We are the long grass and anxious wind,
the generations, speaking softly, between
the lines of history.
IN THE POEMS OF PARNESHIA JONES, 35, the lines of black history that angled north from the Deep South after the First World War empty into the bruised and tender histories of family and community.
The lines above are from “Legacy,” one of the poems from her first collection, Vessel (Milkweed Editions), dedicated to Evanston, Ill., Jones’ hometown, and the home of Shorefront, the organization that documents black lives on the North Shore of Chicago.
“I had a lot of storytellers around me growing up,” Jones tells Sojourners. “My grandmother was a storyteller, my grandpop was a storyteller. I was always the youngest of the group, so I was trained to listen. When you listen to everyone else, you carve out a space to listen to yourself. Young poets should listen more to their families, to the voices they heard growing up."
The poet says she was raised in her grandfather’s juke joint. He migrated north from Mississippi. Her first dog came from Gypsies who hung out outside his clubs.
Jones’ voice, even when banked by the din of a mid-Manhattan restaurant, is soft, leisurely. Telling her story, she will not be hurried. Her story begins with a portentous name, the spawn of chance.
1. 1980—daughter of high school sweethearts
(prom queen
and football captain). Father,
a Creole southern rolling stone, watches an old Greek
movie, hears the word Parnassus.
Parnassus, nexus of poetry, according to the Greeks.
“A name,” she says, “is an heirloom from your parents.”
Vessel is, among other things, a book of names. (Like the Bible, her interviewer teases her.) Names that come at you from every point on her compass: her grandmother Mary Ella Starling, Marvin Gaye and Muriel Rukeyser, Anna Magnani and Josephine Baker, Mae West and Barack Obama.
Names that ferry a life.
There is an unshadowed ease to her, to the poems of her early life. They are lighted with humor. “Bra Shopping,” for instance, is a colloquial coming-of-age narrative far removed from the sober lyricism of “Legacy.” (“I really wanted it to find its place as sheer storytelling,” she says.)
Jones wrote the poem as a grad student at Spalding University in Kentucky. When Caroline Kennedy heard her read it at poet Ellen Hagan’s DreamYard project for the arts in the South Bronx, Kennedy immediately decided to publish it in her anthology on womanhood, She Walks in Beauty. The publication of “Bra Shopping” was the first step in the direction of modest acclaim leading eventually to Vessel’s publication.
What size is she? The nosy bra woman asks.
You want something that will support them honey,
The bra woman winks while my mother inspects.
Oh she’s good size. She’s way out of that training-bra phase.
I want her to have something that will hold them up proper.
Them ... them ... them, she says.
Like they’re two midgets I keep strapped to my chest.
I stand there while these two women, one my own kin,
discuss the maintenance and storage of my two dependents.
The bold, multileveled leap from “Bra Shopping” to “Resurrection under the Moon,” a poem about love between black slaves, makes you wonder for a moment whether the two poems could have been written by the same woman.
He hurtin’ bad.
Master made sure he made his point
with slashed welts traveling like serpents
across his back.
Her song of lament moves, in the final stanzas of “Resurrection,” to an interpersonal resurrection that rises from the depths of the slave’s existential death.
There ain’t no room for fear
when we lovin’ each other,
this ain’t for the takin’,
rapin’, or slavin’.
Master can’t have this part of us.
I let him love me all night.
I know my lovin’ keep him
from the slave grave.
black woman’s love
ain’t nothing casual.
Our love brings our men
back from the dead.
Asked about the absence of anger in such poems, Jones says, “I choose to take things like anger and sorrow and turn them into litanies. Anger only takes you so far. As long as I speak people’s names and tell their stories, I am doing what has to be done. Every year, when 9/11 rolls around, there is a litany, and litanies echo.”
The black Christian music of abiding is there as well when writing about a more recent tragedy, the killings of more than two dozen black children in Atlanta from 1979 to 1981:
Mamas and daddies
up all hours
pacing
searching for their murdered
angels with mutilated wings.
Raised in a Baptist church, where her grandmother was an usher, Jones is no longer a churchgoer.
“I feel myself more spiritual than I can ever be religious. I would call myself a poet of spiritual values. I believe in something much bigger than us. There has to be in the way the world moves all throughout history. But we just don’t know until we get to the other side.”
One day, in a phone conversation, Jones is asked about the current spate of killings of young blacks by police. She is quiet at her end, somewhere in Texas, where she is enjoying the refuge of a writing retreat. There is nothing casual about her words or her silences. She is not someone who holds carelessly what she says or what she doesn’t say.
“I will say this: It is an epidemic, a disease. It’s not just something that’s going to harm people of color. It’s going to harm all people. It’s not necessarily about Black Lives Matter or All Lives Matter. It’s about this is what you are going to carry in your history.”
Her body of work since Vessel bears only one poem about the latest cycle of racial violence. It is called “Bikini Care Instructions.” It is a poem that carries inside it many poems. It is dedicated to “Dajerria Becton, the 15-year-old girl slammed to the ground, wearing only a bikini, by a Texas police officer in full uniform at a pool party in front of her friends and the world.”
You can not hand wash away grass stains
from the kneading of blue knees
in the smooth sea horse back
of a fifteen year old brown girl.
The stains reappear in her final stanza. She will not let go of them.
How many times will we keep washing the
same stains
washing and wringing out the same old story
and hanging it out to dry.
Robert Hirschfield is a poet and journalist in New York City whose work has appeared in the National Catholic Reporter, the Jewish Review of Books, and other publications. His new poetry collection is The Road to Canaan (Presa Press).
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