Kindred Narratives

Sweetwater is a slow cooked auto/ethnography. Each story has a distinct yet complementary character that becomes more layered and deeply textured as the reader stews at home with the folks from “The Bottom.” Author Robin “Bird” Boylorn recovers open secrets and recasts the rural apart from its popular and academic constructions that treat it as a lost space where time has stopped or has reversed altogether, or as less significant place to talk about contemporary blackness, considering much of our collective experience since the great Black migration(s) has been defined through the urban, cosmopolitan black masculine. ¹ Boylorn blends black vernacular and poetic prose with womanist and feminist epistemologies to concoct a homemade familial narrative that is uniquely southern and unapologetically Black woman-centered.

I can taste Sweetwater. It is not so much her description about the aroma of fried fatback and pickled eggs and the lingering ammonia, chicken shit stench as it is the bittersweet, matrifocal memories she pens about lovers and loved ones fighting to see themselves, to free themselves, to be (good with and to) themselves using whatever cultural tools at hand. One of the tools both Boylorn and other womenfolk use is the word. Boylorn stuffs us with a sensory experience rooted in African diasporic storytelling, which privileges orality, interaction, and spirituality. Through idioms, colloquial references, and poetry, she invites us to take in Sweetwater aloud. D. Soyini Madison suggests orality—that connection between sound and rhythm—is important not only to understand Black speech but also to make sense of how we signify and contextualize the world. ² Boylorn purposefully provides a nonlinear, polyvocal narrative—one that stirs folklore with history, personal memory with transcribed interviews, and the sacred with the secular. (She does so with declarations about being superstitious and religious, and with descriptions of the cussing churchwomen.) This unlikely marriage between Black love and hate follow Black girls to womanhood where they experience lifetime tussles with wonderful-terrible men. Still, the redemption song that Boylorn writes is situated in a narrative place of both trial and triumph—a place where Black women have been unable to occupy historically. The conversations among Sweetwaterans within each chapter are echoed across chapters with the integration of “poetic windows” ³ from the city-born series editor Mary Weems. Both conversations reflect call-and-response that is also endemic of African diasporic storytelling and performance. Taken together, Sweetwater highlights a polyvocal, citational style represented in different writing forms and crafted by a diverse group of women who make up a shared experience of Black womanhood.

Following Mary Weems, I also offer my creative response, which fuses Boylorn’s Carolina Sweetwater with my experiences in Virginia’s Tidewater to reimagine a combined coming-of-age narrative of two southern girls learning how flesh Black women in word together.

“You and me, Us never part

Makidada

You and me, Us have one heart

Makidada

Ain’t no ocean, Ain’t no sea

Makidada

Keep my sistah ‘way from me

Makidada.” ⁴

We kindred.

Dash dust daughters pluck petals, sniff, suckle earth honey from strawberry

jelly worn paths we skip to, twist too

a maize-like dandelion lit beneath bark-skin chins to see butter, blow

a pillowy feather white-haired weed with one Deadman-asthmatic breath and

we will make (morning) do

with a combined country copperfield escapist wish we’d do-

over at the first star’s dawn. By dusk,

fresh-dirt hopscotching, butterfly chasing give way to snagging fireflies in jelly jar lanterns from beetle battery light life leaving us running dark

toward towering black electric eyes that signal the sun sank into the sweet-tide-water marsh, (a)rousing ditch-throwing rowdy boys to wrangle loose girls in a frisky game

of hide-and-go-seek in the musty thick

of a southern summer night. We

weather days by listening

to grandmas’ arthritic clocks and katydid, cicada sex calls, and

the shotgun-redbrick-ranch-row house rustle from graveyard shifters shedding white boss-man brands on gray company jumpers, shackle steel toes, hard hats garnished from first paychecks

from the naval shipyard, Ford factory, and the Carolina “shit-spit-ammonia” air-polluting,

Chesapeake Bay-dumping chicken, pork plants.

Shifters drag

zombie pace

single-file line like

Norfolk Southern coal carts rambling ‘cross undead master slave towns. Cypher ‘round

a kitchen table, other-mothers play your spades to my tonk for our dress rehearsals of grownup sword tongue swinging

quilted lace curses, superstitions still mixing

storefront Jesuses with plantation shadows of Shango.

Sit still

quiet sky cries fixing for a sigh

for rainbows do show

the devil done quit beating his wife. Old wives

tales tell of stolen things in pocketbooks nestled between oily legs, lacquered oak floors.

Fold. Bury. Hush. Whisper suitcased storage of bins wonderful-terrible happenings hollowed out daughters hoard new dream fish belly memories to call our names and carry us home again.

“You and me, Us never part

Makidada

You and me, Us have one heart

Makidada

Ain’t no ocean, Aint no sea

Makidada

Keep my sistah ‘way from me

Makidada.”