WALKING GENTRY HOME

A poet’s homage to her family’s past.

Swarthmore College student Young, Youth Poet Laureate of the Southern United States, revives her family’s “long-forgotten history,” from its unrecorded beginnings in Africa to the present, in a multigenerational memoir delicately crafted in verse. “The only way to tell this story is through poetry,” writes the author, “because Black girlhood is eternally laced with rhythm, from the Negro hymns Amy Coleman whispered as she bore her enslaver’s child to the rhythm of the gospel my mother sang at fifteen when she was hailed a child prodigy.” Central to Young’s history is Nannie Pearl, born in 1898 in West Tennessee, the first girl among her forebears to attend the local one-room schoolhouse. At 22, Nannie became pregnant and married; Gentry was one of Nannie’s 11 children and was Young’s great-grandmother. Most women in Young’s family found themselves pregnant as teenagers, marrying in haste to a boy who rarely stayed around. “I am from five generations of shotgun weddings / Of women with stronger wombs than wits,” Young notes, and of mothers who warned their daughters about repeating their mistakes. In an expanding family, Gentry became a “second mother” to her many sisters and brothers instead of enjoying the innocent pleasures of childhood. She was “terrified” when, pregnant, she married at 14. Her daughter Yvonne became pregnant when she was a high school freshman. Yvonne’s daughter, Young’s mother, was engaged at the age of 16. “My family,” writes the author, “has spent centuries in search of girlhood / Even when it came only in the form of running from being a / woman.” With lyrical precision, Young refracts Black history through her family’s experiences of racism and “deferred dreams”—“And if you have enough color / just living shatters fantasies.” Near the end, she writes, “Everywhere in this world I walk, I’ll walk with Gentry. Because this is my legacy.”

A moving debut from a young writer with great promise.