Yellowblack: The First Twenty-One Years of a Poet's Life

Vibe.com, January 30th, 2006

His new memoir, YellowBlack, fuses street riffs, poetry, ruminations, and vignettes to collage the first twenty-one years of his life, the crucial period that eventually determined his life’s path. Written disjointedly, Madhubuti conjures up the sound of Miles Davis, the acuity of Richard Wright, the intellect of W.E.B. Dubois, and the grittiness of street culture: a soundtrack to the lives of urban youth across America.

Born Don L. Lee in 1942, Haki Madhubuti, entered a world where water fountains were separate and the word “nigger” wasn’t in vogue. Growing up around “pimps and ho’s slamming Cadillac doors on the streets of Detroit’s Blackbottom and Chicago’s Westside,” he had to be a man when he should have been concentrating on being a boy. His absentee father, James Lee, worshipped the trinity of women, cars, and money, flexing their artificial power, because he was never taught self-respect. This left Madhubuti’s mother, Helen Maxine Graves Lee (who graces the book’s cover), to raise two children with a broken heart that was never mended, but instead soothed by prostitution and drug addiction. When Madhubuti was seventeen, misery killed her.

Literature and music saved his life. If it weren’t for these two cultural forces, Madhubuti writes, “I would probably be sitting in some prison or fertilizing the weeds growing from the earth covering my body.” Through reading, his consciousness and the writer within grew. Words emerged as his shank against racism, poverty and despair. Long before Public Enemy, Madhubuti was fighting the power.

The importance of YellowBlack is in knowing what happened to the boy who lived on the border of life and death. He became a master of ceremonies that mobilizes communities. He became an intellectual entrepreneur, invading academia and building a publishing empire that distributes literature without asking for someone else’s permission.

Despite the tragedy of his first twenty-one years, Madhubuti isn’t a victim. He writes, “I am a story, a long involved and on-going history. Often told orally in song, prose, and verse, but not widely circulated in the pages of the best read newspapers, magazines, journals or books. I am the notes in the music you love.”

Haki Madhubuti is hip-hop.

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