Description:
A Black Doe in the Anthropocene confronts brutal truths unearthed by the present-day descendant of an enslaved American family--author Artress Bethany White. Following her ancestors' enslavement in 1700s Virginia and North Carolina, White weaves together data from Hairston family plantation archives and her Black Hairston mother's inherited oral slave narrative to create searing poems on a history of Scottish genes and African ancestry. In doing this sacred work, White expands the historical narrative far beyond Hairston plantation grounds to examine the lives of freed people who emigrated back to Africa to reestablish themselves in a Black nation, and to also chronicle her own life in the US.
Invoking themes of heritage and the lives of mixed-race Hairstons, this collection outlines the hardships many emancipated people faced in the US as well as the ways Americans continue to encounter vestiges of institutional enslavement. An essential addition to ongoing conversations on race and racial (in)justice, A Black Doe in the Anthropocene lays bare our intertwined inheritances and what we leave in our wake for future generations.
Brief description: Artress Bethany White is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is the recipient of the Trio Award for her collection My Afmerica: Poems, selected by poet Sun Yung Shin. Her prose, Survivor's Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity, received a Next Generation Finalist Indie Book Award. She is associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University and coeditor of the anthology Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters.
Review Quotes:
No American education should be considered complete without a visceral understanding of plantation life for teenage Black girls in the slavery centuries before the Civil War, when molestation and sexual trauma were so routine that enslavers viewed them as an entitlement. These details, in Artress Bethany White's mind, must never be skipped over. Thusly, the Black fawns are heard on high in this staggering collection.
-- "Foreword Reviews"