—W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of the Sorrow Songs”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Family Tree
Epigraph
Song
I
Dream and Fracture
The Definitions of Siddity
Song
II
What Is Best
Permission to Be Excused
Jingle Bells, Damnit
Song
III
Deep Country
Creatures in the Garden
Happy Birthday
Pecan Trees and Various Miscellanea
An Altered Story
Song
IV
Brother-Man Magic
We Sing Your Praises High
Liberté, égalité, Fraternité, Goddamnit
In This Spot
Feminism, Womanism, or Whatever
V
This Bitter Earth
You Made Me Love You
Don’t Let Me Lose This Dream
A Change Is Gonna Come
Do Right Woman, Do Right Man
VI
The Debate
Founder’s Day
The Dirty Thirty
Reunion
I’m Hungry
All Extraordinary Human Beings
Nguzo Saba
Song
VII
For You to Love
The Night I Fell in Love
Till My Baby Comes Home
My Sensitivity Gets in the Way
A House Is Not a Home
The Other Side of the World
VIII
Keeping the Tune
Whatever Gets You Over
I Need My Own Car
Shower and Pray
You Can Be Proud
Song
IX
Which Negroes Do You Know?
Mammies, or, How They Show Out in Harlem
Umoja, Youngblood
Song
X
The Peculiar Institution
Plural First Person
The Thrilla in Manila
Witness My Hand
My Black Female Time
Song
XI
Who Remembers This?
Any More White Folks
Mama’s Bible
Like Agatha Christie
Not Hasty
Every Strength
The Voices of Children
Acknowledgments
Archival Coda
About the Author
Also by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Copyright
About the Publisher
Song
We are the earth, the land. The tongue that speaks and trips on the names of the dead as it dares to tell these stories of a woman’s line. Her people and her dirt, her trees, her water.
We knew this woman before she became a woman. We knew her before she was born: we sang to her in her mother’s womb. We sang then and we sing now.
We called this woman back through the years to our early place, to our bright shoots rising with the seasons. We know her mingled people. How they started off as sacred, hummed verses. And now, we go back through the centuries to the beginning of her line, to a village called The-Place-in-the-Middle-of-the-Tall-Trees. And we start with a boy, the child who will change everything on our land.
Wait.
We know you have questions, such as, if we tell the story of a woman’s line, why would we begin with a boy? And to your wonder we counter we could have begun with a bird’s call or with a stalk of corn. With a cone from a tree or a tendril of green. All these things lead back to this woman’s line, whether we mention them or not. Yet since our story does not follow a straight path—we travel to places here and across the water—we must keep to the guidance of time. To the one who first walked past a tall, grass-covered mound in a particular place in the woods—and we have questions as well, for, despite our authority, we cannot know everything.
And so we ask if a child cannot remember his mother’s face, does he still taste her milk? Does he remember the waters inside her? Can you answer those questions? No, and neither can we. Yet, we remind you that many children commence within women, and thus, this is why it is completely fine that we begin with a boy.
And so we proceed.
The Boy Named Micco
The boy lived on our land. Here, in a Creek village that was between the wider lands straddling the rivers of the Okmulgee and Ogeechee, near the Oconee River, which crawled through the middle. Though Micco had playmates among the children of his village, he was an unhappy little boy, for he felt the tugging of three sets of hands. Whenever this tugging began, he felt confused and miserable.
There were the hands of his father, a Scottish deer skin trader named Dylan Cornell. There were the hands of his mother, Nila, a Creek woman who belonged to a clan of the highest status in their village, the Wind clan. The little boy’s parents were yet alive, but the hands that pulled at him the strongest were of a man who probably was dead, though no one knew for sure. They were the hands of his mother’s father, a man who appeared one day in the village.
This was in the years after 1733 and the arrival of James Oglethorpe and his ship of petty English criminals, what he called his “worthy poor.” They were those who had been sentenced to death or hard labor for the stealing of an apple or a loaf of bread or some other trifling thing.