From the Other Side of a Migratory Silence: On the Work of Patricia Smith

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• From the Other Side of a Migratory Silence: On the Work of Patricia Smith
• Joy Priest (bio)

In 2022, my grandmother went on to glory, as the old folks say. The last of her generation up from Alabama, she was ninety years old. Anna Priest’s life came to a close as she was sitting in her favorite chair in her living room on East 126th Street in Cleveland, Ohio, but her life began on Negro Church Road in a small sharecropping town called Moulton—a word that sounds off, in my ear, both “soul” and “hot, melting rock” at once. Moulton. Just south of the Tennessee state line, about thirty minutes down a red-dirt road from Muscle Shoals, where many soul artists and bluesy rock bands came to record in the twentieth century, where Aretha Franklin recorded her first hit, “I Never Loved a Man,” at age twenty-four. Moulton, which sounds a bit like Motown.

In recent years, I’d begun to collect little stories from my grandmother. These stories were punctuated by little narrative chasms that required the listener to guess at the point of the story, which was [End Page 221] either too painful or too illicit to call into the aural field. There was the story about my great-grandmother Elsie’s mule, whose ribs, my grandmother said, you could see across the field. The one about her neighbor Charlie’s mule, which knew its way home, and while she and the other women were sewing on the porch in the evenings, would trot by, with Charlie thrown over its back, passed out drunk after 13 hours in the field. “He’d give that mule three ears of corn and tell him, ‘Eat all you want!’” my grandmother added on one rendition, laughing in pain at the memory of hunger. Or the story about how, when she first got to Cleveland, she stayed with her uncle, and his no-good girlfriend would steal her panties. That’s how she ended up working as a live-in domestic for Dr. White, who was a nice man, my grandmother said, staring off, eyes fixed on the past. There’s the story of how my grandparents met: she already knew my grandfather Dennis back in Moulton (“Met him on the playground at Moulton High School”) but they went to different churches (“Priests went to AME, we went to Freedman’s Tabernacle”). When they met back up later in life in Cleveland, Dennis didn’t like her staying at Dr. White’s house, so they got married and he moved her in with him and his father. These are the stories my grandmother would tell if I asked the right question, if the right song was on, the right word uttered, the right name mentioned to trigger her memory, stories that she offered up to me, freely, albeit abbreviated. These are the stories that poet Patricia Smith did not get. For her, Alabama—the world of my grandmother’s and her mother’s childhoods—was left silent as a blank page.

“What hurt you into poetry?” I once heard the southern poet Natasha Trethewey ask. Something must. For some, it is an abusive or alcoholic parent, or a childhood trauma that leads to a loss of voice. For others, it’s the murder of a father, the syrupy sweet-talk of Motown men, the silence of a heritage from which they are severed. [End Page 222] This silence propelled Smith into the life of a poet, the pursuit of a kind of truth about how we have arrived in the places we have arrived and how we have become who we have become, not just as individuals but as part of a people. This truth cannot be found in facts or newspaper articles; it can only be discovered through a poet’s vigilant observation and devout attention to the people around her. In the face of silences that refused to return her love and longing for a personal and communal mythology, Patricia Smith has responded with persona, story, and song. Across more than three decades and eight collections of poetry, with imagination and pluck, Patricia Smith has...