Summer's Shade

 

Summer's Shade

( Mississippi, 1964)

 

Oh! Child, sharecropper's girl,

you hold a book in your hands

under that tree with the flowers

so large and white -- it seems blasphemous.

 

The pages smell -- hope chest old

and the words are old

written by a slave woman

generations before.

 

On the water, a damsel fly

hovers around the wide leaf

of a water lily. its wings checkered

like the author's gingham gown

you saw on the cover.

 

The insect dances, delighting

in the wind's language of heat

and grass scent. In her poems,

the woman writes of singing

 

 

in  a warm grassland

where young women weave baskets

out of the  marsh straw

and cast their shadows proud

and slender on the foot paths.

 

From the evening bush, birds rise.

a sharp flock, a spear head

to honor their  grace and distaff.

The magic craft, the ancestral fingers

minding their skill.

 

Oh! Child, sharecropper's girl,

you  look at your own hands.

They bear the same color

as the writer's. They touch her book.

They will make a difference.

___________________________________________________________________________

 

In the Summer of 1964, The Civil Rights Movement took a major step in promoting the education and voting rights of the African American community. At this time period, Southern States made if extremely difficult for black people to vote demanding they pass literacy tests and other questionable tasks to qualify. Many people of this ethnic group were poor and undereducated. Black people were not allowed access to  libraries among other educational facilities that served  a Caucasian  population. Leaders of the Civil Rights Movement recruited teachers and educators from all over the nation to come to Mississippi and train the  young Black kids to read and write with accuracy, encouraging their knowledge of literature and their own cultural identities. They were exposed to literature written by Black poets, essayists, historians and other people of great, ethnic distinction. My poem is an example of a young girl being exposed to a writer, a freed African Slave woman from the 19th Century, who wrote poems about her homeland in Africa where women were honored for their domestic talents, fertility, wisdom etc. A culture that was closely connected to nature and the grassland. Though, my character is fictitious , she does symbolize the opening of a door, the possibility of a young black female developing an awareness of herself and her historic identity/legacy. The slave woman referenced in this poem is actually based on some black women writers of the era I have found on-line. Several of which wrote poems but were simply titled as anonymous.