Yearning

I feel so much yearning throughout Red Clay Suite. Jeffers yearns for a home that doesn't hate her, for the Cherokee traditions that have been denied her, for peaches, for another landscape, for a father. Wherever Honoree Fanonne Jeffers ventures, she is aware of herself as an outsider.  In the "tiny, white Ohio college town" that offers her a residency, she "roamed rooms, dressed for disaster, shoes by [her] bed's edge. This was Hell" (16). She's become so used to discomfort that it's what she knows best. In "Let Blood Go," she writes: "There's comfort in Confederate / flags, gun racks in backs of pickups, / coldness in the eyes of some whites, / resignation in the eyes of others" (18). And once she's left the South, she longs for it: "I'm feeling the hot arms of the South, / the old men who sell fresh produce / from their roadside stands. I'm feeling the hunger for the fruit of my youth" (55).

Jeffers' poetry made me think about what happens when our associations with home are about not belonging. How we still yearn for it all the same -- and harder in a sense, because we're yearning for all that we wish it had been.

I prayed with a clean heart
then drove through to clear skies.
I swore to myself, to my mama,
to God above,
I'd never leave Dixie if I saw it again.
I lied, forgive me.
Red clay, I lied. 

Being an outsider isn't just categorical or structural. Feeling like you don't belong is such a deeply formative psychic state that it radically shapes how we move through the world.  Home is meant to be an anchor, a reference point. It is supposed to teach us how to grow into adulthood and make another home. And if you've never known what home feels like, how are you to make a home of your own? How do you know what it feels like, when your associations of home are fear and grief and violence? When nostalgia fills you with the "blues you don't want to remember"?

I relate to these experiences viscerally. My parents divorced several months after I was born and I spent my entire childhood and most of my adolescence traveling between the houses of people who hated each other. There was "my mom's house," "my dad's house," "my mom's house," "my dad's house." There was never simply home. Each parent taught me to be deeply mistrustful of the other and competed for my affection; in the case of my stepmother, she flipped the script and made me perform to win hers. My mom and I also moved every one or two years, so by the time I was ten, I had been in four different school systems and lived in five different cities. Certainly, I had the privilege of being seen as white and perceived as middle-class and all the benefits that come with that --  though, as they often are, the realities were more complicated... my Jewishness and its ancestral legacy of nomadism and marginalization and being from a people who have never had a home, has complicated, though not overruled, my relationships to whiteness & class -- but what I'm trying to communicate right now is that despite somebody's reasons for feeling a sense of "unbelonging," those experiences shape us. And so we must shape them into art.

What may happen when you've been born into a family or a home that have taught you that you don't belong, is that you may search out for proxies:"Let Daddy in, sweetheart / Let your daddy in / You search for this honey in anyone's / mouth for close to thirty years" (43). You may cling to false memories: "I see this land the way I remember / and do the same for childhood love -- / the rough hand that touched me / but didn't scrape down to bone" (24). We look for what we want to see, what we know how to see, we because "if this earth is denied me, then what do I know?" (24).

There is no resolution here, no end to the longing. Jeffers' last poem, "Upon Learning That My Indian Student is a Sundancer," is as pregnant with yearning as a prayer. A yearning to return to the story of her Cherokee roots that has been denied to her, mangled, seemingly erased: "i want      i want      grandmother" (68).  If Jeffers cannot belong to a land in this time and place, at least she can dream herself back into relationship with her ancestors.

i know     too late    

grandmother     i don't 

her name     her name    her name


Such ache in these lines. But then in the final stanza, Jeffers' book is revealed to us: its deepest whispers and most sorrowful refrains, the clay that has formed the book and made it whole, made it into art:

red clay    she knew    fever

hawk hoof    children    say

chant    tea   love    holy

mother    blind eye    kiss

dark    way     mark     she knew