Episodes
When a Colored Girl Speaks
Southern-born between the ellipses of segregation and desegregation, I journeyed colored, black, and white Americas, ultimately landing as an Ivy League-trained university professor burdened with racial silences of my own. It was a near hypertensive crisis that led me to gather up who I was and what I have become to reclaim the colored girl within.
Southern-born between the ellipses of segregation and desegregation, I journeyed colored, black, and white Americas, ultimately landing as an Ivy League-trained university professor burdened with racial silences of my own. It was a near hypertensive crisis that led me to gather up who I was and what I have become to reclaim the colored girl within.
1. Drylongso: African American vernacular, adopted from the Gullah dialect, means ordinary, customary, plain, or every day. Also, can be used to describe something previously rare becoming commonplace. See also John L. Gwaltney (1993). Drylongso: A self-portrait of Black America. New York: New Press
2. Glossolalia are utterances approximating words and speech, usually produced during states of intense religious experience, as in “speaking in tongues”: Glossolalia. (n.d.).
3. I’m Glad Salvation is Free. Hymn written by Isaac Watts (b. 1674 – d.1748). Performed by Manual Lloyd.
Going Home to Where I Been
I revisit what was, but I do not long for an American past or seek the romanticisms of a segregated ethnic enclave. I go home to places where I been for the same reasons all those people left my Aunt Fannie to be guardian of so many memories—to know I am, and we were.
I revisit what was, but I do not long for an American past or seek the romanticisms of a segregated ethnic enclave. I go home to places where I been for the same reasons all those people left my Aunt Fannie to be guardian of so many memories—to know I am, and we were.
1. Photograph. Boys on basketball court, A.L. Lewis Elementary (Homestead Florida), circa May 1962. (Aunt) Fannie Jenkins Collection, photographer unknown.
2. Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child: Recognized as one of the most well-known Negro (African American) spirituals dating to the era of slavery in the United States.
3. Song. Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child (track 14). Odetta as Carnegie Hall, 1960. Courtesy of Concord Music Group.
The Rich Davises
A generation beyond enslavement and into the twentieth century, my family sought freedom’s promise, something more than the American Dream. Gathered are fragments of stories told on the way of saying something else---stories of nation, family, and the tenaciousness of will.
A generation beyond enslavement and into the twentieth century, my family sought freedom’s promise, something more than the American Dream. Gathered are fragments of stories told on the way of saying something else---stories of nation, family, and the tenaciousness of will.
1. Marion Post Wolcott, an American photographer, was commissioned by the Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information, during the Great Depression, 1938 – 1942. Wolcott, M. P. (2008). The photographs of Marion Post Wolcott. London: Giles.
2. Sea Lion Woman, performed by the sisters Katherine and Christine Shipp. Permissions granted by The Shipp Family. Recorded by folklorist Herbert Halpert on May 13, 1939 in Byhalia, MS for the Library of Congress. See also for more about The Shipp Family see also Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience by Stephen Wade. Published to Illinois Scholarship Online: April 2017
3. Shotgun house, a common southern housing architectural style during the 1920’s, had a rectangular and narrow shape with front and back doors in straight alignment with one another.
4. 1928 Florida hurricane, also known as the Okeechobee Hurricane, was a category 4-5 storm, killed at least 2,500 people in the state, of these nearly 30% were black. Victims were also buried (set afire) in mass graves due to the heat and health considerations. This is also the storm that Zora Neale Hurston references in her book, Their Eyes were Watching God. See also Nicole S. Brochu, Florida’s forgotten storm: 1928 Hurricane.The Sun Sentinel (September 14, 2003).; See Eliot Kleinberg (2016) Black Cloud: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928. Florida Historical Society Press. This was also my aunts' birthday, who was rendered unconscious by flying debris, she was 14 on that day.
5. 1945 Homestead Hurricane hit Homestead Florida on September 15. 1945. Wind gusts up to 150 mph, and sustained winds from 130 mph to 140 mph have been reported.
6.The Great War: World War I or the First World War. Fought in Europe from July 28, 1914 until November 11, 1918, and the United States entered the work in April 1917. It is estimated that 350,00 to 400,00 black men were enlisted in the U.S. Army.
7.The 1918 Flu Epidemic, also known as The Spanish Flu, affected over 500 million people, and global death toll is estimated that between 17 and 50 million globally, and up to 675,000 Americans died. See John M. Berry, The great influenza: The story of the deadliest plague in history. Viking Press (2004).
8.Camp Devens, U.S Army base built in 1917, located in Massachusetts, was at the epicenter of the virulent second wave of the pandemic. See Catherine Arnold, Pandemic: Eyewitness accounts of the greatest medical holocaust in modern history. St. Martin Press (2018). Byerly C. R. (2010). The U.S. military and the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919. Public health reports (Washington, D.C. 1974), 125 Suppl3, 82–91.