Mrs. Dinah talks about her kitchen


Mrs. Dinah Talks about Her Kitchen



(after a poem Clint Smith leaked from Uncle Tom's Cabin )







Honey , let me tell you.  That cat-haired Ms. Ophelia had the gall ----

the gall I swear ---to duck-walk her behind into my kitchen

with question and jingling keys.  Not knowing how to address a lady

proper-like, she  Yankee-screeched:



"What's the drawer for, Dinah? why is the nutmeg

in conversation with the Baptist hymn book?"



Ain't got the sense God granted the goose.

Don't know nutmeg can keep company with garlic,

being as how herbs and spices is all God's children.

Don't know pinto beans from coffee and poisoned cognition

about the sacred, that shall ---mark my language --

finally end the enslavements.

Soon and very sooner they will see

how Africans role down South.

Likewise up North.



What audacity to ask why

my hair grease be talking to onions.

Tain't none of her business if it do.



I am ---truth be told ---the soul of order

and can make a fine dinner of chaos.



I know my place now, and in a future

she best keep her Catholic  opinions of herself to herself.

Elsewise, I might loose my religion in a flash of redemption

and bring Oshun's water to this here plantation.





Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            August 7, 2017










Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CLA paper

CLA,   April 6, 2018 Jerry W. Ward, Jr. PHBW:   Negotiating the Ideas of Seven Writers [1]                 Founded in 1983 by Dr. Maryemma Graham, "The Afro-American Novel Project" (AANP) had the initial goal of identifying all published novels written by African Americans from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.   AANP became The Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) in 1990 to reflect an enlarged vision and a more ambitious aim.   PHBW want to make a substantial contribution to what we then spoke of as our "Profession" by organizing bibliographic information and databases, sponsoring institutes and seminars, and by encouraging our colleagues to have rigorous engagements with all genres of black (African American) "writing" within   frames   of historical inquiry.                              The Project's   working frame was an   adaptation of the paradigm of unity in African American Studies , f
Read more

reading notes for September 23, 2019

Reading Notes for September 23, 2019 Eighteen years after the tragedy of 9/11 as I re-read Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" (2001), two meanderings occur: 1) a chance temptation to ask what the term "pro-Semitic" can mean in the contexts of (a) Israeli and world politics and (b) to what extent the amount of foreign aid the USA donates to Israel truly matters, and 2) a more focused temptation to ask if Morrison's Playing in the Dark sheds light on the motives that govern projects devoted to discussions of slavery beginning with 1619. I suspect those projects are at once very literary and very political. Such speculations arose during a September 12 conversation with one of my former UNCF/Mellon mentees whose research on redemption now teaches me, the former mentor, a few things about the urgency of scholarship in the twenty-first century.   The journey forth happens in the cognitive territory of "universal enslavement,"
Read more

SENIOR READERS

SENIOR READERS AND AFRICAN AMERICAN NARRATIVES CLA   11 April 2019 People Program, a continuing education opportunity sponsored by the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph in New Orleans, is a site where cultures of reading are practiced with alacrity.   Senior citizens who volunteer to share their expertise in skills and disciplines with senior citizens who hunger to learn and renew themselves model a civility that is rare in the academic world.   Blessed are the elderly, for they shall be elsewhere sooner rather than later, and they shall take with them a neat paradox: the unpleasant pleasure of the text, the African American narrative. The People Program directors stress that senior citizens should have fun, should discover or re-discover the joy of learning.   Since spring of 2018, I have volunteered to direct four classes that focus in whole or in part on African American narratives, displacing traditional student/teacher exchanges in a classroom with conve
Read more