black Leadership, and the people who've sat in that chair are people who are leaders. Now, I've read in some of the material prepared for this interview that you don't think of yourself in these terms, and that you've said that what you do is preaching to the already converted, preaching to the choir.

GIOVANNI: I'm preaching to the saved, yeah.

BOND: To the saved. And these are people who aren't saved by you but are already saved. We could argue about that. But nonetheless I don't think you'd deny that at least in your profession you are a leader, a recognized leader. I just saw in Black Issues in Higher Education, the annual poetry edition, a great celebration of you, lovely picture of you, review of your latest book. That's a leader. They're describing a leader. So when did you first begin to think of yourself as a leader -- and don't deny that you are a leader -- when did you begin to think of yourself as a leader?

GIOVANNI: Okay, I'm going to give you a Condoleezza Rice answer. God, I hate her. That'd be another discussion. In approaching this profession -- which, I wanted to be a poet. I said to myself, "Okay, what are the chances?" Well, the chances are nil, right? You're absolutely going to fail if you want to be a poet. You can't take care of yourself. Nobody's going to read the poetry, right? And so the thing to do is give it your best shot and then when you fail you can say, "I tried." But I got lucky and people did like it, right? So the next thing to do is not take it seriously, because if you take it seriously then you become ponderous, and we know many, many ponderous --

BOND: Stop right there and go back to when you first published. You're in New York. And people take it seriously. Who are the people who took it seriously who are important to you and who I'm guessing, I hate this word, who validated you?

GIOVANNI: They're my readers though. My first book was Black Feeling, Black Talk. I was at Columbia University and I was in the MFA program thanks to the really good offices of a woman named Louise Shoemaker because I -- I met Louise -- see, this is going to be long and ponderous now -- I met Dr. Shoemaker at University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work where I was going to get an MFA. She took me out to lunch one day. It was really very charming, and she says, "You know Nikki we all enjoy your papers -- " And you know when you hear somebody saying you're going to get kicked out of school. So I was just like, "Okay. So you don't think I'm going to be a good social worker?" She said, "Oh no. We know you're not going to be -- " It was just not a thought at all. Said, "Well, we think you'll be a good writer, and why don't you consider Columbia?" I'm looking at her like, come on now. I am a poor girl. I'm on scholarship here, so how am I going to get to Columbia? She said, "I took the liberty of writing them about you." I said, "Well, that was very nice," because I'm like, "And -- ?" I was thinking again this was like gently letting me down. She said "They were impressed, and so we enrolled you in the MFA program." I said, "My God -- "

BOND: You mean your social work papers got you in the MFA program?

GIOVANNI: At Columbia? Uh huh. And a scholarship.

BOND: What were your papers about?

GIOVANNI: Oh, a lot of really good things, because you know we did things on the Holocaust, you know, and community control. Good things that I was interested in. So I always enjoyed --

BOND: I imagine I could write a paper on the Holocaust and I don't think it would get me into any MFA program.

GIOVANNI: Oh I bet --

BOND: I don't think so.

GIOVANNI: You're a good writer. I mean I remember you have a nice sense of humor.

BOND: Not that good a writer, no.

GIOVANNI: Well, I think that -- I don't know, I mean, I think I got lucky and I think Louise was good. But whatever the quality is of writing --

BOND: You had that, and it was evident.

GIOVANNI: But the deal was, in two years you should have completed a book-length manuscript. Well, I completed a book the first year, and having done so and it is poetry, I said, "Well, who's going to publish my poetry, right?" Nobody. I mean who is going to be interested in this? So I called my grandmother and a few friends and I asked my grandmother for $500 dollars because I knew she had it. And I asked a few other people to make it a loan and I had the book published, right. I'm not a bad business woman. I'm not ever going to be rich, but rich was never an object for me.

So I had the book, Black Feeling, Black Talk. I had a thousand copies of it, so I have to sell it, right? So I went to...Book Store --

BOND: In Harlem.

GIOVANNI: -- in Harlem, right, and Robin's Book Store in Philadelphia, City Lights in California. I sent around -- I sent five copies here, five copies there. Asked the people to sell it. Do you know nobody cheated me? They sold them. You'd get these little checks for three dollars, you know. And I thought, "Okay, if you're going to do that -- and this was like Business 101 -- if you're going to do that, the business has to be separate -- which we need to probably still teach, having watched the executives really loot their companies. But business has to be separated from the person.

So I had the business account which meant that I needed to make $700 in this account to take that book back, right. If I tampered with that then I wouldn't know if I had actually made the money. But I said to Columbia, you know, "I did it. I did the book, and it's out and I published it and it's copyrighted and it's in the Library of Congress and it's a nice book and it got reviewed in the minor presses -- not the major presses -- but in the minor presses. And so I want my MFA." They said, "No, no, Miss Giovanni, it's a two-year program." You know how people say "it's a two-year program"?

"You have to complete the second year." I thought, "No," to myself, "that's not going to work for me."

So I had to think that one through. I said, "Okay." So I re-enrolled and I went down -- because I had a scholarship from Ford -- I went down to the comptroller's office and I said, "I'm Nikki Giovanni." I presented all that. I said, "I want my check." She said, "No, Miss Giovanni, we don't give that. That check comes from Ford to Columbia and it pays your tuition." I said, "That's racist of you because you're saying I can't -- I don't know how to handle the money, you know. So that's terribly racist of you," and "Who do I talk to about this? Because I'm shocked." I said, "I didn't realize this, but I'm shocked. I put a year in here and I should be -- I'm grown -- " I was twenty-four years old. She said, "Oh, no. You'd have to talk to -- "

It ended up I talked to one of the vice presidents who said the same thing -- race cards work every now and then. I said, "All right, I can't believe -- but if you want to keep my money you keep it, because I'm gone." So we worked it out. "So here, we're going to give you your check," which I really wanted because it was my check. I didn't want to go back to Columbia because I didn't see wasting time.

BOND: In addition to these people who are your neighbors and friends and living in the building and across the street, you're also meeting poets. You're meeting this New York City group of people who are sort of in the Bohemian life, Baraka and others. What about them?

GIOVANNI: Well, we weren't -- I, of course -- and speaking of older than me -- see, we invited Baraka when he was LeRoi Jones, to Fisk, right? He was grown when we were -- I'm always teasing him like, "You were an old man then -- " He said, "I was not an old man." We have become warmer as the years have gone by because there are fewer of us and because life lessens some of the tensions of the dreams, I suppose. And of course Amina is a wonderful person. Amina and I came together because of a nervous breakdown of a wonderful poet named Carolyn Rodgers, and we were both -- we liked her as a human being and so we were -- we worked together to try to see if we could be of any service. That's kind of what bonded Amina Baraka and me. Of course I knew Ishmael, I mean -- but I was not a Bohemian. And my forays into the Village was pretty much limited to the cheese shop. I'd ride my bike down and --

BOND: But these -- but these figures were around, were they not?

GIOVANNI: But not for me, Julian, to be honest. I mean I threw a party once and they came. I was glad because I had invited a bunch of people. I lived on 83rd, and it was nice to see them, but I didn't hang out with them, and I don't think that if you talked to anyone they would say anything -- there was no antagonism. It was just not what I did.

BOND: You're not in the same world? Is that it?

GIOVANNI: See, this would start an argument. See, to me they just didn't work hard enough. And I didn't see where they had the time. I mean, I remember there was a place -- I think it was called the Lion's Head, the Lion's Den, or something. I didn't see where they had the time to sit there. First of all, I'm not a beer drinker. I only started drinking wine since I came to Virginia Tech. I mean, that's -- my father was an alcoholic. I don't know. If you grow up with an alcoholic, you avoid liquor. I was fifty-three years old before I took a drink. So people have other ideas about you, but I've always been a workaholic, and I just never did see -- I mean, Steve Cannon and them, and I love Steve, you know, I really do. But I just didn't see where they had the time to hang out -- how you could get anything done.

BOND: I look at your vita. I mean, the output is enormous. I'm just amazed. I thought I had followed your life and career, but I was just amazed to see, you know, this long, long line of publications, of records, of compilations and so on. Just enormous. And I'm not able to weigh it against some of these other figures, but I'm just guessing that by volume alone, you're far ahead of these people, many of whom are your contemporaries, older, a little older, but they are your contemporaries. But I wonder, did the fact that they existed -- [Amiri] Baraka and the others -- existed, and they were poets, what did that mean to you regardless of how hard they worked?

GIOVANNI: Well, because Baraka, and please, I hope I didn't just say --

BOND: No.

GIOVANNI: -- that Baraka didn't work, because Baraka did. I was talking about -- we were talking about --

BOND: No, I don't think any of them would take umbrage with what you've said.

GIOVANNI: Okay, because again I was about to say LeRoi -- but as LeRoi Jones and moving into and on with Baraka -- was an enormous output. I think that that's important. I learned from that because I remember when he was saying, "You know, we're not going to publish with white people." That made sense to me. "Okay, that makes sense. Let me listen to that." But in the meantime, of course, there was -- Blackfire was under contract with William Morrow. So I'm thinking, "Okay, I understand what he's saying, but I also understand why he's doing what he's doing, and so I'm not going to let what he's saying interfere with what I should do because I see what he has to do also." So he and Larry edited -- Larry Neal -- edited Blackfire. It was always going to come through William Morrow or Random House, you know, through one or the other.

So when people were saying, "We're not going to do that," it's like, "Well, you're not going to do that if we have other alternatives." Of course, I was happy to work with Broadside Press. Dudley Mann [Dudley Randall] was a great man, and Vivian is a wonderful woman. And Vivian held on even after Dudley's death. It's just recently been sold. But I'm not going to let an ideology prevent me from doing what I think I should do, which is I should get the idea out. I should do that, you know.

BOND: I guess what I'm trying to get at is, here's Baraka and these other people and they are poets. So people say "Well, he's a poet, or she's a poet, or she's -- " What kind of influence did that have on you, that there are people who are making a success of this, there are people who are making a living at this and there are people who are recognized as doing this? What kind of standard did that set for you? I know you worked harder than they did.

GIOVANNI: No, no. I didn't mean it like that. And you were just saying -- we were talking about the Village scene as compared to the Uptown scene.

BOND: Right. I guess I mean in a more general way.

GIOVANNI: I would say none.

BOND: Really? Because you know you said that when you were in school --

GIOVANNI: But I don't think I have any influence.

BOND: Oh, Nikki, you have enormous influence.

GIOVANNI: I know what you're saying but I -- and I enjoy the conversation --

BOND: Don't you think there are people who see you today and say, "Nikki Giovanni is a poet. That means I can be one too"? "Doesn't mean I'm going to be as good as she is. But I'm seeing this -- "

GIOVANNI: No, I think that people --

BOND: " -- black woman do this and it's something until I saw her I didn't imagine I could do." You don't think there are people like that?

GIOVANNI: I don't think there are people who are going to do it, who say that.

And I'm -- I was just going to mention Queen Latifah because she's a kid that I really, really like a lot, and I was able to -- Essence magazine called me and said "You know we put in a query to Queen Latifah and asked her, if she could talk to anybody on earth, who would it be? And she chose you." I was like "Oh my God," because I'm such a Queen Latifah fan. I love what she's done -- and she was working on a movie. And this was the promise. You're her senior so she knows that she should come to you. I said, "You know what kind of sense -- this is a kid who is breaking into the movies -- what kind of sense does that make? I'm -- I'm in my sunset years. I can clear a couple of days to fly out to California. You know, she's building a career, for God's sake. Anybody can stand on that." So I went out to California.

She was like,"I can't believe you did that." It was like "Dana" -- her name is Dana -- "Dana, it's not that I did it. It's that when you get to where I am and there's somebody who wants to talk to you, you'll do it."

And that's what -- so when you were saying "leadership" -- that's what I'm hoping that I've shared, that it's what you give, and how you give it. But you're saying, "Just knowing that they're out there, doesn't it make a difference?" No. It can't. Because nobody -- and, of course, she should have won the Academy Award for Chicago because she was brilliant -- but nobody starts a career based on "Oh, now that I've seen it -- now that Halle Berry won the Academy Award I know I can be an actress." That's ridiculous.

BOND: That doesn't -- I hope that's not what I mean.

GIOVANNI: Oh.

BOND: I wonder if this sense I'm getting from you of an enormous inner-direction, an almost inner-compulsion, if this created tensions in your family circle, in your larger circle. I'm thinking specifically of being expelled from Fisk. You get expelled from Fisk and -- because you, at least the school says, you didn't receive permission from the dean to go home for Thanksgiving vacation. It's incredible to imagine today that you --

GIOVANNI: Oh, there's a bunch of other things --

BOND: Yeah. So I mean this is something you could have done. You could have gone and asked permission and you could have not done those other things. But you did those things. So what kind of tension, if any, did this create in your family circle?

GIOVANNI: Well, my grandfather graduated Fisk in 1905 so my grandmother was embarrassed. There's no question about that. And she came down to Fisk. She took the bus and came down to Fisk. It was like, "You know, your grandfather graduated in 1905, and I think you're going to get kicked out." And I said, "Yeah, it looks like I'm going to kicked out." Because you could -- we were on a collision course. There's no question about that.

And I did, and I think that Grandmother was not disappointed but embarrassed. But it's Knoxville, and Knoxville really has always been to me like, "Oh yeah, you made a mistake," and you go on. Now my mother -- and Mommy's crazy -- and I think it was the first time I realized she was nuts. My mother said, "What did she do to you? What did the dean do to you?" Because in Mommy's mind it was all the dean's fault. Mommy's best friend was a woman named Teresa Elliot who has since died. Teresa was like an aunt to me and just so close. Teresa was like, "Yeah, there's something wrong with Dean [Ann] Cheatam."

Actually I saw Ann Cheatam at the Martin -- “In the Spirit of Martin” at the Smithsonian -- and it was so wonderful because she said, "I don't think you know me." How long has it been, thirty years? She said, "I'm Ann S. Cheatam." I said, "Oh, my God. What a favor you did me!" And she laughed. She said, "Do you think so?" I said, "Yeah, I do." Because failures are important, and it was a failure. And I wasn't going to fool myself about that. I had to think it through, but no matter what everybody -- everybody was being supportive of me because that's the kind of nutty, crazy family I have. But I knew that it was a failure, and I recognized that I had indeed embarrassed my grandmother, though she's not going to ever say anything to me like that. I recognized that that's what I had done. I had embarrassed her.

BOND: And your parents, who surely valued education, must have -- what'd they think?

GIOVANNI: Well, they got their tuition back. I mean that was -- my father wanted his money back. "Well, if she's not in school can I have my tuition back?" and he got it. But our family doesn't function that way. I mean we -- thank God we're not mass murderers or we'd be -- Mommy would be, "Oh, she's a really good mass murderer. She got thirty people." I mean we just don't think like that. I grew up in a -- valuing education, Julian, and you come from a background, that valuing education is not valuing schooling. It's like valuing religion is not loving the church. You can't let the preacher keep you from Jesus, you know. I mean, if you can't start to separate those things -- so I would have remained educated whether I --

BOND: At the same time there's a kind of credentialing --

GIOVANNI: There's a credentialing --

BOND: -- that many people value that goes with the formality of education, which you had, by having this inner-direction, you had cut yourself off from that credentialing.

GIOVANNI: I was endangering it. I did attend the University of Cincinnati. And I did very well because I've always been well read and so I'm at UC, which is a hometown, and I had a job at Walgreens. It doesn't take you very long to realize whatever life holds it cannot be Walgreens. It just cannot be. And so I knew I needed to go back to school. So I wrote Fisk, because if you're going to have a failure than that's where you have to go to correct it. And I've never, and I'm saying it to you now, and I wrote it in Gemini, I never misunderstood that I had done something wrong and stupid. So it was time to get it straightened out, because I can't go forward if I'm carrying this baggage that always says, "It wasn't my fault." Paul Simon has that wonderful song “When something goes wrong I'm the first to admit it and the last one to know." But I -- you accept responsibility.

You know why I'm glad Martha Stewart's going to jail?

BOND: Why?

GIOVANNI: Because she knew damn well she was insider trading. I would have still not cared about that all that much, if they hadn't tried to put it off on the kid. When she tried to say it was the fault of the assistant to -- you know, her assistant, it was Douglas Faneuil's fault -- I thought, "That's trashy." Grownups don't put their responsibilities on children. So I knew it was my responsibility to go back to Fisk, to admit that it was my fault because Dean Cheatam only did what she thought she should do. She would have had to have been a better person than she was --

BOND: At the same time didn't Fisk excise the records --

GIOVANNI: No, they --

BOND: -- and remove her, Dean Cheatam's, critique of you?

GIOVANNI: Sure. But this is going to be of a new dean.

BOND: That seems to me the admission that Fisk had some part in this. They had made some mistake.

GIOVANNI: But we had a new dean, Jackie [Blanche] Cowan was the new dean. She accepted responsibility for Fisk, but she had nothing to do -- this is what I'm trying to say to everybody -- had nothing to do with my accepting my responsibility that I messed up. If you don't do that, you can't go forward. When you mess up you have to think it through. But you have to -- Fisk did do something wrong. Stephen Wright who is a -- the president of Fisk and Mrs. Wright -- I did some fund raisers for them in -- it was fun. I said to the doctor, I said you don't remember me. He said, "Oh yeah. I remember you very well. We did, we kicked you out of school." He said, "I think I'm sorry." I said, "I'm not."

Because at any point in life something needs to happen to you that makes you reassess. I say that to kids all the time, you know. "If you go through school with a four point, if you've always made A's it really means you haven't taken hard subjects. Because if you're always making A's you need to take something that you don't know anything about. If you never have a risk, you can't grow from it." And so I'm not afraid of -- I'm not afraid of failure. But I'm not afraid to admit that I'm wrong.

GIOVANNI: But we had obligations. And so you had to find a way, "How am I contributing?" is what I'm saying. You contribute by the work, but you also have to kind of put yourself out there because I'm a girl. And so I always figured, "Well, yeah, they might shoot [H.] Rap [Brown]. They might shoot, you know, Stokely [Carmichael]. They might beat you up. They beat John up. Nobody's going to bother me." So I felt like my job, then, was to say the things that other people couldn't say because it got them shot. Some people used to say to me, "Are you afraid you're going to get shot?" I said, "No, I'm not afraid I'm going to get shot." I was so sure nobody's going to shoot me and they didn't so far.

BOND: Why do you think they wouldn't shoot girls?

GIOVANNI: I don't know.

BOND: Because they had done.

GIOVANNI: Yeah, sure they did.

BOND: Having talked a little while ago about the large number of women lynched.

GIOVANNI: Yeah. But I just never saw myself in any -- hell, I travel now. Everybody says, "Arabs are mad at me." They're not mad at me. They're mad at America, and well, they should be. So if I get hurt on an airplane, or if I get blown up in London, or I'm doing a research project that's taking me around the world sometimes -- I mean it's not going to happen to me because nobody's mad at me. People like me. It's going to happen to the American.

BOND: The American you?

GIOVANNI: Sure. And there's nothing I can do about that. I can pick a t-shirt, say "I hate him, too," but that would be chicken, wouldn't it? I can't go around the world saying, "I'm against George Bush." I have to go around the world as what I am. I'm a black American. So if something happens to me it's not the black. It's going to be the American. And that's only fair. I just wanted that known, you know, I say that to anybody. I'm not going to be afraid of my life.

BOND: Nikki, let me ask you about being an artist. My general impression is that artists, whether writers or painters or sculptors or musicians, tend to be inner-directed people. And I wonder if you've done enough self-analysis to decide that that's who you are?

GIOVANNI: I think I'm a little greedy. You know, first of all, I think all artists are. I think writers, because we're such a bottom line, and I'm always teasing because I have a lot of friends who are actors and actresses. But they're always using our words. And I think the only other equivalent to writers -- particularly maybe a poet -- would be the dancers, because you just so have to believe in your vision. I mentioned knowing George Faison. Of course, I know Judith Jamison, and I knew Alvin Ailey. You're saying, "I have this vision in my head of this dance. I'm going to call it 'Cry.' " And everybody's going to say it won't work. And they do that to poetry. And so you get in the habit of saying, "Well, I think I'll try it anyway." What you end up doing is taking it to the people, which is I think the better way to deal with it. I could never have been a fine -- you know, I was laughing, but I never could have been a fine painter because you actually take that work to the gallery and it gets sold to a very small number of people and every now and then, you know, you'll do note cards or something. But I always wanted to be judged by the people.

BOND: But the same thing happens with poetry, in a different sort of way. You write a poem. You take it to the publisher or a book, a journal. They publish the poem. A relative small number of people see it and buy it.

GIOVANNI: Well, no, you have readings.

BOND: You have readings. You appear. You have recordings.

GIOVANNI: And if nobody is -- if nobody wants to publish it you take it and do a broadside. Or you give it away. When Angela Davis was being arrested I knew Fania [Jordan], her sister, was in the Village. When they were looking for Angela at that particular point, we wrote a poem -- you know, because we were doing some fund raising -- I wrote a poem for Angela Yvonne Davis. Charles Bible illustrated it. We took it down to a printer, and we had you know like two or three thousand copies selling for a dollar. Gave the money to Fania. So, you can get around publishers.

Even if you're a novelist you're going to have another problem because you've got five hundred pages. For a poem you can always reach your audience with a poem. You can go on the radio. In those days you know people were -- FM was new and everything was AM. So you needed to break AM. But you could go on AM radio and talk about what you've been writing because they would let you fill it in. They'd let you do it. Go on radio at midnight and read your poetry. So you could always find your audience.

BOND: Do you find some resistance between people -- I hate to put you in a generation -- between people of your generation -- which is my generation, although you're much younger -- and this younger generation? I read a critique of these slams in Black Issues' Poetry Month issue. Among the things -- one of the people, I wish I could remember who said the craft was not good. So I'm interested to hear you say it is good. And you think it is good?

GIOVANNI: But see I'm story-driven. So the people who are going to be driven by the meter, or the rhyme, or something like that, I think that they're going to miss a lot. And I'm also ancestor -- ancestral I guess is the term -- driven. When I look at rap, let me put it there, or that hip-hop nation, I see a train, Julian, and the train goes all the way back to 1619 to those first people that stepped off that ship in Jamestown being traded for food and water from a Dutch man-of-war to the British.

So -- and I'm saying that because they had to have a voice. And the kids today have to have a voice. I'm amazed that they found it. I remember Sugarhill Gang with Sylvia, you know: "Uptown, downtown, the Holiday Inn." You know, things like that. Then, of course, I remember the explosion of Tupac Shakur. Losing Tupac was a great loss for this generation. I have a tattoo -- it says "Thug Life" -- because I wanted to mourn with this generation. I don't see how people can knock the kids -- paying so little attention, you know. I had deep regrets -- and I know Rosa Parks, you know, we don't hang out, but I know her -- I so regretted that she lent her name to be used against Outkast, because Rosa Parks is a wonderful -- it's a wonderful tune. And they were giving her props. If people don't -- if the younger generation doesn't sing the praises of the older generation, they get forgotten.

I was totally -- am totally upset and dismayed that Lena Horne withdrew from the Janet Jackson project. I can't imagine anybody better than Janet Jackson to play Lena Horne. And for somebody to say, "Well, Janet and Jason Timberlake -- " who is an extremely talented kid -- you know, because she exposed her tit at the Super Bowl, you know. I mean, talk about drives you crazy, Super Bowl -- steroid-driven testosterone?

BOND: It's a celebration of vulgarity.

GIOVANNI: Well, it is. It's a celebration of violence. I mean, the idea is you line up and you line up, and you do hup, hup, hup, and you throw the ball, and one line tries to break through the other, with any luck as the quarterback is throwing the ball, break his ribs or somehow hurt him. And people were writing in Roanoke where I live, you know, saying things like, "I thought I was getting family entertainment." When was that kind of violence -- the best thing that happened at the Super Bowl was Janet's tit because at least it was nourishing, at least it offered some hope of life. And I resent that because this is America, we use women to sell cars and toothpaste and bread and anything else we want to sell. And then because this kid is there, all of a sudden, it's like, "Oh my God, Janet ruined the Super Bowl!" Well, the Super Bowl was ruined, when when it ended up being Carolina and New England, because who gave a damn?

BOND: But of course, couldn't you also argue that Cincinnati and Knoxville created you? New York may have given you a chance to flourish, but Cincinnati and Knoxville created you just like Knoxville created Thomas Wolfe? I mean if he hadn't --

GIOVANNI: Sure.

BOND: -- grown up there and lived in his mother's boarding house, he wouldn't --

GIOVANNI: Asheville.

BOND: -- have had the chance to go to -- Asheville, I'm sorry --

GIOVANNI: That's okay.

BOND: -- wouldn't have had the chance to go to New York and become Thomas Wolfe?

GIOVANNI: Oh yeah. No, no question, but you have to know, Ernest -- whom I love so much, Ernest Gaines -- who is, I think -- he's not a funny man like "ha ha," but he has these really wry sort of things that he does, and he came to Tech for us recently, he's so wonderful. And we were talking about -- he was talking to the students. And they were asking him about you know Louisiana. And he calls it "that postage stamp where I grew up," and I had never thought, because of all of his great stories, Jane Pittman and all this, coming from right out there.

And he said, "You know I'm lucky," and again I'm sure we could use another term because clearly Ernest Gaines is probably the best writer in the English language who never won the Nobel though he should. But he said, "You know, I'm lucky," he said, "because I left just in time." He said, "If I -- " he said, "I left when I was about ten. If I had stayed longer I would have gotten depressed and I would have realized the hopelessness of the situation. If I had left earlier, I would have been too young to remember." He said, "But I left at the right time and so now I get to mine this postage stamp upon which I grew up."

BOND: And when you're writing today, are you mining these postage stamps?

GIOVANNI: No, not in the same way that Ernest is.

BOND: Cincinnati, Knoxville and -- how differently?

GIOVANNI: Very different because I'm mining the spirit of it, I'm -- the body -- and it's good to have a body, I'm going to recommend the body, they're lovely things that the body does -- but it's the spirit of mankind, of human beings, that's important. And small towns teach us about the spirit, about how we respond emotionally to things. And you take that to New York, you take that with you.

BOND: You have a lot of pop culture references --

GIOVANNI: Oh, yeah. I look at too much TV. My son says that all the time --

BOND: Marvin Gaye and Nancy Sinatra and so on? Where does this come from?

GIOVANNI: I love pop culture, don't you just love it?

BOND: Oh yes.

GIOVANNI: I do, and being at Virginia Tech I recently -- because I'm there in NASCAR country, and I had a student, I was trying to -- I was teaching the expository novel, James Baldwin, so we're doing Baldwin. And I had a student that said to me, you know it's a predominantly white campus, "You know Nikki, you're always making us learn things that you understand." He said "You don't know anything about NASCAR." He said "You ought to ask us sometime," and it was just one of those like, belligerent, and I thought, "Hmm -- he's right, I should find out something."

So I started tuning in like at midnight 'cause it comes on at midnight and it puts you right to sleep. Ennoooww, ennoooww. But I finally found out who Jeff Gordon is, and how many points he had, and Dale Earnhardt, and you know all of a sudden it's like -- "and I said I didn't know NASCAR," you know. And I know bass fishing, too, which is really, really a dumb sport. But you try to keep up because it's not fair that because you're old and because you're the teacher and because you can determine the grade, that you don't let your your students teach you something. So it's a two-way street, I try to learn something.