the seed within
Lately I’ve been thinking about seeds. I need to design a new Rosetta Press logo and want to add some art to my website landing page (possibly a dandelion). I woke up this morning with Jean Toomer’s words from Cane in my mind: “One seed was saved for me.” Which I misremembered—it’s “plum,” not “seed”—but the sentiment is the same. With the mass protests in Mexico over the government-involved disappearance of 43 students, this meme has been circulating on Facebook: “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” And then a couple of days ago I declared myself “too through” with the publishing industry but a wise friend pushed back:
ME: reacting to racism sucks up SO much of our time and energy and limited resources. They give us more money and we keep working to “fix” people who don’t want to be fixed…
NATHALIE: Though you might feel at times it’s waste of your time, your voice is missed if you don’t keep speaking up. Just one seed sowed can sprout a hundred, and more. Whether it be through pushing with the stories you miraculously manage to put out there, or answering a simple FB post. Thanks for giving the latter another try. It’s not in vain.
This morning I read an article sent to me by Libertad about race and the absence of racism in The Hunger Games and other YA dystopian books-to-films. I just saw Mockingjay on Friday and didn’t have much to say at the end. More Black folks dressed as sharecroppers (I guess they’re still picking cotton), more PoC looking to Katniss for salvation (which quickly gets them killed, of course), and a couple more secondary characters to replace Cinna and Rue. I don’t think I saw any Asians in the film, maybe one Latino. The article ends with a consideration of Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, which again got me thinking about seeds. I haven’t read the Bible in ages but if I remember correctly, the lesson for the sower is not to waste time throwing seeds on unreceptive soil since seeds will only thrive under the right conditions. But Nathalie’s point is that if you scatter seeds by speaking out, you never know how many people you might reach. This morning on Twitter folks have been sharing a quote from my 2013 conversation with Ibi Zoboi, “Black Girls Hunger for Heroes, Too.”
ZETTA: I haven’t read the trilogy, but I watched the first film at home and the second one in the theater. And when it got to the part where Gale was being whipped, I could sense the tension in the [interracial] audience. And I thought to myself: “How many people in here went to see 12 Years a Slave?” It’s interesting to me that in the white imagination, the dystopian future involves white people living through the realities that people of color have lived or are living through right now!
You never know how far your words may travel, or where they’ll take root and grow. And sometimes seeds can thrive even under less than optimal conditions, which is what it means to live as a person of color in this country. Ferguson is simmering. Just thinking about the potential for state-sponsored violence against the people makes me queasy. But I carry this seed within:
In a time of destruction, create something.
Thank you, Maxine Hong Kingston.
Song of the Son
By Jean Toomer
Pour O pour that parting soul in song,
O pour it in the sawdust glow of night,
Into the velvet pine-smoke air tonight,
And let the valley carry it along.
And let the valley carry it along.
O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree,
So scant of grass, so profligate of pines,
Now just before an epoch’s sun declines
Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee.
Thy son, I have in time returned to thee.
In time, for though the sun is setting on
A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set;
Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet
To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone,
Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone.
O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums,
Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air,
Passing, before they stripped the old tree bare
One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes
An everlasting song, a singing tree,
Caroling softly souls of slavery,
What they were, and what they are to me,
Caroling softly souls of slavery.
