Room Swept Home

By Remica Bingham-Risher

Room Swept Home serves as a gloriously rendered magnifying glass into all that is held in the line between the private and public, the investigative and generative, the self and those who came before us. In a strange twist of kismet, two of Bingham-Risher's ancestors intersect in Petersburg, Virginia, forty years before she herself is born: her paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Lee Fowlkes, is interviewed for the Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives in Petersburg in 1937, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, is sent to Petersburg in 1941, diagnosed with "water on the brain"—postpartum depression being an ongoing mystery—nine days after birthing her first child. Marrying meticulous archival research with Womanist scholarship and her hallmark lyrical precision, Bingham-Risher's latest collection treads the murky waters of race, lineage, faith, mental health, women's rights, and the violent reckoning that inhabits the discrepancy between lived versus textbook history, asking: What do we inherit when trauma is at the core of our fractured living?

[sample poem]

XI. the more ground covered, the more liberated you became

I am scared my mind will turn on me.
I am scared I will be naked in a burning
house. I am scared my children won't outpace me.
I am scared my children (who aren't made by me)
believe I am a sad imitation of the others.
I am scared I will gather in a room
where everyone will ask me to remember
and when I don't lie they'll say I'd hate to be you.
I've lived long enough to be scared my kidneys
will give out on me. I've lived long enough to know just
when they should. I have never shared my fears
with anyone; I am scared they will map the land
and take liberties. Will the women be ashamed?
I'm scared to ask. What will live again? What will die with me?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: Feb 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9780819500991

Remica Bingham-Risher

Remica Bingham-Risher is a poet, interviewer, and essayist, a Cave Canem fellow, and an Affrilachian Poet. Her book, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and Questions that Grew Me up, was published by Beacon Press in 2022. Her work has been featured in the New York times, the Writer's Chronicle, Callaloo, Essence, and a host of other outlets. She is the author of Conversion, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award; What We Ask of Flesh, shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and Starlight & Error, winner of the Diode Editions Book Award and a finalist for the Library of Virginia Book Award. She is the Director of Quality Enhancement Plan Initiatives, which help faculty integrate write and reading into the classroom, at Old Dominion University. She resides in Norfolk, Virginia with her husband and children.

Book preview

Room Swept Home

Also by Remica Bingham-Risher

POETRY

Conversion

What We Ask of Flesh

Starlight & Error

PROSE

Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions that Grew Me Up

Wesleyan Poetry

Remica Bingham-Risher

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

Text and photographs unless otherwise noted © 2024 Remica Bingham-Risher

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed and composed in Garamond Premier Pro by Mindy Basinger Hill

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bingham-Risher, Remica, author.

Title: Room swept home / Remica Bingham-Risher.

Other titles: Room swept home (Compilation)

Description: Middletown, Connecticut : Wesleyan University Press, 2024. | Series: Wesleyan poetry | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: Poetry exploring the impacts of family bonds through enslavement and institutionalization in the stories of three generations of women, examining race and lineage, and asking: What do we inherit at the core of our fractured living? — Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023036720 (print) | LCCN 2023036721 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819500984 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780819500991 (ebook)

Subjects: BISAC: POETRY / American / African American & Black | FICTION / African American & Black / Women | LCGFT: Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS3602.I544 R66 2024 (print) | LCC PS3602.I544 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23/eng/20230822

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023036720

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023036721

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For my Nana, Shirley Bingham,

who shared her memories of Minnie with me

and loves hard enough to make us believe

grandmothers are our best thing

and

For Aunt Mary (Evelyn) Brown,

Mary’s oldest child, who made it here

unscathed, who shares her own stories

and encourages me always.

I just know I could if I knowed how to write, and had a little learning

I could put off a book on this here situation.

MINNIE LEE FOWLKES, 1937

Contents

Lost Friends.

In the Corridor

MINNIE LEE FOWLKES (1859–1945)

Birth Story

On the plantation or, as some say, down home

Battle of the Crater

April when de war surrendered

Wanderlust

Strip Tobacco Like Greens

Work Song

Questions That Still Need Answering

Putting Mother in the Ground

Catching Babies

Ruddy

Seems Like We’re Building a City

RIOTING BREAKS OUT AT NORFOLK, VIRGINIA—Six persons were shot during a clash between whites and blacks in the negro sections of the city tonight. Four of the wounded are negroes, of whom two are expected to die.

the Great Depression was hard to distinguish when poverty was always a way of life

Night Class, Peabody High School

The Tenderness of One Woman for Another

Perhaps Minnie Sees Mary and Prays for Her Safekeeping

MARY ETTA KNIGHT (1922–2007)

Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane Founded in Petersburg, Virginia

victims killed in 1922 were burned at the stake in a form of torture that most people today associate with the so-called Dark Ages. These horrific acts happened in modern [enter the name of the state where you were born], just a few generations ago. And white people caught the events on film and put the photos in their own family albums

Mary perfects the Charleston, recalling it for the next eighty years

Dear Doll

June 18, 1941

Mary Taken to the Central Lunatic Asylum

MASTER INDEX: CASE RECORD

The color blue was full of darkness

To Calm the Mind

a fish has broken from the water its rod of a body

Two Months and Thirteen Days

Life’s An Ever-turning Wheel

Clean white homes and smiling black servants appropriately attired in language and dress

Child with Playthings in Black and White

Tweedle Dee, LaVern Baker

The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, 1957

remains of the stained glass windows of the 16th Street Baptist Church

Rainy Night in Georgia, Brook Benton

Ars Poetica #214

The Two White Women I Cleaned For Send Checks Until The Day I Die Or Until They Do, Whichever Comes First

Mary Admires James Brown’s Casket

There is going to be a resurrection of both the righteous and unrighteous

WHAT WE HAD TO PASS THROUGH TO GET HERE

Commemorative Headdress For Her Journey Beyond Heaven

Eden Before the Fall: Southern Pastoral

White Children and the Intimate Landscape of Defeat

The black mammy, like the southern lady, was also born in the white mind

25 days after I am born

because the scale of our breathing is planetary, at the very least

The Domestic who is the Bearer of the Present

THE LOSE YOUR MOTHER SUITE

WHAT SURVIVED

Minnie and Mary Live to 84

Where did you come from/how did you arrive?

There Is Nothing In Your Story That Says You Should Be Here

In My Best Dreams They Are On The Water

Refusing Rilke’s You must change your life

I am trying to carve out a world where people are not the sum total of their disaster

Room Swept Home

Acknowledgments

Notes

Illustration Credits

Selected Bibliography

Lost Friends.

NOTE. – We receive many letters asking about lost friends. All such letters will be published in this column from the end of the Civil War until those in need stop looking and, if this isn’t the case, in perpetuity. We make no charge for publishing these letters from subscribers to the Southeastern Herald. All others enclose fifty cents to pay for publishing. Pastors will please read the requests published below from their pulpits, and report any case where friends are brought together by means of letters.

Dear Editor: I wish to inquire for the women in me, in the interest of my mother, father, aunts, uncles and a great many cousins.—I want to find my people. They were carried from us when I was less than thought of. In their dreams, they called me Seborn or Glory but now I am called Still Becoming. My parents’ names are Here, Holding. Uncles names are Sprightly, Long Gone, Whisper