April 12, 2022 • 31 mins
This week I’m taking y’all behind the poetry and digging into my poem “Start With Your Roots.” Listen in as I share how Outkast’s album Aquemini and my own southern upbringing inspired this poem.
To get transcripts, links, and details from each episode, check out the show notes. To continue your support of the podcast and my work, become a member of my Patreon community where you can get access to archived episodes, bonus episodes, and behind the scenes content. Follow me on Instagram and Twitter, for podcast clips, poetry quotes and random quips. For information on how to book me to speak or perform at an event, visit amenabrown.com. Thanks for listening and thanks for your support!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Hey, everybody, Welcome back to a new episode of Her
with Amena Brown and I am Amina Brown, your host.
Oh my goodness, y'all. We are getting knee deep into
the spring here. And 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 like favorites about different time
(00:52):
of year things is it relates to living here, but
the spring is probably one of my favorite times of
year because it's one time of year whether weather is
just warm enough, the summers here get pretty they get
to be pretty sweltering. So when it's springtime and you
can kind of be out with your short sleeve stuff on,
(01:13):
you know, it might even be warm enough to wear
like shorts, but you're not feeling like you're just sweating
all of your skin off. The spring here is very nice,
so we are here celebrating that. Uh, it's not too
nice for my friends that have allergies though. The pollen
out here is very very strong. So 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
(01:35):
least you can see the beauty from inside, and you
don't have to worry about the pollen being inside, you know.
So we're 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
(01:55):
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. So normally right
here will 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.
(02:19):
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, Mamma and Pat Pats and never
wish for better luck or four leaf clover's because New
(02:40):
Year's and black eyed peas and collar 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 the crap. 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
(03:01):
your mama's house, grandma's hands, kisses on mama's cheeks, dirt
under granddad's fingernails from tending his garden, Daddy smelling like
homemade oil changes and porch 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.
(03:24):
Remember she knows the sting of sit in the back
of colored sections, colored insurance, 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 of her children and children's children, to keep
them safe from noose and bullet and eyes and hands
(03:47):
filled with hate. Take that with you. Read it on
crinkly pages like the family Bible, with records of deaths
and births and weddings and generations. Breathe it in like
the scent of candy, yams and rain coming and magnolia,
trees and pigs, smokers and fried everything. Hold it in
your chest like Grandma's voice, seeing that old hymn, like
(04:08):
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.
(04:31):
To go through the season. Start with your roots and
always return there. 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 like social gathering that my husband and
(04:52):
I used to do years ago at our home. It's
kind of interesting to me to think about it now,
because I'm like, dang, that was so much fun, why
don't we stop doing that. We used to do these
events for our artist friends and we called it the
listening Party. And basically what we would do is we
would pick an album, typically from like Rolling Stones Top
five hundred. I think I think we did two of
(05:13):
these that I can remember, and we would invite our
friends to come over. This is all pre pandemic stuff,
but about our friends to come over and tell them
to like bring a snack or their favorite drink or
something to share, and everybody would get there. Would have
about thirty minutes for people to kind of mill around
and snack and chit chat, and then we would start
(05:33):
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, you know,
(05:54):
people wanted to use. And then after the album finished playing,
we would kind of 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, and one of the listening parties that we
had the album was outcasts Equipment I. First of all,
(06:14):
it's just a dope album, which is why it was
also included in the top five albums of Rolling Stone.
But it's a particularly important album to me because around
the time that Equipment I was being released was my
like early first one or two years of college. This
was sort of the album for us at that time,
(06:36):
and I just have a lot of like 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, you know, in people's cars when
they were driving by. It was just this soundtrack to
(06:56):
our time here and in particular going to spell Men.
Being in the Atlanta University Center at the time, it
was sort of this surrounding music that was there. And
to have all of that location and place playing a
role in this album was really interesting, and I think
in general, in my writing and in my creative work
at the moment, there's a lot of thought and inspiration
(07:19):
that I get from location in place. It's the things
we right, it's the memories we experience but they're not
disconnected from the place right from the place where we were,
from the particular location in that place where we were,
so to be in Atlanta at the time the Outcast
is releasing a Quemini and Outcast being this born and
(07:40):
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 like
released out into the world. So they're all these layers
(08:00):
that I have in coming into the listening party thinking
about this album in particular, right, and so that night
I decided to just journal, and the beginnings of Start
with Your Roots is what came out that night. So
that was sort of the beginning of what made me
write the poem. And then after that night, I decided
(08:21):
to kind of go back and tool around with the poem,
you know, 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? I think that part of what made
(08:43):
that come up for me is there's a song on
aquim and I called Rosa Parks and it's one of
my favorite Outcast songs, and it has this section of
it in the middle that sounds like a Southern hold out,
you know. It's all the uh fiddles and carmonica. I mean,
it's it's it's such a fantastic piece of music. And
(09:07):
I think that conjured up to me, that was this
fascinating choice that Outcasts made to put something so distinctly
Southern in the middle of this hip hop record, you know,
And I started thinking a lot, And I think prior
to that moment, had been thinking a lot about even
though I moved around a lot as a child, you know,
I lived um in a lot of different places in America.
(09:31):
I moved around a lot as a child, and I
traveled a lot as a child as well, and 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. So there are particular feelings that
(09:55):
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, you know, everyone has like different perceptions of
places that they've never been or that they're not very
familiar with. And then on top of that, you have
TV and film and all sorts of other media that
(10:16):
sort of put out an image or a sound that
that they will tell you is how that place is.
And that could be accurate or it could be totally inaccurate, right,
but you don't really know because you've never been to
that place. Like if I would give you an example,
I would say, for those of you that watch Saturday
Night Live a lot, whenever Saturday Night Live has to
(10:39):
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. Right,
that's a pretty consistent Southern representation. But for those of
us who actually live here in the South, we know
(11:02):
that that's not all that the South is. And 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 you know,
it was really the the hotbed of the capitalist slavery
(11:25):
industry in America. 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 were still in place, that
(11:46):
were very particular to the South. Right. However, we know
that overall, there's so many foundations about America and how
America began in American history that we know. Racism is,
Racism was and is still widespread right all over America.
But there were certain narratives about what that meant from
(12:08):
the South, and certain people, you know, would say like, oh,
I wouldn't I would never live down there. You know,
I would never want to live anywhere in the South.
You know, it's too racist down there. Different things people
would say, and I'm like, well, you know, it's racist
all over America in a lot of ways. But I
started to really kind of explore my own roots, you know,
(12:30):
explore my family line. When I think about black history,
I want, in particular to know my family's history, you know,
what what is our black history? Right? And 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
(12:51):
about what does it mean to be from the South
I have chosen in my adult life. You know, it's
different when you're a kid and your parents parents have
different reasons why they need to move, and you need to,
you know, go with them, right. But then you get
to be an adult, you can in some ways, you
can choose where you want to be, where you want
your home to be, where you want to put down
(13:13):
your own roots. And I chose a southern city, you know,
I chose Atlanta. I had a lot of places I
could have gone as a performing artist. I contemplated, you know,
making my life in New York, and then I contemplated
making my life in l a. But neither of those
places ever felt like home to me like Atlanta does.
And so I stayed here. And now I have lived
(13:35):
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 what was it
that I loved about being in the South. What what
was it like to me being a child? Uh, sort
of going home to the South where my grandmother lived,
(13:58):
what were the rich thing is about that that I
really loved? And then in in very particular ways, even
honing down even more, what was it like to be
black and from the South, And what were some of
those memories that I had. So I was kind of
swirling those ideas around, and I think as I was
(14:19):
listening to outcasts Rosa Parks from a quim and I
then the ideas sort of 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, they're sort of these first several
lines that are more more generally about the South, about
(14:43):
things that I think a lot of people from the
South would say, the experience, you know, the importance of
the porch, Like 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 um even you know this
moment in the beginning of you know, Grandma saying, closed
(15:05):
the screen door behind you, right um. Even first of all,
visiting other places where they have no idea what a
screen door is, and that a lot of the houses
I visited of my family members in the South had
screen doors. Right, You've got like all the mosquitoes and
different things that go on in the summer like that,
you know, you gotta kind of have that screen door
(15:28):
so that you have that and you're like regular door.
And even that phrase Grandma saying, closed 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, you know, in my great grandmother's house or
(15:50):
some of my cousins houses growing up. So this beginning
part of the piece was my attempt to sort of,
uh generally say some things that were part of my experience,
but also I thought would be part of the sort
of southern upbringing experience for a lot of folks, you know.
And then I think the poem does get to a
(16:11):
place where I'm really now drilling down into what is
Southern Black culture for a lot of us. You know,
these ideas about superstition and luck and that those things
are different in Southern Black culture than just looking for
a four leaf clover. You know, it's making your black
eyed peas on college greens on New Year's. My great
(16:33):
grandmother was really big on if you're if your hands
started to itch in the palm, that that meant, you know,
some money was coming to you, or if your nose
itched to meet, somebody was going to come visit you,
and all of those little childhood games we play that
had the different rhymes in there, and that you know,
you don't want to step on a crack on the
sidewalk because you'll break your mom's back and things like that.
(16:56):
You know, Um ended up sort of showing up to
me as I was trying to get these ideas out,
and then it's you know, kind of goes back here
in some ways to some general ideas about you know,
thinking about Bill Wither's grandma's hands and also thinking about
my own grandma's hands, right, thinking about the sort of
(17:18):
respect things that you do when you walk into uh
a house of black Southern folks. You know, it's like,
if that's your mama's house, then you walk in, if
everybody's up and about, you know, you walk in, first
thing you want to do is give your mama kiss
on the cheek, give your grandmama kiss on the cheek,
you know those kinds of things. Um, really was giving
(17:41):
a shout out to my dad and my grandfather on
my dad's side, they both were big in gardening, and
you know, we're just those type of like 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, right, Um.
(18:03):
And then I get into this, you know, 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,
you know, 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
(18:23):
had to travel when we left her. Right. And 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 that 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
(18:45):
would make a whole chocolate cake. But then she would
slice the cake and put each wrap each of the
slices and wax paper, and she would put I didn't
mention this in the piece, which I was surprised when
I look back at it, actually, but she would put
all this food in this shoe box Bucks, and then
we would, you know, go on our way and be
so excited to open up that shoebox when we got
(19:07):
on the train or on the bus. Oh my goodness,
you know. And it was interesting because you know, sometimes generationally,
and 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. You know, why were they
(19:28):
saving the aluminum foil? Why were they rinsing it off
and folding it back up and putting it back in
the cabinet. Right. I've even joked with a few of
my friends, I'm curious for those of us who are
living through this time of the pandemic and of COVID, like,
what will be some things we will retain from this
that when we're in our you know, seventies eighties, will
(19:49):
still be doing that, even though it may not be necessary.
But it's like our brains are already there thinking about it,
you know. And um, my grandparents were being raised in
the age po the Depression, so there was still a
lot of ways that they were sort of rationing certain things, right,
And this was one of those things that my grandma did.
(20:10):
But we didn't really know the explanation as children. I
just thought she did that because Grandma was like to
make sure you have food, you know. 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, She explained to me, you know, because
of segregation. I do that because I did that, you know,
(20:33):
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
(20:56):
to sort of bring everything that we needed with us,
you know. And that really gave me a lot of
pause hearing my grandma recount that, and it gave a
lot of gravity to that tradition. It's also interesting because
(21:25):
after I wrote this poem, I'm trying to think about
the years. It's maybe it was maybe a few years
after this. My grandma turned eighty five that year, and
my cousin organized this beach trip for our whole family. Right,
So that mean my grandma, all her kids, all the grandkids,
(21:45):
and the great grandkids. Right. We were all in the
same beach house. And 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, you know,
And I decided it as tradition, you know, to make
this cake. I cannot remember now if we had fried
(22:07):
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 can consider to be a chocolate cake, which
is yellow cake with chocolate frosting. I can't argue with
you about it. It's just the way it is. So uh.
(22:27):
I made the cake for my grandma this time, and
then my cousins, a couple of my cousins had to
leave earlier, and 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,
(22:48):
you know, 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.
So that was a really beautiful moment that I remember
happening after this poem got written. And another thing that
(23:11):
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. 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 know.
(23:34):
You feel like you can see that you know, grandfather
at the head of the table holding hands everyone, everyone,
regardless of whatever their own religious affiliation is a bowing
their head when the granddaddy says, let's pray type of thing.
You know. Um, I really loved that. I love that
(23:54):
there are certain sense that, um really are very characteristic
of the South, that if you've ever visited the South
as a child, you know, there's like 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 like that pig smoke
(24:17):
or scent. You know, I know that scent. Well, I
could be any place and immediately be sort of transported
back to some place in the South where I first
smelled what that smells like, you know. And I loved
this idea of when we're really talking about we start
with our roots. We study the people that we came from,
(24:39):
in my case that is Southern black folks. You know.
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
(25:00):
continue on after us. You know, if my ancestors are
my roots, and then here I am the tree that
sort of grew from them. Then eventually I will become
the roots of someone else, you know, some future generations
(25:20):
out there, and that we all sort of 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. 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
(25:42):
my mind, I feel like I was at jab A
Monkey Speaks, which was an open mic that used to
happen in Decatur here in Atlanta, and it was an
open mic that the the way the coffee shop was made,
it doesn't exist anymore. On for internately, the coffee shop doesn't.
Jova Monkey Speaks still exists and they have an Instagram
(26:04):
account where you can follow them. It's open mic. This
turn virtual now. But the location that we used to have,
which was a coffee shop called Jova Monkey burned down
unfortunately a few years ago. But if you can imagine,
it was a coffee shop that had it had like
a it was kind of shaped like a shotgun house.
(26:26):
Even though it was only one story that I remember,
and so you would kind of walk in and everything
was sort of down this like like like a galley kitchen.
It was all down one narrow way, and you walked
in and there would be a few coffee shops, and
then you went back to the coffee bar, and then
it kind of turned like an l when you got
to the back and it had a little wine bar,
(26:47):
and then it turned again and you would go out
to this patio and the patio was covered, but you
were still obviously outside, right And if I remember right
when I finally finished this poem, it was summer, and
it would be so hot, even though the patio was
(27:09):
covered and there were fans out there. You know, you
just had to be prepared that it was just hot.
And 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, you know, all those things that
(27:30):
are are real memories for a lot of people that
grew up in the South. So there was something really
beautiful about my memory of that, my first time taking
this poem out to the open mic and how do
I feel about the poem now? Um, this poem is
still one of my favorites. I think when I'm assuming
(27:52):
other performers think through this stuff too. But I know
for me, as a person that performs poetry, you know
you have this you have 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
(28:12):
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. And it's nice to
have some poems that sort of lay this introductory groundwork, right.
(28:33):
They give people to 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
(28:54):
and there may be some other people in the audience
that also grew up in the South, so we get
to have that sort of, you know, nostalgic feeling together.
So it's still one of my one of my favorite
poems to perform for that reason, because it really gives
the crowd this little window into who I am and
(29:15):
and who are the people and things that built me.
So I love that about this poem, and it made
me also think about when I was when I was
in college and our English professors, especially our our English
writing professors, they would always talk about this concept of
show not just tell, right, and that there's a way
(29:38):
you could say. You could say I was walking down
the street, which might be a tell, But if you
want to show that you're walking down the street, then
you might say, you know, the sound of my heels
click collect on the granite as I left the building. Well,
when you say I was walking down the street, that's
(30:00):
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, you know 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. And I don't know because
(30:22):
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
(30:43):
of behind the poetry. Start with your roots. Thank you
all for listening, See you all next time. Her What
Amina Brown is produced by Matt Owen for sob Fhe
(31:03):
Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network
and partnership with I Heart Radio. Thanks for listening and
don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.
Hey, everybody, Welcome back to a new episode of Her
with Amena Brown and I am Amina Brown, your host.
Oh my goodness, y'all. We are getting knee deep into
the spring here. And 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 like favorites about different time
(00:52):
of year things is it relates to living here, but
the spring is probably one of my favorite times of
year because it's one time of year whether weather is
just warm enough, the summers here get pretty they get
to be pretty sweltering. So when it's springtime and you
can kind of be out with your short sleeve stuff on,
(01:13):
you know, it might even be warm enough to wear
like shorts, but you're not feeling like you're just sweating
all of your skin off. The spring here is very nice,
so we are here celebrating that. Uh, it's not too
nice for my friends that have allergies though. The pollen
out here is very very strong. So 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
(01:35):
least you can see the beauty from inside, and you
don't have to worry about the pollen being inside, you know.
So we're 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
(01:55):
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. So normally right
here will 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.
(02:19):
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, Mamma and Pat Pats and never
wish for better luck or four leaf clover's because New
(02:40):
Year's and black eyed peas and collar 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 the crap. 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
(03:01):
your mama's house, grandma's hands, kisses on mama's cheeks, dirt
under granddad's fingernails from tending his garden, Daddy smelling like
homemade oil changes and porch 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.
(03:24):
Remember she knows the sting of sit in the back
of colored sections, colored insurance, 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 of her children and children's children, to keep
them safe from noose and bullet and eyes and hands
(03:47):
filled with hate. Take that with you. Read it on
crinkly pages like the family Bible, with records of deaths
and births and weddings and generations. Breathe it in like
the scent of candy, yams and rain coming and magnolia,
trees and pigs, smokers and fried everything. Hold it in
your chest like Grandma's voice, seeing that old hymn, like
(04:08):
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.
(04:31):
To go through the season. Start with your roots and
always return there. 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 like social gathering that my husband and
(04:52):
I used to do years ago at our home. It's
kind of interesting to me to think about it now,
because I'm like, dang, that was so much fun, why
don't we stop doing that. We used to do these
events for our artist friends and we called it the
listening Party. And basically what we would do is we
would pick an album, typically from like Rolling Stones Top
five hundred. I think I think we did two of
(05:13):
these that I can remember, and we would invite our
friends to come over. This is all pre pandemic stuff,
but about our friends to come over and tell them
to like bring a snack or their favorite drink or
something to share, and everybody would get there. Would have
about thirty minutes for people to kind of mill around
and snack and chit chat, and then we would start
(05:33):
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, you know,
(05:54):
people wanted to use. And then after the album finished playing,
we would kind of 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, and one of the listening parties that we
had the album was outcasts Equipment I. First of all,
(06:14):
it's just a dope album, which is why it was
also included in the top five albums of Rolling Stone.
But it's a particularly important album to me because around
the time that Equipment I was being released was my
like early first one or two years of college. This
was sort of the album for us at that time,
(06:36):
and I just have a lot of like 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, you know, in people's cars when
they were driving by. It was just this soundtrack to
(06:56):
our time here and in particular going to spell Men.
Being in the Atlanta University Center at the time, it
was sort of this surrounding music that was there. And
to have all of that location and place playing a
role in this album was really interesting, and I think
in general, in my writing and in my creative work
at the moment, there's a lot of thought and inspiration
(07:19):
that I get from location in place. It's the things
we right, it's the memories we experience but they're not
disconnected from the place right from the place where we were,
from the particular location in that place where we were,
so to be in Atlanta at the time the Outcast
is releasing a Quemini and Outcast being this born and
(07:40):
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 like
released out into the world. So they're all these layers
(08:00):
that I have in coming into the listening party thinking
about this album in particular, right, and so that night
I decided to just journal, and the beginnings of Start
with Your Roots is what came out that night. So
that was sort of the beginning of what made me
write the poem. And then after that night, I decided
(08:21):
to kind of go back and tool around with the poem,
you know, 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? I think that part of what made
(08:43):
that come up for me is there's a song on
aquim and I called Rosa Parks and it's one of
my favorite Outcast songs, and it has this section of
it in the middle that sounds like a Southern hold out,
you know. It's all the uh fiddles and carmonica. I mean,
it's it's it's such a fantastic piece of music. And
(09:07):
I think that conjured up to me, that was this
fascinating choice that Outcasts made to put something so distinctly
Southern in the middle of this hip hop record, you know,
And I started thinking a lot, And I think prior
to that moment, had been thinking a lot about even
though I moved around a lot as a child, you know,
I lived um in a lot of different places in America.
(09:31):
I moved around a lot as a child, and I
traveled a lot as a child as well, and 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. So there are particular feelings that
(09:55):
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, you know, everyone has like different perceptions of
places that they've never been or that they're not very
familiar with. And then on top of that, you have
TV and film and all sorts of other media that
(10:16):
sort of put out an image or a sound that
that they will tell you is how that place is.
And that could be accurate or it could be totally inaccurate, right,
but you don't really know because you've never been to
that place. Like if I would give you an example,
I would say, for those of you that watch Saturday
Night Live a lot, whenever Saturday Night Live has to
(10:39):
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. Right,
that's a pretty consistent Southern representation. But for those of
us who actually live here in the South, we know
(11:02):
that that's not all that the South is. And 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 you know,
it was really the the hotbed of the capitalist slavery
(11:25):
industry in America. 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 were still in place, that
(11:46):
were very particular to the South. Right. However, we know
that overall, there's so many foundations about America and how
America began in American history that we know. Racism is,
Racism was and is still widespread right all over America.
But there were certain narratives about what that meant from
(12:08):
the South, and certain people, you know, would say like, oh,
I wouldn't I would never live down there. You know,
I would never want to live anywhere in the South.
You know, it's too racist down there. Different things people
would say, and I'm like, well, you know, it's racist
all over America in a lot of ways. But I
started to really kind of explore my own roots, you know,
(12:30):
explore my family line. When I think about black history,
I want, in particular to know my family's history, you know,
what what is our black history? Right? And 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
(12:51):
about what does it mean to be from the South
I have chosen in my adult life. You know, it's
different when you're a kid and your parents parents have
different reasons why they need to move, and you need to,
you know, go with them, right. But then you get
to be an adult, you can in some ways, you
can choose where you want to be, where you want
your home to be, where you want to put down
(13:13):
your own roots. And I chose a southern city, you know,
I chose Atlanta. I had a lot of places I
could have gone as a performing artist. I contemplated, you know,
making my life in New York, and then I contemplated
making my life in l a. But neither of those
places ever felt like home to me like Atlanta does.
And so I stayed here. And now I have lived
(13:35):
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 what was it
that I loved about being in the South. What what
was it like to me being a child? Uh, sort
of going home to the South where my grandmother lived,
(13:58):
what were the rich thing is about that that I
really loved? And then in in very particular ways, even
honing down even more, what was it like to be
black and from the South, And what were some of
those memories that I had. So I was kind of
swirling those ideas around, and I think as I was
(14:19):
listening to outcasts Rosa Parks from a quim and I
then the ideas sort of 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, they're sort of these first several
lines that are more more generally about the South, about
(14:43):
things that I think a lot of people from the
South would say, the experience, you know, the importance of
the porch, Like 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 um even you know this
moment in the beginning of you know, Grandma saying, closed
(15:05):
the screen door behind you, right um. Even first of all,
visiting other places where they have no idea what a
screen door is, and that a lot of the houses
I visited of my family members in the South had
screen doors. Right, You've got like all the mosquitoes and
different things that go on in the summer like that,
you know, you gotta kind of have that screen door
(15:28):
so that you have that and you're like regular door.
And even that phrase Grandma saying, closed 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, you know, in my great grandmother's house or
(15:50):
some of my cousins houses growing up. So this beginning
part of the piece was my attempt to sort of,
uh generally say some things that were part of my experience,
but also I thought would be part of the sort
of southern upbringing experience for a lot of folks, you know.
And then I think the poem does get to a
(16:11):
place where I'm really now drilling down into what is
Southern Black culture for a lot of us. You know,
these ideas about superstition and luck and that those things
are different in Southern Black culture than just looking for
a four leaf clover. You know, it's making your black
eyed peas on college greens on New Year's. My great
(16:33):
grandmother was really big on if you're if your hands
started to itch in the palm, that that meant, you know,
some money was coming to you, or if your nose
itched to meet, somebody was going to come visit you,
and all of those little childhood games we play that
had the different rhymes in there, and that you know,
you don't want to step on a crack on the
sidewalk because you'll break your mom's back and things like that.
(16:56):
You know, Um ended up sort of showing up to
me as I was trying to get these ideas out,
and then it's you know, kind of goes back here
in some ways to some general ideas about you know,
thinking about Bill Wither's grandma's hands and also thinking about
my own grandma's hands, right, thinking about the sort of
(17:18):
respect things that you do when you walk into uh
a house of black Southern folks. You know, it's like,
if that's your mama's house, then you walk in, if
everybody's up and about, you know, you walk in, first
thing you want to do is give your mama kiss
on the cheek, give your grandmama kiss on the cheek,
you know those kinds of things. Um, really was giving
(17:41):
a shout out to my dad and my grandfather on
my dad's side, they both were big in gardening, and
you know, we're just those type of like 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, right, Um.
(18:03):
And then I get into this, you know, 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,
you know, 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
(18:23):
had to travel when we left her. Right. And 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 that 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
(18:45):
would make a whole chocolate cake. But then she would
slice the cake and put each wrap each of the
slices and wax paper, and she would put I didn't
mention this in the piece, which I was surprised when
I look back at it, actually, but she would put
all this food in this shoe box Bucks, and then
we would, you know, go on our way and be
so excited to open up that shoebox when we got
(19:07):
on the train or on the bus. Oh my goodness,
you know. And it was interesting because you know, sometimes generationally,
and 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. You know, why were they
(19:28):
saving the aluminum foil? Why were they rinsing it off
and folding it back up and putting it back in
the cabinet. Right. I've even joked with a few of
my friends, I'm curious for those of us who are
living through this time of the pandemic and of COVID, like,
what will be some things we will retain from this
that when we're in our you know, seventies eighties, will
(19:49):
still be doing that, even though it may not be necessary.
But it's like our brains are already there thinking about it,
you know. And um, my grandparents were being raised in
the age po the Depression, so there was still a
lot of ways that they were sort of rationing certain things, right,
And this was one of those things that my grandma did.
(20:10):
But we didn't really know the explanation as children. I
just thought she did that because Grandma was like to
make sure you have food, you know. 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, She explained to me, you know, because
of segregation. I do that because I did that, you know,
(20:33):
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
(20:56):
to sort of bring everything that we needed with us,
you know. And that really gave me a lot of
pause hearing my grandma recount that, and it gave a
lot of gravity to that tradition. It's also interesting because
(21:25):
after I wrote this poem, I'm trying to think about
the years. It's maybe it was maybe a few years
after this. My grandma turned eighty five that year, and
my cousin organized this beach trip for our whole family. Right,
So that mean my grandma, all her kids, all the grandkids,
(21:45):
and the great grandkids. Right. We were all in the
same beach house. And 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, you know,
And I decided it as tradition, you know, to make
this cake. I cannot remember now if we had fried
(22:07):
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 can consider to be a chocolate cake, which
is yellow cake with chocolate frosting. I can't argue with
you about it. It's just the way it is. So uh.
(22:27):
I made the cake for my grandma this time, and
then my cousins, a couple of my cousins had to
leave earlier, and 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,
(22:48):
you know, 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.
So that was a really beautiful moment that I remember
happening after this poem got written. And another thing that
(23:11):
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. 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 know.
(23:34):
You feel like you can see that you know, grandfather
at the head of the table holding hands everyone, everyone,
regardless of whatever their own religious affiliation is a bowing
their head when the granddaddy says, let's pray type of thing.
You know. Um, I really loved that. I love that
(23:54):
there are certain sense that, um really are very characteristic
of the South, that if you've ever visited the South
as a child, you know, there's like 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 like that pig smoke
(24:17):
or scent. You know, I know that scent. Well, I
could be any place and immediately be sort of transported
back to some place in the South where I first
smelled what that smells like, you know. And I loved
this idea of when we're really talking about we start
with our roots. We study the people that we came from,
(24:39):
in my case that is Southern black folks. You know.
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
(25:00):
continue on after us. You know, if my ancestors are
my roots, and then here I am the tree that
sort of grew from them. Then eventually I will become
the roots of someone else, you know, some future generations
(25:20):
out there, and that we all sort of 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. 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
(25:42):
my mind, I feel like I was at jab A
Monkey Speaks, which was an open mic that used to
happen in Decatur here in Atlanta, and it was an
open mic that the the way the coffee shop was made,
it doesn't exist anymore. On for internately, the coffee shop doesn't.
Jova Monkey Speaks still exists and they have an Instagram
(26:04):
account where you can follow them. It's open mic. This
turn virtual now. But the location that we used to have,
which was a coffee shop called Jova Monkey burned down
unfortunately a few years ago. But if you can imagine,
it was a coffee shop that had it had like
a it was kind of shaped like a shotgun house.
(26:26):
Even though it was only one story that I remember,
and so you would kind of walk in and everything
was sort of down this like like like a galley kitchen.
It was all down one narrow way, and you walked
in and there would be a few coffee shops, and
then you went back to the coffee bar, and then
it kind of turned like an l when you got
to the back and it had a little wine bar,
(26:47):
and then it turned again and you would go out
to this patio and the patio was covered, but you
were still obviously outside, right And if I remember right
when I finally finished this poem, it was summer, and
it would be so hot, even though the patio was
(27:09):
covered and there were fans out there. You know, you
just had to be prepared that it was just hot.
And 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, you know, all those things that
(27:30):
are are real memories for a lot of people that
grew up in the South. So there was something really
beautiful about my memory of that, my first time taking
this poem out to the open mic and how do
I feel about the poem now? Um, this poem is
still one of my favorites. I think when I'm assuming
(27:52):
other performers think through this stuff too. But I know
for me, as a person that performs poetry, you know
you have this you have 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
(28:12):
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. And it's nice to
have some poems that sort of lay this introductory groundwork, right.
(28:33):
They give people to 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
(28:54):
and there may be some other people in the audience
that also grew up in the South, so we get
to have that sort of, you know, nostalgic feeling together.
So it's still one of my one of my favorite
poems to perform for that reason, because it really gives
the crowd this little window into who I am and
(29:15):
and who are the people and things that built me.
So I love that about this poem, and it made
me also think about when I was when I was
in college and our English professors, especially our our English
writing professors, they would always talk about this concept of
show not just tell, right, and that there's a way
(29:38):
you could say. You could say I was walking down
the street, which might be a tell, But if you
want to show that you're walking down the street, then
you might say, you know, the sound of my heels
click collect on the granite as I left the building. Well,
when you say I was walking down the street, that's
(30:00):
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, you know 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. And I don't know because
(30:22):
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
(30:43):
of behind the poetry. Start with your roots. Thank you
all for listening, See you all next time. Her What
Amina Brown is produced by Matt Owen for sob Fhe
(31:03):
Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network
and partnership with I Heart Radio. Thanks for listening and
don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.
Popular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!