BLACK HISTORY MONTH (BHM) #1 GREAT MUSTACHES OF BLACK HISTORY

“He was more concerned about his mustache than his haircut. He always liked his mustache to be up off the lip, like a butterfly. He would tell me, make it like a butterfly this time.”

Nelson Malden, MLK Jr.’s former barber

Deputy US Marshal Bass Reeves (July 1838 to January 1910)

Frederick Douglass (Feb 1818 – Feb 1895) Abolitionist, writer, orator

Gordon Parks (Nov. 1912- Mar. 2006) Photographer, Filmmaker, Composer, Author

Richard Roundtree (July 1942 – Oct. 2023) Actor, as seen in Shaft (1971)

Ted Lange, Actor (b. 1948) as seen in ABC TV series, Love Boat (1976-1990)

What squad of men occupy the Rushmore mountain of mustaches in Black History?

Lawman Bass Reeves’ armed mouth saddle

Statesman Frederick Douglass’ velvet plumage

Comic’s Pryor and Murphy mic’d with black tassels above the lip

The twin batwings of brothers from the Whispers

Gordon Parks’ weeping willow, graying thru winter / inventor of Shaft’s smooth plumage

If the afro is an ocean, the mustache its anchor–securing a boy to his manhood, a man to his time

Steve Harvey’s mustache needs a biography

And its own wing in the Afro Sheen museum

Black granite; almost a wig in its dominant construction

Harvey’s mustache formed first in the womb; during ultra

Sound, nurses reported the embryo appeared to be eating a moth

Martin Luther King Jr’s childhood dream was for a mouth dressed with butterflies

For a boy, manhood emerges like a gator beneath the nose

Cracking the surface of an eggshell face with pepper,

Weedy, invasive / with silent insistence / a scribble of ink scratching out a child.

While standing in the bathroom mirror, my father said:

“Poor ground don’t grow no grass.”

then lifted a blades length of crème speckled with cheek hair,

the air bitter and scratchy from the aroma of Magic Shave.

Television silently mocked bald faces of the 1970’s.

Smoothness was a kind of invisibility / Making one slick and suspicious.

My young face remained smooth with shame before darkness shadowed

The only spring my father shaved his goatee—revealing the simple

man behind the curtain—he lost his identity along with keys

and I wouldn’t let him in: suspicious of every smooth faced stranger.

You not no real man, I must’ve thought, squinting thru the window.

And you don’t belong here with us.

Members of music group, The Whispers (formed 1963) feat. Leaveil Degree, and Walter and Wallace Scott

Civil Rights Leader Martin Luther King Jr. (Jan 1929- April 1968)

Comic, Actor Richard Pryor (Dec 1940- Dec 2005)

Comic, actor, tv host Steve Harvey (b. Jan. 1957)

A Few Words On William Marshall’s Blacula (1972)

Broadway and Shakespearean Eater William Marshall (Aug 1924-June 2003) at lunch in Scream, Blacula Scream

What must a woman think beneath the gaze of William Marshall’s Blacula

Batwing breath the odor of a neglected death in a moth-soured suit

Then the razored greed of fangs slicing into a pastry soft neck,

pushing her head aside to drink with the greed of a thousand mouths

What must his mustache feel like, crawling thru blood muddied skin,

a crooked dealer shuffling a foul poker of skin cells,

his tongue a hunting leech. That mustache, though!

moldy lichen, crispy leaves on the tree flourishing

in a cemetery. Black grass tickling you down

into your ice cold grave — Is this what you want, vixen?

To die and be born again on the lips of death

lips twisting, twitching, dripping clots of unchewed meat,

draped with ribbons and rivulets of un-licked blood.

The last human thing you’ll feel, woman, is the soft tingle and tickle

of black light filaments moving like petals following the pulse of your sun.

Actor William Marshall, Death Pimp, Circa 1972. B*tch Betta Have My Plasma