Words From a Recovering Ally
Black History Month should remind us that the struggles of our brothers and sisters must become our struggles, too.
Years ago, when February and Black History Month rolled around, I believed I was doing enough to honor the occasion because I could see and acknowledge certain cultural intricacies of the South. Like the fact that the okra binding our gumbos or frying in our bacon grease is part of Southern culture only because the seeds of the okra plant, which is not native to North America, came here in the pockets of enslaved Africans.
These days, I think differently. I know that knowledge and acknowledgement are hardly enough.
Right after Black History Month last year, I interviewed another Alabaman, one of my favorite Southern poets, Jacqueline Allen Trimble. We were talking about a piece called “Allies,” from her last collection of poems, How to Survive the Apocalypse. “Allies” is simply a long list of statements that come out of the mouths of well-meaning white folks like me, who speak too often without understanding. Here are the first nine lines:
Thank you for letting me know
you voted for the black guy
you are sad when you think of segregation
you are angered by your family’s attitude
you have boycotted businesses on my behalf
you never use that word
you disapprove of those who do
you protest Confederate monuments
you give to the NAACP
It goes on like that for thirty more lines. One after the other, with no breaks.
I told Jackie that reading “Allies” was hard for me. I thought an ally was a good thing to be. Her reply floored me.
“I have a really good friend, a wonderful friend. We've been friends for decades,” Jackie told me. “She is a white woman who grew up in North Alabama. I mean, we're real friends, you know, not just kind of ‘Oh, that's somebody I know.’ And she read that poem and she says, ‘Oh, God, Jackie. I don’t… Where can I enter this poem?’ And her suggestion to me was to put it in couplets. She said, ‘So maybe they'll give me a little resting place between.’
“And I said, ‘No, I’m not going to do that.’ Because here's my issue, here's my thing, here's what I'm really trying to say: I don't like the word ‘ally.’ And I don't like the word ally because an ally is like a person who cheerleads from the sideline. This is a person who says, ‘I'm not going to get in your way. I’m down for your cause. Do you.’ But an ally doesn't have to stand shoulder to shoulder with you.”
“What people in this country have got to realize is that race and racism and white supremacist patriarchy are not just a mechanism that controls Black people and people of color. It is a mechanism that controls white people, too. This is your fight.”
Her message was so clear: I had to realize, at a fundamental level, that my white skin was in the game along with her Black skin.
“Because what happens to you is not just something I have sympathy or empathy for,” she continued. “What happens to you matters to me. It affects me. It directly affects my life. And until we realize that, we are never going to get anywhere in this race conversation. So what I'm saying in terms of race is this: you can't just be for my cause. It has to be your cause. And what people in this country have got to realize is that race and racism and white supremacist patriarchy are not just a mechanism that controls Black people and people of color. It is a mechanism that controls white people, too. This is your fight. This is a mechanism that controls white people, too. Because what it has done to generations of white people is it has kept them fighting against their own self-interest.
“And I think when people realize that…you know what? I’m not an ally. This is my war. This is. This is my war for the soul of democracy. This is my war for the republic. This is my war for a better opportunity for my children. Because when the public schools go down, it's not just going to affect people of color. Please stop being so complacent. Please realize you got to be a soldier, not just an ally, because this is your war, too.”
Then she took a deep breath and said, “That's more than you ever wanted to know, but there it is.”
When I broadcast that interview on the Salvation South podcast, I said, no, that was exactly what I needed to know.
Listen: “Jacqueline Allen Trimble and How to Survive the Apocalypse”
That conversation with Jackie changed forever how I will think about Black history. (I should address her, really, as Dr. Trimble, because she is the chair of the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University, an HBCU in her hometown of Montgomery.)
Yes, I will need to learn more about it and deepen my understanding of it continually, for as long as I live. And yes, everything I learn should deepen my empathy. But most importantly, I need to understand that even though I enjoy the privilege that comes with white skin, my government can remove my rights—and even my freedoms—in the same way it has denied those rights and freedoms to Black Americans for centuries.
If your skin is white like mine, you might think this could never happen to you. But look around you. It’s happening even as you read this. The ability to earn a living is being taken away from millions of Americans, plunging them into uncertainty and anxiety and threatening their financial security, for no reason other than their choice to seek a job in public service. Who knows what could come next? We live in dangerous times.
The White House first officially recognized February as Black History Month in 1976, and ten years later, Congress passed a law making it official. After Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared all “identity months dead” within his department a week ago, I assumed the government’s official website—blackhistorymonth.gov—would disappear, too. But it remains alive, jointly maintained by the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Gallery of Art, the National Park Service, the Smithsonian Institution and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The site is a treasure house containing thousands of resources—stories, access to all government archives about African American history, aids for teachers, and hundreds of documentary videos about the role of Black Americans in everything from the civil rights movement to the world of sports.
Dive into it while you can. Given the state of the American government these days, we can no longer trust it will be there tomorrow.
Learning that the struggle of my Black brothers and sisters was mine, too, got me to thinking about a bedrock principle by which I try to live my own life—to love my neighbors as I love myself. To live by that, truly and consistently, I must understand that “neighbor” doesn’t just mean the folks on my street...or the folks I grew up with...or the people I hang out with today. It means everybody. It means all of us.
“I wanted to use the blues as a kind of touchstone through the poem to think about how we have been almost conditioned to think of all of this gunplay, this gun violence, as normalized. And it’s not normal. It's not normal.”
To celebrate the beginning of this year’s Black History Month, we’ve invited Dr. Trimble back into our pages. The new poem we publish today, “I Hear America Singing the Blues,” results from her processing a horrific incident. Her daughter, an attorney in Memphis, was returning from a yoga class and found herself caught in the crossfire of a shootout.
“She was stopped at a traffic light and the car behind her just comes out from behind her and passes her, sort of turns around in the middle of the intersection, and faces her,” Trimble told me. “And the people in the car start shooting at the people in the car behind my daughter. And she had nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. And she didn't know what to do.”
Finally, her daughter decided to maneuver her car out of the crossfire, despite her fear she could be hit as she did it.
“She gets to the back of a building and all the buildings are locked up because of course, everybody’s hearing this gunfire,” Trimble said. “We know that anytime you hear gunfire, you need to lock up and try to stay out of the way. Well, there was a lull finally in the gunplay, and the people in the building opened the door and were kind of beckoning for my daughter to come in. She got out of the car, was running toward the building, and the gunfire started up again. So they shut the door, locked the door, and she had to get back in the car and sort of wait it out.”
The police arrived after about ten minutes and the shooters sped away, leaving one man dead in the street.
Afterward, Trimble began trying to process what had happened to her daughter and put it in the context of our nation’s epidemic of gun violence.
“I started thinking about the morning my father died,” Trimble told me. “My father died at home one morning getting ready for work, when I was six years old. I started thinking about a kind of history of violence—local violence, national violence, etc., and personal violence. And I began to think about the Walt Whitman poem, ‘I Hear America Singing,’ and I wanted to riff off of that. I wanted to use the blues as a kind of touchstone through the poem to think about how we have been almost conditioned to think of all of this gunplay, this gun violence, as normalized. And it’s not normal. It's not normal.”
My wish for all Salvation South readers is that you will take “I Hear America Singing the Blues” into your minds and hearts and keep it there. Perhaps you will share it with people you love. I hope you will empathize with the people whose stories it tells. But most of all, I hope you will realize the struggles described in Trimble’s poems are your struggles, too.
“I Hear America Singing the Blues”: a new poem by Jacqueline Allen Trimble
About the author
Chuck Reece is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Salvation South, the weekly web magazine you're reading right now. He was the founding editor of The Bitter Southerner. He grew up in the north Georgia mountains in a little town called Ellijay.
- Chuck Reecehttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/chuck_reece/
- Chuck Reecehttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/chuck_reece/
- Chuck Reecehttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/chuck_reece/
- Chuck Reecehttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/chuck_reece/
Boy is this a tough conversation.
I sense a deepening of Chuck & Salvation South’s important mission.
For each of us, how wide are we willing to make our community?
In these times where so many are cruelly closing theirs.
Keep the Faith.
Thanks, Nelson. The basic idea is, all are sisters and brothers.