V Efua Prince – Women & Writers

Tag: V Efua Prince

Sweet Potato Pie

February 10, 2023
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At the red light, a young man, maybe 30, probably younger, held a cardboard sign with words I didn’t bother to read. Living on the streets added an aged veneer. Yet, his complexion was pure. Crisp. Sharp. Onyx, topped with hair that might have been as saturated if he could have washed it more often. He wore a coat, appropriate to the Detroit wind, which was blowing mercilessly despite the mild February temperatures. I had seen signs of this sort before. Besides, I was heading somewhere, going to see about a couple. Mr. Horne had called an hour and a half ago to tell me that he had come across pictures of my beautiful family. He asked after my “famous husband.” I reminded him, not for the first time, that my husband had fallen in love with someone else and left us. He seemed hurt. Not by the news, but by the failure of his memory, which let him down so frequently these days. He had been a formidable man in his day. Tall. Sharp witted. Onyx skinned like the man beside my car holding the sign.

I was bringing them something sweet. I asked for a pie, but the restaurant did not have a whole pie. So they had given me six slices. The wedges were placed into cardboard take away containers and two were put into a paper bag. Three bags were inside a plastic grocery bag so that I could carry them more easily. I had just taken one container out and set it in the passenger seat for myself. That left five, an odd number. How would that work among the couple I was going to visit? I had only just wondered when I was stopped at the traffic light where the onyx skinned man seeking handouts. He appeared as an answer.

He came over in response to the window rolling down and peered sheepishly at me as he accepted my offering. He wanted money but he would take this small paper bag. “Sweet potato pie,” I told him in response to his unasked question. He wanted to know but had become accustomed to not asking questions, particularly of people who were willing to offer him things. He could discard the bag later if he chose, but for now, he humbly reached to receive the bag.

But the words “sweet potato pie” were unexpected, like a sudden, brisk wind, blowing open a curtain. A gust of recognition swept a memory to a place just behind his eyes. And I felt air escaped from that crack in his eyes. He adjusted the tilt of his head ever so slightly and he was exposed. I turned away quickly, feeling him to be vulnerable, like I might have felt upon noticing that his fly had come open. The air felt of joy too out of reach to be longed for—just as much hurt as relief. Gratitude was in there too.

I didn’t intend to pull the drapery from his eyes, but that is what I had done, so I averted my own eyes in an effort to offer him privacy. But now I was drawn to him. I wanted to see him, which is odd. I must have passed a thousand homeless people and never felt a desire to really see a single one. Even when I handed them money or food.

It was the pie, though. I liked sweet potato pie. My own mother’s being my favorite. Few make a pie as smooth and tasty as my mother’s. Gus’s came close, which is why I wanted to bring one to the elderly couple I was heading to see. I wanted them to have sweet potato pie, which reminds me of so many Thanksgivings. And, I could see now, that like me, this onyx skinned man had eaten sweet potato pie inside a warm kitchen, in the company of his family. This moment held recognition and disbelief suspended by the brown paper bag in his hand.

I turned my eyes and watched him through a mirror as he took the container from the bag to get at the slice of pie. He had it upside down. No matter. He lifted it to his lips. They were weathered and gray. The bite he took was too much. The light was green now. I was driving away.

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A Bundle of Letters

December 27, 2022December 27, 2022
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I binge watched Christmas movies from Thanksgiving to Christmas. I could have watched anything–action, adventure, comedy. I chose romantic Christmas movies. I wasn’t in the holiday spirit so much as I wanted something to pull a tear from my now chronically dry eyes. Christmas movies make it seem like life is full of happy endings. Watching them distracted me from the reality of our fragile democracy, the thinning generation of my elders, inflation, the impact of climate change, and increasing threat of gun violence.

I watched the one where Brooke Shields played a writer who wins over the affections of the man who was forced to sell her his family’s estate. And the one with Jack Black who falls for the woman who exchanges houses for the season with a woman who falls for the brother of the woman who owns the English cottage. I watched another about two independently minded Indian-Americans whose more traditional parents are pressuring them to get married. (Wait, that might not have been a Christmas movie.) I watched Notting Hill (1999) with Julie Roberts and Hugh Grant, again. I watched far too many to recall much less name. The particular films didn’t matter to me. I was only watching romances this year because I knew before I began how the movie would go.

I was happily watching The Noel Diary (2022) (it stars that actor from that tv show we all loved with the triplets) when the bliss of my cinematic retreat was disrupted by a bundle of letters. It’s a familiar trope, a stack of old letters mailed over a period of years collected rather neatly despite their varied sizes and colors but united by the common script denoting the name of the intended receiver. Sometimes the letters are bound by scraps of twine. Sometimes they are tucked into a cardboard or wooden box. Always they have been collected by someone who has been entrusted with the responsibility of distributing such letters to those who live at that address. But they haven’t in fact reached their intended reader until this moment of discovery. We feel the sense of betrayal and loss.

What does not come into the story, perhaps because it seems terribly difficult to depict, is just how intrusive a letter can be. By definition that letter is coming from someone who isn’t there. Someone who has not been present to make the receipt of a letter even possible. The movies don’t encourage us to think of that. That part is not romantic—it’s house work in its myriad forms. I’m not talking about that Martha Steward brand of perfect table settings and tidy living rooms, better homes & gardens shit. Just maintaining an address requires work. Ask anyone who actually does the work that goes into building and sustaining a home. Or anyone experiencing homelessness or living in a shelter. A letter writer takes that work for granted.

Housework and the accompanying work of building and maintaining a family is not the stuff of Christmas stories. Christmas stories are about love, choices, loss, and recovery. Even when it involves tension and intrigue, the work of house and home is too messy to be piled so neatly and held together by string. It consists of the daily grind that Robert Hayden captures in “Those Winter Sundays.” A poet can say what the filmmakers cannot. If they could say it, we might see that very often house work is the push behind the pull that carried the letter writer off into the world. Those Winter Sundays

The person who hid the letters away never goes out into the world. That person has been in the same place for all the years it took to commandeer each letter. The movies would have us believe that there’s something destabilizing and oppressive about the one who withholds the correspondence. That they are fearful of the possibilities the letters represent. These characters are depicted as obstacles, as part of the conflict the protagonist must overcome. Perhaps.

Admittedly, I would not have even read the letters the way that I am now if two days before Christmas I had not opened a large envelope addressed to me to discover three more envelopes inside. Two addressed to my adult children and a third addressed to me, with my teenager’s name penned neatly at the bottom. I passed the letters on to their intended receivers but for the first time I understood why the trope of the hidden letters was a thing. My peace is a premium now. And these letters–addressed to me but intending only to make me witness–demanded something of me that I could hardly spare. No! Enough! I am doing all I can already to make this home and keep this home safe.

Teenagers are not as easily transported to stable adulthood as two hour made-for-tv-movie often makes them out to be. And parents are not omniscient. The best shot a kid has at getting to the relatively safe haven of a mature, functioning adulthood is a parent, who is present, who willingly prioritizes the child’s needs. When someone who has absented themselves from the family decides to appear in the form of a letter, the letter reminds the kid that they are remembered by the letter writer, which is great. But it does not account for the work that goes into bringing a home back into order that inevitably follows its unexpected appearance.

Maybe one day, a woman of a certain age too will write a Christmas story. Maybe despite her having spent half a lifetime doing housework and homemaking, she will be presented with an opportunity to make that story into a tv movie. And perhaps that movie will show the work of keeping the house where that kid will be fed, the work that goes into their being able to sleep at night. And maybe, I will tear-up while watching it.

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Winter Solstice

December 22, 2020
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It’s the shortest day of the year. And what a year it has been. 2020.

In my mind I am drawing on the power of Saturn being in Jupiter to write some brilliant piece of literature. Instead I’m lying in my bed half-watching a show I half-like feeling half-a-headache and writing this blog post. Half-writing.

Someone just hit me up. We were supposed to talk today about my speaking at his college. He and I worked together a few years back. Before he and I both left the school under duress. His duress very different than my own. I was unable to proctor my exams that year because I wound up in ICU. I collapsed upon recognizing that my husband of 27 years was not what he had appeared to me to be. That was just before the winter solstice, too. On the solstice that year, I remember feeling the light through the window. It was pink, but not warm.

If you are receptive, winter reveals truths that the other seasons secret away. Take a walk and see why winter is cold. It doesn’t guard your feelings. But winter should get more love than it does. Folks get excited about the snow because people love cover. We should appreciate more the time after the leaves have fallen, before the snow comes to hide shit.

When someone who knew me as a married person–who knew and loved my family–appears now, it’s hard for me to keep myself together. It took time for me to gather myself after I was released from the hospital. I went about sweeping up the petals of my life from dusty corners. I was everywhere. Under the bed by a rawhide bone the new puppy had lost track of. Behind the shelf stacked with textbooks I had taught from three jobs ago. Beside a thumbtack that had fallen off the cork board where our family used to post sketches and graduation announcements. Those pieces are hard to keep in one place once they have already been scattered.

His text today saying we would talk tomorrow, blew through me like wind through an open door. And I remembered things this old friend does not know. Things I dare not write now and cannot say. Still pieces of me fall off my tongue despite my desire to hold it all together. Twenty seven years. How many wilted memories.

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This Woman’s Work

August 31, 2020August 31, 2020
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My kid starts seventh grade today. I did not go back to school shopping for the first time in 21 years. There’s no squeaky new tennis shoes. No stiff new jeans. No new t-shirts or zipper jackets. Instead, he will return to class while sitting at a small make-shift desk in my parent’s dining room. We have been staying with them due to an ill-timed kitchen remodeling project. (When is a good time to remodel the kitchen?)

I start classes tomorrow. But this year, unlike in years past, I feel like I have been doing the same kind of work all year–without my usual shift during the summer break. Generally I write in the summer. I did spend a lot of time writing this summer but the nature of the projects changed. The extended argument has given way to shorter, crisper statements that can be said while I am being pulled in many directions.

I learned more than twenty years ago while still in graduate school that if I were to ever become a researcher, I would have to turn my attention to the things that hampered my focus. That is why I started studying home. I was a wife and would give birth to one and then another baby while still in school. Studying home enabled me to remain psychically connected to my academic work while being pressed by the immediacy of home and family.

As time passed, my writing has become increasing local. I was working from home even before COVID 19. These days many are experiencing the disorientation that can occur when the physical boundaries that usually distinguish our identities–as professor, writer, mother, daughter, and so forth–have become increasingly blurred.

Recently articles have been appearing about the inequities which have emerged in the quarantined world–as the productivity of women professors declines and that of men professors increases. Further calls for social justice around matters of race and policing have been met with the counter cry for law and order. There is, of course, a market opportunity connected with the thirst for information in these destabilizing conditions. In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, sales of Black books spiked and I can’t count the number of times I saw Ibram Kendi on tv with his daughter in his lap talking about raising anti-racist children. (That girl is too young for him to be carting her out like that and talking about her like she’s already fully formed. Children have a way of turning parents into liars.) But the industries managing the distribution of that knowledge are driven not only by old structures that assign value in society in racialized and gendered terms but also by neoliberal forces that seek to leave the welfare of the populace to the management of market forces.

What that means is that “work” is assigned value in ways that may not reflect its practical significance, which is why during this pandemic so many of the world’s essential workers are among the lowest paid. And it is also why women can be seen as “less productive,” while carrying a larger burden of the responsibilities required to ensure functional households. Yet, if I choose to write about such things, there is the question of distribution that remains. Distribution ties into media outlets that prioritize appetites over the more intrinsic value of writing–the refinement of thought for the larger benefit of society. What then would happen if all of the work of women professors could be recognized as significant and designated professional value?

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Letter to Emma Davis

July 29, 2020July 29, 2020
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Mrs. Emma Davis
400 Forest Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia

15 June 2020

Dear Mrs. Davis,

I am writing as follow up to your letter dated December 5, 1938 to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In your letter you asked that Mr. Roosevelt send someone to investigate Sam Wix, the owner of Imperial Laundry where you worked. You probably heard President Roosevelt on the radio explaining his New Deal. He championed a minimum wage and sought to regulate the length of a work-week. He was from a wealthy family but his concern for the common man must have given you reason to hope.

You really could have used a new deal because the old one sucked. Your letter explained that your children were going without food to eat and that they did not have clothes to wear. Yet you were working at the laundry night and day.

You, like so many African Americans before you and countless since, believed in the promise of democracy. So you wrote the White House imagining the new laws might also benefit you. My telling you now that your hope was misplaced is like counting the life rafts on the Titanic.

I am writing to you 82 years late because I know that the response you received was woefully inadequate. My letter cannot rectify that fact. The facts are that the laundry industry was supported by notorious rulings like the 1936 case of Joseph Tipaldo who managed a laundry in Brooklyn, New York. He skirted the state law by coercing nine women laundry workers to return the difference between the $14.88 demanded by the New York minimum wage and the $10 a week he intended to pay them. After Tipaldo was jailed for forgery, conspiracy, and violating the State’s minimum wage law, his lawyers sought a writ of habeas corpus on the grounds that the New York law was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, voiding the law. The decision was among the Court’s least popular. Conservative Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish condemned the ruling as akin to the Dred Scott decision, one in his estimation that doomed 3 million women and children to economic slavery. So in 1936 when Roosevelt won re-election by a landslide, he saw it as a mandate to reform labor laws.

Laborers, like you who worked for poverty wages at laundries, wrote to him. The White House sent your letter over to the Women’s Bureau where the director kindly returned a neatly typed response stating in part: “I am sorry to inform you that the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act which gives the Federal government authority to fix the hours in private industry, applies only to industries of an interstate character, and laundries are not included under its regulation.” It would take decades for the law to apply to workers like you.

I found your letter in a box labeled Record Group No. 86 at the National Archives containing General Correspondence of the Women’s Bureau, 1919-1948. Mrs. Davis, as you well know, FDR would never go see about that bastard Mr. Wix. But I have read your letter.

You and my grandmother were contemporaries. Both of you from Georgia. Domestic workers. I never met you or your children, but your story is the story of the majority of black women in the South. And I want you to know that your children were not left naked and starving. They lived. And they died. Between, they argued, they laughed, they danced, they vomited, they fell ill, they drank too much, they got high, they fell out of love, they smoked, they made really funky music, they made babies, they made war, they spoke their peace, they shut their mouths, and they lived.

The principles of democracy have been put to the test every day for more than 200 years. Some days are hungry ones. But it has been women like you with the audacity to write to the people’s house to blow the whistle that reveal what’s most important. Nevertheless, hope is not external. You carried it within you.

Mrs. Davis, I look to you and the women of your generation in these troubling times. The question of democracy will not likely be settled by protest and marches. Instead it will be resolved by the resilience and quiet persistence of women who managed to wash the dirty clothes; that will yet determine if and when this nation-state succeeds. Because they raise the soldiers and teachers and artists and politicians and writers—the citizens. They are at the root.

We will not find our salve in industry and consumerism. Look to the hands that taught us thrift. To those who cleaned. To the ones who conserved and sustained. Mrs. Davis, I look to you.

Warmest regards,
V. Efua Prince

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Exhibit O: “June” read by V. Efua Prince

May 17, 2020May 17, 2020
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I dreamed I was carrying a dead man on my back. The stench of his decomposing flesh poisoned each breath. His weight bent my shoulders like a sack filled with cotton. He had been dead long enough for his flesh to yield its contents so I was soiled beneath the mass. But I held his arms and kept a labored pace. When I woke, I buried him without ceremony. I did not mark the date.

What’s left? Memory. But where is it lodged? In the brain as images? In the flesh as disease or scar tissue? In the air like a virus? In the soil like seed? In the marrow of bone….

–excerpt from “June”

V Efua Prince reading “June”

V Efua Prince is a professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University whose research centers on the complexities of home. Her writing often takes an interdisciplinary form as history, poetry, drama, and performance, in order to transform the history of black women into political art. She is the author of Burnin’ Down the House: Home in African American Literature (2005), Daughter’s Exchange (2018), and numerous other creative works. First published in The Masters Review, Prince’s award-winning essay, “June,” represents the interconnectedness of rape with global and historical factors.

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Exhibit N: Tai chi and the future of black…

May 8, 2020May 9, 2020
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Tai Chi practitioner and poet, Bro Yao (Hoke S. Glover III) is at the table today with V. Efua Prince talking about living with books. Glover founded and operated Karibu Books, which was the largest black bookstore in the history of the country. Our conversation begins with the question: Can you have too many books? Glover’s answer is yes.

Glover’s pick for this week’s segment of Opening Paragraph is “The Untouched” The Government of Nature by Afaa Michael Weaver.

Exhibit M: The future of black books

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Exhibit M: Finding food in the old neighborhood

May 3, 2020
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Join us at the table as V Efua Prince talks with Rahima Rice about changing food and changing neighborhoods. Growing up in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington, DC, carryouts were a staple in what would other wise be a food desert in the predominately African American community. Now like cities across the country, Rice’s neighborhood is gentrifying. And like many of her generation, Rice has abandoned her childhood diet for a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle. Rice is concerned about the food deserts in black urban communities that leave residents dependent on less healthy convenient meal options.

Rice is a playwright and filmmaker who draws upon the neighborhood she grew up in as the setting of her work. Her most recent work includes the web series, Room 513, the one-act play, The Eight -which premiered at the 2018 Anacostia Playhouse Visions/Revisions New Works Festival- and the soon to be released short film Making & Breaking. She is the founder of The 4208 Group. https://www.the4208group.com/

Exhibit M: Finding food in the old neighborhood

Also, in today’s Opening Paragraph segment, Rice reads The Four Noble Truths from the Dhammapada.

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Exhibit L: The wonder of wasting time

April 16, 2020April 16, 2020
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On this episode, my guest is the Artistic Director of the Adventure Theatre in Glen Echo, MD, Chil Kong. On the drive in to work in the morning, he centers himself. Kong carried from his college days a philosophy which he explains in three stages: “Make the mundane regular. Make the regular masterful. Make the masterful magical.”

Chil Kong holding his choice for Opening Paragraph *Paper Kingdom* by Helena Ku Rhee

Adventure Theatre is a family theater company that focuses on stories targeted mostly toward kids.

Adventure Theatre located at Glen Echo Park, Maryland

It is located in what was originally designed as a segregated theme park.

At the opening of our conversation, Kong talks about how his presence as the only Asian American artistic director of a major family theater company challenges that troublesome past.

Chil Kong’s pick for this edition of Opening Paragraph is The Paper Kingdom by Helena Ku Rhee.

Exhibit L: The wonder of wasting time–talking with Chil Kong

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Exhibit K: Inheriting photographs of the Puerto Rican migration

April 6, 2020April 7, 2020
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Join me in this episode when Sami Miranda is at the table. He talks about inheriting hundreds of photographs taken by his grandfather, documenting decades of family life, as well as the Puerto Rican migration to New York City.

Photo taken by Miranda’s grandfather of a soldier stationed in the Panama Canal Zone during WWII

Josefina at her son Ignacio’s grave, who died during WWII

Efua Prince talks with Sami Miranda about poetry and photographs

Now a significant part of the DC writing scene, Miranda says, “Everybody who puts work into their art form deserves support.” Miranda is the managing partner of the American Poetry Museum located in Washington, DC. He is an educator, poet, and visual artist.

photo of Sami Miranda by Monica Liang Aguirre

This week’s Opening Paragraph is drawn from John Murillo’s Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry.