Valerie Sweeney Prince – Women & Writers

Tag: <span>Valerie Sweeney Prince</span>

Place vs Space

December 12, 2024
by vefuaprince

An art piece hangs on my wall. It is a graphic rendering of the famous photo of Rosa Parks seated at the front of a city bus. The bottom is filled with text: TAKE UP SPACE—in all caps. The command taking note of Parks’ life-changing refusal to “stay in her place.” Instead, she moved. She changed places. In so doing, she took up space.

Place is bounded. Space is unbounded. Understanding this distinction matters because of the way they operate. As Henri Lefebvre explains, space is not simply a void waiting to be filled by a fertile presence. Space wields power. Lefebvre says, “Power’s message is invariably confused—deliberately so; dissemination is necessarily part of any message from power.” Place, too, is conflicted.

I, dare say like a majority of humans, spend a lot of time trying to make myself at home in this world. Even at home, I feel ill-at-ease these days. But why? Is the world really less safe today than it was when we were dreaming of “joy” and “hope”? Or is it more safe for those who have been longing for by-gone-days of a once great nation?

We should all spend time thinking about the ways that we inhabit and move around in the world. And about the structures we set in place. And about why they seem so necessary.

literature

Exhibit Q: PG County’s contribution to Black intellectualism surpasses…

July 3, 2024July 3, 2024
by admin

Some years ago while staying at a boutique hotel in the Bahamas, I found myself sitting with a couple from England and a slight blonde from the Midwest—who, upon learning that I was from the DMV, recalled a time when she got lost while traveling to Washington, DC. She found herself straying, inadvertently into Prince George’s County. People had warned her that she should avoid the county as it was dangerous. She thought that I would understand her trepidation, asking, “Where are you from?”

Prince George’s County. I had been invited to do a talk on home in African American literature at the College of the Bahamas. I am an academic. In fact, many of the most significant African American thinkers and writers have been shaped by the rich culture of Prince George’s County, Maryland. In fact, I would argue that PG, as the county is colloquially called by locals, has had a more enduring impact on and made more sustained contributions to Black letters than Harlem. Just look at some of the folks who have lived here:

Ntozake Shange, daughter of the Black Arts Movement at the vanguard of womanist literature;
Marita Golden, the founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation;
Aalyah Bilal, whose debut short story collection was a National Book Award Finalist;
Zane, who broke open Black erotica and for a time reigned as one of the most powerful women in the book industry;
Connie Briscoe, best-selling author;
Jason Reynolds, best-selling author;
Omar Tyree, best-selling author;
Thomas Sayers Ellis, the founder of the Dark Room Collective;
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet, MacArthur Fellow, and CEO of Freedom Reads; and
Hoke S. Glover III (Bro Yao) poet who founded, owned, and operated Karibu Books which spawned Mahogany Books.

Of course, these writers are in community with others from the broader metropolitan region, such as:

Kwame Alexander, Emmy award winning and best-selling author;
Ta-Nehisi Coates, among the most influential Black writers of our time; and
Rion Amilcar Scott, Pen/Hemingway recipient creates a fictional Cross River, based upon his experiences growing up in neighboring Montgomery County.

So why aren’t people talking about a PG Renaissance? For one thing, Prince George’s is not noted for dramatic patterns of migration. Unlike New York, Maryland is south of the Mason Dixon Line. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, in order to escape slavery, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and others had to leave Maryland. At least, until the Civil War ended in 1865.

Nevertheless, during the twentieth century, people migrated to DC for many of the same reasons that people moved to Harlem. Especially after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision of “Separate but Equal,” the Federal Government was compelled to open its offices to African Americans to work behind a desk. This allowed Black migrants to obtain good government jobs, earning benefits, salaries, and pensions. As a result, according to Andrew Van Dam of the Washington Post, PG is surpassed by only Charles County as home to the most affluent African American population in the country.

My parents were new, first-time homeowners when they brought me, their third born child, home to Kentland. That house accommodated us comfortably while we were young. When I was seven, we moved to a larger home in a new development on the southern edge of Bowie where I would grow up with my brothers. My parents rose early to take Route 50 into Washington, DC to work. PG cannot be disconnected from DC.

Prince George’s County leans toward the District of Columbia and not just as a site of employment. Take, for instance, the way Prince Georgians tell folks who ask when traveling that they are from DC, because if they say, “Maryland,” people who are not from this area usually ask, “Baltimore?” Baltimore’s gritty blue-collar culture is notably different from the white-collar bureaucracy that helped turn the nation’s capital into Chocolate City. Not to mention the fact that Baltimore has distinctly different franchises in the Ravens and the Orioles than DC’s Commanders and Nationals.

Following the financial crisis of 2008, gentrification ate the Chocolate City—renovating row homes, building luxury condos—and expectorated many of the city’s poorer, more melanated residents. A number of the Black people who used to live in the District relocated to PG. Half a century prior, the county transitioned from rural to suburban with the passing of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 as African American families like mine fled the inner-city turmoil and in search of larger houses with nice yards. More recently, many of the County’s wealthier residents migrated to Charles County looking for the same things. IRS records show that fifty-six percent of Charles County’s most affluent Black residents relocated from PG.

Renaissance literally means re-birth. In fact, PG has not experienced a re-birth so much as it serves as a steady pump at the core of an incubator for today’s most prominent poets and writers. Joy Alfred, Brian Gilmore, Sufiya Abdul Rahman, Khadijah Ali-Coleman, Monifa Love, and Randall Horton are just a few. Moreover, the DMV has deep, if not storied, ties to African American letters. Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Anna Julia Cooper, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, and Toni Morrison, have all had meaningful connections to this region. In addition to the likes of celebrated entertainers like Dave Chappell, Taraji P. Henson, Chadwick Boseman, Felicia Rashad, and Martin Lawrence, who spent some or all of their formative years in the DMV, writers like Ibram X. Kendi, Tony Medina, Fred Joyner, Shakeema Smalls, Toni Asantelightfoot, Sami Miranda, Joel Dias Porter, Kenny Carroll, Derrick Weston Brown and Reuban Jackson continue to feed this vibrant culture. Yet, this reality fails to draw attention of historians and scholars.

And the state does not even seem aware of this distinction. The information about Prince George’s County on the Maryland state website is literally four sentences long. The site gives neighboring Montgomery County more than four times that many, which suggests something of the status assigned to the two counties in the region. PG ranks a close second to Montgomery County, with just over 955,000 residents. Surely the State might find something to note in such a well-populated county.

A hundred years ago, Harlem was in vogue. The Great Migration was in motion and Black people were leaving the country in droves, heading to the city. Among them came artists, musicians, dancers, and writers. Alain Locke, who also has ties to the DMV, famously named himself midwife to this New Negro born of an era which has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Despite the fact that the period of increased productivity only lasted just over a decade, it’s legacy has been heralded for nearly a hundred years.

It is time that PG County take its place as a locale of note within a metropolitan region responsible for so much literary production. Emmy Award Winning and bestselling authors, National Book Award finalist, Pen/Hemingway recipient, MacArthur Fellow, and Black owned bookstores. I remember, near the end of his life after evacuating New Orleans following hurricane Katrina, MacArthur Fellow and artist John T. Scott telling me that culture is not like rain; it bubbles up from the ground like a spring. It’s no wonder, then, that Prince George’s County, in particular, and the DMV more broadly—home to a diverse community of Black people—gives rise to a class of writers who generate an ongoing stream of noteworthy literature.

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Sweet Potato Pie

February 10, 2023
by admin

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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This Woman’s Work

August 31, 2020August 31, 2020
by admin

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
by admin

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
by admin

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
by admin

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
by admin

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
by admin

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
by admin

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.