Teacher, Mother, Poet, Star
Join Salvation South in an intimate conversation with the prize-winning Alabama poet Jacqueline Allen Trimble.
“Stupendous educator, super hero wife and mother, ride or die friend, bearer of history, lover of sweet potato pie, vengeful as hell, practitioner of cuss words, American poet, woman, Black.”
I can attest that the above words make up an accurate description of Dr. Jacqueline Allen Trimble, a poet of renown and distinction, who grew up at the corner of Rosa Parks Avenue and Jefferson Davis Avenue in Montgomery, Alabama. How do I know the description is accurate? First, from my own conversations and correspondence with Trimble. Second, because she wrote those words herself in a poem called “FYI to the Men Who Rejected a Wikipedia Entry on Me Because They Didn’t Think I Was Important Enough.”
Jackie Trimble still has no Wikipedia page, and that, to my mind, is, to say it like she might, a fucking crime.
I believe the poetic works of Dr. Trimble, who chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at the HBCU Alabama State University, are among the most important words being written in the 21st century South.
Why?
Because they are direct, powerful, and challenging. They can change minds. My copies of Trimble’s two collections of poetry—American Happiness, from 2016, and How to Survive the Apocalypse (2022)—are well thumbed and deeply highlighted. Here are a few passages I’ve dabbed with neon yellow throughout my multiple readings:
Salvation South this week is proud to welcome the renowned South Carolina author and Guggenheim Fellow George Singleton to our family of contributors.
— “Irish Exits”: fiction by George Singleton
—“Yard Work”: poems by Caleb Johnson
—“Refrigerator”: a poem by Joyce Compton Brown
How can I continue
to take and eat this image
of myself, choke on the eloquence
of my dissent, speak love fluently
to someone with his knee
on my neck, his bullet in my child?
—“This Is Why People Burning Down Fast Food Joints and Whatnot”
Wooden fingers tapped at my window, to get me. They were fire without light, an unrelenting darkness, hidden in white laundry. And on those summer evenings, when we sat gazing across our own back yard, when neighbors shot their guns to say hello, my father did not know I saw them in the trees. How could he have known? How could I, a child in Tuskegee, Alabama, the shotguns calling in the July darkness, have known that they were only this?—these wooden men, tinder for my fire.
—“The Klan Panhandles for Donations at the Intersection of Court Street and the Southern Bypass”
do not scream and cry and cuss, do not
pick up your weapon and kill his killer, do not
blame the jurors for being blind.
Say nothing, say nothing, say nothing.
Smile and bury your only son.
Smile and calm the crazy crowd.
Smile and forgive, forgive, forgive.
Forgiveness covers centuries of sin.
—“How to Survive as a Black Woman Everywhere in America Including the Deep South”
Words such as these not only change minds, but can also change hearts. They’ve changed mine. Reading Dr. Trimble’s work opened my eyes—the eyes of a white mountain boy who grew up in a town with no Black people and heard that dreadful word as frequently as if we were talking about water—and made me see that my desire to fight racism could not rise from my desire to help them. It had to come from a desire to help myself.
“What people in this country have got to realize is that race and racism and white supremacist patriarchy is not just a mechanism that controls Black people and people of color. It is a mechanism that controls white people, too,” Dr. Trimble told me this spring. “That 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.”
We here at Salvation South think every Southerner should have the chance to take part in conversations about these issues. That’s why Jacqueline Allen Trimble will be the guest at our next Writing Your South seminar. We hold these online seminars periodically and keep the audience size small, so everyone can enjoy a meaningful conversation and direct interaction with our esteemed guest authors—in this case, Dr. Trimble.
Only 25 seats are available, and they are going quickly. The price of admission is high, but there are two reasons for that:
- It reflects the value of what will genuinely be a priceless experience.
- It assures our speaker get a well-deserved honorarium—and that Salvation South itself brings in money that will help us keep conversations like this thriving.
We said when we began this journey almost three years ago that we wanted our publication to feel like a house party, where people of good will can come in, sit down, and stay a while—so they can talk with and not at each other.
We hope you can join us on August 21.
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/