Free Fantasia: Tiger Flowers (1975). Detailed description

Published in Angle of Ascent, “Free Fantasia” memorializes another African-American figure whose identity and significance had been overlooked and lost within the dominant culture. Tiger Flowers was an African-American middleweight boxing champion in the mid-1920s, who was very successful but died young (32).

Flowers is significant because of what he represents, a time of great optimism and excitement for many Americans but particularly for the many African Americans who migrated to major cities in the North. The Harlem Renaissance was at its height in New York with counterparts in Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. The sense that the race was “on the move” was heightened by the successes of figures like Flowers, whose triumphs and sumptuous style of living were the news of the day. Hayden uses Flowers’s life and early death to communicate that shared hope, excitement, and eventual disappointment.

First, he evokes for us the excitement and optimism of his childhood spent partially in his “secret” work for the prostitutes of Paradise Alley—otherwise seen as the slum of his youth. He captures the sense of being drawn to and touching the forbidden. (His strict father, who disapproved of even the jazz and blues of the day, was totally unaware of the young Hayden’s adventures.) He runs errands for the larger-than-life, exotic figures Stack-o-Diamonds, Eula Mae, and Miss Jackie.

Demonstrating his poetic exactitude, he calls these women “Dixie odalisques.” An odalisque is a woman at the bottom of the social pool in a harem. She is the servant to women who are concubines but may, if talented or beautiful enough, someday rise to become a concubine herself. That is the actual status of these women in the larger context of the American scene.

The fantasia of the title is exact as well. Each person is caught up in fantasy—the child persona who “thought such gaiety could not die,” the women “speeding through cutglass dark to see the macho angel,” and the whole African-American community who through their fantasies indulge in Flowers’s successes and luxurious life, part of their dreams for themselves—beautiful, exciting, and just beyond reach. “Fantasia” captures the mood of the times, each participant locked in a dream speeding headlong toward its conclusion.

The end of the poem moves from the fleeting “dream” to longer-lasting art. Rousseau’s The Virgin Forest is the poet’s choice as an elegy for Flowers, conjuring the innocence of the age in which people indulge naively in exoticizing the past, and the lives of others. It seems a good fit: “the dark figure” in the painting is only a shadow—no details about the man himself are clear, overshadowed by his colorful surroundings. Thus the poem is a mural providing readers with an evocative, colorful scene that draws us into this fantasy and invites us to contemplate its meaning.

For Discussion or Writing
1. By explicitly alluding to an artistic creation from a different medium, Henri Rousseau’s The Virgin Forest, and declaring that it is an elegy for Tiger Flowers, Hayden incorporates the painting, making it an integral and essential part of the poem. Find an image at an online site such as <http:// www.artofeurope.com/rousseau/rou5.htm> and write a well-developed essay that explores the relationship between Rousseau’s creation and Hayden’s poem. Use informational Web sites such as http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/ nge/Article.jsp?id=h-870 to investigate the life of the boxer whose nickname was Tiger Flowers and incorporate this information in your comparative analysis.

2. “The great migration,” which took place in the first half of the 20th century, was a major event in the history of African Americans. Between 1916 and 1930, nearly 1.5 million African Americans moved from smaller cities in the southern United States to large, urban centers of industry in the North, seeking jobs and refuge from institutionalized racism. Using trustworthy online sources such as the New York Public Library’s In Motion Web site (http://www.inmotionaame.org/ migrations/landing.cfm?migration=8), write a well-developed essay that discusses how Hayden’s poem about the “elegant avenger” captures or fails to capture the plight, hopes, or disappointment of African Americans trying to start new lives in the North.