Home Cooking
A poem that recounts the remarkable story of the author's great-grandmother, Alma Davenport, who was born in Pheba, Mississippi, in 1898.
No one in my family
owned slaves — like Kenny says,
people aren’t slaves and can’t be
Owned — but at least two
in my family did
enslave at least one
Black woman. My great
grandmother’s great-
great-great grandfather,
whose body was either
lost or destroyed, left
a woman named Lucy
to his wife Margaret
in his will. With
the Cherokee (from “people
of different speech”), women
were the heads of households,
owned property, held
political power.
That was long before
becoming Greenville,
South Carolina, and long
before any of my
known line enslaved, believed
they owned, lived on “settled”
land, or protected
their own. Family I’ve known
has leaned toward
the matrilineal, but
maybe even that’s just
romance and i-
dolatry. There is
no record of Joseph
Davenport’s body,
but he left a woman
to his wife, whatever
gesture that is,
and 94 years later,
my grandmother’s mother
was born in Pheba,
Mississippi, and learned
to cook from Black women,
even as she called them
what she shouldn’t have but
so many of her children
did. Plenty of us
have a mamaw, but I
was the great-grandchild
that apocryphally coined
ours Beautiful Mamaw.
When she was 15,
her three-day-old child died.
She married at 18,
had five kids, and was showing
a sixth when her husband
died in a car crash, July
1926. She was
27, had a breakdown,
delivered the child that fall,
but the state found her unfit,
had already scattered
her other five across
the South. (Sounds familiar.)
Then a web of kindnesses,
desire, and wit, as she brought
her children back with her
again, to a new home
in Norfolk, Virginia.
That triumph lined
with loss, spotted with venom,
streaked with laughter. All of it
true, the whole watershed.
What to do with all that?
If the heart is a map,
you still have to squint
and it’s a good idea
to check another.
If the heart is a stewpot,
you want to know
if the peas are black-eyed,
Glenwood or crowder.
You want to know
where the collards
are from. If the heart is
a language, its original
dialect is lost
like an ancestor’s body.
Andy Fogle is the poetry editor of Salvation South. He is the author of Mother Countries (forthcoming from Main Street Rag), Across From Now, and seven chapbooks of poetry, including Arc & Seam: Poems of Farouk Goweda, co-translated with Walid Abdallah. He’s from Virginia Beach, spent years in the D.C. area, and now lives with his family in upstate New York, teaching high school.
The poet Fogle has crafted a slow poem that winds around facts and surmises. Ultimately it asks the big question: now, “what are we to do with all this? ”
“Take it to heart”– to Map, stewpot, language.
Thank you for dredging up the word “Mamaw” I had forgotten.
Hey, yeah, just like potlikker! I love that piece. But yes, for sure, stewing really is the thing.