September 19, 2023 • 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. Please enjoy this episode from the HER Archives.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:30):
Hey, everybody, Welcome back to a new episode of Her
with Amina 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 favorites about different time of
(00:52):
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 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 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
(01:33):
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, you know.
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
(01:55):
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. So 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
(02:17):
it out. 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 Pappa, to
never wish for better luck or full leaf clovers because
(02:39):
New 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 a 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 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.
(03:24):
Remember she knows the sting of sitting 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 and 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 filled
(03:48):
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 candied yams and rain coming and magnolia trees
and pig smokers and fried everything. Hold it in your
chest like Grandma's voice, seeing that old hymn, like Granddaddy
(04:09):
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 social gathering that my husband and I
(04:52):
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 did
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 we did two of these that I can remember,
(05:15):
and we would invite our friends to come over. This
is all pre pandemic stuff. We'd invite our friends to
come over, tell them to bring a snack or their
favorite drink or something to share, and everybody would get there.
We'd have about thirty minutes for people to kind of
mill around and snack and chit chat, and then we
would start the album and we would play the album
(05:36):
all the way through, and we would just invite people
to really be quiet during that time and to do
whatever they liked 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, people wanted to use. And then
(05:56):
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 Equimini.
First of all, it's just a dope album, which is
why it was also included in the top five hundred
(06:20):
albums of Rolling Stone. But it's a particularly important album
to me because around the time that Equimini was being
released was my early first one or two years of college.
This was sort of the album for us at that time,
and I just have a lot of like really fond
(06:41):
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
our time here and in particular going to Spelman being
in the Atlanta University Center at the time, it was
(07:03):
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 that I get
from location in place. It's the things we write, it's
(07:23):
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 Qumini, an Outcast being this born and raised hip
hop group that really counted Atlanta as home. The way
(07:47):
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, right, and so that night I decided
(08:09):
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 to kind of
go back and tool around with the poem, you know,
see if I could maybe complete the story, see where
(08:30):
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 that come up
for me is there's a song on a Quimini called
Rosa Parks and it's one of my favorite Outcast songs,
(08:52):
and it has this section of it in the middle
that sounds like a Southern hodown, you know, it's all
the fiddles and harmonica. I mean, it's such a fantastic
piece of music. And I think that conjured up to me,
that was this fascinating choice that Outcasts made to put
(09:12):
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 in a lot
of different places in America. I moved around a lot
as a child, and I traveled a lot as a
(09:34):
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 I have around what it
(09:56):
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. They're sort of put out an
(10:19):
image or a sound 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 were to give you an example, I would say,
for those of you that watch Saturday Night Live a lot,
whenever Saturday Night Live has to represent the South, they
(10:42):
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 that that's
(11:02):
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 hotbed of the capitalist slavery industry
(11:25):
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 are still in place, that
(11:46):
were very particular to the South. Right, However, we know
that overall there are 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't I would never live down there. You know, I
would never want to live anywhere in the South. You know,
it's two 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, explore
(12:31):
my family line. When I think about black history, I want,
in particular to know my family's history, you know, 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 about what
(12:53):
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 your own roots.
(13:14):
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 la But neither of those places ever felt
like home to me like Atlanta does. And so I
stayed here. And now I have lived most of my
(13:36):
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 what was it like to
me being a child sort of going home to the
South where my grandmother lived. What were the rich things
(14:00):
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, 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 listening to outcasts Rosa Parks from a Quimini,
(14:24):
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, there's sort of these first several
lines that are more generally about the South, about things
that I think a lot of people from the South
(14:45):
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 even you know this moment
in the beginning of you know, Grandma saying, closed the
(15:06):
screen door behind you, right, 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 mosquitos and different things that
go on in the summer like that, you know, you
(15:26):
gotta kind of have that screen door so that you
have that and your 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,
(15:48):
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 sort of 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
(16:09):
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. 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
(16:31):
and collar greens on New Year's My great grandmother was
really big on you. If your hand started to itch
in the palm, that that meant, you know, some money
was coming to you, or if your nose itched and
meant somebody was going to come visit you. And all
of those little childhood games we played that had the
different rhymes in there, and that you you know, you
(16:51):
don't want to step on a crack on the sidewalk
because you'll break your mama's bag, and things like that.
You know, 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 Withers grandma's hands and also thinking about my
(17:13):
own grandma's hands, right, thinking about the sort of respect
things that you do when you walk into 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,
(17:36):
give your grandmama kiss on the cheek. You know, 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 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
(17:56):
could have been from the garden, it could have been
from them doing their own oil changes. Right, 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,
(18:17):
different memories of where we were living at certain times,
and we would go to her house and then depending
on where we were living, which way we had to
travel when we left her. Right. And for a good
bit of my like 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
(18:37):
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 put each wrap each of the slices in
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
(18:57):
food in this shoe box, and then we would, you know,
go on our way and be so excited to open
up that shoe box when we got on the train
or on the bus. Oh my goodness, you know. And
it was interesting because, you know, sometimes generationally, I don't
know many of us can say this is true in
our families. There are some things that the old generations
(19:20):
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 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
(19:42):
some things we will retain from this that when we're
in our you know, 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, you know.
And my grandparents were being raised in the age post
the Depression, so there was still a lot of ways
(20:03):
that they were sort of rationing certain things, right, And
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 Grandma was like to
make sure you have food, you know. She never explained that.
And when I got older and I asked her why
was she making this chicken and this cake to send
(20:24):
us on our way, she explained to me, you know,
because of segregation. I do that because I did that,
you know 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,
(20:44):
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 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
(21:07):
lot of gravity to that tradition. It's also interesting because
after I wrote this poem, I'm trying to think about
(21:29):
the years it was. 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 meant my grandma, all her kids, all the grandkids,
and the great grandkids. Right. We were all in the
same beach house. And my grandma's birthday is actually in October,
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but she wanted us to celebrate her birthday that summer
because we were all going to be together, you know.
And I decided, as tradition, you know, 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
(22:14):
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 I
made the cake for my grandma this time, and then
my cousins a couple of my cousins had to leave earlier,
(22:35):
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, you know,
it turned to be this thing that now we can
do out of love in the same way that our
(22:56):
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 I
really love about this poem that I think became really
important in the real story of writing behind it is
(23:19):
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 fry everything. You know,
you feel like you can see that, you know, grandfather
at the head of the table holding hands. Everyone, everyone
(23:42):
regardless of whatever their own religious affiliation, is bowing their
head when the granddaddy says, let's prey type of thing.
You know. I really loved that I love that there
are certain sense that really are very characteristic of the
South that if you've ever visited the South as a child,
(24:04):
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 that pig smoke or scent. You know,
I know that scent. Well, I could be any place
and immediately be sort of transported back to some place
(24:25):
in the South where I first smell 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, 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
(24:48):
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. You know,
if my ancestors are my roots, and then here I
am the tree that sort of grew from them, then
(25:12):
eventually I will become the root of someone else, you know.
Some future generations 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
(25:34):
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 in Atlanta, and it was
(25:55):
an open mic that the way the coffee shop was
made it doesn't exist anymore. Fortunately, 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.
This turn virtual now. 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
(26:17):
can imagine, it was a coffee shop that had it
had like a it was kind of shaped like a
shotgun house, 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
(26:37):
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, 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
(27:01):
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 know,
you just had to be prepared that it was as hot.
And there was some gravitas to reading this poem for
the first time at Java Monkey in the South in
(27:21):
Atlanta in the summer and talking about all of the cobbler,
the watermelon, sticky fingers, you know, all those things that
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
(27:44):
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 know you have
this you have as a performing artist, you have some
audiences you perform in front of, and they're already familiar
(28:06):
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. And it's nice to have some
(28:29):
poems that sort of lay this introductory groundwork right that
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
(28:51):
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 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 who
(29:15):
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 English writing professors, it
would always talk about this concept of show, not just tell, right,
(29:37):
and that there's a way 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 clacked on the granite
as I left the building. Well, when you say I
(29:58):
was walking down the street, that's who 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.
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And 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
(30:41):
little bit of the story of behind the poetry. Start
with your roots. Thank y'all for listening, See y'all next time.
Her with Amina Brown is produced by Matt Owen for
(31:03):
slover Feed 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.
Hey, everybody, Welcome back to a new episode of Her
with Amina 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 favorites about different time of
(00:52):
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 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 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
(01:33):
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, you know.
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
(01:55):
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. So 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
(02:17):
it out. 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 Pappa, to
never wish for better luck or full leaf clovers because
(02:39):
New 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 a 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 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.
(03:24):
Remember she knows the sting of sitting 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 and 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 filled
(03:48):
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 candied yams and rain coming and magnolia trees
and pig smokers and fried everything. Hold it in your
chest like Grandma's voice, seeing that old hymn, like Granddaddy
(04:09):
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 social gathering that my husband and I
(04:52):
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 did
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 we did two of these that I can remember,
(05:15):
and we would invite our friends to come over. This
is all pre pandemic stuff. We'd invite our friends to
come over, tell them to bring a snack or their
favorite drink or something to share, and everybody would get there.
We'd have about thirty minutes for people to kind of
mill around and snack and chit chat, and then we
would start the album and we would play the album
(05:36):
all the way through, and we would just invite people
to really be quiet during that time and to do
whatever they liked 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, people wanted to use. And then
(05:56):
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 Equimini.
First of all, it's just a dope album, which is
why it was also included in the top five hundred
(06:20):
albums of Rolling Stone. But it's a particularly important album
to me because around the time that Equimini was being
released was my early first one or two years of college.
This was sort of the album for us at that time,
and I just have a lot of like really fond
(06:41):
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
our time here and in particular going to Spelman being
in the Atlanta University Center at the time, it was
(07:03):
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 that I get
from location in place. It's the things we write, it's
(07:23):
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 Qumini, an Outcast being this born and raised hip
hop group that really counted Atlanta as home. The way
(07:47):
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, right, and so that night I decided
(08:09):
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 to kind of
go back and tool around with the poem, you know,
see if I could maybe complete the story, see where
(08:30):
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 that come up
for me is there's a song on a Quimini called
Rosa Parks and it's one of my favorite Outcast songs,
(08:52):
and it has this section of it in the middle
that sounds like a Southern hodown, you know, it's all
the fiddles and harmonica. I mean, it's such a fantastic
piece of music. And I think that conjured up to me,
that was this fascinating choice that Outcasts made to put
(09:12):
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 in a lot
of different places in America. I moved around a lot
as a child, and I traveled a lot as a
(09:34):
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 I have around what it
(09:56):
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. They're sort of put out an
(10:19):
image or a sound 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 were to give you an example, I would say,
for those of you that watch Saturday Night Live a lot,
whenever Saturday Night Live has to represent the South, they
(10:42):
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 that that's
(11:02):
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 hotbed of the capitalist slavery industry
(11:25):
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 are still in place, that
(11:46):
were very particular to the South. Right, However, we know
that overall there are 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't I would never live down there. You know, I
would never want to live anywhere in the South. You know,
it's two 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, explore
(12:31):
my family line. When I think about black history, I want,
in particular to know my family's history, you know, 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 about what
(12:53):
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 your own roots.
(13:14):
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 la But neither of those places ever felt
like home to me like Atlanta does. And so I
stayed here. And now I have lived most of my
(13:36):
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 what was it like to
me being a child sort of going home to the
South where my grandmother lived. What were the rich things
(14:00):
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, 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 listening to outcasts Rosa Parks from a Quimini,
(14:24):
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, there's sort of these first several
lines that are more generally about the South, about things
that I think a lot of people from the South
(14:45):
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 even you know this moment
in the beginning of you know, Grandma saying, closed the
(15:06):
screen door behind you, right, 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 mosquitos and different things that
go on in the summer like that, you know, you
(15:26):
gotta kind of have that screen door so that you
have that and your 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,
(15:48):
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 sort of 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
(16:09):
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. 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
(16:31):
and collar greens on New Year's My great grandmother was
really big on you. If your hand started to itch
in the palm, that that meant, you know, some money
was coming to you, or if your nose itched and
meant somebody was going to come visit you. And all
of those little childhood games we played that had the
different rhymes in there, and that you you know, you
(16:51):
don't want to step on a crack on the sidewalk
because you'll break your mama's bag, and things like that.
You know, 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 Withers grandma's hands and also thinking about my
(17:13):
own grandma's hands, right, thinking about the sort of respect
things that you do when you walk into 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,
(17:36):
give your grandmama kiss on the cheek. You know, 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 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
(17:56):
could have been from the garden, it could have been
from them doing their own oil changes. Right, 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,
(18:17):
different memories of where we were living at certain times,
and we would go to her house and then depending
on where we were living, which way we had to
travel when we left her. Right. And for a good
bit of my like 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
(18:37):
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 put each wrap each of the slices in
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
(18:57):
food in this shoe box, and then we would, you know,
go on our way and be so excited to open
up that shoe box when we got on the train
or on the bus. Oh my goodness, you know. And
it was interesting because, you know, sometimes generationally, I don't
know many of us can say this is true in
our families. There are some things that the old generations
(19:20):
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 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
(19:42):
some things we will retain from this that when we're
in our you know, 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, you know.
And my grandparents were being raised in the age post
the Depression, so there was still a lot of ways
(20:03):
that they were sort of rationing certain things, right, And
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 Grandma was like to
make sure you have food, you know. She never explained that.
And when I got older and I asked her why
was she making this chicken and this cake to send
(20:24):
us on our way, she explained to me, you know,
because of segregation. I do that because I did that,
you know 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,
(20:44):
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 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
(21:07):
lot of gravity to that tradition. It's also interesting because
after I wrote this poem, I'm trying to think about
(21:29):
the years it was. 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 meant my grandma, all her kids, all the grandkids,
and the great grandkids. Right. We were all in the
same beach house. And my grandma's birthday is actually in October,
(21:53):
but she wanted us to celebrate her birthday that summer
because we were all going to be together, you know.
And I decided, as tradition, you know, 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
(22:14):
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 I
made the cake for my grandma this time, and then
my cousins a couple of my cousins had to leave earlier,
(22:35):
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, you know,
it turned to be this thing that now we can
do out of love in the same way that our
(22:56):
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 I
really love about this poem that I think became really
important in the real story of writing behind it is
(23:19):
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 fry everything. You know,
you feel like you can see that, you know, grandfather
at the head of the table holding hands. Everyone, everyone
(23:42):
regardless of whatever their own religious affiliation, is bowing their
head when the granddaddy says, let's prey type of thing.
You know. I really loved that I love that there
are certain sense that really are very characteristic of the
South that if you've ever visited the South as a child,
(24:04):
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 that pig smoke or scent. You know,
I know that scent. Well, I could be any place
and immediately be sort of transported back to some place
(24:25):
in the South where I first smell 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, 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
(24:48):
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. You know,
if my ancestors are my roots, and then here I
am the tree that sort of grew from them, then
(25:12):
eventually I will become the root of someone else, you know.
Some future generations 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
(25:34):
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 in Atlanta, and it was
(25:55):
an open mic that the way the coffee shop was
made it doesn't exist anymore. Fortunately, 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.
This turn virtual now. 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
(26:17):
can imagine, it was a coffee shop that had it
had like a it was kind of shaped like a
shotgun house, 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
(26:37):
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, 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
(27:01):
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 know,
you just had to be prepared that it was as hot.
And there was some gravitas to reading this poem for
the first time at Java Monkey in the South in
(27:21):
Atlanta in the summer and talking about all of the cobbler,
the watermelon, sticky fingers, you know, all those things that
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
(27:44):
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 know you have
this you have as a performing artist, you have some
audiences you perform in front of, and they're already familiar
(28:06):
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. And it's nice to have some
(28:29):
poems that sort of lay this introductory groundwork right that
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
(28:51):
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 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 who
(29:15):
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 English writing professors, it
would always talk about this concept of show, not just tell, right,
(29:37):
and that there's a way 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 clacked on the granite
as I left the building. Well, when you say I
(29:58):
was walking down the street, that's who 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.
(30:20):
And 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
(30:41):
little bit of the story of behind the poetry. Start
with your roots. Thank y'all for listening, See y'all next time.
Her with Amina Brown is produced by Matt Owen for
(31:03):
slover Feed 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.
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