Couple Power

In the kicked-up dirt and brittle yellow grass, Michael Datcher sees a thriving garden. Standing in dusk’s drizzle, just beyond the front door of the Windsor Hills home he shares with his wife, Jenoyne Adams, Datcher summons rose bushes and a plush-carpet of a lawn. Surrounding it, of course, the white picket fence he long ago commenced to build, plank-by-plank, in his mind.

A poet, it’s Datcher’s business to dream a world in all its glory and despair, to acknowledge life’s extremes. But for him, summoning images and breathing life into them has always been a survival mechanism as well.

An adopted child who maneuvered the mean streets of Long Beach, Datcher searched for a father he’d never know, rebuffed a biological mother who gave him up and later attempted to woo him back. He’s had to make do. He’s made much of it up as he’s gone along.

In time his resume grew to include journalist, essayist, author and co-organizer of the influential World Stage Anansi Writers Workshop in Leimert Park. Success achieved by pure will. But in his wildest imaginings, he couldn’t have conjured this--that he and Jenoyne (Juh-NOAN), his wife of almost four years, would have found one another, worked through a rocky start of ideological sparrings and written first books arriving on store shelves only weeks apart.

“It’s about being able to share the space,” says Datcher. Not just the physical--but the psychological and spiritual.

Both Datcher’s new memoir, “Raising Fences: A Black Man’s Love Story” (Riverhead Books), and Adams’ novel, “Resurrecting Mingus” (Free Press), confront the intricacies of love--trust, faith and self-transformation. Their goals in mind: to retrofit the foundation of the black family.

Their home is a laboratory in itself--a work in progress--reflecting first steps of trying to merge two very independent lives drawn in bright colors and bold, confident lines.

The living room, their communal space, has the feel of a mountain cabin with rough-wood walls and low-slung ceilings. A weak fire fidgets in the fireplace. Bebop struts out of stereo speakers. The coffee table shows off fancy picture books--portraits of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; William Claxton’s moody jazz photographs. Thick ivory candles lend the room a sanctuary feel.

As the fire wanes, Adams, tall and all fluid angles, pads across the polished hardwood floors in leopard-print fuzzy slippers--as graceful as the dancer she spent years training to be. Close at hand she keeps her pen and open journal, careful not to miss a thought.

Like the struggling fire, marriage has to be coaxed. Watched. It’s not just a challenge to build but to maintain, both readily admit--especially when not enough examples exist and numbers tallying failure taunt otherwise.

Certainly, the inability to get close knows no bounds of gender, no color lines. But of late, how this phenomenon has permeated black life has been on the minds and souls of black folk too. For a people who in slavery sought strength and solace from strong family ties, the slow deterioration of those once-tight bonds has been nothing short of devastating.

In her newly released book, “Salvation: Black People and Love” (William Morrow), culture critic bell hooks sees this shift as an unexpected evolutionary byproduct. “As an organized black liberation movement emphasizing love was replaced by a call for militant violent resistance, the value of love . . . was no longer highlighted. When the ‘70s came to an end, a new cynicism had become the order of the day. . . . [Love] began to have little or no meaning in the lives of black folks, especially young people. . . . Indeed, love was mocked. . . . The denigration of love in black experience, across classes, has become the breeding ground for nihilism, for despair.”

It is within that embattled larger landscape that Datcher and Adams grew up, where hardened eyes often meant a locked-up heart. And though in their homes love abounded, attempting to find an approximation outside became an epic-worthy journey.

A Window Into the Male Psyche

Garnering praise from writers as diverse as Quincy Troupe and Junot Diaz, Datcher’s story is a raw truth-telling. It’s a window on the male psyche for women attempting to understand the men they want to love. It’s shared testimony for young men who struggle with the weight and purpose of the armor that they carry, the protective layers that keep them from getting hurt--on the street and off.

“Of the 30 families that lived in our eastside Long Beach apartment building during the mid-’70s, I never saw a father living in a household. I never even saw one visit,” he writes in a forthright voice. “We rarely talked about our missing fathers. Instead, we poured our passion into our skateboards, our marbles and our mothers.” Even still, he allows a peek behind the tough-kid facade, “Quiet as it’s kept, many young black men have . . . picket fence dreams.”

Survival mode was default. And the “fences” that Datcher, 33, raises have multiple functions: fences shield emotion, they determine borders, they protect what is mine and ultimately--with trust--what is ours.

“At 27, 28 years old, I was still rife with contradictions. Still trying to look for a father. Looking was an obsession,” says Datcher. “By 1995, I began to think about exactly what it was I was looking for.” It was so much more.

Up until then, Datcher put all of his energy into his craft--when he wasn’t clubbing. He’d survived the lure of the streets. He’d put himself through college and graduate school (UC Berkeley and UCLA, respectively), despite little encouragement from high school teachers--a psychic bruise that stays with him.

His plan was set in stone: to dedicate his life, as a writer, to raising the bar, shattering expectations. “To defend and better represent black men.” That was until a protracted moment of passion almost rendered it all into shatters. A casual liaison forced Datcher to learn quickly what it took to be a stand-up man. Even if that image was a composite based on the men--young and old--who, in their successes and mistakes, were all he had to go by.

Adams’ novel also takes on love’s more treacherous landscapes. A dull ache of a book, “Resurrecting Mingus” is a lingering look at the wilting life of Mingus Browning. A success on the face--good job, nice car, comfortable home--Mingus struggles with trusting and loving--not just others--but primarily herself.

We meet Mingus at the close of yet another interpersonal disaster. Fed up with players and false princes, Mingus’ latest ruin coincides with the dissolution of her parents’ 35-year marriage--her black father leaving her white mother for another woman--a black one. Mingus, like her mother, finds herself navigating uncertain borders--forgetting where the relationships stop and she begins.

Growing up in San Bernardino, Adams was showered with books by her father. But, unlike Datcher, she was intent on studying law. Still, in her spare hours she wrote and recited poems. She shared them like secrets with only her sister and close friends. Her full attention was focused on her studies at Cal State Fullerton and her job with Xerox and stints as a reporter. “I was content,” she remembers.

So she thought.

She found herself dogged by these imagined characters and their predicaments--particularly Mingus’ mother, M’Dea. “When I started to push it down, they came back up,” Adams recalls, “I started being awakened by it. So I just started writing these character sketches. Getting them out on the page.”

Exploring the Intricacies of Love

After a set of rejections, revisions, rejections, a new agent--Datcher’s--read it and quickly shopped it around. It was Dominick Anfuso, vice president and senior editor at Free Press, who was the highest bidder. “She showed signs of real talent. There were just so many powerful themes. A professional black woman who is lost. Plus these sub-issues--biracial identity, alcoholism--it just worked on a variety of levels. Most of us are confused in our skin. I saw an audience for her, and it was broad. And I think she’s got a great career ahead of her.”

For both Adams and Datcher, these explorations of how people bump up against one another and either drift or connect, the pain they inflict in order to protect themselves stems some from personal experience. And their relationship, to both of their initial discomfort, occupies the last third of Datcher’s book. Full of hurdles and missteps, it is a testament to possibility.

“There’s a certain amount of stress to represent what I recall as the truth. And sharing someone else’s life,” Datcher says. “I made the decision about writing a memoir; she didn’t.”

Set up by a friend of a friend, Adams recalls, “I’d prayed to God, show me a sign that he was someone of substance. We argued over the phone the first time. About religion.”

Datcher, who, like Adams, had a busy life--his freelance sewn together by book projects--wasn’t looking to get hooked up for the long term, or so that was the way he was spinning things. “He told me that he was really focused on his work,” says Adams.

“I was. That wasn’t a line. I was,” he leans forward not a challenge, but more of a point of clarification.

Adams smiles. “I was too.”

What was just a “let’s get acquainted drink” turned into months of Saturdays together. The usually loquacious poet was for the first time without words, the composed writer-dancer transfixed by the fluidness and honesty of a smile. Datcher proposed to her in the form of a seven-page poem in front of his World Stage family--four Februarys ago.

In “Raising Fences,” Datcher writes, “When I began to bring Jenoyne to Leimert Park, we both noticed people staring at us. It was when we began to notice the stares of the grandmothers, the Audubon seventh-graders, their teachers, that we realized it wasn’t simply about . . . rudeness. There are so few young black couples walking through the neighborhood, so little black love on public display. We were an oddity.”

In the most romantic sense, says friend and World Stage Workshop member Peter J. Harris, who also hosts a weekly radio poetry show, “Inspiration House,” on KPFK-FM (90.7), “It’s a great love story. Watching Michael has made me take some risks in my own life. . . . I think that he has a deeper vocabulary of what it means to be in love. I think that they symbolize a return to eloquence. Let’s make some perfection together.”

In these days before he’s set to go out on tour, sharing the details of his life, “I’m a little stressed out,” he admits, but tries to stay focused on the greater good. “Black men have done a good job at surviving. But not necessarily thriving.” Both these books are about the power of believing in someone. “I call myself an activist,” says Datcher. “I’m trying to activate change when I go out into the world. But I tell the brothas, the best kind of activism you can do now is meet someone and fall in love and start a family. Now that’s grass-roots. ‘Find you a woman and be good for her.’ That the most grass-roots activism you can do.”

* Michael Datcher will read at “Seeking Eldorado: African Americans in California,” Saturday at the Gene Autry Museum. (323) 667-2000.

* Jenoyne Adams will read at Eso Won on Monday at 7 p.m. and Datcher on April 3 at 7 p.m. (323) 294-0324.