VERNELLIA RANDALL'S HOMEPAGE
                                                
Big Confusion re:
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An eclectic collection of poetry, music, essays and the musing of one African Vernellia RandallAmerican woman on race, gender, health care, law, and legal education.


I hope that this site 

inspires women-of-color  and men-of-color who are struggling to succeed in a racially hostile world.

provides insight and education to non-blacks on issues of important to the black community.
 

I use this site to provide me a creative and spiritual outlet  as I struggle in a profession that has become almost devoid of creativity and spirituality. 
 
I hope that my site reflects who I am - 

a child of god,
an African American, 
a woman, 
a mother,
a sister,
an aunt, and a friend
 who works continuously 

at changing the world through law, love and activism.

 Don't Forget to sign my Guestbook - Ujima!!

But first I'd like to share  with you some 
poems and passages that have been important in my life:

As a teenager growing up in Texas, I could not have dreamed that one day I would be a law professor and travel the world.  At that time, I lived in constant fear and abuse, exploited and demoralized.  My only escape was my reading. I loved poetry. When I was about fifteen years old I read a  poem which became the cornerstone of my soul.  The single most important poem in my life has been Invictus.  Whenever, I felt my fear was overwhelming I would recite Invictus -- reminding myself  that:

 
  "I am Master of my fate. . . I am the Captain of my soul."
    INVICTUS

William Ernest Henley 

This Little Light of Mine!
This Little Light of Mine!!
Fem-mass
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be 
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance 
I have not winced nor cried aloud. 
Under the bludgeonings of chance 
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate, 
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Since I have been adult, (especially as an African American  woman professional) it seems like my whole life is centered  around being a bridge between groups that can't seem to communicate directly. About two years ago, my friend Kim O'Leary (who was a former colleague here at the University of Dayton and who teaches at Thomas Cooley Law School) gave me a book This Bridge called by Back, Writings by Radical Women of Color. In it I read The Bridge Poem, by Donna Kate Ruskin. All I could say was  Hallelujah!! Amen!   
The Bridge Poem
 I've had enough 
I'm sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things 
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody 

Nobody 
Can talk to anybody
Without me 

Right? 

I explain my mother to my father my father to my little sister 
My little sister to my brother my brother to the white feminists 
The white feminists to the Black church folks the Black church folks 
To the ex-hippies the ex-hippies to the Black separatists the 
Black separatists to the artists the artists to the my friends' parents. .

Then I've got to explain myself 

To everybody 
I do more translating 
Than the Gawdamn U.N. 

Forget it 
I'm sick of it 

I'm sick of filling in your gaps 

Sick of being your insurance against 
The isolation of your self-imposed limitations 
Sick of being the crazy at your holiday dinners 
Sick of being the odd one at your Sunday Brunches 
Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people 

Find another connection to the rest of the world 
Find something else to make you legitimate
Find some other way to be political and hip 
I will not be the bridge to your womanhood 
Your manhood 
Your human-ness 

I'm sick of reminding you not to 
Close off too tight for too long 

I'm sick of mediating with your worst self 
On behalf of your better selves

I am sick 
Of having to remind you to breath
Before you suffocate 
Your own fool self. 

Forget it 

Stretch or drown 
Evolve or die 

The bridge I must be Woman and Doves
Is the Bridge to my own power
I must translate
My own fears
Mediate 
My own weaknesses I must be the bridge to nowhere 
But my true self 
And then
I will be useful. 
I often desire for gifts of  all kinds. I want to sing, to write, to be a leader. .  .  a part of me longs for some special gift. . more often than not I pray for the gift of love. . 
1 Corinthians 13:1-13

If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a tinkling symbol. 

And if I have prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 

And if I dole out all my goods, and if I deliver my body that I may boast but have not love, nothing I am profited.

Love is long suffering, 
love is kind, it is not jealous, 
love does not boast, it is not inflated.

It is not discourteous, it is not selfish, it is not irritable, it does not enumerate the evil. It does not rejoice over the wrong, but rejoices in the truth  It covers all things, it has faith for all things, it hopes in all things, it endures in all things.

Love never falls in ruins; but whether prophecies, they will be abolished; or tongues, they will cease; or knowledge, it will be superseded. For we know in part and we prophecy in part. But when the perfect comes, the imperfect will be superseded.  

When I was an infant, I spoke as an infant, I reckoned as an infant; when I became a man, I abolished the things of the infant.  For now we see through a mirror in an enigma, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know as also I was fully known. 

But now remains faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

I try to live my  life (both professionally and personally) as an activist , a progressive and a radical .  If blacks (and other people of color) ever  hope to gain true freedom and progress than we must be willing to engage in the struggle daily, even if it means "our lives and the lives of others".

 

 
 No Struggle, No Progress
Frederick Douglass, 1857

 
The whole history of progress of human liberty
Shows that all concessions
Yet made to her august claims
Have been born of earnest struggle.
If there is no struggle
 There is no progress.
 
Those who profess to favor freedom,
And yet deprecate agitation,
Are men [and women] who want crops 
Without plowing up the ground,
They want rain 
Without thunder and lightning.
They want the ocean
Without the awful roar of its waters.
This struggle may be a moral one;
Or it may be a physical one;
Or it may be both moral and physical;
But it must be a struggle. 
Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did, and it never will.
Find out just what any people
Will quietly submit to 
And you have found the exact measure
Of injustice and wrong 
Which will be imposed upon them,
And these will continue till they are resisted. . . 
The limits. . . are prescribed 
By the endurance 
Of those whom. . [are] oppress[ed].
Men [and Women] may not get all they pay for
in this world, but they pay for all they get.
If we ever get free 
from the oppressions and wrong heaped on us,
we must pay for their removal.
We must do this 
by labor, 
by suffering,
by sacrifice,
and if needs be
by our lives and the lives of others
To my mothers and fathers, my sisters and brothers, my daughters and sons, I offer myself and this website to you with 
the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi:
 
Lord, make me a channel of thy peace
that where there is hatred, I may bring love
that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness
that where there is discord, I may bring harmony
that where there is error, I may bring truth
that where there is doubt, I may bring faith
that where there is despair, I may bring hope
that where there are shadows, I may bring light
that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.
Lord, grant that I might seek rather to comfort, than to be comforted
to understand, than to be understood
to love, than to be loved
.
For it is by self forgetting that one finds.
It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.
It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.
 
The University of Dayton School of Law
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Always Under Construction!
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Vernellia R. Randall
Last Updated:  07/31/2000
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