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Breathe into Believing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2021
Extract
This begins before 1896. This begins before Arkansas. But “this can't be right grandmother. who are our Ancestors! she said, shit gal, i don't know” (Bridgforth 2012). One of my ancestors walks toward me. She be Gertrude. Gertrude Grant. I have no pictures of her. I have no living memories of her. Yet I remember. Her. My Nana's mama, born around 1890 in the lumber town of Canfield in southern Arkansas.
- Canfield, Arkansas, 1896
- We're children
- Babies really
- when the fires start
- A mob is always ready to take
- our wages
- Run us away
- Always ready to lynch us
- When a volley of shots
- be my lullabies
- I won't live to see 36
- Type
- Musing
- Information
- Hypatia , Volume 36 , Special Issue 3: Conjure Feminism: Tracing the Genealogy of a Black Women's Intellectual Tradition, Summer 2021 , Summer 2021 , pp. 555 - 565
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation
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