Yvonne Chism-Peace

My current prose fiction reflects stories I did not and could not include in my three books of narrative poetry. These stories did not lend themselves to the aesthetic boundaries I had set for the poems, yet their settings continued to intrude upon my daily peripheral inner vision; their characters continued to lurk unwritten, if not unvoiced, within earshot. Now, with more than two decades of poetry behind me, these more than forty stories have emerged during three summers of steady writing. Counterpoint to my poetry's updated mythologies, these stories abound with contemporary specificity. Whereas the poems exalted the abiding rootedness of female ancestry, these stories veer headlong into modern, urban ephemera with characters in the crush of transitory demands: careers, apartments, marriage. These stories acknowledge the dizzy shuttle between depression and humor, between intimacy and estrangement, between Philadelphia and New York City, between memories and moving on...somewhere...maybe.

The poet Yvonne writes short fiction under the name Yvonne Chism-Peace. Born and raised in Philadelphia, she attended St. Francis de Sales parochial school, West Catholic Girls' High School and Rosemont College before moving to Manhattan where she attended NYU and Bank Street College of Education for graduate studies. While poetry editor at MS. (1974-1987), she won two NEA fellowships and awards from Mary Roberts Rinehart, New York State Council on the Arts, and Bronx Council on the Arts. Published in one of the earliest editions of Pushcart Prize Anthology, she also performed in the inaugural Poetry at the Public Theater series and Manhattan Theater Club. Her poetry books are Iwilla Soil, Iwilla Scourge, and Iwilla Rise (Chameleon Productions Inc. 1985, 1986, 1999). In 2002 she began her ezine career with fiction in Pindeldyboz, Moxie, Moondance, The3rdegree and others. Her stories can be accessed from her home page.
 

After the little girl became a big girl, she began to spend every other Saturday at the hairdressing parlour. That is what her mother called it, not beauty salon like the white housewives on television. Miss Muriel did hair in a large converted living room with breezy French doors that led to a narrow enclosed front porch, windows half concealed with pots of tall snake plants and a monstrous species of rhododendron. There in cozy white wicker chairs with faded cabbage rose-patterned cotton cushions, refined Negro matrons of modest means waited their turn. They flipped through a tired Ebony or Life or Readers' Digest; they relived wartime gaiety and romance with Cab Calloway and Jimmy Dorsey and Lena Horne on the radio; they stared blankly at the street traffic below the dark corrosive rumbling Market Street El. To the big girl the place looked frayed and old-fashioned like the neighborhood dry cleaners or the hosiery and lingerie shop where everything was hidden in thin plastic covers or plain white cardboard boxes.

For many years the mother had been a patient customer of Miss Muriel. But when the mother grew weary of the pompadour and the Veronica Lake dip, Miss Muriel could not quickly adjust to the change. She did not know how to make long hair look light and feathery. She applied too much pomade; she made stiff symmetrical waves like something out of a '30s movie; she took two hours to do what should have been done in one. Eventually the mother tried a smart modern hairdresser advertised in the local Negro newspaper. The woman called herself a beautician, hired two other "girls" to shampoo and manicure, and rented the storefront of a commercial building on the corner of a wide two-way traffic avenue. Poor Miss Muriel. As recompense, she was passed on to the big girl like a faithful family servant.

- from "Miss"