winding road - Red Clay Suite

Red Clay Suite by Honorée Fannone Jeffers

Wow. Wow. It’s getting harder for me to try to write a cohesive response to these books, it feels as though my brain goes in one hundred more new directions with each one we read and I don’t know how to start.

The first section of Red Clay Suite stood out to me because of the recent class discussion that’s still floating around in my brain. How does one identify with home, with land? Ideas of migration, forced migration, elective migrations, traveling to find something, to find a sense of home. “Migration Cantos” says so much about the imaginary lines drawn up and down this country; how made up they are, but also the very real impact they have on us. Right from the beginning, there is a sense of travel; “Migration”, “I follow the interstate line”, etc. It is like the reader is sitting in the passenger seat of a car while the speaker drives from state to state and back again. But there are so many twists and turns!

“The Compass of Moss” stuck out to me. How the speaker felt the history of the Underground Railroad alive in the “tiny, white Ohio college town” she is visiting, and the different emotions that bubble up from that (29). Even though the speaker is “among friends” she feels so ill at ease in this town, so frightened:

“but I was scared in that fairytale village.

Don’t most stories hold a Grimm twist,

a flaxen-locked dame ravished by dark beast--

why not the same in reverse?”

There’s so much happening in this one poem and even in this little excerpt. I love how the speaker challenges the age old white supremacist association of dark with bad, and vice versa. She succeeds in making this small, white town feel chilling and sinister. And then there is this beautiful cathartic moment with the moss covered trees;

“stopped to check the oaks (for Harriet)

to see if that slave tale held true,

that moss grew only on the north side.

For once I got it: when the clouds

cloaked the guiding Star,

the compass of moss pointed the way

for poor souls. Follow.

Then I teared up, spilled over,

wiped my face. Shaken.

Why couldn’t I let it go?” (30)

I don’t quite understand the last line (Does she mean the history of this place? why should she let it go?), but the others really hit me. The way she writes about her tears, so straight to the point, without fuss, I really loved that. I found the succinct language no less emotional than any flowery description of a good cry. The speaker going out into the trees to check the moss, thinking of Harriet, having this moment of emotion with the trees, with the moss, with history. And then, again, it goes from bittersweet to strange and sinister again, when a murder of crows (I know that’s really what they’re called but wow) call to her “Ah ha, ah ha, so now you think you’re free?” (30). I’m not going to try and unpack what that ending might mean, I’ll only say that the twists in tone and emotion that I got from this one poem echoes through much of the rest of the collection for me. Twists and turns in a road.