Description: With poems that revel in African American signifying, spirituality, and traditional storytelling, McCray's collection establishes a sincere legacy for Ota Benga as she shares her friend's harrowing tale with new generations.
Brief description: Born in Lynchburg, Virginia, Carrie Allen McCray was an educator and social worker before turning to writing later in life. McCray is the author of Freedom�s Child: The Life of a Confederate General�s Black Daughter, which details her discovery that her mother was the child of a Confederate general and his black servant. McCray is the author of the poetry chapbook Piece of Time, and her poems have been published in Ms. Magazine, River Styx, Point, and the Squaw Review, and in the anthologies Moving beyond Words and The Crimson Edge: Older Women Writing.
Review Quotes: �In a narrative that moves like a classical tragedy, Ota Benga is �caught in a web / of flawed science,� but emerges as a complex and real figure, a man out of time, out of place, whose dignity and humanity have left us with a harrowing story shared here by one who knew him best. Carrie Allen McCray weaves a rich tapestry in this cultural epic. We hear African rhythms and tribal voices, we encounter poems that seem like plays and chants and rituals and journal excerpts, and we witness the �birth of anthropology� with an awful, embedded racism in its infancy. In McCray�s loving portrait of Ota Benga, we come to relish the small touches as much as the large ones�the landscape of turn-of-the-century Virginia, the manners of folks at work and play, the sense of tribal and familial loyalty, and the voices that accumulate into a cultural symphony, sometimes broken into grief, sometimes sustained by joy.�
�David Baker, poetry editor, Kenyon Review