Gailellen Conyers: Poems of Joy, Anger

“Am I glad to be a woman?” begins a poem written by Gailellen Conyers. “Am I glad to be a black woman in the 20th Century?”

Several times a month, Conyers reads this and other poetry at small Orange County coffee shops and community theaters. The poems express the joy and anger that span her 40 years.

“Poetry is my heart, my soul,” said Conyers, sitting in her elegant, contemporary house in Orange, a place far removed from the foster homes and abuse of her childhood. “It’s my experience, but beyond that, it’s how I wish it could’ve been, or how I fantasized others’ experiences to be.”

When Conyers was a baby, her family moved from San Diego to Sacramento. As a result of physical and sexual abuse, she was placed in the first of a series of white foster homes at age 4, each painful experience lasting from a week to two months. At age 10, she was removed from her mother’s home for good.

“I grew up being invisible, and I got very good at it,” she said. “In these homes people didn’t even see you, you didn’t have any substance, you were ignored and overlooked. Holidays were the worst part.” Even now, Conyers has to force herself to remember people’s names.

“You learn to disconnect,” she said. “When people leave, they don’t exist anymore. It’s a coping mechanism that keeps you from going crazy.”

At 15, she went to live with relatives in Tennessee, where she attended a black high school, the “best experience of my life,” she said. It was there that she had her first stable home and teachers who gave her seeds of self-esteem.

“The teachers encouraged me to write and put down what I was feeling,” she said. “I had always written in secret, but I made the mistake of showing something to my stepmother and got seriously ridiculed. Now I learned it was OK to express myself, that I had some value.”

A year later, she was sent back to California to live with her father and stepmother, she said. When that didn’t work, she spent most of her last two years of high school in rented rooms.

After college, she worked 15 years for the Orange County Probation Department, where she was assigned to cases of domestic violence and abandoned children. By 1989, she suffered chronic fatigue, ulcers and an arthritic-like condition and retired from that job.

She now buys and sells trust deeds with her husband’s help, gives psychic readings and writes her poetry, despite almost constant physical pain.

“Am I glad?” she read from her poem. “Lip smacking, rib cracking, barrel laughs over some of the more joyous adventures of youth. Reminiscing, soul-searching evaluation of the past 25 years. The good times, bad times, in between time, no time for feeling sorry. Ever onward masochistic curiosity always plotting tomorrow’s course.

“Am I glad? No, I ain’t always glad. But I ain’t given up either!”