Major Talent 

"Yeah," concurs his wife. "You put a little of everything…"

"A little of everything."

Jackson has always existed in at least two worlds at once. He experienced firsthand W.E.B. Du Bois' famously controversial theory of "double-consciousness," which reflected a time when black self-image and white America were at odds. Even though conditions have changed, that duality remains, says Jackson. You have "always a sense of yourself as part of the larger culture, but [you're] also very much aware of your identity, your racial identity."

Aptly enough, one of the poems in Leaving Saturn is entitled "Between Two Worlds." It's one of several -- including the title piece -- written in the persona of jazz musician and self-styled extraterrestrial Sun Ra. His personal cosmology embraced galaxies, but in this poem the musician is confined to the space behind a curtain so that his band won't be seen by the white audience in a 1940s nightclub. Jackson uses the image as an acute metaphor for double consciousness: Sun Ra trapped by the system, but sailing on "Wind synths, organ/ Music. My Myth Space Lab, next best/ Thing to a crystal ball."

Jackson's writing soars whenever he writes about music. It's in his blood: one of his grandfathers collected jazz records and took him to see Lionel Hampton; his father's mother danced in the Cotton Club and dated Cab Calloway. Jackson recognizes, as Sun Ra did, that music can be a way to pierce the curtain of identity.

Still, Jackson has never found much escape from the sense of "betweenness," even within black communities. Raised in North Philadel-phia by his maternal grandparents until age 8, he was acutely aware that his family's economic status was different from his neighbors'. "You say North Philadelphia, most people think impoverishment. That wasn't my experience, but that was the experience of my friends -- and that's where the self-consciousness comes into play."

His parents were separated, but both had solid middle-class jobs, and they lived in prosperous black neighborhoods. The contrast with North Philly "was very difficult for me," he says, "because although the faces were the same, the pockets weren't the same." Even-tually, Jackson's mother remarried and he moved back in with her.

He remembers the way people reacted to "The Cosby Show." "Most people in this country thought no way in the world could there be a household like that, black lawyer and a black physician… My best friend in high school, both of his parents were physicians, so when I'd come across people at Temple who'd say that could never happen, I'd say, ‘Are you kidding?'"

He has been the target of such skepticism himself. Working in the computer lab at Temple, Jackson was playing an e-version of Jeopardy with another student, who was white. "The Final Jeopardy question was very simple: ‘The art movement that sounds like a call to a parent.' He didn't know it was Dada, I got the answer correct, and he was furious. I've never seen someone so angry. He wanted to know, how did I know that? It just boggled his mind that I could potentially have that kind of awareness." He accused Jackson of having played the game before -- the assumption being that there was no other way he could have known the answer.

"It's about accepting intelligence," Jackson says. "We marvel at it."

Who marvels?

"Specifically white people," he responds first, but later adds that he's encountered suspicion of black intellectualism among blacks, too.

"I think we're all implicated." Jackson's high school memories include specific instances when he was challenged for being different. Once, a student tore his headphones from his head to find out what he was listening to. "It

wasn't Chuck D, it was The Cure, and it was like, ‘What is this?'" Another time, on the bus to a game with his basketball team, a teammate stole Jackson's journal and began reading his poetry aloud. Everyone laughed. It was so embarrassing that he stopped writing for a while. "I felt exposed; it was my interior self being read back to me. That was the other thing -- it sounded weird to me, like, ‘Who is this guy?'"

Now Jackson's son is being assailed by similarly confused attitudes about blackness. Langston is 11; his mother, who is black, lives in Philadelphia. Langston has lived with his father in Oregon, in New Orleans, where Jackson got his first professor's job, in Provincetown, and now in Burling-ton. The boy is polite and articulate, and his teachers love the knowledge of the world he brings to the classroom. But Langston came home one day and said that he'd heard a rumor that a friend had accused him of trying to act "more black than what he really is."

"What is that?" asks Jackson. "What is acting black?"

"My mind spins," adds Johanson. "So this kid [who is white] is claiming knowledge of blackness. He has the understanding."

"He has a blackometer!" Jackson says, laughing.

They can laugh about it, but Jackson's been measured by the blackometer, himself -- been accused of being an Oreo, he says, by other blacks. He was refused service in a black barbershop in a poor section of New Orleans. It's as much an issue of class as race, yet the irony is that his poetry is celebrated for its vivid evocation of inner-city black culture.

"I'm exhausted, to be honest, talking about race," Jackson says.

But he can't ignore indignities that involve his son -- like the classmate's comment, or the J.C. Penney incident. Jackson complained to management that he and Langston had been the victims of minority profiling, and his colleagues at UVM petitioned the store to condemn the practice. Corporate lawyers called Jackson to make sure he was mollified.

Otherwise, Burlington is more likely to offer a surfeit of brotherhood. Johanson reminds him, "You came back from the health-food store, first week or two that we were here, and you were like, ‘Every white person had to say hi to me. I mean, I love alternative spaces, but jeez, I'm tired of smiling!"

Neither he nor Johanson feels that being an interracial couple is a particularly big deal. "Both of us are interested in working through issues of sexuality as well as race as well as class as well as you name it," says Johanson. "It's a fascination of mine as a counselor and a human being, and of his as a poet and a human being. But in the relationship I don't remember that ever coming into play."

Their baby, 18-month-old James Welden Romare Jackson, is adorable and, no surprise, highly verbal in a screechy kind of way. His name pays tribute to African-American cultural history through the black artist Romare Bearden, and to Johanson's Minnesota roots. James and Welden are names from her family tree. It's a nicely symbiotic coincidence that the name also recalls James Weldon Johnson, a venerated figure in early 20th-century black poetry.

Like any writer, Jackson must contend with literary ancestors. He is particularly attuned to the canon of great 20th-century African-American writers: Johnson, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden. A course he taught last fall traced a path from these poets through the Black Arts movement of the '60s -- Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni -- through to the pioneers of hip-hop.