Room Swept Home
Description
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?
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Person
REMICA BINGHAM-RISHER (Norfolk, VA) is director of quality enhancement plan initiatives at Old Dominion University. Her books include Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up, and What We Ask of Flesh and Starlight & Error.
Content
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
