A follow-up to Dungy's debut collection What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, her second book Suck on the Marrow
consists of historically-based fictional accounts of former slaves and free blacks. It's a braided narrative told from the perspectives of Joseph, a freeman abducted into slavery, his wife Melinda who becomes with the abolitionist movement after Joseph’s disappearance, Molly and Shad who work on the Jackson Farm in Virginia where Joseph ends up, Dinah and Rebecca at the Jennings Home, and other characters. Many of the instances can be traced to actual historical figures embroiled in “the peculiar institution” such as Ida B. Wells’ account of a woman lynched by being sealed in a barrel punctured by nails and a woman who escapes like Henry “Box” Brown.
Each poem addresses this forced servitude and the small rebellions staged by women. There are letters that Joseph imagines writing to Melinda. “Lesson” is a haunting poem about the differences between the children whom slave women were permitted to care for and their own often-neglected children. Dungy breaks the short poem into two overlapping columns that place these children side by side. “Code” explores how Miss Amy punishes Lena when her husband, Lena’s master, sexually assaults her. “At Madame Jane’s” explores how Rebecca is at least paid for sexual intrusions in a brothel after escaping slavery. Each of these poems explores a different facet of black womanhood during this era of American history. This book could easily sit on the shelf beside Women of Plums by Dolores Kendrick and Linda Brent’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
.
“Complicit” is a poem written from Melinda’s perspective after Joseph Freeman has been abducted into slavery. She is silently boycotting the products that use slave labor while her employer talks of rounding up black people being liberated and returned to Liberia. In these 4-line stanzas, you can feel Melinda’s tension and the relief that she feels when she can wear cotton in the summer and not wonder if her husband’s hands have touched the cloth that she uses to make shirts for “the little Cartwright men.” If you only read the italicized on the right hand side, sounds like Melinda’s appealing to the others to boycott too.
“Complicit”
“We’ll have to round up all these free men and send them back to Africa.” Friends
of Mrs. Cartwright’s, Colonization Society folks who think she ought to be informed,
say Liberia is waiting. They ask, “What other way?” They ask what other chance there is
for the colored race to hope for true improvement.
Mrs. Cartwright says, for her part she’s glad to know I’ll always be on hand
in Philadelphia. Quick as it’s said, I’m sent to market for common width calicoe
I’ll sew into work frocks for her in-house girl and fine shirting muslin
from which I’ll fashion shirts for all the little Cartwright men.
A year into Joe’s absence I burned my petticoats, flannels, all of
Jacob’s trousers. I couldn’t let the skin he touched touch cotton
and wouldn’t let my mouth wet rice. I ate nothing sugared, cultivated
a taste for boiled water so I could wean myself from tea.
My employer looks to Rev. Finney to learn which acts will prove her faith. She gets by
quite alright since Mr. Cartwright’s textile ventures have begun to do so well
(she told the ladies who came today for coffee). Her help is handsomely remunerated
to assure loyalty (she added after I’d removed myself and all their untouched cakes).
The production of sugar for a family of five requires several months’ labor
from one slave. I still eat little but greens, tubers, beans, and fruit. The free goods
my grocer sells. I suffered through summers in wool and
owned no kerchiefs until the Committee opened a free labor store.
Tara Betts is the author of Arc & Hue. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University. She represented Chicago twice in the National Poetry Slam and appeared on HBO's "Def Poetry Jam" and Jessica Care Moore's "SPOKEN." Her work has been published in Essence, Callaloo, PMS, That Takes Ovaries!, Bum Rush the Page, both Spoken Word Revolution anthologies, among other publications. You can find her on twitter as @tarabetts and at http://www.tarabetts.net.
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Suck on the Marrow, Red Hen Press, 2010.
Camille T. Dungy is also the author of What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006), a finalist for the PEN Center USA 2007 Literary Award and the Library of Virginia 2007 Literary Award. A recipient of an NEA grant, she recently edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2009), a finalist for the 2009 NAACP Image award and Northern California Book Awards Special Recognition Award winner. She also co-edited From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea, 2009). She’s currently associate professor in the creative writing department of San Francisco State University.
Your book takes the reader back to the 19th century, to the decades heading toward the Emancipation Proclamation, but the oppressive life on Jackson Farm in Virginia is as palpable as ever. I’m intrigued by the love narratives--between Melinda and Joe, between Molly and Shad--how these couples are drawn together and kept apart by the same desires, namely escape and survival. What took you to these particular characters and why is it important (even during the Obama era) to revisit one of this country’s most troubled historical periods, when “if you’re born black anywhere/ you’re most unlucky”?
I am interested in writing real life stories, whether the characters I am detailing are fictional or truly walked this earth. By exploring the challenged love narratives between Melinda and Joe, and between Molly and Shad, I was able to examine the characters’ strengths and vulnerabilities as they might be revealed only to, and by, their most intimate companions. It was a way of rendering potentially two-dimensional characters as fully as I possibly could. Who and how and if people can choose to love is a question as relevant today as it was in the 19th century.
The “Rebecca & Dinah” section of this book is devastating: one woman is repeatedly raped by her master, the other runs away from this household only to land in a brothel, where the rape and abuse of black women is performed under the guise of fantasy. It’s difficult to gauge what’s a worse fate when neither woman can fully run away from her skin. And when Madame Jane tells Rebecca, the fresh body at the brothel, “you’ll be a platter for their cornbread/ a skillet for their sauce,” she might as well be speaking to Dinah. You conducted extensive research on figures like Dinah (among others), at what point did they come to life on their own and cease to be shadows in the archives, and what was this transformation like in the writing process?
The writing process doesn’t really take off until I manage to transform my research into a new, and immediate, sort of reality. Otherwise I suppose all I’m doing is taking notes. One thing I must manage to do is digest the materials I encounter in research to such a degree that I can reinvent the stories as entities different, and separate, from the anecdotes I discovered in archives and books. It is only at that point that I am able to start really writing poetry. The reality is, women throughout time have either “chosen” to barter their bodies for power or suffered disempowerment through the abuse of their bodies. A Latina reader from Texas told me that, encountering “Dinah in the Box” out of the context of the rest of the book, she did not realize that this poem was set in the 19th century until she came across the word “abolitionist” nearly 3/4 of the way through. I took this as a great compliment because it indicated that the story I told didn’t feel like a side bar in a history textbook. It touched that reader like the stories of women she knew. It’s a question of specifics. I must thoroughly detail the interior and exterior space around the character I am creating. What’s touching her skin? What does she have nightmares about? What smells trigger her most secret desires? The archives don’t tend to tell us these aspects of a story, but poetry must.
The final section is dedicated to Melinda, living in Philadelphia. Her freedom comes with a hefty price (which I will not reveal to the readers). Anti-slavery committees are generating momentum, but with great resistance. Melinda will become one of the era’s “institutional memories” since it’s clear she will live to see the abolition of slavery. Why were you most attracted to the stories of the women?
In many ways, Suck on the Marrow began as a departure from my first book. What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison is a series of rogue sonnets, 14- and 28-line poems that conform to specific restraints, written about people who actually walked the earth, and first triggered by the stories of two men. I thought I was going to write a book that didn’t use sonnets, but the poems in Suck on the Marrow are often constructed around restrictive and compulsive forms, including sonnets. I thought I would write a book that didn’t rely on the stories of real people. My answers to the previous questions should make it clear that, in the end, the people in Suck on the Marrow needed to feel as real as anyone with material fingerprints might. I wanted to write a book that revolved around the stories of women rather than men. Though half of the world’s history is a woman’s story, this part is less frequently told. Reading 19th century history texts I was constantly struck by questions about what the women at the margins of the narratives were doing and feeling. Thus, Melinda’s story, and the stories of Molly, Dinah, and Rebecca, became central to the formation of my book. In the course of writing Suck on the Marrow, however, I acknowledged that I could not be true to these complex women without accurately rendering portraits of the people they fought for and against and loved. So then came Melinda’s Joseph, Dinah and Rebecca’s Jennings, and Molly’s Shad. It is clear that each of these women will live beyond the timeframe of this book (a fact that is not an equal certainty for the men), but you are right to assume they will then fade into the shadows, composite memories without shape or specifics or name. I guess I felt compelled to extract these segments of their stories from the margins and give them contour and life.
You’ve done plenty of work as an editor: besides Black Nature, you also co-edited From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great(Persea Books, 2009), and were an assistant editor of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade University of Michigan Press, 2006). How did developing a critical and discriminating eye help you in selecting archival material that would prove useful in the writing of Suck on the Marrow? (I’m particularly impressed by the piece at the conclusion of the book, in which you comb through an extraordinary amount of documents to construct this “found poem” or cento.)
“’Tis of Thee, Sweet Land,” the cento to which you refer, is a compendium of much of material I was not able to use directly in poems but which reflected upon the nature of the book as a whole. Though the bulk of the book individualizes experiences suffered through the institution of slavery, the language in this final poem comes from sources as far ranging as Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, ex-slaves recorded through the WPA, and pro-slavery newspapers. It was important to me that the book end with the reminder that, in addition to being a plight born by individuals, slavery was and is and always will be an intrinsic part of the fabric of this nation. That said, with the exception of the notes section, “A Primer, or a History of These United States (Abridged),” all the poems in Suck on the Marrow were completed before I took up the 3-year task of editing and co-editing Black Nature and From the Fishouse. Perhaps it was the “critical and discriminating eye” I developed combing through all the archival materials required to produce Suck on the Marrow that gave me the attention and discipline to edit two 100-poet anthologies at the same time. Certainly, my elation locating forgotten texts and frustration at not having been able to locate other necessary texts spurred me along whenever the editing projects began to feel too onerous. I could at least be responsible for making sure posterity and a contemporary readership did not have similar difficulties with the subject matter of these two anthologies. When it came time to write a notes section for Suck on the Marrow, something I knew was required since the average reader has not spent half a decade studying 19th century American history, I knew I had to write something that was at once inviting and informative. This explains the way I finally constructed “A Primer.” The process of editing the two anthologies gave me the distance and insight needed to creatively formulate this necessary component of Suck on the Marrow.
>via: http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/small_press_spotlight_camille_t._dungy/
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Review by James Benton
SUCK ON THE MARROW
by Camille T. Dungy
Red Hen Press
P.O. Box 40820
Pasadena, CA 91114
ISBN 978-1-59709-468-9
2010, 88 pp., $18.95
www.redhen.org
I love these poems. I am conflicted by them. On the one hand, they reveal and pay tribute to the human sorrow created by an old and, thankfully, dead institution—at least in this country. By individuating the history of slavery in America, by making it personal, Dungy gives life to history, voice to the silent, and honor to the lost. She gives us poems vivid in their imagery, and powerfully evocative in their occasion, and she never blinks. Each poem distills its emotional momentum into language that is accessible and economical. And so I love them. The mood here is dark and deeply tragic, with subject matter ranging from flogging, escape, forced prostitution, and rape, to the tender love of husbands and wives and children longing for one another’s embrace.
On the other hand, I can only react to these poignant poems through the lens of an outsider, and as such, I also perceive an ongoing racial divide one wishes were bridged after so much time. And perhaps that is the ultimate lesson to be taken from this volume: ours is forever a shared but divided history. Dungy reminds us of wounds cut too deep to heal, even after a century and a half. She creates a dual consciousness on both sides of the divide, and it is this dual consciousness that permeates each poem. This duality takes several forms. From “The Unwritten Letters of Joseph Freeman”:
A man
whose livelihood depends on stealing
the toil of other people’s bodies
must keep a keen eye on his own
most dear and precious things.
Without trivializing their historical implications, these words also define the enslavement by a corporate aristocracy of today’s working classes. In fact, Dungy renders the plight of the present more humanely comprehensible by the comparison. Here, then, the duality takes the shape of the past informing the present.
Consider the following lines from “Lesson,” (quoted here in its entirety) in which the dual consciousness arises from the impossible conditions of slavery:
the child of the breast gets the child of the womb
eats
the table served the roasted meat scraps
the savory pies
the womb’s child kneels and swallows
the child of the breast knows hope only comes to the one who sucks
the best milk and claims the labor the marrow
of working hours chews on the bone
Dungy takes advantage of the fractured environment of the line to emulate a fractured social order, while she uses italics to establish a vertical relationship between “the child of the breast” and “the child of the womb.” The lines can be read horizontally or vertically, producing a three dimensional world of opposing realities inextricably entangled. In this way, the poem illustrates and enacts the condition of living in two social spaces simultaneously, one visible, one hidden, one pretense, and one authentic, together an act of physical and emotional survival. Dungy uses this same technique to serve varying purposes. In “Code,” for example, the italicized words, when read separate from their surrounding context, are an advertisement for the sale of two house servants; in “Runaway ran away,” the italicized words are the text of a wanted poster. In all, these italicized portions operate in the manner of an underground communication system, a counterpoint in opposition to the surrounding text. The effect is accessible and clever without ever becoming a mere gimmick.
Suck on the Marrow does not resolve any of the conflicting emotions attendant upon the shame of American slave history. Rather, it confronts the past in order to preserve it in all of its duality, both its ugliness and its humanity. As a reader—an outsider gazing upon the inner lives of slaves, hearing them speak to one another from a century and a half distant—I want to empathize and to plead for my own innocence: That was not me! And yet the fracture of our history, the fracture of social order and individual, our national open wound as Dungy presents it was all of us, it is all of us, then and now. Indeed it is as Dungy finds it in the (italicized) words of Thomas Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just.”
>via: http://rattle.com/blog/2010/08/suck-on-the-marrow-by-camille-t-dungy/
