It's an African word rooted in Nigerian culture that means joy. Watkins felt it more closely reflected the person she wanted to be and how she saw her life.

With her new moniker, Watkins felt empowered to champion the lives of black people in particular and poor people in general, through plays and poetry and bringing disparate segments of the community together.

"She would see things not right, socially or politically, and she would commit," said her son John Watkins. "The things she believed in, she believed in passionately. It wasn't seasonal. She was all in."

Nayo Watkins died this year of lung cancer. She was 68.

Nayo Barbara Malcolm Watkins was born in Atlanta in 1939. Her father worked on the railroad and picked up odd jobs, at factories and once at a mental institution. He told hilarious stories about his exploits, and perhaps it was from him that Watkins inherited her storytelling abilities.

Watkins married and divorced three times and raised eight children, often as a single mom.

During the civil rights movement, Watkins helped register people to vote. She wrote politically tinged poetry that doubled as social activism and moved around in search of jobs that fulfilled her.

In Mississippi, she directed a cultural arts coalition. In Minneapolis, she headed a women's theater. In Durham, which she moved to about 1990, she served as executive director of the Chuck Davis African American Dance Ensemble.

Her poetry and plays focused on race and the lives black people lived.

"A lot of people who go through what black people go through, they give up," said Hollis Watkins Sr., a former husband of Watkins who remained a close friend. "But she didn't want that to happen."

Watkins intertwined her work with her community, creating plays about the history of Durham's Hayti neighborhood and Wake Forest's Dubois High School.

In writing "Hayti Lived Before," Watkins interviewed former residents and sifted through written accounts of life in Hayti, a bustling downtown Durham black business district that was eventually bulldozed to make room for the Durham Freeway.

"One of the most interesting aspects of oral history is that everyone had a Durham and everyone's Durham was different," Watkins told The News & Observer in 1993.

In her play about Dubois High School, Watkins tells the tale of a boy who confronts segregation after his relatives graduated from the all-black school named for the famed black educator, writer and editor W.E.B. DuBois.

A personal cause

More recently, she began ardently preaching awareness of the steep increase in the number of blacks committing suicide. The interest was intensely personal: Ten years ago, on a spring afternoon, her youngest child hung himself from a tree overlooking the baseball and soccer field at Carolina Friends School in Durham. Nyamekye Akil Malcolm -- known as Mekye (pronounced "Mickey") -- was dyslexic, and Watkins thought that sparked his depression.

After getting over the initial shock of losing her 16-year-old son, Watkins turned his death into purpose.

Not one to sit still when wrongs needed righting, Watkins arranged in 2002 for Durham to host the fifth annual conference of the National Organization for People of Color Against Suicide. She established the Mekye Center, which works with families, educators and children to give children with learning disabilities -- Watkins called them "learning differences" -- more of a voice.

Watkins knew that sometimes, children who learn differently respond well to art. So the Mekye Center has not only tutors but artists who work with children.

At home, Watkins kept Mekye's memory alive with representations of butterflies. Like his mother, Mekye had been an artist. Where Watkins wrote plays and poems, her son sketched butterflies. She had butterfly calendars in her office, a butterfly ceramic ornament outside her door, a butterfly welcome mat.

Nia Wilson, a friend of Watkins', met her through a friend, another poet, who told Wilson to sit at Watkins' feet and absorb her wisdom. Together, they would sit on Watkins' couch and talk.

"I learned about being a servant of the community, about being real, about struggle," Wilson said.

But the talk was not always abstract. Despite her vision of cultural and artistic wholeness, Watkins had a determined, down-to-earth persona.

"She was a real woman who smoked cigarettes and cussed and laughed and cried," Wilson said.

Nayo Watkins is survived by seven children and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

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