Speaking Barbara

Uncolored

I say let us be

black, and they can

be the “uncolored.”

They can be those

colorless masses

who float like

ghosts against

our ripe skin.

I say keep your white,

your “uncolored” skin.

It reflects everything, you know.

My skin

holds it all in.

Ammunition

The cracked leather seats

of our Richmond-bound train

were black and shiny

like the soldiers’ shoes

that surrounded us.

Those polished boys stood

like guards or trophies,

ever at attention,

ironed and tall as pines.

My father, a soldier himself,

ut us on the train

like artillery shells.

I wonder if he knew

the explosion that would come

when that soldier-filled train

hit Virginia.

Two Grandmothers

Grandmother Croner was burlap hands and chicken eggs and old but sturdy kitchen tables. She was open skies and wood chips and the belly of a stove that burned the newspapers she never read. She was land and corn and hogs and heavy black shoulders that jumped up and down when she laughed her deep holler laugh.

Grandma Sally was ribbon-skinned and gold-rimmed. She was upright like a tea-spout and stood like the books that lined her walls. Grandma Sally was sharp words and penmanship and an “A-framed” house that sat in the middle of Farmville. She wore thick cotton dresses and colorful Sunday hats that orbited her head like planets.

And I am both, and I am neither as we are all both and neither—the water in the bucket and the emptiness, before and after.

Vernon’s Shoes

Barbara’s mother taught her to tie Vernon’s shoes twice—a double knot that wouldn’t come undone as her little brother galloped like a wild horse down the southern roads of Prince Edward County, Virginia.

Barbara’s mother taught her to cook the bacon before the eggs so that the eggs would sop up the bacon grease. It made breakfast easier to clean, and Daddy liked greasy eggs.

Barbara’s mother taught her to dress herself before she dressed Joan because Joan would wail and cry and storm about the house until the old white school bus started kicking up dust.

Barbara was good at tying shoes, cooking eggs, and dressing Joan. She was good at feeding chickens, bringing water, and keeping the house tidy. She was as good at planting tobacco as she was picking it.

Barbara’s mother had returned to Washington, D.C. when there wasn’t enough work in Farmville. Daddy and the kids stayed with various grandmothers, passed off like weighty batons, and her mother worked at the Pentagon, sorting papers in a clerk’s office. Barbara’s mother wore a starched white shirt that she ironed every night.

Barbara’s father ran a small farm that supplied the Johns family and most of the black community with cotton, fresh vegetables, and tobacco. The store was as much a civic center as it was a grocery stand. Barbara knew many of the parents from their children. She could see similarities in their noses or eyes. Sometimes she could tell a parent by the shade of brown: the light mocha mother was Jenny’s kin, the midnight black was Henry Walton’s. Barbara liked to work at the store, to see strangers from nearby Richmond throw out seeds of stories and watch the old black women peck at them like great dark chickens. She read the paper with her father at night, so she knew about the mill strikes in Danville; she knew about North Carolina letting in their first Negro medical student; and she knew about Farmville, how nothing ever happened worth mentioning.

Freckles

Barbara had freckles, a baker’s dozen that sat on the bridge of her nose and curled around her high cheek bones. Her grandmother said there was Cherokee in her blood. From National Geographic, Barbara concluded there must be Irish as well. She laughed when she thought about herself with a long Indian headdress or bright red hair.

Barbara’s freckles made her look younger than she was, but no one mistook Barbara for being a child. Even at sixteen she held her body with such poise, new students would often think she was the teacher. And she was and she wasn’t, but when asked, she always just smiled, flashed her reddened cheeks, and said, “Not yet.”

Little Wooden Shoes

Those shoes?

They burned.

They burned in the fire

that took the house

on the hill that we were

all so proud of.

Those shoes

were wooden.

They were brought here by

my Daddy from Holland,

and I had the only black feet

in Virginia

that ever filled a pair

of red wooden shoes.

Hiding Place

In the woods near my home there is a rock that the trees bend over. Here, where the sun cannot even find me, I sit and read and think. When I was quite young, it was here that I would hide from monsters. As I grew older, it was here that I would fight them. I did not set out to change the state of segregation in Virginia Public Schools, but it is changing. I would be ignorant to say that I have not had at least a small part in this. I have found though, that the truths of the human spirit will find victories in the most unlikely of places. I am not a hero or a political activist. I am not a lawyer or a social scientist. I am a young woman. I like bobbing for apples and Saturday night fish fries. I like dancing and sweet potatoes. I like dresses that flare up when I spin. I knew something was wrong, and I decided to do something about it. This does not make me better or worse than anyone else. This only makes me Barbara Rose Johns, still in the woods near my home, keeping the monsters at bay.

Numbers

I was a bookkeeper and a bill collector before I was a teenager. I was good at math and had a good memory. When Daddy started to let people credit purchases to accounts, Mary, Jane, and I spread our numerical wings and took to flying around Farmville. We knew all the black houses and the white ones where our aunts would sometimes work. We would alight upon telephone poles and weather vanes. We would sing complicated songs of patron’s bills and money still owed. We built nests out of receipts and ledgers. Our Daddy gave us feathers before he gave us feet. Unlike the white children, some of us black folk had to grow top down.

Classroom

We shouldn’t be here

on this long white bus,

but Moton is out of room.

Our teacher, a heavy black

woman cannot easily

walk down the narrow aisles.

She yells from the front

like our driver would yell,

“Hush up children,”

“Pay attention children,”

“Don’t make me come back there,”

But we know she cannot,

so we slouch down in our seats

on a bus going nowhere.

We see freedom outside.

Too many windows is, indeed,

a dangerous thing.

Tobacco

The old men who smoke

the tobacco we grow

don’t know

that it cuts my hands.

The old men who smoke

the tobacco we grow

don’t know

that it trips my sister’s feet.

The old men who smoke

the tobacco we grow

don’t know

that it gives my daddy headaches.

The old men who smoke

the tobacco we grow

don’t know

that it makes my momma sigh.

But the old men who smoke

the tobacco we grow

do know

that their chimney throats

are our food,

our roof,

and our salvation.

Patchwork

There are seams on the ground—

laces where you can tell

this town was torn apart

and sewn back together.

It is a patchwork job,

rusty needles and heavy thread.

Threads like the one between my black face

and your white hand.

It is a patchwork place,

mis-colored and sewn on wrong.

There are hems on the hearts.

There are knots in our throats.

There are stitches in the sky.

Apple tree

This school is an apple,

rotting from the inside.

The school board keeps

admiring our shiny skin

while we eat soft

and sour meat.

My uncle told me that

we can tie up our tongues

and watch the white

apple, so fresh you can

hear the bite, or we can

find another tree.

There is only one tree in Farmville.

I think he meant that we should shake it.

Playground

We get a cup, and they get the bottle.

We get a slice, and they get the loaf.

We get a handful, and they get the bushel.

We get an egg, and they get the dozen.

We are on the same seesaw, I think.

They are just heavy, holding the ground.

We are dangling, four feet above the

hard earth, always about to fall.

New School

I dreamt last night

of a three story school

with rows of red lockers

and shelves that were full

of unbroken spines and

ages not torn,

of books that had never

been opened before,

and the fountains were clear

and the chairs, unmarked.

There was smooth black asphalt

where the teachers could park.

There were tubas and trumpets,

ianos and flutes,

jump ropes and baseballs

and basketball hoops.

There were maps on the walls

and creatures in cages

and well-sharpened pencils

and clean notebook pages

And a checkerboard floor

that stretched on for miles

and a high ceiling covered

with styrofoam tiles.

And the teachers were black

and the students were black

and the white kids would stare

at the school that we had

And at three stories high,

we could see the whole world,

but I woke up too early

a Moton High girl.

Fire and Ice

Moton was built for 150 students. By 1951, it had risen to 450 and counting. There were no busses, only a bus. The classrooms no longer supported the size of the student body, so like a smashed ant hill, the Moton High students scattered about the campus, reinventing classrooms in auditoriums, beneath old Virginia oaks, in hallways, and even on their one bus. In response to a plea from parents and teachers, the Farmville Public School District built tar-paper shacks to accommodate the growing population. The paper thin walls did nothing to shield from the winter, so large potbellied stoves were installed. Dependent upon their assigned seat, these tar-paper children were either being frozen or burned alive. The Farmville Public School District didn’t seem to mind either, knowing, as Robert Frost had known, that both could do the trick.

Picking Time

Barbara had called them out one by one. She knew what she was doing. Edwilda Isaac was only a freshman, but she was tall and slender and had light brown eyes that the boys followed like sports scores. Martha did not speak often, but when she did, whole herds of Moton High men would stop and crane their necks. John A. Stokes was president of the senior class. He was dark and wore thin-rimmed glasses. He had a mustache that hung like a little comb on the hearth of his upper lip. He was bold with the teachers and smart. He could tell a lie like it was scripture. John Watson and Claude Tabor were good, solid grassroots boys. They would do what they were told. Vera Allen, Carly Johnson, and Wendy Sugg were Barbara’s best friends. Joan Johns was, of course, Barabara’s sister. Sisters have to help.

Barbara met them all on the football field. She made them cut class, which none of the girls had ever done. She told them that she had a plan to make the white people at the school board listen. She said that they would not get in trouble if her plan worked. She seemed not to have considered a scenario where it didn’t.

And so it was, like clockwork for the next year, these nine would meet in hallways and behind the Johns’ store. They would paint signs and recruit allies. They were militant when no one was around. It was an easy army, and they marched this way for a year.

At the end of the year, however, Barbara decided to go to war. Her army, ready or not, prepared formation.

Students Only

Fellow Students,

It is time we do something about the state of our school. It is time we stop asking and begin demanding for the kind of classrooms we deserve. Today at noon there will be an assembly. The teachers do not know about it, and they must not know. When the announcement is made, untangle yourself from your chairs, look one last time at your makeshift classroom, and walk out the door. Do not heed teachers’ demands to be seated. Do not stop walking until you reach the auditorium. Once there, I will tell you our plan.

It is time for change,

Barbara R. Johns

Prank Calls

“Yes, sir. Is this Principal Jones?”

“It is. How can I help you?”

“Well, sir. I believe some of your young colored men are skipping school”

“Who did you say this was?”

“This is . . . Roberts . . . Marshall Roberts at the county courthouse. Are you going to get these boys or am I going to call the police?”

“Oh, No sir. No need for that. I am on my way. County courthouse, you said?”

“Yes, sir. Please hurry.”

“I will Mr. . . Roberts. I will”

M. B. Jones set the heavy black phone down on the receiver and, for the first time in twelve years, left Moton during school hours. He told his receptionist that he was going to see about some truant children. He slipped on his jacket and shut the door behind him. As he walked down the hall, she heard the faint sound of whistling.

Call to Order

As Barbara looked about the stage she did not find a gavel or a bell. Frantically searching for something to draw the attention away from the doors, she started to clap her hands. The faint applause fell like ash on the fiery crowd. And then at once, the students, as if a great wind blew them, turned their heads to the podium. There, with a stone look in her eye, Barbara Johns was beating the wooden platform with the heel of her black shoe. Sarah looked down and saw her balancing on one leg, not willing to put her bare foot down.

As the crowd grew quieter the banging grew louder until small beads of sweat rolled down Barbara’s face. When the murmurs subsided, when the whispers ebbed and receded, Barbara set her shoe on the podium, a makeshift gavel.

Before she could speak, Mr. Salazar once again opened the auditorium door and started to enter. Barbara jumped from the stage and hurled her other shoe at him. Other students pushed him out in a great wave, leaving a barefoot Barbara in the very center of the crowd.

From here she began to speak.

“Do not,” she said, her voice steady and calm, “let any more teachers through that door.”

“Today is not about them, and it is not their fight. Today is ours.”

Strike

The word bubbled in their throats as Barbara walked back to the podium. Strikes were common in the mining towns around Farmville, and the Farmville Herald always held pictures of great mobs of people with signs.

“What do you mean, strike?” a yellow-skinned sophomore boy asked.

“I mean strike,” Barbara repeated as calmly as if she had said carousel or peanut butter.

By now the crowd started to dissipate from the stage and students were moving into their small familiar groups of friends. Many were talking about class or the upcoming Mayfest to be held in town. For many this was an assembly like any other assembly. They were waiting for it to end, planning on returning to their teachers and coursework.

Barbara sensed the percolating apathy and spoke again. Her voice was louder now.

“I mean that we are walking out of here. I mean that we are walking out of here and not coming back until they agree to build us a new school.”

“I mean that we are not going to learn out of secondhand textbooks in a secondhand school as secondhand children.”

“I mean that I am not a secondhand girl, and I do not need nor want a secondhand education.”

Barbara now had the attention of the room. She quietly picked up a white wooden sign with the words “STRIKE” in big black letters. She stepped down from the stage and walked toward the auditorium doors. The boys who were keeping the teachers out stepped aside. Barbara looked once behind her before stepping into the first day of the Moton High School strike. Gathering extra signs hidden behind the stage, the students fell behind Barbara, John and Joan taking her left and right.

The crowd of students walked two miles down Main and then Putney to talk to T.J. McIlwanie, a man known for his large glasses and large ears. When they entered the waiting room, the receptionist could barely speak. Barbara coolly asked to speak to Mr. McIlwanie, The receptionist eased out of her chair and hurriedly walked down a back hallway. After muffled squeaks from the receptionist, the large-eyed, large-eared T.J. McIlwanie came charging down the hall.

“I want your names. I want all of your names. Your parents are about to lose their jobs because of you. I want your names.”

Barbara spoke.

“Johns, sir. J-O-H-N-S. We are here to talk to you about our new school.”

“ “

The town papers are calling our strike a “strike.” They have referred to our committee as a “committee.” To that I ask the “men” who are in “leadership” to consider the “equality” they have achieved with our “fine” provisions.

They best not keep quoting. I grew up between those unforgiving marks.

Tourists

We drove past the courthouse and there were Negroes, whole swarms of ’em on the front steps. Some were sitting and picking at their dresses and others were marching in small circles, holding old pieces of painted plywood.

They stared at us as we drove by, heavy long stares that followed us all the way home.

Momma shook her head until the car stopped, telling no one what she had heard in the beauty parlor, on the tennis courts, at the Maytag store. Daddy held the steering wheel like a bull. His white knuckles popped like corn.

I didn’t sleep well that night. I kept seeing those Negro eyes, big and focused, not looking at us, looking at what was coming after.

Blowing Trumpets

I’m not so small that they

can’t hear me if I yell with my

whole mouth.

I’m not so small that they

can’t hear me if I yell with my

whole head.

I’m not so small that they

can’t hear me if I yell with my

whole body.

I’m not so small that they

can’t hear me if I yell with my

whole color.

And they’re not so big that

when I do, they won’t fall

like Jericho.

Cap and Gown

Barbara didn’t graduate from Moton High. Concerned for her safety, Barbara’s parents moved her north to live with her Uncle Vernon, a tall stocky man, who always wore a tie. Far from the stoked fire of Farmville, Virginia, Barbara walked across a May stage with strangers, nameless faces that had never seen a picket sign in her hands.

From 1959 to 1964, Farmville education closed its doors, and six years of children, black and white, were not taught.

Barbara never moved back to Farmville.

Effigy

A cross doesn’t look the same

once you’ve seen it on fire,

once you’ve seen it through

your bedroom window.

Who She Is

Barbara Rose Johns is a giant.

Forgotten in the volatile history of the early 1950s, Johns, a freckle-faced, sixteen-year-old girl, stood up where she felt duty required her to stand. Then a student at Moton High School in Prince Edward County, Virginia, Barbara Rose Johns recognized the inequity of her segregated black school. She and her classmates were barely second-class citizens in the inequitable distribution of educational resources. During a long pause in the building of a promised school house for black secondary students, the school board elected to build three “tar and paper” shacks to contain student overflow. Peter Irons (2002) points out that “during the winter, students who sat near the [wood-burning] stoves in ‘the shacks’ were sweltering, while those on the far side of the room were so cold they wore their overcoats” (p. 82). Clearly not a place for much-needed education, Johns began to question her parents, her teachers, her principal, and even her school board about the injustices.

Answered in tired resolution or unanswered, Johns decided it would be her responsibility to take action. In the spring of 1951, she did just that. On the morning of April 23, 1951, Johns arranged for the principal of Moton High School to tend to some allegedly truant students in downtown Farmville. Through student council, Johns had relayed a message to all students and teachers at Moton High School that an assembly was to be held in the auditorium. When the curtains of the stage were drawn back, however, it was only Johns and her intimate roster of allies who stood at the podium (Irons, 2002). Teachers were promptly removed from the premise (some forcibly), and Johns began to direct the 450 students of Moton High School on what they would do next.

Johns and her entourage marched to the county courthouse in Farmville and were met with a slammed door. The school board chairman also refused to help. On the advice of a local reverend, Johns wrote Spottswood Robinson III of the Richmond, Virginia NAACP legal office. Robinson’s involvement in the Moton High School strike led to the court case Davis v. Prince Edward County, one of five cases that underwrote Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

While for safety Johns was removed from Farmville to live with relatives, her bravery and intelligence made an indelible mark on the landscape of education and race relations in the United States. It is for this reason that Barbara Rose Johns is a giant, silent and towering over us, her legacy, a great shadow that has changed us.

Why We Should Care

Barbara Rose Johns’s story must be told. Her life is a rich portrait of those most honorable qualities of courage, dedication, and pride. Because of both her youth (consider Claudette Colvin) and the many powerful adult male figures in the Brown case, Johns has been left as marginalia in most Civil Rights readings. In books with a specific focus on the Brown decision or post-Brown years (Irons, 2002; Kluger, 1975; Branch, 1989, Bell, 2004; Martin, 1998) Johns is given a terse and functional treatment if mentioned at all. Only Kluger (1975) offers a more intimate look at Johns as a person and not just an instrument. The most detailed account of Johns’s life, understandably, considering the nature and scope of the piece, is Bob Smith’s (1965) They Closed Their Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia 1951-1964. Using extensive quotations from friends, family, and Barbara Rose Johns, herself, Smith creates a more visceral presence of the child activist.

Academia has also turned a blind eye and deaf ear to Johns. Articles that mention Johns are few and far between, only appearing in history or education journals such as Preview American History, OAH Magazine of History, and Scholastic Update, whose boutique readership restricts Johns’s larger notoriety. In a more public sphere, Jeffrey Zaslow (2005), in his provocatively titled “Kids on the Bus: The Overlooked Role of Teenagers in the Civil Rights Era,” draws attention to both Johns and her equally forgotten civil rights sister, Claudette Colvin. Zaslow’s Wall Street Journal article, however, is a stepping stone to a larger commentary on forgotten heroes, not a documented argument for Johns’s place in history.

Barbara Rose Johns, her incredible resilience, her boldness in the face of tyranny, and her just and wise cause are in danger of being forgotten if her story is not better anchored in history. My poetry is a way to safeguard the character of Barbara Rose Johns and insure that future generations will know at least enough to ask questions.

Retelling Barbara

In an effort to recreate Johns’s story, I have collected primary and secondary material on her life and her historic 1951 walkout. Juxtaposing the story of Barbara Rose Johns as told by reflective authors (Smith, 1965; Kluger, 1975; Branch, 1989), the story as told by eyewitnesses (Gilbert, 2004), the story recounted by Johns herself (unpublished memoir courtesy of the Moton High Museum in Farmville, Virginia), and salient articles from the Richmond Times Dispatch and the Farmville Herald during the spring of 1951, I constructed a scaffolding of the Barbara Rose Johns story.

Through poetry, I then began to rewrite the story, anchoring what I felt in what I “knew.” The series of poems that came from this exercise is a multivocal account of Barbara Rose Johns. Some poems take on the voice of Johns while others assume voices of unnamed community leaders. Some use an omniscient narrative voice while others are the voice of a limited narrator. In all instances the voice(s) is/are a delicate braiding of truth, my understanding of truth, and my created biographical fiction.

How to Tell a Story/How to Tell a Person

The poetry and prose poetry work to both shape a vibrant narrative and offer a retelling of Johns’s story as an instrument to critique mid-Twentieth-century America and the reconstructed south’s malicious forms of hate, of which segregation was/is only one. The collection is historical ethnographic fiction. While rooted in documents and recorded accounts of Johns’s life, the work is “fleshed out” with my own interpretation of history—my own assumed character interactions, intentions, and reactions.

The Reality of Fiction

One trouble with historical ethnography is the tension created between what is “real” and what the author understands to be real. Denzin (1997) [quoting Todorov (1977)] describes this chasm as the space between truth and verisimilitude. The author constructs reality based on the premise of what he or she has researched. However, the sieve of that information, the author lens that sees “truth,” and the glue that reconstructs “truth,” is not, in its most primitive definition, the truth. The hope of the author, and what Denzin (1997) argues is the goal of the author, is to create a text whose verisimilitude meets the demands of the original truth and resolves the disparities that the audience would view between their knowledge/assumptions and the author’s text/performance.

However, this hope (in itself) cannot be the final goal if additional goals include critique, emancipation, and personal reflection. This work is a not an encyclopedic entry. This work is not an unbiased examination of a historical figure. This work is full of me, my experiences, my reactions, and my reflections (Denzin, 2005). Along with testimonios, fiction, short stories, and personal narratives, historical ethnographic poetry is a form of narrative that, like testimonios, should “be read as remembering and honoring the past, not as factual truthfulness” (Denzin, 2005 p. 947).

I accept that even if my intentions were to create a “pure” historical treatment of Barbara Rose Johns, I would fail. Denzin and Lincoln (1994) calls research a “multicultural process” because inquiry is shaped by “class, race, gender, and ethnicity” (p. 19). As a white, middle-class male, raised in the suburban south, my reading and retelling of Johns is messy (Marcus, 2007). It is not pure because it is colored with my own assumptions, impressions, and even inquiry intentions. Second, my intention is not simply to describe but to perform the narrative of Barbara Rose Johns. Descriptions serve to produce generally accepted facts; they are often one-dimensional and lack multiple purposes. While I hope to deliver some characteristics of Johns and facts surrounding her 1951 walkout, I also intend to create a vibrant memory. It is not my only goal to dispatch information; instead, I want to create an experience. This creation requires me to both stretch existing truth and assume connective characters, moments, and conversations. I desire to create a representation of Barbara Rose Johns that not only tells her story but one that reaches out to and resonates within an audience.

Finally, my treatment of Barbara Rose Johns’s life is not a documentation of fact. It is, as Denzin (2003) notes, “a text that reengages the past and brings it alive in the present” (p. 55). The notion of truth is a dangerous idea when all parties involved are alive. While posthumously engaging the life experience of a historical character, truth is even more contentious.

It is for these reasons that I have departed from attempts to create a historical biography and instead have accepted the reality (and necessity) of my own fiction and have embraced historical ethnographic fiction.

The Choice of Poetry

Poetry is words, still alive. The motion of poetry makes the text vibrant, interactive, and resonant. The art of poetry is not to tell but to show. The poet creates space inside the poem where readers can enter, dwell, consider, and retreat. I use lyrical poetry to “represent actual experiences—episodes, epiphanies, misfortunes, pleasures—capturing those experiences in such a way that others can experience and feel them” (Richardson, 1997, p. 183). Poetry is an alternative way to engage a public in a particular discourse. Ivan Brady (2009) writes that “poetry is a way of constructing lines and meanings in spoken or written words” that does not fear “sometimes deliberately fictionalized realities that ‘ring true’” (p. xiv). He claims that poets do not write about their subject but instead write “in and with the facts and frameworks of what they see in themselves in relation to Others, in particular landscapes, emotional and social situations” (Brady, 2009, p. xiv).

Poetry as Truth Serum

Additionally, poetry ensures that my impressions of Barbara Rose Johns are limited to my own abilities and conscience. A real danger of traditional texts is that they are too often read as infallible truth. The truth is that all authors fall short of truth as truth is a constructed and subjective entity. There can be agreement on facts (or at least agreement not to question particular facts), but the story itself will always be infused with the experience, emotion, and intent of the author. The vehicle of poetry naturally delineates from detached reporting and cues the reader to the subjective and improvised nature of the text. A familiar form for personal observations, impressions, and considerations, poetry helps the reader read my work as an ethnographic fiction, an ethnography interpreted by and through me. The form links the work to the author before the subject. The form allows the reader to be critical of both the subject and the author.

Selected Voices

The multivocal model of my poetry collection offers a richer view of Barbara Rose Johns’s life. To limit my poetry to only Johns’s voice would give unwanted privilege to her experience. I think the greater benefit of her story is to recognize what/whom her story effected and affected. When I do use Johns’s voice, I do not claim that my voice is accurate as I could not possibly imagine to perfect a voice I have never heard, much less one that resonates from an experience so unlike mine. As Andrew Hudgins explains after completing a piece on a mid-Nineteenth-century poet and musician,

Despite his having been dead for over a hundred years now, I’d like to thank Lanier [the poet and musician] for allowing me to use the facts of his life—more or less—to see how I might have lived if it had been mine. (Hudgins as quoted in Faulkner, 2009, p. 35)

Hudgins does not presume to recreate Lanier’s life but instead to recreate the vehicle of Lanier’s life so that others (including himself) can experience it. It is not my goal to reincarnate the voice of Barbara Rose Johns, nor is it my intention to construct a ventriloquist dummy that poses as Johns but speaks only with my voice. The multivocal approach attempts both to recreate an educated telling of Johns’s and the Farmville, Virginia community’s experience in 1951 and allow room for question, debate, and fiction. As narrator, title speaker, and community member, the many voices act simultaneously as generator, critic, and referee—all the while switching roles.

Johns as a Collection

In addition to providing the opportunity to experiment with multiple voices, the collection of small poems in lieu of one or two longer or epic poems has meaning. Butler-Kisber and Stewart (2009) claim that

creating a series or “cluster” of poems around a theme is a powerful way of expressing a range of subtle nuances about a topic while simultaneously producing a more general overview. These simultaneous perspectives that are provided by poetry clusters give a richer and deeper understanding of a phenomenon. (p. 4)

Butler-Kisber and Stewart (2009) argue that poetry clusters are highly dependent upon individual interpretation and thereby avail several different “truths” to different readers. The subjective nature of the readers’ experiences with the cluster echoes the subjective nature of the author’s experience with the “facts” of the event. Thus the reader is more closely aligned with the experience of the author than if the work was more informative or expository. A cluster, specifically a multivocal cluster, of poetry makes the reader work for information. Even in a printed chronology, readers are more likely to read out of order, reread, or share particular poems out of context. This freedom offers multiple interpretations of the event even as the author’s creation is one of many interpretations of the event(s) in question.

Image Over Form

Academically trained as a formalist and neo-formalist poet, I understand the tradition of themed or form-specific collections. Formal collections build momentum, create homogeneity that empowers particular ideas or themes, and help to position the collection as one interconnected thought. A variety of forms, however, works to preserve the multivocal (and multitruthed) nature of my fiction. Prose poems like “Hiding Place,” epistolary poems like “Students Only,” metered poems like “New School,” and dialogue poems like “Prank Calls” help to vary the ways of reading historical fact and imagining an ethnographic fiction.

Additionally, the focus on image over form uses meaningful figurative language to give concrete detail richer meaning (Cahnmann-Taylor, 2009). For example, I connected early memories of Johns’s home burning and a pair of shoes that her father brought her as a gift. These two memories, an event and an object, serve in “Little Wooden Shoes” to emphasize the singularity of Johns and her special shoes. The poem marks both a loss of property and a loss of entitlement, losses that I imagine were recalled as she questioned school inequality.