Jaki Shelton Green shares a moving evening of poetry with Black Mountain

Local library hosts N.C Poet Laureate

Fred McCormick
The Valley Echo
October 9, 2023

N.C. Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green reads to an audience in the Black Mountain-Tyson Public Library, Oct. 3. Photo by Fred McCormick

Many of the words uttered by Jaki Shelton Green, Oct. 3, as she read her works at the Black Mountain-Tyson Public Library, hung heavy in the air in the packed education room. Her prose, as she recited verses written throughout a lifetime literary career that has earned her an induction into the N.C. Literary Hall of Fame and countless awards and recognitions, cut through the somber silence. 

Ever-present in the delivery of the first African American and third woman to hold the office of N.C Poet Laureate, however, were the ancestors who have inspired Green in her journey. 

The Friends of the Black Mountain Library-sponsored appearance by the poet laureate, an office established by the state in 1935, was rare, if not unprecedented, in the Swannanoa Valley. 

“James Baldwin once said that art should agitate, it should instruct, it should always make us think ,” Green told the nearly capacity crowd in the venue. “We always think about the poet, or any artist, as someone who allows us to look in those dark places where poetry and truth really reside.”

She opened the reading with a pair of poems written from the perspective of Elizabeth Keckley, who was enslaved at birth before purchasing her freedom in the 1850s and embarking on a career as a seamstress in Washington, D.C. Keckley went on to become a trusted confidante of first lady Mary Todd Lincoln and wrote an autobiography in 1868.

“She and Mary Todd Lincoln had a very interesting relationship, because they were best friends but they were not equal,” said Green, who was raised in Orange County, where Keckley was forced into servitude at Burwell School for girls in Hillsborough.

In her appearance, Green, a professor of documentary poetry at Duke University who has published eight books and an album in her four-decade career, emphasized the importance of representing those who endured brutal injustices.

“We have some work to do on behalf of our ancestors, always,” she said. “We get to define what that work looks and feels like, but there’s not a day when my grandmother, or women beyond that lineage, are speaking to me, through a tea cup or a photograph.”

One of the poems she shared focused on the story of Lydia, an enslaved woman whose story was nearly lost to history.

“A few weeks ago I was humbled to have the honor to pen a poem for an enslaved woman named Lydia,” Green said. “At the time, the N.C. law only allowed the owner of an enslaved person to punish that person. Mr. Mann rented Lydia for a year, and he was known to be very mean. One day he was about to beat Lydia and she ran, but Mr. Mann got his gun and shot Lydia.”

Jaki Shelton Green, the first African American and third woman to hold the office of N.C. Poet Laureate, speaks, Oct. 3, in Black Mountain. Photo by Fred McCormick

While the enslaved woman survived the attack, the incident resulted in a legal decision in which Judge Thomas Ruffin declared, “the power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect.”

“The tragedy in all of this is that Judge Ruffin changed the law to allow any white man to beat any slave,” Green said. “But, dear Lydia did not know that the story of her running is the beginning of the worst of the worst.”

Green, a professor of documentary poetry at Duke University, has published eight books and an album in her four-decade career while founding SistaWRiTE, an organization that brings women together through writing retreats around the world.

Her poetry leans heavily into historical narratives and often explore her “very complicated relationship with the South.” Green, who fielded questions from the audience in Black Mountain, encouraged emerging writers to trust their instincts.

“Don’t be afraid to write what you know,” she said. “Trust your spirt. Write your stories, and don’t let the made up strange rules keep you from the telling the truth.”