INTERVIEW WITH ABIGAIL ROSEN (McGRATH)

I came to be in NYC during the 60's because I still lived at home. I was born there. My mother was the Harlem Renaissance poet, Helene Johnson, and she was raised in Boston, Massachusetts. Actually, she and her cousin Dorothy West, the Harlem Renaissance novelist and short story writer, were raised together as if they were sisters. They did not know that they were cousins until they entered the Girls Latin High School in Boston. They won a contest in Challenge, a literary magazine at the time, and the prize was a trip to NYC. Once my mom saw Harlem, she never looked back. Harlem was the place to be and my mom made a big deal about my being born in New York City. So when, almost nine months pregnant, she moved down south to everybody's consternation to have a child born in Harlem.

Of all the writers during this period, my mother was the only one to have a child, It is so strange that she should spend her youth during the flapper period in NYC when life was filled with wild abandonment and that I should spend mine during the so called hippy period in NYC - talk about wild abandonment! Like mirror reflections only the mirrors were Coney Island fun house mirrors. So, here we have a poet mom raising a child on her own, not in NYC as was her dream, but in Brooklyn as was her reality. We are talking educated poor here - think about it, how many wealthy poets do you know? It is easier to get a job as a meteorologist than as a poet.