On Sunday March 21, 1999, I travelled by Amtrak to Providence from Boston to interview Aishah Rahman. She met me at the station in her Volvo sedan, and from there we drove to the BookStore, an interesting assemblage of comfort and quiet near the campus of Brown University, where Aishah is Professor of English in the Graduate Writing Program. Much like the jazz that informs the interstices of her writing, Aishah is the composite motion of sound, brilliant and arresting, edifying and elusive, the answer and the question in tandem. Nestled in a corner of the restaurant that features sofas and a coffee table, we talked about her life and her work-in the improvisational blur of mysteries that speak thru all she lives and believes, mysteries such as Nina Simone or Abby Lincoln or Charlie Parker. This blur is the quick spark in her eye or the need for art to survive our histories.

Fourteen months earlier, we saw her play On Only in America at Providence's Perishable Theater. Her characters are music incarnate.

AMW: What are your memories of growing up in Harlem?

AR: It was a lot of fun, walking the streets, seeing the different sights, and feeling the energy and hearing the music. The parades, the spectacle. I remember all the different kinds of parades on Saturday and Sunday that I would run and follow. Daddy Grace's parades were all down to 11 6th Street, where he would be baptizing people in the streets. Daddy Grace would have his long fingernails out, and each nail was painted a different color. He would took like those pictures of Jesus, white with long, straight hair. That's vivid in my mind. Going to all the different churches. Particularly for girls, sometimes the only way we Could get out of the house was to go to church, so church hopping was a pastime, write about this in my memoir, Chewed Water. As a result I visited the numerous types of churches in Harlem. The more theatrical, the better I liked them. of course was the Sanctified storefront church which filled me with a lot of terror and wonder at the same time. There was also the camaraderie I had growing up with boys and girls my same age. I really never knew anything about white people until I went to high school. 1 remember being wary of the prospect of High School. Until then I had attended schools in my neighborhood. To add to my anxiety, I had attended an all-girls junior High so High School would be quite a change, boys and white folks. I went to George Washington, which was considered one of the best public schools at the time. Going to and from High School was an emotional gauntlet because our school was in an all white neighborhood whose inhabitants did not even want us passing through. This was in New York City, mind you.

AR: Yes. Practically.

AMW: What year was this?

AR: I graduated high school...