On her first birthday since her passing, Nikki Giovanni still lavishes us with gifts. It’s not just her words but also her deeds that still endure.
And those deeds hearten those who connected with her on sacred ground for Black writers — Black bookstores.
“Nikki was our favorite,” James Fugate sighs over the phone. The soft jazz playing in his LA living room transmits to my Atlanta porch. Our conversation drifts and wafts, circling Eso Won Books, the Black bookstore that Fugate has owned with Thomas Hamilton for over three decades.
“If we ever wrote a book about Eso Won, there will be a lot of Nikki stories,” James offers with a chuckle.
One story that stands out is the time Nikki chided James for not liking A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines. “She said I didn’t get it, so I reread it…she had a point. When an elder spanks you, you don’t anger back.”
But Nikki didn’t just discipline. She doted, too. A friend of Eso Won, she visited the store regularly and once even sat for four hours, signing all their Nikki Giovanni stock at the Los Angeles Festival of Books.
The thing about Nikki was that the love and care she showed felt singular, but it was actually characteristic of her. She was both intimate and infinite, sharing her charm and talent with bookstores across the country—from Chicago’s Afrocentric Bookstore to San Bernardino’s Phenix Information Center, Baltimore’s Sibanye Inc., down to Atlanta’s Shrine of the Black Madonna.
In her foreword for Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores, Nikki describes traversing the country in “an old clunker.” She writes: “Every Black community had a Black bookstore. And we had pride. We had song. We had readings. Nothing was more important than the bookstores, except perhaps the churches.”
Nia Damali, owner of Atlanta’s Medu Bookstore, recalls Nikki Giovanni letting her in on a secret. The celebrated poet first visited Medu in disguise. When Nia asked Nikki at a subsequent in-store book signing, “Well, did I treat you right?” Giovanni quipped, “You think I’d be here if you didn’t?” The Atlanta Daily World covered Nikki’s visit with the headline “Giovanni Blesses Medu with Book Signing.”
Nikki’s presence blessed us. Twenty-five-year-old Nikki asserts in her book Gemini, “Artists very rarely have the chance to go back home and say, ‘I think I’ve done you proud.’” Nikki was one of those rare artists. Home being not only Knoxville, Tennessee but every Black bookstore she stepped in. She did us —the booksellers, the writers and the readers— so proud.
And even with all the awards, accolades and distinctions Nikki Giovanni collected over her decades-long career, she still made time to love on us, to make her way to the Black bookstore, sign remainder copies, flash her smile (and thug life tattoo), and perhaps unknowingly gift us with memories we’d unwrap even when she was no longer here.
“You always think the one you love will always be there to love you,” Nikki once wrote. We love Nikki, and while she’s no longer here physically, it’s safe to say she’ll always be there to love us back.
To the woman as warm as her smile, as bold as her verses, and as sharp as her wit: Happy birthday, Ms. Giovanni. You were our favorite—and you still are.
Katie Mitchell is a storyteller and bookseller based in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores.
