DREAM A DRESS, DREAM A POEM

Myra Viola Wilds turned to poetry after years of fine dressmaking ruined her eyesight.

Two of Wilds’ poems, “Thoughts” and “Dewdrops,” bookend the text. In spare verse laced with unforced rhymes, James stitches sparsely known details into a tender tapestry of a creative life. Like other Black Americans taking part in the Great Migration, Wilds left rural Kentucky for a city where she could learn to read and ply a trade. Though Wilds made dresses for those much wealthier than her, James describes her dressmaking as a creatively gratifying art form: “Sitting sewing gorgeous gowns / and fashionable frocks to wear to town. // …Formal for important places, / big ideas, and serious faces.” Extending James’ captivating verse, Ejaita depicts Wilds as heroic, a silhouetted figure towering over the landscape as she migrates from countryside to city. In one double-page spread, a gritty, charcoal-like texture blurs a dress’s colorful details, representing Wilds’ failing vision. In others, herringbone tweeds, bright colors, and hatched and contoured lines lovingly present Wilds’ dresses. As she shifts from dressmaking to poetry, her needle becomes a pen, and thread flows into letterforms. A brown child is portrayed and addressed at beginning and end—another set of bookends. James’ cogent historical note sets Wilds’ story within the fraught period between Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow laws.

Beautifully crafted and compellingly celebratory.