All the Songs We Sing: Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Carolina African American Writers' Collective

By Lenard D. Moore and Jaki Shelton Green

"An expansive spectrum of literary purpose and aesthetics that shine fiercely" —from the introduction by Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Poet Laureate

The Carolina African American Writers’ Collective celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary with All the Songs We Sing, an anthology of works by members of the Collective, edited by its founder, Lenard D. Moore. North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green introduces the anthology, which includes works by Lenard D. Moore, Bridgette A. Lacy, Crystal Simone Smith, Evie Shockley, Camille T. Dungy, Carole Boston Weatherford, and many others. Individually, these poems, stories, and essays have helped these Carolinians voice their experiences, remind us of our history, and insist on change, and gathered together, their chorus is turned all the way up and demands to be heard. These writers have shaped the modern literary landscape of the Carolinas for the last twenty-five years and will continue to influence and inspire African-American writers for generations to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carolina Wren Press
• Release date: Jun 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781949467345

Jaki Shelton Green

Jaki Shelton Green is the Poet Laureate of North Carolina. She is the first African American and third woman to hold the honor. She was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow by the Academy of American Poets. Her books include Breath of the Song, singing a tree into dance, Dead on Arrival, Conjure Blues, and I Want to Undie You.

Book preview

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.

In previous years, we had the CAAWC newsletter, which was distributed at the workshops/meetings and mailed nationally. The newsletter went from being typewriter generated to computer generated. It included members’ news, literary markets, book reviews, and the Founder’s Message. Like the evolution of the newsletter, CAAWC members have also evolved as people, as writers, as musical wordsmiths. CAAWC became known for sharing its newsletter, publishing as a group, presenting readings, and serving on panels; it also became known for assigning reading in the early years, such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Spunk and James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues.

We have participated in contemporary literary movements. Our members have published several dozen books and have won numerous awards and honors. We have been featured in countless literary magazines and anthologies, such as One Window’s Light: A Collection of Haiku, which won the Haiku Society of America’s prestigious Mildred Kanterman Merit Book Award for the best haiku anthology published in 2017. Others include Catch the Fire!!!: A Cross-Generational Anthology of Contemporary African-American Poetry; Dark Eros; and Fertile Ground. Literary journals that have featured us are Obsidian, African American Review, BMa: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review, Poetrybay, and others.

Moreover, we have presented readings and participated on panels at Bimbé Cultural Arts Festival, National Black Arts Festival, North Carolina Literary Festival, Virginia Festival of the Book, Furious Flower Poetry Festival, and Festival of the Eno, and at universities and colleges, libraries, bookstores, and heritage centers. In addition, CAAWC has been featured at the North Carolina Museum of Art, the North Carolina Museum of History, and the Nasher Museum of Art. We have collaborated with musicians, sculptors, photographers, painters, dancers, graphic designers, and printers. It is so fascinating to witness the collaborative art: writing with other mediums of expression.

In short, we hope you will let these works travel with you on life’s journey. More importantly, we want you to tell others about All the Songs We Sing. The book is not comprehensive because we were unable to contact some members from several years ago, though we have included some lifetime members. There is a roll call at the end of this book. So we also hope you will share copies of All the Songs We Sing with friends, acquaintances, and even strangers. In other words, let these stories and songs settle in your bones and walk with them, talk about them. Let them riff and become your favorites. Go into the world with All the Songs We Sing and play these poems, short stories, fiction excerpts, and essays like soundtracks.

—Lenard D. Moore,

April 10, 2019,

Raleigh, North Carolina

POETRY

Pray

Oktavi Allison

Meek-eyed against the

shiver morning or bask

of yellow noontide.

Stand, kneel, pace, and

pray against faltering

terra cotta slipped

into purple dusk.

Pray facedown at your

altar pew; like incense

burned slow, sweet, and

long.

Bring your petition and

tarry with me. Sweep dross

scattered in your sacred

space.

Pray ancient prayers sent

with you. Shadows of hieroglyphs

tinctured on walls. Sing

canticles hymned to wombs.

Rise and know that I am

merciful, divine. You are

the essence of My holiness.

When I Consider the Open Casket

Kim Arrington

For Emmett Till

Emmett’s skin hung loose like a browning pear

There would have been crisscrossing

If waterlogged skin would hold any imprint

Any language other than the song of the South

When I consider the smell of Murray’s pomade and Faultless starch

Replaced by no frankincense, mirth resounding

Right eye plucked out like a meek catfish

The hole in the skull like sea coral

The Mississippi runs rogue through it

The Jet on the coffee table made for teeth gnashing

Miss Mamie said he had only one tooth left

Emmett’s slim fourteen-year-old shoulders

Swelled, the algae of the Tallahatchie River; pocket psalms

When I consider minnows swimming through his body

Like Blackbeard’s sunken ship

Take off your clothes, boy!

The coliseum in Money, Mississippi, on that August evening

A place where browned gladiators are stripped—

Their winged bodies are Maypoles

When I consider Miss Mamie pulling nails

From that pine box to show the world

Emmett’s neck broken like a Christmas chicken

Submerged by Eli Whitney’s cotton gin fan

When I consider Emmett calling to me

Through loveless Black boys, gyrating Black girls

I heard him call too, once in a sixteen-year-old summer

We promised our young, merry-go-rounds and penny peppermint sticks

Not safaris and faceless martyrs.

Haiku

Valeria Bullock

brown girls

in the noonday sun

jumping double dutch

hiking trail

sweet smell of gardenias

enters my nose

An Unrelenting Meal

Beverly Fields Burnette

Along a Florida lake,

an old crane dipped and ducked

in shallow water;

darted away from younger, more agile fowl,

then steadied himself

on thin, awkward legs.

In his feeding frenzy,

he twisted and crooked his neck,

gulped hard to choke down

an unyielding fish,

before others realized

he’d bitten off

far more

than he could swallow.

Artichoke Pickle Passion

A Sonnet

Beverly Fields Burnette

In southern springs we dug for artichokes

In Miz Olivia’s tall and weedy yard.

She dipped her snuff, but never, ever smoked;

At eighty-five, she wasn’t avant-garde.

Her ’bacco spittings grew the vegetable;

Well-nourished were the tubers, strong, the stalks.

And even though their worth was questionable,

With hoe in hand, we dug, postponing talk.

Once washed, soaked, sliced, they met some torrid brine.

Aromas flew on steamy clouds of heat.

When canned, the waiting was the longest time.

How many weeks or months before we eat?

In southern springs, we dug the precious root,

And still, this day, it is my passion fruit.

Donny Hathaway

Christian Campbell

listening to He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother

Lingering at the edge

of want, grasping how,

clawing, gripping again,

then leaping, spread-winged,

shape of wail, taking yes

to good night. Rivering,

ghosting in a slow-drag:

churching gravity. Praise

armed to hold bones, larynx

of soldered gold, soldier

for the blues coup, heaven

flung, for what’s coursing out.

Past the plunge of need, of we,

when salt-throat bears all

to the blood of undone.

portrait of pink, or blush

Adrienne Christian

when today at a bistro

an elderly couple in jeans, leather

bomber jackets, and heeled boots

stepped down from their stools

to stand and go home—

him behind her,

his bomber jacket zipper

a spine at her back,

him wrapping on her scarf

the heart-shaped cookie she nibbled

the shape of her mouth,

that cookie, puffy,

with still-soft icing white and rose—

I learned

the anthropology of blush

The Moment at Hand

L. Teresa Church

Michelle Obama’s green-gloved hands

cradle Lincoln’s

red-cased Bible

this winter day.

On the Capital’s West Front steps

we watch her grace,

esteem her style,

First brown Lady.

Her grasp pedestals this moment

when Barack’s palm

presses his stance

indelible.

Golden Whistles for Emmett Till

L. Teresa Church

If there was a whistle in Money

worth this boy’s life, let’s hear it.

Break golden streets into pieces, dear God,

shape, shine them to fit Emmett’s lips.

Mold his melody between your fingers.

Please let Emmett’s whistle judge his killers.

Loose that boy’s notes all over Glory.

Woman-Child

L. Teresa Church

For the last twenty-four months,

more woman than child,

her ninth summer

stretches the shadow of dolls.

Beyond plank-bottom swing,

she sets two-year-old brother on her hip.

Like a steel-trap, she grasps

little sister’s thumb-suck hand.

Six days a week, seven when needed,

she be her mama’s stand-in-mama.

Woman-child hauls water buckets.

Woman-child bends over washtub.

Woman-child wrings mop strings.

Woman-child stirs cook-stove pots.

Woman-child gazes past clothes on wire line,

longs to be more child than woman.

Brown Fedora

L. Teresa Church

At least two other girls

about my age, build, height, complexion,

despised a man known to us

for his unblinking gazes that snaked

after us like charms when he thought

no other adults would see his hands,

ape-strong, as they jungled the darkness,

pulling us into his sweaty armpits.

One girl said he whispered into her ear,

that he liked young love. Others

stayed out of his reach, unlike the night

he cornered me in the back seat of our car,

knowing Momma and Daddy

couldn’t hear the scuffle, as I scratched,

pinched, elbowed, punched, snatched

off his brown felt fedora, tried to throw it

out the rolled-down window, before Daddy

screeched to a stop, dropped him off, after

my open-palmed slap bowed that hatless head

more than enough to clear the car door’s frame.

Haiku

L. Teresa Church

sliver of moonlight

stretches across the bed

my husband’s snore

rose-laying

at Alex Haley’s tomb

a rooster crows

springtime farewell

B.B. King’s processional

rolls down Beale Street

navy blue hearse

hauls the bluesman home

a mosquito sings

wild onions

we watch cows

chew their cud

Things My Father Taught Me

DéLana R.A. Dameron

The back porch. The cock

& pump: two for a light

kickback—the bb grazes

the pine pole before it jumps

to earth. Four or more—

if straight shoot—I add

my signature to it: lead

pellets mark an old tree turned

phone pole. Daddy says

Don’t think about the pain,

keep the left hand level.

On the barrel, my left palm

holds the weight, holds

this weapon inscribed

with my initials—

the delta of my right

shoulder & budding breasts

keep everything in line.

I move one opened eye right

to see clearly as the shadowed

aperture moves left. I reach

for the trigger’s tight hold.

Pull. The telephone pole’s

silver-dollar label

caught in crosshairs.

Dear—,

DéLana R.A. Dameron

I want the story about little seed-eaters—

sparrows flitting atop roofs

or windowsills, how you say

they never worried about hunger or thirst,

never wondered when the next blessing

would manifest.

Once, I believed God’s hand against me:

my loves all fallen

to dust, cut by the farmer’s scythe

barreling headlong towards the hollow reeds

of their bodies & I the lone-standing stalk.

Tell me again how to be the little gatherer

who accepts offerings for which it did not ask?

Black Barbie

celeste doaks

Psychologists and married couple Kenneth and Mamie Clark completed a study on dolls in the 1940s which showed that children, despite their color, prefer white dolls over brown dolls.

Luckily, I can recall when

you were released

Long silky hair

Full brown bosom

Momma brought you home, elated

to possess one

Mattel’s phenom

Her prize du jour

Inauguration day presents

A living one

Draped in white, our

First Lady doll

Black Lotus

celeste doaks

Lotus rising out of South Side water & night

Gifting the world with your brilliant fruitful flower

We marvel at your beauty; bless your seeds with light

You bloom ivy, league that is, grow tall in their sight

Defying every shallow pond with fierce power

Lotus rising out of South Side water & night

Your floral family hails from a deep southern plight

Ancestors fertilize the A.M.E. church hour

We marvel at your beauty; bless your seeds with light

For