Incident in the lives of three African American poets, written by themselves

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by L. Teresa Church, Lenard D. Moore, Evie Shockley

Early in November of 2002, three poets, all members of the Carolina African American Writers' Collective, began a journey from our homes in Winston-Salem, Durham, and Raleigh, North Carolina. We had been invited to give a poetry reading in Bertie County, in the northeastern part of the state, an almost wholly rural area with a predominantly African American population. A member of the county's arts community had seen the need to target some programming toward this potential African American audience, and we were very happy to support her efforts. To save us from having to make both the eastbound and westbound trips in a single day, she had thoughtfully suggested that we come in and spend the night before our reading at her home. So on the appointed afternoon, we gathered in Raleigh, packed ourselves into a single car, and headed for the hinterlands.

Little did we know that our 120-mile drive would take us into a world we wished this nation had left behind. We passed from city to towns to the "boonies," as rural areas are sometimes called, until no commercial establishments had appeared for many miles and cotton fields surrounded us as far as the eye could see. This scene did not scare us. We are all Southerners, born and raised; moreover, one of us grew up on a farm in Virginia, another had often worked in his great-grandmother's peanut fields in North Carolina and picked other crops, as well, and the third is the granddaughter of a Tennessee farmer, on whose land she had spent many a week, summer and winter, in her childhood. We thought we knew what we were getting into, had planned how we might handle the Klan if it reared its ugly head, had made sure we had gas aplenty to get us safely to our host's home. If we felt any misgivings--when our directions proved a bit ambiguous, when the autumn darkness settled over the countryside somewhat faster and heavier than we had expected--we brushed them aside with each other's assurances.

Nonetheless, arriving at our destination, we finally had to admit that the situation had gotten out of our control. We had wondered aloud how our host was going to put us up; it would have taken more space than most black folks had, rural or urban, to provide each of us and our spouses, who had also been invited but did not accompany us, with places to sleep. Turning in at the picket fence as our directions instructed, we could not see a thing beyond the beams of the headlights; the house was invisible in the double darkness of a night cluttered with pines as old and thick as eternity. A pleasant-looking white woman answered our knock, to our surprise. None of us had met her--she had interviewed one of us by phone more than a year earlier, for a local newspaper feature, and had corresponded with two of us by email. But her way of talking, her cultural knowledge, her expressed concerns in arranging this reading had (mis)identified her as African American. Had we guessed that she was white, we might not have dismissed the idea that had briefly crossed our minds earlier, the couldn't-be that most certainly was, as we realized immediately upon entering: Our host lived in a plantation house.

Not just a plantation house--a very carefully preserved one, in which the furnishings, the decor, the very air we were choking on were virtually what they had been in the mid-nineteenth century. Our host and her family wined and dined us, simply but generously, and demonstrated themselves to be thoroughly likeable and considerate people--except insofar as it had not occurred to them that many African Americans would rather spend a night in jail or in a graveyard than in a "big house." Indeed, this house was like both a jail and a graveyard to us that night. Having been given no warning, no choice in the matter, and being a long, dark, lonely way from anywhere we might be able to find a motel, we were feeling quite locked in. And the house reeked of the rot of slavery; we could smell and hear and feel its wounding history in every inch of the structure. Unquiet, peaceless spirits wandered the halls and brooded in corners. Rationality fled in the face of such determined "rememories," to borrow Toni Morrison's powerful word. When at last we had a few minutes alone, just before going to bed, we turned a bottle of oil that had been blessed by a holy woman into the swords and shields our battered psyches needed. Still, sleep was hard to come by.

The next morning, our nightmares were embodied in the vision of an elderly man raking leaves in the yard and in our host's acknowledgment that his man was descended from one of the families that her family had held in bondage. While waiting on breakfast, we discovered the sole visual representation of African America to be found in the public areas of the house: a portrait of an elderly black woman wearing spectacles, a white bonnet, and a look of determined blankness. Upon asking, we learned that she had worked as a cook in this house after Emancipation and was, in fact, related to the gentleman working outside. Our host's grandmother had painted the portrait. These revelations were enough to make us afraid that we might walk out and find carriages instead of cars in the driveway.