What had she given her back, that woman, anything all these years? The green fruit and purple flowers, fierce eyes of living creatures. Had pulled a brush through her hair, whose hands had brought her maypops, They would be joinedīy the memory of walking back up Depot Street.Īnd say: I have changed, have tried to replace the iron heart with a heart of flesh.īut the woman whose hands had washed her,

They'd be divided by past belief, the town's parallel tracks, To visit at her house, sat unsteady in a chair in the smoky room, The eyes of children she had raised for others. If she cared for her company, pictures under table glass, If she was sitting, knotted feet to the stove, if the coal had lasted, Whether she had, this spring, Beatrice did not know. The scar, the woman who had walked beside her then, splitīut determined to live, raising mustard greens to get through There they waited for wheels to rush like the wings of an iron angel,įor the white man at the engine to blow the whistle. Past the cotton gin, onto the bridge above the railroad tracks. They flared and smoked like the sawmill fires she walked pastĪs a child, in the afternoon at 4 o'clock, she and a dark woman, Years revolved, began to circle Beatrice, a ring of burning eyes. The sky stared down.Īt the center of the world's blue eye, the woman stared back. She furrowed herselfīy hand through the ground.

Her legs endedĪt the ankle, old brown cypress knees. Her chair into fragile clumps of new grass. Roxboro Road, she'd seen a woman with no feet wheel On roller skates, pull a string of children, grinning, gaudy-Įyed as merry-go-round horses, brass wheeled Beatrice walks back into the past and finds the history of resistance that she has never been taught she listens to her fellow travelers as they all get ready to create the future.In Hollywood, California (she'd been told) women travel We hear the testimony of freed slaves and white abolitionists speaking against Klan violence, fragments of speeches by union organizers and mill workers, and snatches of songs from those who marched on the road to Selma. In these dramatically multivocal narrative poems, we hear the words and rhythms of Bible Belt preachers, African-American blues and hillbilly gospel singers, and sharecropper country women and urban lesbians.

She struggles to free herself from the lies she was taught while growing up-and she finds the other people who are also on this journey. Beatrice searches for the truth behind the public story-the official history-of the land of her childhood. In Pratt's fourth volume of poems, Walking Back Up Depot Street, we are led by powerful images into what is both a story of the segregated rural South and the story of a white woman named Beatrice who is leaving that home for the postindustrial North. Selected as ForeWord Magazine’s 1999 Gay/Lesbian Book of the Year

Minnie bruce pratt s he