Amena Brown:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to a new episode of HER With Amena Brown and I am Amena Brown, your host. Oh, my goodness y'all, we are getting knee deep into the spring here. For those of you that have been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that I live in Atlanta and spring here is wonderful. I have a lot of favorites about different time of year things as it relates to living here. But the spring is probably one of my favorite times of year, because it's one time of year where weather is just warm enough. The summers here get pretty... They get to be pretty sweltering. So, when it's springtime and you can be out with your short sleeve stuff on, it might even be warm enough to wear shorts, but you're not feeling like you're just sweating all of your skin off. The spring here is very nice.
Amena Brown:
So, we are here celebrating that. It's not too nice for my friends that have allergies though. The pollen out here is very strong. I'm also holding space for you, if you're listening, and springtime is a difficult time for you because of the pollen. But at least, you can see the beauty from inside and you don't have to worry about the pollen being inside. So, we are going behind the poetry today. And if you have listened to the podcast for a while, you know that periodically I'll come in and do these behind the poetry episodes. Where I'll take you through what's the background behind how the poem got written and how the poem got ready for stage, if it was something that I performed. So, I'm really excited to delve into this poem. We've never talked about this on the podcast before, and this poem is called Start With Your Roots. Normally right here, we'll drop in a recording or something, but I thought, for this episode, I would read this poem instead. And then we'll dig into it from there. Check it out.
Amena Brown:
Start with your roots, back porch, harmonica, washboard, rhythm of picking beans. Grandma saying, "Close the screen door behind you." It's okay to be proud to be from the South, to rep for hot summers, cobbler and watermelon sticky fingers. Big mama and grandpa. Mamaw and Papaw never wish for better luck or four-leaf clovers, because new years and black-eyed peas and collard greens. Because an itch in the palm of your hand means a payday is coming, because an itch on the nose means a surprise visitor is coming. Because you protect your mama's back when you don't step on a crack, because when you see gray hair, you say, "Yes, ma'am, no, ma'am. Yes, sir, no, sir." Because no matter how old you are, you always respect your mama's house, grandma's hands.
Amena Brown:
Kisses on mama's cheeks, dirt under granddad's fingernails from tending his garden. Daddy, smelling like homemade oil changes and pork chops. Take that with you. Carry it. Wrapped in wax paper like grandma's chicken and chocolate cake. Take it in the car, on the bus, on the train, on the plane. Remember why she does this. Remember she knows the sting of, sit in the back, of colored sections, colored entrance, colored water fountains. The long wait on road trips between stops and countertops that may not serve your kind here. She wraps food in wax paper, the same way she hopes her prayers caress the brown skin for her children and children's children. To keep them safe from noose, and bullet, and eyes, and hands filled with hate. Take that with you.
Amena Brown:
Read it on crinkly pages, like the family Bible with the records of deaths and births and weddings and generations, breathe it in. Like the scent of candied yams and rain come coming and magnolia trees and pig smokers and fried everything. Hold it in your chest like grandma's voice. Sing that old hymn like granddaddy giving thanks and holding hands at the head of the table. From there, you can grow. Become your own tree, spread your branches and limbs, make your own generations, create a safe place to lean on and find shade. Be spring, embrace summer. Fall, but always survive winter. Bloom, then plant seeds, so they'll be here long after your tree ceases to go through the season. Start with your roots and always return there.
Amena Brown:
So, I always start, when we're going behind the poetry, to first of all, share what made me write this poem. And this poem came to me at a particular social gathering that my husband and I used to do, years ago, at our home. It's interesting to me to think about it now, because I'm like, dang, that was so much fun. Why did we stop doing that? We used to do these events for our artist friends and we called it the listening party. Basically what we would do is, we would pick an album, typically from Rolling Stones top 500. I think we did two of these that I can remember. And we would invite our friends to come over, this is all pre-pandemic stuff. We would invite our friends to come over, tell them to bring a snack or their favorite drink or something to share. Everybody would get there, we would have about 30 minutes for people to mill around and snack and chit-chat.
Amena Brown:
Then we would start the album and we would play the album, all the way through. And we would just invite people to really be quiet during that time and to do whatever they like to do for reflection. So, if they wanted to journal, if they wanted to paint or sketch, and we would have all sorts of journals and crayons and whatever people wanted to use. Then after the album finished playing, we would go around and everybody would share maybe things about the album that stuck out to them, or if they drew something or wrote something, they might read it. In one of the listening parties that we had, the album was Outkasts' Aquemini. First of all, it's just a dope album, which is why it was also included in the top 500 albums of Rolling Stone. But it's a particularly important album to me, because around the time that Aquemini was being released was my early, first one or two years of college. This was the album for us at that time.
Amena Brown:
And I just have a lot of really fond memories of being in Atlanta and listening to that album. But not myself listening, hearing it come out of people's dorm rooms, hearing it in people's cars when they were driving by. It was just this soundtrack to our time here. And it particular, going to Spelman, being in the Atlanta University Center at the time, it was this surrounding music that was there. And to have all of that location and place playing a role in this album was really interesting. I think in general, in my writing and in my creative work at the moment, there's a lot of thought and inspiration that I get from location and place. It's the things we write. It's the memories we experience, but they're not disconnected from the place. From the place where we were, from the particular location in that place where we were.
Amena Brown:
So, to be in Atlanta at the time that Outkast is releasing Aquemini, and Outkast being this born and raised hip-hop group. That really counted Atlanta as home. The way that they spoke. There were so many things on not just this album, but many albums of theirs that were so particular to Atlanta, but also got released out into the world. So, there are all these layers that I have in coming into the listening party, thinking about this album in particular. That night I decided to just journal. And the beginnings of Start With Your Roots is what came out that night. That was the beginning of what made me write the poem. And then after that night, I decided to go back and tool around with the poem. See if I could maybe complete the story, see where it might need to be edited. And that's how the poem got written. What's the real life story behind the poem?
Amena Brown:
I think that part of what made that come up for me is, there's a song on Aquemini called Rosa Parks, it's one of my favorite Outkast songs. And it has this section of it in the middle, that sounds like a Southern hoedown. It's all the fiddles and harmonica. It's such a fantastic piece of music. And I think that conjured up to me, that was this fascinating choice that Outkast made to put something so distinctly Southern in the middle of this hip-hop record. I started thinking a lot. And I think prior to that moment, I had been thinking a lot about... Even though I moved around a lot as a child, I lived in a lot of different places in America. I moved around a lot as a child and I traveled a lot as a child as well.
Amena Brown:
Then I ended up in a career where I also traveled a lot. So, I've just been a lot of places, particularly obviously in America and a few places around the world as well. But most of my upbringing was between Texas and the South. There are particular feelings that I have around what it means to be Southern, what it means to be Southern and Black. And it was interesting to me, because the more I traveled and met different people, everyone has different perceptions of places that they've never been or that they're not very familiar with. Then on top of that, you have TV and film and all sorts of other media that put out an image or a sound that they will tell you is how that place is. That could be accurate, or it could be totally inaccurate.
Amena Brown:
But you don't really know, because you've never been to that place. If I were to give you an example, I would say, of those of you that watch Saturday Night Live a lot. Whenever Saturday Night Live has to represent the South, they typically choose something that seems like some sort of Redux version of the characters from Gone With the Wind. It's those accents, it's that style of dress. That's a pretty consistent Southern representation. But for those of us who actually live here in the South, we know that that's not all that the South is. I think there were times, especially when I first started traveling professionally, I think there were times that I would feel this sense of shame about being from the South, because it was really the hotbed of the capitalist slavery industry in America.
Amena Brown:
The South was not the only place, but it was a place where that was a big part of business and how America was built and the Civil Rights movement. There were just so many systems and things, some of which we know are still in place, that were very particular to the South. However, we know that overall, there are so many foundations about America and how America began and American history that we know racism was and is still widespread all over America. But there were certain narratives about what that meant from the South and certain people would say, "Oh, I would never live down there. I would never want to live anywhere in the South. It's too racist down there." Different things people would say. And I'm like, well, it's racist all over America in a lot of ways.
Amena Brown:
But I started to really explore my own roots, explore my family line. When I think about Black history, I want in particular to know my family's history, what is our Black history? So, I think I was having a lot of those thoughts, and around this season of time, when I was working on Start With Your Roots. I was starting to really think about, what does it mean to be from the South? I have chosen in my adult life... It's different when you're a kid and your parents have different reasons why they need to move and you need to go with them. But then you get to be an adult, in some ways, you can choose where you want to be, where you want your home to be, where you want to put down your own roots.
Amena Brown:
And I chose a Southern city, I chose Atlanta. I had a lot of places I could have gone. As a performing artist, I contemplated making my life in New York. And then I contemplated making my life in LA, but neither of those places ever felt like home to me like Atlanta does. I stayed here and now I have lived most of my whole life in the South. And truthfully now, I've lived half my life here in Atlanta. So, I wanted to explore those ideas. What was it that I loved about being in the South? What was it like to me being a child going home to the South where my grandmother lived? What were the rich things about that that I really loved? And then in very particular ways, even honing down even more, what was it like to be Black and from the South?
Amena Brown:
And what were some of those memories that I had? I was swirling those I ideas around and I think as I was listening to Outkasts' Rosa Parks from Aquemini, then the ideas came into the words of this poem. It's interesting thinking about this poem, because I think when it opens up... If I were to break this poem into stanzas, there are these first several lines that are more generally about the South, about things that I think a lot of people from the South would say they experience. The importance of the porch. The porch is such a big thing for a lot of us that grew up in the South. Depending on where you lived, if you had a front porch, if you had a back porch, if you had both, if it was screened in. Even this moment in the beginning of grandma saying, "Close the screen door behind you."
Amena Brown:
Even, first of all, visiting other places where they have no idea what a screen door is. A lot of the houses I visited of my family members in the South had screen doors. You've got all the mosquitoes and different things that go on in the summer like that, you've got to have that screen door so that you have that and your regular door. And even that phrase, grandma saying close the screen door behind you, there's a certain clack sound that a screen door makes in the South. And it's like, whenever I say that line, it's like I can hear that screen door sound in my great-grandmother's house or in some of my cousin's houses growing up. So, this beginning part of the piece was my attempt to generally say some things that were part of my experience, but also I thought would be part of the Southern upbringing experience for a lot of folks.
Amena Brown:
Then I think the poem does get to a place where I'm really now drilling down into what is Southern Black culture for a lot of us. These ideas about superstition and luck, and that those things are different in Southern Black culture than just looking for a four-leaf Clover. It's making your black-eyed peas and collard greens on new years. My grandmother was really big on, if your hand started to itch in the palm, that meant some money was coming to you. Or if your nose itched, it meant somebody was going to come visit you. All of those little childhood games we played that had the different rhymes in there, and that you don't want to step on a crack on the side wall. Because you'll break your mama's back, and things like that ended up showing up to me as I was trying to get these ideas out.
Amena Brown:
Then it's goes back here in some ways to some general ideas about thinking about Bill Withers Grandma's Hands, and also thinking about my own grandma's hands. Thinking about the respect things that you do when you walk into a house of Black Southern folks. It's like, if that's your mama's house, then you walk in. If everybody's up and about, you walk in. First thing you want to do is, give your mama a kiss on the cheek, give your grand-mama a kiss on the cheek. Those kinds of things really was giving a shout out to my dad and my grandfather on my dad's side, they both were big in gardening and were just those type of Southern men that would have just that little bit of dirt under their fingernails. And it could have been from the garden. It could have been from them doing their own oil changes.
Amena Brown:
Then I get into this really great memory for me as a kid, where my grandmother would always fry chicken and make chocolate cake for us when we were leaving her house. And of course, I have different memories of where we were living at certain times when we would go to her house. And then depending on where we were living, which way we had to travel when we left her. For a good bit of my time in elementary school and into the beginning of middle school, we lived in Maryland. So, we were driving distance away or we were a train's distance away. And there would be times that my mom would take... We would take the train down there and then take the train back home. And my grandma would fry up some chicken for us and she would make a whole chocolate cake, but then she would slice the cake and wrap each of the slices in wax paper.
Amena Brown:
And she would put... I didn't mention this in the piece, which I was surprised when I look back at it actually. She would put all this food in this shoebox, and then we would go on our way and be so excited to open up that shoebox when we got on the train or on the bus. Oh my goodness. It was interesting, because sometimes generationally... I don't know, many of us can say this is true in our families. There are some things that the older generations went through or did, or even routines they had that you never got the explanation as to why they kept doing that. Why were they saving the aluminum foil? Why were they rinsing it off and folding it back up, and putting it back in the cabinet? I've even joked with a few of my friends.
Amena Brown:
I'm curious for those of us who are living through this time of the pandemic and of COVID, what will be some things we will retain from this. That when we're in our seventies, eighties, we'll still be doing that even though it may not be necessary, but it's like, our brains are already there thinking about it. My grandparents were being raised in the age post the Depression, so there was still a lot of ways that they were rationing certain things. This was one of those things that my grandma did, but we didn't really know the explanation as children. I just thought she did that, because grandmas like to make sure you have food. She never explained that. When I got older and I asked her, why was she making this chicken and this cake to send us on our way?
Amena Brown:
She explained to me, because of segregation, I do that because I did that sometimes for my kids growing up and then my mother, she did that for me when I was a child and so on. Because if we were traveling somewhere, whether it was by the bus or train or car, we weren't guaranteed to have a place that we knew we could go in and order a sandwich there or something. We might have a whole trip where there was no place safe to stop, to get out. So we had to bring everything that we needed with us. And that really gave me a lot of pause, hearing my grandma recount that, and it gave a lot of gravity to that tradition.
Amena Brown:
It's also interesting, because after I wrote this poem, I'm trying to think about the years. It was maybe a few years after this. My grandma turned 85 that year and my cousin organized this beach trip for our whole family. So that meant my grandma, all her kids, all the grandkids and the great-grandkids. We were all in the same beach house. My grandma's birthday is actually in October, but she wanted us to celebrate her birthday that summer because we were all going to be together. And I decided, as tradition, to make this cake. I cannot remember now if we had fried chicken that day or not, maybe we did. I can't remember. But I remember that we made the same cake that my grandma would make for us, which was what most Southern people consider to be a chocolate cake, which is yellow cake with chocolate frosting.
Amena Brown:
I can't argue with you about it, it's just the way it is. I made the cake for my grandma this time, and then my cousins, a couple of my cousins had to leave earlier. So, I sliced up the cake and wrapped it up in wax paper. And it just felt like this... It felt like this beautiful food tradition, that even though it was born out of really terrible times, it turned to be this thing that now we can do out of love. In the same way that our grandparents and great grandparents and so on, they did out of love and protection for their family members too. That was a really beautiful moment that I remember happening after this poem got written. Another thing that I really love about this poem that I think became really important in the real story of writing behind it, is I wanted it to be full of imagery.
Amena Brown:
I wanted it to feel sensory, that you feel like you can see these places and things. You feel like you can smell the pig smokers and the fried everything. You feel like you can see that grandfather at the head of the table, holding hands. Everyone, regardless of whatever their own religious affiliation, is bowing their head when the granddaddy says, "Let's pray," type of thing. I really loved that. I loved that there are certain sense that really are very characteristic of the South, that if you've ever visited the South as a child. There's this certain smell of how certain trees or flowers here or in the place in the South where you're from may smell like. Or certain foods that it's like, that pig smoker scent. I know that scent well. I could be any place and immediately be transported back to some place in the South where I first smelled what that smells like.
Amena Brown:
I loved this idea of, when we're really talking about... We start with our roots, we study the people that we came from. In my case, that is Southern black folks. Then there's this idea, well, it doesn't just end with us studying our roots or knowing history. We want to know history and we want to know our roots so that we might also grow, so that we might also want to put something out in the world that will continue on after us. If my ancestors are my roots and then here I am the tree that grew from them, then eventually I will become the root of someone else. Some future generations out there. And that we all have this way to be a part of a legacy. We want to leave something here that continues growing even when we are no longer here anymore.
Amena Brown:
So, I loved that, ending the poem with that idea. What is the real life story behind performing this poem for the first time? In my mind, I feel like I was at Java Monkey Speaks, which was an open mic that used to happen in Decatur here at Atlanta. It was an open mic that... The way the coffee shop was made, it doesn't exist anymore, unfortunately. The coffee shop doesn't, Java Monkey Speaks still exists, and they have an Instagram account where you can follow them. It's an open mic that's turned virtual. But the location that we used to have, which was a coffee shop called Java Monkey burned down unfortunately a few years ago. But if you can imagine, it was a coffee shop that had... It was shaped like a shotgun house, even though it was only one story that I remember.
Amena Brown:
So you would walk in and everything was down this like... Like a galley kitchen. It was all down one narrow way. And you walked in and there would be a few coffee shops. Then you went back to the coffee bar and then it turned like an L when you got to the back, and it had a little wine bar. Then it turned again and you would go out to this patio. And the patio was covered, but you were still obviously outside. If I remember right, when I finally finished this poem, it was summer and it would be so hot. Even though the patio was covered and there were fans out there, you just had to be prepared that it was just hot. There was some gravitas to reading this poem for the first time at Java Monkey in the South, in Atlanta, in the summer, and talking about all of the cobbler, the watermelon sticky fingers, all those things that are real memories for a lot of people that grew up in the South.
Amena Brown:
So there was something really beautiful about my memory of that, my first time taking this poem out to the open mic. How do I feel about the poem now? This poem is still one of my favorites. I think when... I'm assuming other performers think through this stuff too, but I know for me, as a person that performs poetry, you have this... As a performing artist, you have some audiences you perform in front of, and they're already familiar with your work. So you may have a different way that you start your set, or different poems you might do, because they're already familiar with you. They're already fans or supporters of your work. But for a lot of indie artists, you're going to have crowds. You're going to perform in front of that, it's their first time finding out who you are.
Amena Brown:
And it's nice to have some poems that lay this introductory groundwork, to give people the feel for, who are you? Where are you from? What brings you to the page? What brings you to the stage? And I love that about Start With Your Roots. I love that it is one of my poems that I have opened up a set with, because it immediately sets the tone for what I am going to be talking about, what I am about. And there may be some other people in the audience that also grew up in the South, so we get to have that nostalgic feeling together. It's still one of my favorite poems to perform for that reason, because it really gives the crowd this little window into who I am and who are the people and things that built me. So, I love that about this poem. It made me also think about when I was in college and our English professors, especially our English writing professors. They would always talk about this concept of, show, not just tell. There's a way you could say, "I was walking down the street," which might be a tell.
Amena Brown:
But if you want to show that you're walking down the street, then you might say, "The sound of my heels click-clacked on the granite as I left the building." Well, when you say, "I was walking down the street," that still gives people some sort of visual. Maybe they think of themselves walking down the street. Maybe they imagine you walking down the street. But when you start talking about the click-clack, the granite, the colors, the sound, the smell, the taste of something, it really shows people where you are. It shows people what you're talking about. It's not just telling them. I don't know, because I've never shared this poem with a former English professor of mine, but I feel like they would be proud that this poem does a lot of showing. And I hope that it evokes the same memories in the listener or in the audience as it evoked for me while writing it. So, that's a little bit of the story of behind the poetry Start With Your Roots. Thank y'all for listening. See y'all next time.
Amena Brown:
Her With Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.