All the Songs We Sing Read online

  ALL THE SONGS WE SING

  ALL THE

  Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the

  SONGS

  Carolina African American Writers’ Collective

  WE SING

  EDITED BY LENARD D. MOORE

  BLAIR

  Copyright © 2020 by Lenard D. Moore

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover design by Callie Riek

  Cover art from Ascension by Gordon C. James

  Interior design by April Leidig

  Blair is an imprint of Carolina Wren Press.

  The mission of Blair/Carolina Wren Press is to seek out, nurture, and promote literary work by new and underrepresented writers.

  We gratefully acknowledge the ongoing support of general operations by the Durham Arts Council’s United Arts Fund and a program support grant from the North Carolina Arts Council.

  Publication of this book was made possible in part by a grant from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  ISBN: 978-1-94-946733-8

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020930163

  Contents

  Foreword

  Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Poet Laureate

  Introduction

  Lenard D. Moore

  POETRY

  Pray

  Oktavi Allison

  When I Consider the Open Casket

  Kim Arrington

  Haiku—brown girls, hiking trail

  Valeria Bullock

  An Unrelenting Meal

  Artichoke Pickle Passion: A Sonnet

  Beverly Fields Burnette

  Donny Hathaway

  Christian Campbell

  portrait of pink, or blush

  Adrienne Christian

  The Moment at Hand

  Golden Whistles for Emmett Till

  Woman-Child

  Brown Fedora

  Haiku—sliver of moonlight, rose-laying, springtime farewell, navy blue hearse, wild onions

  L. Teresa Church

  Things My Father Taught Me

  Dear—,

  DéLana R.A. Dameron

  Black Barbie

  Black Lotus

  The Grill Master

  celeste doaks

  What to Eat, What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison

  7 Problems in Pedagogy

  Camille T. Dungy

  That Feeling I Get

  Rise

  Cynthia M. Gary

  The Pictograph Selfie

  A Link Between Worlds

  Ashley Harris

  Annuals and Perennials

  Janice W. Hodges

  All Children Are Our Children

  Janice W. Hodges (The Call) and Afefe Lana Tyehimba (Response)

  Answer

  Love Poem

  Barrage

  Janice W. Hodges

  sons of the dark

  Brian H. Jackson

  Ghazali

  Chantal James

  First Breath

  Out of This World

  My Best Days

  Valjeanne Jeffers

  In a Place Where

  Somebody’s Child

  In My Father’s House

  Patricia A. Johnson

  Father Sound

  Seven Ways of Looking at Black Flowers

  Gullah

  Fred Joiner

  Aftermath

  Because of Emmett Till

  When I Thought of Racism

  Diane Judge

  poet: code’s story

  iset, god and mother

  persephone (call me perse)

  Raina J. León

  Sweetness

  Pollination: Outskirts of Raleigh, NC, 1968

  Haiku—in Dorian’s wake, carved wooden horses, tidal pools on the beach, a single deer, near the ruins

  Sheila Smith McKoy

  Interrogation of Harriet Tubman

  A Reminiscing Daddy

  Bop: Coaching Poets

  Haiku Sequence

  Lenard D. Moore

  Haiku—the dark rock-road

  Mai Bahamian Haiku

  Maiisha L. Moore

  Color Like This

  Deeper Than Skin

  Walking Sepia

  Grace Ocasio

  the ballad of anita hill

  ballad of bertie county

  evie shockley

  Vitals

  Greyhound

  Whole Fish

  Post-Surgery Strength

  Life Alert

  Haiku—spring break, slave museum, plantation tour

  Crystal Simone Smith

  Brother Haints

  North Star Blues

  Rattle Grass at Fort Fisher

  Darrell SCIPOET Stover

  Black Light: To MLK, Jr.

  Sojourner: Daughter of Eden

  Elementary Days

  Gina M. Streaty

  Your David, My Saul

  Tact

  A Few Years In

  Cedric Tillman

  Ashe (So Be It)

  The Dowry

  Legacy of Somebody’s Baby (Beaten and Suspended from a Tree)

  Afefe Lana Tyehimba

  Tired Enough to Fill a River of Sleep

  Blackbirds Listen

  Karen Wade

  Driving Lesson

  New Spring

  Morning Rises

  Jacqueline D. Washington

  The Archeologist: Excavating the Long Green

  The Question of Doctor Isaac Copper

  Isaac Copper I: Why I Am Called Doctor or Minister

  Carole Boston Weatherford

  I Am Black & Comely

  You Da Only Man I Loves, Daddy: Lot’s Daughters

  L. Lamar Wilson

  Haiku—the smell of tomato plants, pale ferns, early frost, water from the sky

  Gideon Young

  FICTION

  Sophia (excerpt from

  Salt in the Sugar Bowl)

  Angela Belcher-Epps

  When the Stars Begin to Fall

  Tracie M. Fellers

  A History of Wanting (excerpt from Fes Is a Mirror)

  Chantal James

  On the Border

  Mélina Mangal

  Sanctuary

  Sheila Smith McKoy

  Tuck Hughes

  Gina M. Streaty

  NONFICTION

  From Dirt

  Camille T. Dungy

  Perennials

  Angela Belcher Epps

  The World Loses Its Former Shape: Caught in the Undertow of Grief

  Chantal James

  Scents and Sensibility: The Loss of Smell Brings an Unexpected Gift

  Bridgette A. Lacy

  An Onslow County Tradition

  Lenard D. Moore

  A Literary Mission Accomplished:

  Twenty-Five Years of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective

  L. Teresa Church

  Afterword. “Report from Part Three”: The Legacy of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective

  Dr. Lauri Scheyer [Ramey], scholar and author of A History of African American Poetry (2019)

  Contributors

  Acknowledgments

  Carolina African American Writers’ Collective Roll Call

  Foreword

  Jaki Shelton Green

  All the Songs We Sing is an expansive spectrum of literary purpose and aesthetics that shine
fiercely. The narrative focus offers a rich social and political history. This particular collection exhibits the genius and skill characteristic of each selected writer’s literary artistry.

  All the Songs We Sing draws us near while pushing us away. This raw, terrifying, necessary, and beautiful book is a rich orchestration of memoir, essays, fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction that bears witness to the hushed songbirds of captivity belonging to a collective past whose future generations sing proud and out loud.

  With literary assertion, this collection unveils and magnifies in several passages what is buried in the chests of black girls and black women who shed so many layers of their scorched wings into word-song. Our minds follow their fire-dust caught inside the writer’s inkwell in an attempt to become more of who they dared themselves to become.

  The pages of this anthology form a sensual map of many tongues offering links to bewitching Moroccan nights and dark dirt roads in unnamed Southern towns that muffle the cries spilling from shotgun houses, wrong turns at the crossroad, and juke-joints that become theatres for too much living gone bad. The reader sits comfortably with the directives of line formations, tenses, and personifications turned upside down, inside out in the vernacular of “knowing the know,” knowing when the writer demands to bow down, stand straight, dodge poisonous arrows, or when it is safe to wade through troubled waters.

  Images such as “Shards of gold flecked / violet split the air” create textured poetic nuance enabling the musicality of form and tension to soar in unison (Jeffers, “First Breath”). All the Songs We Sing conjures place and space where these meticulous scribes pick the bones of dead black men with keen, delicate needles. A presence of the holiness of language roots us up by the elbows and allows us to lean into the truths inside the interconnectedness of sorrow.

  I am grateful for how the poetics provide the powerful back stories of all the stories represented that help us hear them clearer. If we listen intently, we might see how forgiveness becomes the berry’s flavor or how grace chronicles the magnificence of somebody’s God. So much benediction and ancient wailing exist between the spaces. “Tell me again how to be the little gatherer / who accepts offerings for which it did not ask” (Dameron, “Dear—,”).

  Each pause between story, poetics, and telling opens into a field of sanctuary, prayer, and unstitched wounds bearing unbearable holiness. Emmett Till’s restless spirit evokes his hair ablaze with Murray’s Pomade. We do not escape being scratched by the Faultless Starch holding onto his bloodied collar. These words so memorable, yet ordinary and pedestrian, become verbs nailing his name to skin to coffin to southern Augusts that cannot bleach or bear remembrance.

  All the Songs We Sing are new lamentations, praise songs, and litanies offering fresh language inside sonnets, haikus, and stories that bear witness to the juxtaposition of Black existence, Black memory, and all the liminal spaces in-between. “Praise / armed to hold bones, … Past the plunge of need” (Campbell, “Donny Hathaway”). These are offerings, “the anthropology of blush” (Christian, “portrait of pink, or blush”). The hushed sadness locked inside “woman-child gazes past clothes on wire line, / longs to be more child than woman” (Church, “Woman-Child”).

  These diverse genres shape how language transforms the meanings inside the content of how writing matters, but not in the abstract, and not divorced from its social context of time and place. This anthology is not culturally prescriptive. It interacts with the worlds we inhabit and struggle with. Writing that is necessary, meritorious, accessible, and available helps all of humanity to understand the dynamics and insights that are relevant for addressing the unraveling of our larger social realities.

  All the Songs We Sing documents the urgency of protecting the agency of Black voices that reflect our people, politics, social conditions, and subject matter that should be a catalyst for engagement. Some of our deepest perspectives, values, feelings, fears, and aspirations flow through these pages.

  In the words of Joanne V. Gabbin, “whether Gwendolyn Brooks intended it or not, the term furious flower is a stunning metaphor for African American poetry because it implies a literature that is both rageful and resolute in its beauty.”1 This book ushers forth this metaphor and the diverse perspectives that testify to that rich tradition as well as to its ability to provoke thoughtful and critical dialogue.

  The different sections work together as a musical ensemble. There is the subtle riffing, call and response, and surprising thematic differences that demonstrate the culturally unifying potential inherent in the complex forms, rhythms, phrasing, and sensibilities. The selections as a whole are interactive, much like a gallery space in which each work enhances our reading of another.

  All the Songs We Sing is a valuable text that will guide readers to explore literary traditions that are both oral and visual. The artistic identifications with the everydayness, the ordinary, common people, and the natural world presents a cogent analysis of the relationship between poetic personae, characters, and the writers themselves. These poems, stories, essays, and memoirs call into question basic human relationships and how literary constructs are formed and sustained inside the truth—the truth that existence in this world is not always safe and harmonious.

  I am hopeful that All the Songs We Sing will be heralded as an anthology that identifies the diversity and energy of American literature. All the Songs We Sing simultaneously shows how the development of individual voices into the next century contribute to a more inclusive collective.

  Fortunately, these writers will expand into the future and continue to upset the usual anthology posture. I am grateful that Lenard Moore’s editing vision did not have any specific inclination toward the experimental or the formal. In fact, his editing and selection are most interesting where the two actually meet. We find the experimental where it’s not supposed to exist and strong formalist tendencies in the avant-garde. So, the binary is upset, refreshingly irrelevant from the outset.

  The language throughout this anthology is alive and vital, adding something new to the reading experience that escapes the trap of telling the reader how a text should be read. This isn’t a collection of identities. It is a collection of different literary forms and devices that dictate their own boundaries and determine their own fields of influence.

  I am honored to hold space on my shelf, in my classrooms, but more importantly in my heart, for an anthology that is necessarily active, flexible, and fluid, and operates outside the usual canonical rules. Blessings and praises for All the Songs We Sing.

  NOTE

  1. Joanne V. Gabbin, ed., The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 1.

  Introduction

  Lenard D. Moore

  During this third week of spring 2019, as I’m writing this, a news bulletin interrupts the regular TV programming as morning deepens with yellow pine pollen settling everywhere. Soon the anchorman informs us that there has been a massive explosion in Durham, and a building is on fire in the downtown area. Something happens every day locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. Not everything gets reported. The media has to make crucial decisions regarding what to report, how to investigate the facts, and how to make meaning of the truth.

  We poets and writers must also make decisions about what to document. However, there are times when inspiration moves us, when the divine moves us, and when experience moves us. In short, it is not always easy to explain what causes us to write. What we do know is that we must create art with our words. Language is our medium. Somehow we must write about pain, joy, rituals, and celebrations.

  When we write in our language, for us English, we must employ what captures music, the five senses, and a multiplicity of meaning. Then, too, we must be able to employ allusions, symbols, and details. We must become the art that we create, and the art must become us. Everywhere we live and every place we visit becomes a fabric of us. With our fabric, we weave, as if making a tapestry of
North Carolina that extends beyond borders. Yes, North Carolina informs our writing, our outlooks, and ourselves. And yet, we also write about the United States of America and the global community.

  Every day, we live an often painful history. But we must rise above it. Our way of moving onward, even in the midst of tragedy, is by writing with eyes wide open, ears wide open, and minds wide open. We go to our dining room tables, living room couches, and office desks to write. Other times we write in libraries, coffeehouses, classrooms, and music halls. Yet, wherever we write, we take our roots with us, our hometowns, because that is where our writing germinated, blossomed, and yielded poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays. Nevertheless, North Carolina has seasoned this anthology because the writers herein have lived in this great prospering state.

  Although we all employ the English language, there are different styles, different ranges, and different voices in All the Songs We Sing. Within the pages, you will find the traditional style and the modernist approach. There are poetic forms such as bops, kwansabas, minute poems, persona poems, free verse, ballads, haiku, haibun, innovative poems, and so forth. However, we all sing on key, in unison, one accord—a chorus, a choir, if you will. We also collaborate. We tell the story of North Carolina, the story of the United States, the story of America, and the story of the World. But we always find our way back to North Carolina. In these stories/songs, we hope you will learn something about our origin, real and metaphorical.

  What do you infer about the land? What do you infer about the culture? What do you infer about our language? It is important to note that we return to home, though we also write about travel, relationships, art, family, history, music, civil rights, and freedom. What does it mean to work the land, to work in gardens and fields? We trust that answers will surface during your reading of All the Songs We Sing. We also trust that your close listening to our voices will trigger memories. Maybe this literature will whisper like grace notes across the mind. Maybe they will move you into rhythm, into deeper emotions, into greater understanding of the South.

  Here, in the twenty-first century, in the year 2020, All the Songs We Sing celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective (CAAWC). In the beginning, there were false starts in 1992 and 1993, but the CAAWC or “The Collective,” began with regular monthly workshops/meetings at my own home, from August 12, 1995, until May 19, 2001. The people who attended the first meeting were Bennis Blue Lathan, Victor E. Blue, Janice W. Hodges, Brian H. Jackson, Bridgette A. Lacy, and Lenard D. Moore. During those first six years, literary magazines were distributed to the first five participants who attended those meetings. Then we held CAAWC meetings at libraries, cultural centers, bookstores, and other members’ homes. Whoever hosts each CAAWC workshop/meeting teaches the writing workshop: poetry, fiction, or nonfiction.