Full Description
Intimate and sweeping poetry that examines race and lineage
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?
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 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
Notes
Photo Credits
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgements
