Young, 19, is the 2021 youth poet laureate of the Southern U.S. 'Walking Gentry Home' archives her family's history — and the legacy of slavery. She tells the stories of nine generations of women — back to Amy, the first of her foremothers in Tennessee.
"I started the book this way because I feel like this is a story that doesn't have a starting place," Young told NPR's."For thousands of generations, Black women have existed on this planet and all of the culmination of thousands of women led to me being here."
In the book, Young recounts the stories of nine generations of women — all the way back to Amy, who was the first of Young's foremothers to arrive in Western Tennessee. Amy was enslaved and had a child with her enslaver. The book takes readers through all the stories that come after, leading to Young's own story of becoming a young woman.It always needed to be about my family's history, because these poems didn't start out about me. They started out about not knowing the names of my family members, about losing my grandmother, and thinking what difficulties she must have gone through being a pregnant teenager in the South in the 1960s.
I actually interviewed all the living women in my family. I did a lot of genealogy research, and once I reached a point where there was nothing more I could learn from the records, I sat down and I called every single living woman in my family and I interviewed them. We had wonderful conversations and honestly, I feel like I'm so much closer to the women in my family now because of this book.When my grandmother Gentry was 14 years old, she got pregnant. And then of course, she got married.
And I want to make sure that, through discussing this troubling sensation I feel, I don't dismiss the struggles of darker skinned women. But to me, darker skin has always been a symbol of true beauty because my mom is brown-skinned and I see her as the epitome of all things good and gentle and compassionate.I believe poetry is such a powerful tool, because it can convey the human experience in a way that no other kind of writing can.
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