Keeping House

Marina Magloire writes on the Clifton House, the Pamoja workshop, revolution, and refuge, in an essay from LARB Quarterly no. 47: “Security.”

By Marina MagloireDecember 22, 2025

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This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 47: Security. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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IN THE FALL OF 1980, Sidney Clifton watched a white auctioneer standing on the porch of her foreclosed family home. As he took bids from strangers and neighbors, Sidney couldn’t help but think that the scene was reminiscent of a slave auction. That house on Talbot Road in Baltimore’s Windsor Hills neighborhood had held her, her five younger siblings, and her parents for 12 years. Before moving to the house in 1968, the family had moved or been evicted from multiple homes, and Sidney had attended six different schools. On Talbot Road, Sidney finally felt as though she had room to breathe. The auction felt like a direct violation—the house was, almost literally, being sold out from under her feet. Hearing this story made me think of a line in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). After the slave catchers enter Baby Suggs’s house to re-enslave her daughter-in-law and grandchildren, she keeps repeating, “[T]hey came in my yard.” And here were all these people, standing right there, in Sidney’s yard.

As Sidney watched, she tried to detach herself from feeling. Wow, auctioneers really do talk that fast, she thought. Her mother, the famed poet Lucille Clifton, had tried desperately to keep the house afloat. Despite being the poet laureate of the state of Maryland and the author of four lauded poetry collections at the time, Clifton was financially overwhelmed. In order to protect her husband and children, she bore much of the burden of struggling to feed, clothe, and house her family of eight alone. “Her instinct was to keep secrets and try to fix it herself,” says Sidney.

In the aftermath of the foreclosure, the large family had to split up and live temporarily in different places. In many ways, the family never got over the shock of losing the house. In 2019, on the ninth anniversary of Clifton’s death, Sidney woke up with a strong urge to contact the current owner of the lost house on Talbot Road. “I was told,” she says, describing the dream. The owner was shocked: the house had just gone on the market that day. Later, after she had bought the house back, Sidney “woke up with another directive: I know what this house wants to be.” And what the house wanted to be, it seemed, was closer to what it had been in the 1970s: a place to breathe. But this time, instead of a family home, it would be a dedicated space for Black artists.

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The 1970s, the decade when the Clifton family lived on Talbot Road, was a time of fierce desire for Black autonomy. In contrast to the systems of white patronage and allyship that had underwritten cultural movements like the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, movements in the 1970s sought security in self-reliance. White funding made Black people vulnerable to the financial whims and ideological pressure of outsiders. Langston Hughes describes the dangers of overreliance on white funding in his retrospective account of the Harlem Renaissance, which was effectively defunded after the stock market crash in 1929: “We were no longer in vogue, anyway, we Negroes. […] Colored actors began to go hungry, publishers politely rejected new manuscripts, and patrons found other uses for their money.” In 1967, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee faced cuts from white funders in retaliation for pro-Palestine articles published in its newsletter. No matter how talented the Black person or organization, white people’s money often came with strings attached.

In what became known as the Black Arts Movement, Black cultural workers and activists of the late 1960s and 1970s sought to learn from the lessons of the past by creating Black-run initiatives that barreled toward Third World revolution without waiting for the support of white people. “At this time in history our struggle is a struggle for liberation of the lands and resources of our people,” the Black New Orleans–based playwright John O’Neal wrote about the stakes in 1971:

[W]hile the struggle for liberation is revolutionary (will necessarily come to revolution), most of us are not now engaged in the work of revolution, but […] the programs and projects we undertake are valid only insofar as they are vehicles for our contributions to the struggle of our people for total liberation.

Pending revolution, the programs and projects of the Black Arts Movement shouldered the heavy burden of Black people’s liberation. All-Black theater ensembles cropped up in Harlem, New York; Jackson, Mississippi; New Orleans; and Miami, showcasing plays from across the diaspora. Black-run presses such as Broadside Press and Third World Press produced affordable, widely disseminated books containing the cutting edge of Black poetry and political thought, and serial Black-run publications like Negro Digest (later retitled Black World) offered a Pan-Africanist perspective on current events. This is to say nothing of the untold living rooms, parks, pop-ups, bookstores, and now-defunct community centers that housed our collective aspirations for sovereignty. Most of these spaces no longer exist, and the ones that have taken their place are often just as ephemeral as their predecessors.

As a Black writer, I find it difficult to imagine the 1970s, with its wealth of physical and literary spaces in which we could be ourselves. Places where we could actively disagree without having to worry about looking raggedy in front of white folk. To be messy, nuanced, and complex without an audience betting on our failure or fetishizing our success. The loss of these spaces is nothing less than a loss of ourselves. The goal was and still is: no one comes in our yard unless explicitly invited. But the question remains, now as in the 1970s: For the descendants of people deemed property, can any yard fully belong to us?

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Black women writers, even famous and well-respected ones, are often subject to the same housing insecurity as any other Black person in this country, whose history is marked by segregation, redlining, predatory home loans, and unchecked gentrification. These structures are a centuries-long assault on Black well-being and autonomy, and it often takes generations for one Black family even to begin to undo the damage.

The house on Talbot Road is a rare example of reclamation. Since 2021, the Clifton House has functioned as a sanctuary for artists, especially those of African descent. It has run poetry workshops, residencies, and talks by renowned authors. The Clifton House has established itself as a community-accountable institution, with much of its programming geared toward expanding arts access in Baltimore. However, since its initial grants from the V-Day Foundation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Mellon Foundation, the Clifton House has entered the precarious of world of incessant fundraising in order to survive. As we have learned from the literary boom and bust of the 1920s and the rise and fall of DEI in the 2020s, short-term funding can create a different kind of vulnerability if it is subject to the fads of a particular philanthropic moment.

Camille Bacon, the co-founder and editor in chief of Jupiter, a small Black arts magazine founded in January 2024, is intimately familiar with the obstacles and obligations of grant applications. Private funders, she says, “want to see 18 years of organizational history before they give you $10,000.” Jupiter is inspired by the radical internationalist criticism of Black World magazine (1970–76), as well as by the “literary activism” of Black women editors at more mainstream publishing houses and magazines in the 1970s and 1980s, like Toni Morrison at Random House and Cheryll Greene at Essence magazine. There are now few contemporary, Black-run publications that have achieved both the wide readership and the political engagement of earlier Black publications. Essence magazine still exists and still boasts a large Black audience, but its numerous articles on style and beauty are a far cry from the magazine’s former mission. In a 1983 essay, June Jordan urged Essence readers to throw “arsenic in [de Massa’s] soup.” In 1988, Essence organized a writers’ retreat in the Bahamas that gathered some of the most celebrated Black women writers of the day, including Clifton, Toni Cade Bambara, Octavia Butler, and Sonia Sanchez. Camille cites Atlanta-based Burnaway and Philadelphia-based Seen as two small magazines that are, like Jupiter, trying against all odds to publish rigorous criticism by and about Black artists.

For Camille, there is an intuitive connection between a home and a publication. “A home at its best is a sanctuary, is a place to return to at the end of a long day, where you can arrive at your own language and your own self-conception,” Camille says. This aspiration can apply to the space of a magazine (stewarded by a careful editorial team) as well as the space of a house (watched over by a loving parent); under ideal circumstances, both can be places where there are people who know who you are and where you come from, places where you do not have to explain yourself or justify your own belonging. The success of places like the Clifton House has provided some sense of security in an otherwise precarious funding landscape, but for Camille, the general scarcity of Black autonomous spaces reflects “[t]he way we have been metaphysically placed in this position of not feeling like we deserve a place that feels like home.”

In June 2025, the Clifton House held a weekend celebration of Clifton’s life and legacy starting on her birthday, co-sponsored by Jupiter. The gathering was called “All of My Bones Remember,” after the following lines in Clifton’s 1972 poem “africa,” which read:

home 

oh 

home 

the soul of your 

variety 

all of my bones 

remember

This is a knowing deeper than words. Clifton remembers that to be home is to be within a polyvocal continent whose variety feels almost incomprehensible in comparison to this country’s circumscribed notions of Blackness.

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The Clifton House is a handsome, three-story house built in the early 20th century, complete with a wraparound porch, two kitchens, and multiple bathrooms. When you walk into the house, you are greeted by a mantel lined with black-and-white photographs of the generations of the Clifton family: Lucille as a baby, three of her children, her mother smiling in a lawn chair. Small offerings including flowers, a candle, a glass of water, and a bottle of jasmine perfume give the display the air of an altar. A large mirror behind the photographs reflects your own face among those of the Cliftons. It is a welcoming house, perfect for a large family (the Clifton children once fit comfortably two to a bedroom), but it is just as well suited for entertaining.

Gathered in the living room this past June, within view of the dining room where Clifton wrote many of her poems, I could feel the house as it must have been during the Clifton’s legendary gatherings in the 1970s: teeming with Black artists and organizers talking late into the night, the smell of smoke from Fred Clifton making burgers on the grill, the muted sounds of Bill Withers singing “Lovely Day” in the background. I was struck by how many artists were from Baltimore, and by how many Baltimoreans had come to enjoy the slate of panels, musical performances, and poetry readings. Joyce J. Scott, a Baltimore-based artist who knew the Clifton family when they lived on Talbot Road, considered the city’s changes over the last 50 years and argued, “I don’t believe we’ve lost a thing. I just believe we’re wearing different armor. […] How do you lose your DNA? You do not.”

The poet Nikky Finney was also in attendance and, peering sternly over her rounded glasses, addressed the audience: “You won’t find this in a university. What I feel is that the future and the now is this place. […] We keep waiting for some kind of divine intervention.” The current presidential administration’s attacks on the people and programs it has labeled as “DEI” did not come as a surprise to Black-run organizations. Black communities know well that funding from universities and government entities can be fickle at best, duplicitous at worst. Far from being spaces of last resort, living rooms can be deeply transformative in ways that institutional spaces—even those with money and resources—cannot be.

In 1982, responding to the heartbreaking conditions of war raging in Lebanon, the poet June Jordan wrote, “I need to talk about living room / where the talk will take place in my language.” I heard the language of the living room in the Clifton house. It sounded like variety, like a language whose speakers were not measured by productivity, clout, credentials, or other markers of success. It was a different language from the one that might weigh people down beyond the house’s capacious porch. If you have a living room, Finney implied, you can create this atmosphere. And, one day soon, you may have to.

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Lucille Clifton was not the only writer whose living room could be a place of refuge. Clifton’s contemporary, the fiction writer Toni Cade Bambara, was also using her home in Atlanta as a community space in the late 1970s 
and early 1980s. Though the two writers were not close, there is evidence that Bambara and Clifton felt a part of the same community—Black women writers who wrote about working-class Black people. In 1972, Clifton provided a blurb praising Bambara’s first collection of short stories, writing:

It is so good to be reading about real Black people who are doing what Black people really do; that is, dealing with life. She has captured it all, how we really talk, how we really are; and done it with both love and respect. I laughed until I cried, then laughed again. I loved it! She must love us very much.

Like Clifton’s house, Bambara’s is perched at the top of a hill carved with a set of stone steps, giving it an air of privacy and fortification despite its location in the middle of Atlanta. In the house on Simpson Avenue (alternatively known as Simpson Street or Road, now renamed Joseph E. Boone Boulevard), Bambara hosted a writer’s workshop called Pamoja, Kiswahili for “unity.” The workshop began in 1979, when one of Bambara’s syllabi was rejected by Spelman College for its “radical” content and she decided to teach the class out of her living room. Pamoja was 20 people sitting on the floor: nurses, bus drivers, students who didn’t yet know what their lives would become—including a young Nikky Finney. That living room made things possible that were not possible in a university classroom: yearslong community-building with a group of people, writing without the pressure of grades or degrees.

Finney’s memories are some of the only written records we have of the Pamoja community. In a 2014 essay, Finney describes Sunday afternoon gatherings that were so absorbing they sometimes lasted into the evening. She also describes community accountability beyond the workshop: one night, at 2:00 a.m., Bambara enlisted Finney to help one of the workshop members escape from a violent family member. The woman brought two pillowcases of belongings to Bambara’s house, where she stayed for several months. In another essay, Finney recalls Bambara helping a local mechanic fill out housing paperwork after he approached her and asked, “Are you that writer lady?” Rather than limiting the scope of her focus to literary writing only, “she gave him what she gave all of us, without a drop of fear, the address of her Simpson Avenue house.” For Finney, Bambara’s example challenged the idea that “writers and artists avoided quotidian tasks and saved themselves for the real work that was always done back at their desks or in their studios.” Bambara’s writing was, after all, a call to practice the Black feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist values she espoused.

Alongside Pamoja, Bambara had also co-founded the Southern Collective of African American Writers (SCAAW) in Atlanta in 1978. It was simultaneously a writer’s guild, a union, and a popular education outlet to cultivate the creative aspirations of Black Southerners who may have been interested in writing but were daunted by the publishing industry. SCAAW held regular meetings, sent a delegation of writers to Martinique and Jamaica, and held a yearly conference with workshops on everything from dream journaling to finding a literary agent. Though the collective made use of university spaces and the Neighborhood Arts Center, many of the organization’s readings and receptions (including a disco party) were held at Bambara’s house on Simpson Avenue. According to the organizational history authored by Bambara,

the published writers’ mystique provokes a dichotomy between the published writer and the non-published writer which inhibits both from sharing insight and information vital to their mutual, as well as community, development […] the tendency to exalt the writer as an individual, to separate him/her from the community discourages the community from identifying and using that resource (the writer) as a mouthpiece.

For Bambara, writing was a public service, a way cultural workers could make revolution irresistible. Writing was a way to solve community issues, not to escape them through fame and fortune.

In 1986, Bambara moved to Philadelphia. The house on Simpson Avenue was rented, not owned, and it left the Bambara family when they left Atlanta. Yet, similarly to the Clifton children, Bambara’s descendants are returning to the legacy of their ancestor’s work. Her granddaughter, Zoe Bambara, works as a full-spectrum doula, as a childbirth educator for incarcerated people, and as the community and volunteer coordinator for the only abortion fund in Georgia. In her limited spare time, she is also developing the Toni Cade Bambara Community Arts Center, which has offered film screenings, book clubs, and community meals since 2023. Unlike her grandmother’s house, Zoe’s Atlanta-based community center is nomadic, hosted by other time-honored Black women’s spaces such as Spelman College’s Women’s Research and Resource Center and Yes Please Bookhouse. Like her grandmother, though, Zoe embraces the grassroots nature of her budding project. “Your organizing should never start or end at an institution,” she says, “especially one that sends you W-2s.”

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Imagine starting an educational arts space in your own living room. Think about the labor, the scheduling, the sacrifice of privacy. Exhaustion and burnout are daily realities for the people trying to hold small and underfunded community initiatives together. Camille Bacon argues that many Black women have been socialized into accepting this exhaustion: “I will make sure everyone around me is good while I’m crumbling.” Perhaps this is also why so many Black community spaces have been unsustainable over long periods of time.

Toni Cade Bambara’s 1980 novel The Salt Eaters addresses this issue head-on. “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” a faith healer asks a burnt-out community organizer in the opening sentence. The novel contends with the balance between personal wellness and community responsibility, and yet some of its lines have become decontextualized, being used to suggest that Black women should discard activism in favor of self-care. This is a constant frustration for Zoe Bambara, who feels as if this is an effort to censor her grandmother’s legacy. “If you’re going to mention her name, it makes no sense to me why you’re not advocating for Palestine, Sudan, Congo, incarcerated people,” says Zoe.

Many of Bambara’s most quoted—and often misunderstood—lines deal with the topic of revolution. Another highly decontextualized quote comes from Bambara’s introduction to the 1970 anthology The Black Woman, where she wrote that “revolution begins with the self, in the self.” This has been used to defang revolution, presenting it as individual wellness rather than as collective action. But Bambara also said: 
“As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible.” Taken together, these two quotes show revolution as a dialectic between self and the “oppressed people” to which one belongs. Revolution cannot be dependent on a single body. Making revolution irresistible means showing others what it might feel like to live in a postrevolutionary society where basic needs are met and no single person is sacrificed to the needs of their family or community.

For Bambara, this process began with the self—though, crucially, it didn’t end there. Nikky Finney recalls that Bambara gave the writers at Pamoja this advice: “Y’all spending too much time cleaning your house when you should be sitting at your desk.” Zoe Bambara and her mother have inherited her grandmother’s priorities. Zoe sleeps with pens and notepads, as well as pots and pans from eating hurried meals in bed. “The work comes first. […] There’s a lot of stuff that could be done,” she says. She views “community care as self-care.” These words and actions made me think of a scene in The Salt Eaters in which Bambara describes the role of community in healing an individual:

[S]ometimes a person held on to sickness with a fiercesomeness that took twenty hard-praying folk to loosen. So used to being unwhole and unwell, one forgot what it was to walk upright and see clearly, breathe easily, think better than was taught, be better than one was programmed to believe—so concentration was necessary to help a neighbor experience the best of herself or himself.

For Black women trained in self-sacrifice, it is often easy to forget that your neighbors want you to be whole and will help you. Revolution and care, as conceived by Bambara, are a mutual font of energy flowing into and out of an individual.

Bambara dedicated The Salt Eaters to her mother, “Helen Brent Henderson Cade Brehon[,] who in 1948, having come upon me daydreaming in the middle of the kitchen floor, mopped around me.” Here we see a Black mother teaching a Black child that her imagination is as valuable as the day-to-day exigencies of domestic work. That Black child grew into a Black woman who taught others how to mop around each other—to give each other and themselves space to daydream.

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In keeping with her grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s legacies, Zoe Bambara believes that, “whether you’re a bus driver, a drug dealer, a revolutionary, wherever you are in life, you should be able to be in these spaces and dream what liberation looks like for our people.” Which is why she hopes to someday house the Toni Cade Bambara Community Arts Center in a physical space like the Cliftons’ home.

Describing the Clifton House, Sidney Clifton says: “It’s not a just space, it’s also a movement.” The creation of physical gathering spaces for Black people is not a passive gesture; it is a political belief in the ability of Black people to determine our own approaches to healing and supporting our people. Camille Bacon, who also dreams of a brick-and-mortar space for Jupiter, sees hyperlocal initiatives as an important strategy on the longer road to a more egalitarian world. “It reminds me of the work of tending to an herb garden rather than tending to a huge forest,” she says, “It helps us be more precise […] and specific about who you’re in service to, and it helps us to actualize our mission with more care.”

Shared spaces guard against the individualism that being a “writer” (or an artist, or a teacher, or an organizer, or any number of titles chosen and bestowed upon our personal pursuits) can breed. Unlike the timid hand-raising of a classroom or the vociferous approbations of social media commentary, Talbot Road and Simpson Avenue mobilized communities, breaking down the hierarchy between producing and consuming knowledge. In a communal space, you know who you are accountable to. You are confronted daily with joys, sorrows, and contradictions. You may not know how to solve every issue, but at least the attempts will be collective.

There is some encouragement from the metaphysical realm. Lucille Clifton was a person of strong psychic intuitions—in the house on Talbot Road, she developed a practice of spiritual communication with the dead, including her own mother, Thelma. Just as Sidney “was told” to ask about the house in 2019, Clifton began channeling in the summer of 1976 because “something told” her to get out the Ouija board. In an archival document dated October 9, 1980, Clifton received a message from Thelma about the house’s foreclosure: “[Y]our house is your house and your life is just beginning and you can’t know what the future will bring because you never know what wonders the world holds especially when it has brought such awful things.” Thelma’s words offer a talisman for the days ahead. They can withhold their money, come into our yards, and exile us from our living rooms, but our house is our house.

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Featured image: Courtesy of the Lucille Clifton Estate.