First Friday Review: More than Meat and Raiment by Angela Jackson

Angela Jackson is a Chicago poet, playwright, and novelist currently serving as the Illinois Poet Laureate. More than Meat and Raiment is her eighth book of poetry, published in 2022 by TriQuarterly Press at Northwestern University. The title comes from a Bible verse, Matthew 6:25 where Jesus asks, “Is not life more than food? Is not the body more valuable than cloth?” In this verse Jesus is telling his disciples to stop worrying about what they’ll eat or how they’ll be clothed; to seek first the kingdom of God and their needs will be provided. In Jackson’s poetry this is an ironic verse to reference when nothing comes easy. The reader might have expected a reference to Genesis 3:19: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.”

More than Meat and Raiment is a book in three parts. The first, “Hero-House,” is dedicated to “the Black Family” and describes the Jackson family’s struggles in Chicago during the era of the Great Migration. As they worked to provide shelter, food, and clothing, Black families were doing much more than caring for bodies, they were doing the holy work of preserving a people. In the poem “Bills” she writes of her father’s parsimony: 

My father squeezed dollar bills
in a wallet thick with IDs and papers
to give the appearance of wealth,

a flock of green birds rustling inside
to get out for some extravagance
(Baldwin’s ice cream for each of us!)

but inside were dry leaves
pressed together cramped as the pages
of the Bible he did not need to read
to pray with his tight fists.

Contrast this with “Money Trees,” which grow like lilies of the field for some: “Certain people neither sow/Nor spin/But spend their days/Raking leaves leisurely/From money trees.” Jackson’s parents built a home and grew a garden amid great difficulty, including seeing a hole dug “in the heart of the city–/a cavern covering half our street” for the Dan Ryan Expressway. What followed were “Blank houses and emptied lots, more people poured out./A pounding out of losses until we were deaf. Then the thieves/And body counts of children in this city that never weeps.”

This section of Jackson’s book is a lamentation but also a proud family origin story. The final poem, “Providence” describes how as a six-year-old she was nearly hit by a car as she bounced out of a store with a coveted stick of grape gum. In the middle of the block, “There was providence from each and every church/There was plenty from each and every store./There was a generosity in the people of the sun.” 

I am that block, and I am each church.
I am more than gum under big boots, and I am a memory store.
I was a Black girl, now I am a woman of the sun.

Part two, “Wishbone Wish,” is an “African-Americanized Folktale” telling of a girl who is tricked by a hyena and all that is left of her is a pile of bones. In spite of the fact that she is repeatedly warned by little birds that “You can’t cure everything,” the girl’s disconsolate mother carries her bones on a wearying journey, trying to find a way to restore her life. The result is a half-alive version of her daughter who accuses her mother of “Carrying my bones, crying out her grief/caring not a fig for me.” 

Told in 54 separate poems, the story has a macabre feeling that reminded me of Beloved. But somehow it’s suffused with love and hope. For me, as the mother of a teenage daughter who could fall to the tricks of hyenas, I sympathize with the mother’s desperation, even if her actions don’t end up making her daughter’s life any better. The last poem acknowledges that “Tortured, a mother proves/Her mettle” and “Every mother is a mixed bag of sweets, pleasantries, entreaties, and evil ways/Elegant Truth and Difficult Consequences/Whatever/Is in season.”

Part three, titled “Soul World” is an eclectic mix of poetry. As Jackson writes in “Snow Poems, she takes the poems “as they come.” “The poems take/Their own shape./Each one a snow/Flake.” This section contains my favorite poems and shows Jackson’s range of interests and her breadth of style as a poet as well as her reverence for her political and artistic and forbearers. For example, in “The Red Record,” an homage to Ida B. Wells-Barnett, we read of injustices applied to people for simply “Being while Black.” “The Unmother,” an homage to Gwendolyn Brooks, is a moving contemplation on being childless. And “Ida’s Call to Action” is a stunning composition about the vigilance required to preserve liberty. As the 2024 presidential election is just days away, Jackson’s vivid description of monsters who “walk and rule and legislate/among us … must be toppled or immobilized/silent gnomes or odious ogres’ licenses/revoked to ravage as they please.” This is a call to action that we need now and that, according to Jackson and Wells-Barnett, we will always need.

Returning to the title, the poem “More Than Meat and Raiment” is somewhat enigmatic, referring to “Spirit-beings gathered up in human being momentarily/More than flesh and flashy garments.” In what ways are these beings more than meat and raiment? They are a collection of their whole lives: all the stories they were told, songs they’ve heard sung, all their assaults and bruises, and more. More than their sex or race or class. “More than anything we can name.” And this is what makes Jackson’s poetry so vital. She writes in the particular and what emerges is a striking but familiar portrait of humanity.