A01=Carrie Allen McCray
Allen Say
Author_Carrie Allen McCray
Carrie Allen McCray
Category=DC
Category=DSC
Category=JBSL
Colin Turnbull
Cornelius Eady
Dear Friend
Eisa (dance)
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
eq_society-politics
Galway Kinnell
Homegoing
In the Woods
James Weldon Johnson
John Chilembwe
Kwame Dawes
Louis Sarno
My Father
Ota Benga
Sharon Olds
Sonia Sanchez
The Forest People
Toi Derricotte
W. E. B. Du Bois
Product details
- ISBN 9781611170856
- Weight: 525g
- Dimensions: 139 x 215mm
- Publication Date: 22 Mar 2012
- Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In Ota Benga under My Mother's Roof, Carrie Allen McCray (1913–2008) uses poignant and personal verse to trace the ill-fated life of the Congolese pygmy who was famously exhibited in the Bronx Zoo in 1906 before being taken in by the McCray family of Lynchburg, Virginia. Rooted in the rich historical and autobiographic context of her own experiences with Benga, McCray offers compelling, dexterous poems that place Benga’s story within the racial milieu of the early twentieth century as the burgeoning science of social anthropology worked to classify humans based on race and culture. The theme of this book is a study of humanity, of people of all kinds, in which Benga’s vitality becomes the measure against which everyone is measured. With poems that revel in African American signifying, spirituality, and traditional storytelling, McCray’s collection establishes a sincere legacy for Ota Benga as she shares her friend’s harrowing tale with new generations.
Born in Lynchburg, Virginia, Carrie Allen McCray was an educator and social worker before turning to writing later in life. McCray is the author of Freedom’s Child: The Life of a Confederate General’s Black Daughter, which details her discovery that her mother was the child of a Confederate general and his black servant. McCray is the author of the poetry chapbook Piece of Time, and her poems have been published in Ms. Magazine, River Styx, Point, and the Squaw Review, and in the anthologies Moving beyond Words and The Crimson Edge: Older Women Writing.|Kevin Simmonds is a writer, musician, and filmmaker originally from New Orleans. He is the author of Mad for Meat and editor of Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality. Simmonds’s collaborations include the Emmy Award–winning documentary HOPE: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica and Voices of Haiti: A Post-Quake Odyssey in Verse, both commissioned by the Pulitzer Center. His genre-defying films include Singing Whitman and feti(sh)ame. He divides his time between San Francisco and Japan.
