Funeral Arrangements...for Reginald Lockett

Reginald Lockett's service will be held on Thursday, May 22 @ 11 a.m. at Bebe Memorial at 3900 Telegraph Ave. Oakland, California. He will be interned at Rolling Hills in El Sobrante. The repast at the Black New World following the burial about 4 p.m. Guests are asked to bring a dish for the repast and a poem, art, a song to share, etc.. The gathering is to be celebratory.

The Black New World. is at 836 Pine St. Oakland CA 94607 Oakland: Jack London Square (510) 451-4661, www.BlackNewWorld.com. You can send condolences to Reggie's family's house: 3717 Market St., Oakland, CA, 94608

Reginald's Daughter Maya Lomasi Lockett can be reached (510) 798-8201.

This is from an email exchange Reginald and I had a couple of years ago.

February 16, 2006

Wanda:

This is just a note to thank you for the wonderful introduction and being instrumental in having me as a guest at College of Alameda. I really appreciate it. Here's a poem by Derek Walcott that speaks to all human beings:

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.


Derek Walcott

Bio
Reginald Lockett was born Reginald Franklin Matthis in Berkeley to Rebecca Sue Matthis. To this day I do not know who my biological father was, or is. It is said he was a West Indian merchant marine or a US Navy sailor from somewhere back east. My biological mother left me in the care of three aunts--Alyce Lockett, Marzetta Stearns, and Argie Sloan--and moved to Los Angeles. I was later adopted by Jewell and Alyce Lockett who I always thought were my actual parents. I began school at Pearl Harbor Elementary School in Honolulu. I was later shipped off to Marion County in Northeast Texas to live with my grandmother Sudie Matthis. I attended a segregated country school Macedonia where a great-uncle Levi Matthis was principal. My great-grandfather Paul Matthis, a former slave, was one its founders and later served as principal. His wife Angela was also a former slave and a daughter of her former master who sent her to a normal school to become a teacher. The idea to write about fried bologna sandwiches was inspired by what we were served for lunch. Many southerners consider this a delicacy. I returned to California after my grandmother passed and attended Longfellow Elementary where I was placed in a special education class because white folks assumed black kids from the South lacked scholastic skills. I attended Hoover Junior High School and McClymonds. I earned a BA and MA from San Francisco State University. It was at Hoover that I fell in love with the word and became a voracious reader. James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" was the first book by an author of African descent I ever read. Yes, I spent the money on the book, not the Levi's. This lead to the discovery of other Black authors. I was a member of the BSU at SFSU where I would read my poetry with Marvin X, Amiri Baraka, Askia M. Toure, and Sonia Sanchez. My work has been published in over 50 anthologies and periodicals, and I have published 4 books of poetry. As the editor the KPFA Folio in 1978, I had access to an IBM composer that was used to type news print and other graphic arts material. I learned how to use many of the tools and decided to produce a chapbook to sell at open readings. I lived in San Francisco then and hung out with the boyfriend of Diane Brown, sister of Santana bassist David Brown, who dated Cyn Zarco. Cyn gave me a call to inquire about what I was doing. She knew how to produce books because she worked with Ishmael Reed and Al Young producing "Yardbird". Out of this encounter Jukebox Press was born.