Walking Gentry Home, page 1
Copyright © 2022 by Alora Young
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Hogarth is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Young, Alora, author.
Title: Walking Gentry home : a memoir of my foremothers in verse / Alora Young.
Description: London ; New York : Hogarth, [2022] |
Identifiers: LCCN 2021058451 (print) | LCCN 2021058452 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593498002 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593498019 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Young, Alora—Family—Poetry. | African American girls—Poetry. | African American women—Poetry. | Halls (Tenn.)—History—Poetry. | LCGFT: Autobiographical poetry. | Young adult nonfiction.
Classification: LCC PS3625.O933 W35 2022 (print) | LCC PS3625.O933 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23/eng/20211215
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021058451
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021058452
Ebook ISBN 9780593498019
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Cassie Gonzales
Cover illustration: Cassie Gonzales, based on images © Shutterstock and © Stocksy
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Those Who Came Before
Walking Foreword
Numbers
Part One: The Story Before: I Am Because You Are
Mothers, TN, Many Many Generations
Show Me the Company You Keep I’ll Tell You Who You Are, Part I
A Lot See But a Few Know. Halls, TN. Always.
Mitochondrial Eve, Africa, 150,000 Years Ago
When They Took Us, Benin and Togo, Circa 1560
Black Tax, America, 1650–Present
This Country 1776
Widows, Haywood County, 1790
Amy 1796
Collie, b. 1837
Becoming a Free Woman Haywood County Circa 1840
Dance On
1864
Part Two: Wash Day and No Soap
Ninnis, b. 1878
Railway Stop, 1882
Nannie Pearl, b. 1898
No Soap 1918
Ortho B, 1921
Sample Cakes, 1930
Brinkley; Abridged. 1940
Part Three: The Story of Gentry: Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil
Dinner 1930
Gentry Dancing 1932
This Frightening Change
Momma Flute 1920–2017
Midnight Women, an Alternate Reality, the Past to the Present Day
Gentry Pregnant, 1939
Walk Gentry Home, Haywood County, TN, Circa 1940
Shotgun Weddings 1941
Colorstruck
Floydia B
Stockings, Ripley, TN, 1944
The Air Base
Part Four: Little Girl, Don’t You Dare Be Afraid to Suck the Marrow from Chicken Bones
Kill a Love Song
Advice Poem
Reckless Girls
Halls Consolidated
The Movies 1950
So a Man Thinketh So Is He
Lord Give Gentry Some New Monkeys Cause These Can’t Dance
Stillborn, Haywood County, 1957
The Lacy Girls
Make a Fool Out of You 1960
Cotton Picking 1960
The Birth of a Young Son, Halls, TN, Circa 1960
The Colored Prom, 1960
Black Sheep
Church
The Chaperone
Yvonne Pregnant, 1969
The Only Pool in Ripley
Keep Living
Part Five: Show Me the Company You Keep I’ll Tell You Who You Are
Good Girls
The Day It Happened
Bunny Rabbit, 1976
The Day Mccord Died, Just 25, Ripley, TN, Circa 1976
St. Louis, 1977
1977, Halls, TN
The Blood the Blood the Bride
Green Piano 1980
Monette
Independence, 1980
Patches of Green, Ripley, TN, 1984
As Man and Wife, 1984
Drive, 1985
District 10, Haywood County, Always
Life of It
The Choir
The Most Judgmental Women Are Those Who Hate Themselves
The White Dress
One-Sided Fights Ain’t Nothin’ but Abuse
Young Brides
The Daughter Will Learn, Halls, TN, Summer 1969–1981
Monette, Driving
Y’all Need to Stop Underestimating the Evil in Somebody Just Because They Say They’re a Woman of God
Miss Halls
Perm
The Soprano
Labor Day
Geology
You Ain’t Gotta Die and Go to Heaven or Hell to Get What You Deserve, Part I
Growing
Show Me the Company You Keep I’ll Tell You Who You Are, Part II
Smoke
Bobos
Colonizers, 1990, Knox County, TN
Part Six: The Story of Alora
A Letter from the Womb, Teaneck, NJ, 2002
Summer
Halls, Depleted
Darkskin/Lightskin 2008, Davidson County, TN
Sister, Sister
Black Tax Continued
Dear Black Girl
Wage Slavery
When I Stop Calling Mom, Mommy
Black Tax Completed
Home
When You Are Old Enough to Make Gumbo
To My Mother, Who I Caught Crying in the Shower
White, TN, Present
Girlhood Delights
The Blacktop
Things That Are Annoying
“For a Black Girl,” TN, 1970–Present
Dying Town, Halls, TN
American Blessings, America, Present Day
The Day My Grandmother Died, Halls, TN, February 17th, 2016
Hair, Our Heads, Circa 2017
You Ain’t Gotta Die and Go to Heaven or Hell to Get What You Deserve, Part II
A Question of Privilege, Ap Human Geography, District 5, Nashville, TN, 2018
Rant, 2019, Nashville, TN
To Have a Name
The Untouchable
Bad Dreams, After the Death of George Floyd, 2020
Climbing Out Windows
Athena & Ida
Cannibalism, Present Day, Tennessee
Convocation
The Chosen People, TN, Always
Black Mothers, TN
When We Realized We Were Black
A Thousand Generations
I’m Still Walking
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Walking Foreword
This home of mine lies in the steam that rolls off the hot water cornbread. It is singed fingertips from tinfoil-wrapped fried bologna sandwiches. It is tiptoeing barefoot to the ice cream truck over old sienna pavement. It is the best Dollar General on either side of the Mississippi. My home is the one-to-one pickup-truck-to-people ratio; everyone in this town has their all-wheel-drive alter ego. My home is in the honey mustard that sticks to the lid of the to-go packets that come with Exxon fried chicken. In my home even the gnats move slow, just taking their time. You can see the heat if you look hard enough. It leaves you sweating like a sinner in the Lord’s house. My home has a patina like a skillet of cast iron, a thousand times seasoned, a million times fired. My home is a tiny town in West Tennessee that for centuries you could barely find on a map. I carry it with me always.
Halls is the town where my mothers have lived since their beginning in this country. The kind of place where everyone is family. It’s where I found God, the second time. It’s the place that taught me love is unconditional and unrelenting. The people I love that thrived there die with the changing seasons. I watch the thrift shops and candy stores get boarded up and fade into phantoms of their former s
In Halls, I am the bearer of a prophecy. From the moment Momma’s body opened, they said I was the one they waited for. They say I’m the culmination of a thousand generations of brilliant women, prayers, internal warfare, deferred dreams. They have told me I am every voice and poem that never graced a page, or another’s ears and eyes. And because I bear this prophecy, I think it’s my fault every time one of their dreams dies.
* * *
—
This multigenerational memoir in verse chronicles the lineage of a group of Black women and girls in West Tennessee, from unrecorded history to the 1700s up to my life in the present day. These are not just any girls, however; they are my foremothers. In the beginning, we have a series of poems about my ancestors whose names we no longer know, before arriving at my several-greats-grandmother Collie, the child of an enslaved woman and her enslaver in the days when Tennessee was still primarily wilderness. We follow a teenage Gentry, my great-grandmother, as she moves out of her mother’s home to marry at fourteen; my grandmother when she had my mother at seventeen; my mother, the beauty queen; and finally, we come to the present day, with me, attempting to recover the legacy of the then-teenage girls whose lives of hard work and limited opportunity led to the now-teenage me writing their long-forgotten history.
The only way to tell this story is through poetry, because Black girlhood is eternally laced with rhythm, from the Negro hymns Amy Coleman whispered as she bore her enslaver’s child to the rhythm of the gospel my mother sang at fifteen when she was hailed a child prodigy.
Walking Gentry Home is a story about girlhood and how the world scoffs at the way Black women come of age. It is an American story that persists, and we persist in ignoring it. The innocence and adolescence of Black girls are stories that are desperately needed because Black girls begin being called women far before they know what women really are.
This is for them—and for me.
Numbers
Alora, daughter of Monette, daughter of Yvonne, daughter of Gentry, daughter of Nannie Pearl, daughter of Ninnis, daughter of Collie, daughter of Amy, daughter of unknown, unknown, unknown
PART ONE
The Story Before: I Am Because You Are
Prehistory–1865
Mothers, TN, Many Many Generations
I have many mothers
They are mostly Black
They are mostly broken
They have existed here for centuries
They are dying with the towns that birthed them
Show Me the Company You Keep I’ll Tell You Who You Are, Part I
My favorite company has always been that of ghosts.
Hear me out,
I mean that I find the most comfort surrounded by stories from the past.
People from the past.
Worlds that have faded into hills or cityscapes.
This is a story about girlhood,
and artists,
and a town in West Tennessee that keeps on dying.
I suppose I tell it because when you find
so much comfort in dead things,
you know the worst part
is that they are only alive in your head.
My family’s story is possibly yours too.
Because even when eras change,
girls will inevitably grow up
and fall in love and bleed
and fall out of love and fight over blood,
and my god will they fight over it.
Adolescence,
more specifically girlhood, is a bloodbath.
My mom has a habit of telling me things
I’m not yet sure I’m ready to believe.
Recently she has been telling me
this world is ready for me to be a woman.
Giving up being a girl
is more terrifying
than Halls dying
so I’m trying to save this
aging place because my favorite
girls/ghosts
all lurk there.
Perhaps this is just me running
away from one more dying thing.
A Lot See But a Few Know. Halls, TN. Always.
It’s a funny thing being born.
Someone
carried us for about nine months
and that one person
will always know
where we came from.
Them.
But that’s where things start to get complicated;
it gets blurry as we get less concentrated;
we zoom out on the camera of history
and like the smallest part of cells
the microscopic organelles
once you zoom far enough
they just disappear.
But they’re still here,
we’re still here.
My story goes back centuries
but I see so few generations
my culture is calamity
and far away nations
my blood bleeds into endless cotton fields
of empty stalks on family trees.
My ancestry was lost
in chains and boats across the seas.
Am I aristocracy?
Do I belong to a great nation?
What if my Black Girl Magic
is just cultural appropriation?
My genes are on a selfish streak
and decided to abstain
from sharing what runs in my veins
with my desperate brain.
I never know if my identity
is more than just a guise
all I have to go off
is a fro and slanted eyes.
My recipe remains a mystery
and as I grow and die
I crave any bit of history that takes the question out of I.
I want the glittery grains of broken past
that cut me deep like broken glass
to hold tightly in my hand
but the powerful don’t care
for it’s their world that we must understand.
We are all dying and degrading
every second till we’re dead
from the moment we’re born
to exist in our heads.
Like history melting into the ground that we tread
the only stories that survive are the ones we’ve all read
