In a new memoir in verse, Alora Young traces the lives of generations of Black women

Transcript :

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

A young Black woman coming of age traced her life back through generations of mothers in her family.

ALORA YOUNG: My name is Alora Young. I’m 19 years old. I’m a poet. I’m an activist. And I am a lover.

FADEL: Young has a gift for spoken word. And she archives her family’s history in her new poetry collection, “Walking Gentry Home.” She recounts the stories of nine generations of women in her family all the way back to Amy, who was the first of Young’s foremothers to arrive in Tennessee. Amy was enslaved and had the child of the man who enslaved her. The book takes us through all the stories that come after, until we get to Young’s own story, still being told, as she moves from childhood to adulthood. I asked Young to read the first poem from the book.

YOUNG: (Reading) I have many mothers. They are mostly Black. They are mostly broken. They have existed here for centuries. They are dying with the towns that birthed them.

FADEL: Wow. Can you tell me why you started the book this way?

YOUNG: I started the book this way because I feel like this is a story that doesn’t have a starting place. And I started it with the line I have many mothers because for thousands of generations, Black women have existed on this planet. And all of the culmination of thousands of women have led to me being here.

FADEL: Was this always going to be a memoir of your family history? Or did it become that as you wrote your poetry?

YOUNG: It always needed to be about my family’s history because these poems, they didn’t start out about me. They started out about not knowing the names of my family members, about losing my grandmother and thinking what difficulty she must have gone through being a pregnant teenager in the South in the 1960s.

FADEL: Yeah.

YOUNG: It’s the brutal realities that my family members faced. And I wanted to make sure their stories were never, ever, ever forgotten.

FADEL: You call it “Walking Gentry Home.” Let’s talk about who Gentry is.

YOUNG: Gentry is my great-grandmother. So when my grandmother, Gentry, was 14 years old, she got pregnant. And then, of course, she got married. And one day, she got into a fight with my great-grandfather, Walter D. And she walked all the way from her house with her husband, miles and miles back to her early family home, where she grew up. And she gets there. And her mom’s like, oh, hey. And, like, they spend the day together. And she hangs out with her brother. And at the end, Gentry says, Mama, I want to come home. And then Nanny Pearl, who is Gentry’s mom, says, OK. Ortho B, walk Gentry home. And can you imagine the shock of thinking you are home…

FADEL: Yeah.

YOUNG: …Thinking that you’ve finally come back to your family, only to be told that the home you grew up in is not your home anymore. She says, Otho B walk your sister home. Walk Gentry home, back to the house that she’s making. And I think it’s so powerful because I think that is the transition from girlhood to womanhood. It’s walking from the home you grow up in to the home you make.

FADEL: Your poems explore the history of your family in so many different directions. And one of the things that struck me was when you were talking about your own complexion.

YOUNG: I don’t know if this is a plight that all lighter-skinned women of color face. But it’s something that I know that me and my other sister have definitely experienced. And it is the feeling that when you look at yourself in the mirror, you see that the color of your skin is the product of uninvited attention from people who enslaved your family. And I look the way I look not because either of my parents are consensually white, but because my bloodline is filled with nonconsensual whiteness. And it’s honestly a hard thing to think about. And it’s a hard thing to experience because no one wants to look at themselves and see rape.

FADEL: Wow.

YOUNG: But that’s just a reality that I have to live with. And that’s something I see when I look in the mirror.

FADEL: Did you talk about that with the women in your family that you interviewed for this book?

YOUNG: Yes, I talked about it with my sisters, definitely. It’s a hard conversation because colorism is so prevalent in the Black community.

FADEL: Right, which is something you also write about.

YOUNG: Yes. And I want to make sure that, through discussing this troubling sensation, I feel I don’t dismiss the struggles of darker-skinned women. But to me, darker skin has always been a symbol of true beauty, because my mom is brown-skinned. And I see her as the epitome of all things good and gentle and compassionate.

FADEL: In your book, you write about a lot of painful and shameful history. But you also write in this hopeful way about partnership and how you can’t let hate devour you, that you can’t climb alone out of something. When you write these things, these poems, are they a path to solutions, to understanding, to breaking the cycle?

YOUNG: Yes, I believe so. I believe that poetry is such a powerful tool because it can convey the human experience in a way that no other kind of writing can. And I believe that we can use this art form as a tool for education and as a tool for communication. I believe poetry is something that can cross any line, any border. And I think we need to try to cross these lines and cross these borders and connect our world through the arts because we can make the world better.

FADEL: Alora Young is the youth poet laureate of the Southern United States. And her new book is called “Walking Gently Home.” What a voice you are. Thank you so much for your time.

YOUNG: Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.