In this work, Minnie
Bruce Pratt searches for the truth behind the public story - the
public history - of the land of her childhood, she hears and sees
the unknown past come alive. She struggles to free herself from
the lies she has been taught while growing up - and finds others
who are also on this journey.
In these dramatically multivocal narrative
poems, we hear the words and rhythms of Bible Belt preachers,
African-American blues and hillbilly those who marched on the road
to Selma.
Lillian Smith once wrote, "Your poet and
demagogue--and mine--inhabit the same terrain; poet transforming,
bringing new forms out of chaos, demagogue destroying. Each day,
one or the other wins a small battle inside us." the land of
her childhood, she hears and sees the unknown past come alive. She
struggles to free herself from the lies she has been taught while
growing up - and finds others who are also on this journey.
In these dramatically multivocal narrative
poems, we hear the words and rhythms of Bible Belt preachers,
African-American blues and hillbilly gospel singers, and of
sharecropper country women and urban lesbians. 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 song from those who marched on the road
to Selma.
Lillian Smith once wrote, "Your poet and
demagogue--and mine--inhabit the same terrain; poet transforming,
bringing new forms out of chaos, demagogue destroying. Each day,
one or the other wins a small battle inside us." Walking Back
Up Depot Street reclaims history from the hands of the demagogues
of the twentieth-century.
from Walking Back Up Depot Street
Years revolved, began to circle Beatrice, a ring
of burning eyes.
They flared and smoked like the sawmill fires she walked past
as a child, in the afternoon at 4 o'clock, she and a dark woman,
past the cotton gin, onto the bridge above the railroad tracks.
There they waited for wheels to rush like the wings of an iron
angel,
for the white man at the engine to blow the whistle. Beatrice had
waited
to stand in the tremble of power.
Thirty years later she saw
the scar, the woman who had walked beside her then, split
but determined to live, raising mustard greens to get through
the winter. Whether she had, this spring, Beatrice did not know.
If she was sitting, knotted feet to the stove,
if the coal had lasted,
if she cared for her company, pictures under table glass,
the eyes of children she had raised for others.
If Beatrice went back
to visit at her house, sat unsteady in a chair in the smoky room,
they'd be divided by past belief, the town's parallel tracks,
people never to meet even in distance. They would be joined
by the memory of walking back up Depot Street.
Walking
Back Up Depot Street : Poems 
Rebellion
: Essays 1980-1991 
