Testifying and Telling: Frank X Walker’s Poetic Civil War History
In his new collection, the Affrilachian Poets founder gives voice to Black Civil War soldiers and their families, aiming to uncover hidden truths inside Southern history.
Appalachia used to be a part of the South not generally associated with the African American experience. But in 1991, Frank X Walker changed that narrative.
The Kentucky-born writer coined the term “Affrilachian” to identify black people living in the Southern mountains. He also co-founded Affrilachian Poets Collective to let everybody know that there are other stories, other histories, and other writers ready to tell this area’s overlooked or excluded Southern narratives. Thirty-three years later, the Affrilachian Poets Collective is still active—and is the oldest predominantly African American writing group in the nation.
For more than three decades through eighteen books, numerous journals, and more than fifty anthologies, this award-winning writer, educator, and first African American Poet Laureate of his native Kentucky has been on a quest to discover lost or unspoken histories and tell the world. His efforts have been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Cave Canem fellowships, the Donald Justice Award for Poetry, and four honorary doctorates. Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers won an NAACP Image Award, and Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York earned the Lillian Smith Book Award, a prize usually reserved for books of history and rarely given to poetry collections. And even with all this, including being Professor of English and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, he managed to become founding editor of pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture.
I first met Frank X Walker on the pages of Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, a brilliant exploration of the assassinated civil rights leader through poems crafted from meticulous research. The book exemplifies what Walker has done throughout his career and what he continues to do masterfully: bring history to life by giving voice to stories that have not been told. He has turned his keen gaze on subjects as varied as York, an enslaved man who traveled with Lewis and Clark on their historic expeditions, but whose story remained a barely mentioned footnote. And on Affrilachians, Black people in Appalachia with a rich cultural history, and Isaac Burns Murphy, a Black man who in the late nineteenth century became the most successful jockey in America. Using research, imagination, and astonishing poetic skill, he reconstructs the lives of ordinary Black people as essential to the American landscape.
Load in Nine Times dives deep into the lives and experiences of enslaved African Americans as wives, husbands, soldiers, and people caught in untenable circumstances.
Walker’s new book, Load in Nine Times, which explores the experiences of Black soldiers and their families before, during, and after the Civil War, may be the most impressive yet. The book began as a project to humanize the biographies of Kentuckians, and soon became a personal quest to know more about Walker’s own ancestral past. One poem in the collection, “Testify,” makes an epigraphic reference to Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who commits infanticide to save her children from slavery, the same Margaret Garner Toni Morrison writes about in Beloved.
Like that novel, Load in Nine Times dives deep into the lives and experiences of enslaved African Americans as wives, husbands, soldiers, and people caught in untenable circumstances. The collection evokes, right up front, literary history, offering three quotations, ending with a few lines of a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem, and announcing itself at its onset as a testimony to a history that is often hidden, erased, or overlooked. Weaving literary allusion, artifacts, and the ways in which African American people were documented and documented themselves, Walker explores the tensions created by often-competing texts to reveal narratives rooted in historical fact that counter more comforting and long-held historical fantasies.
Jacqueline Allen Trimble: I love the way Load in Nine Times begins, with the dedications to Mary and Randal Edelen and Elvira and Henry Clay Walker. I’m assuming these are family members who served in the U.S. Colored Troops, right? How do these ancestors figure into the book?
Frank X Walker: Well, thank you. Thank you for recognizing that and acknowledging it. That is important to me. I didn't want it to be lost, so I needed that to be up front. I think it's the reason that there's a book about this whole story. And I walked backwards into it. Initially, I was asked to write some short bios for a website called Reckoning Inc. It was this thing they started doing in Kentucky where they got all these monies to digitize records connected to Black Civil War soldiers and their families, and they wanted to be able to post the bios of the Kentucky soldiers—these real short, 250-word pieces. And they would send me these documents that I was supposed to pull the biographical information from to make it feel more real to people.
“She had to get affidavits to prove that they had kids and that they were his kids and their kids. They strung her along for ten years before she got, I think, $14 a month.”
After my third batch of biographical material, I remembered this conversation about one of my ancestors, but we didn't have any personal information. The research that we had tried to do just wasn't available to us. So I'm responding to the request to write these bios. And after the third one, they sent me two more batches of info. Then I asked them if they might consider looking up my own relative. So I sent them his name and what information I had, and they sent me back a ninety-nine-page file.
JAT: Wow. Wow.
FXW: And I'm just blown away. In that file, there are affidavits that show that a third great, great, great grandmother had been trying to get the pension from her deceased husband. And it took ten years. That's why it was ninety-nine pages. Because there are all these affidavits of her having to prove he had been injured during the war. She had to get affidavits from every physician she could find who had treated him. And affidavits to prove that she was actually married to him. You know, there were no marriage documents, so she had affidavits from witnesses who had been at the marriage ceremony. She had to get affidavits to prove that they had kids and that they were his kids and their kids. They strung her along for ten years before she got, I think, $14 a month.
JAT: Oh, my gosh.
FXW: I'm also reading about this ancestor hurting his back, pulling a box of blacksmith tools out of the Rio Grande River. And I just said, like, wow, that's a whole movie. And it is new information about somebody I came from, you know. I didn't know any of this. I was able to trace him to a census that had him down as a blacksmith. That made me feel good, like, now he's starting to become a 3-D person, not just a name on a family tree. But the thing that got me is I recognized that every time I saw [that great, great, great grandmother’s] signature on the affidavits, it looked a little different. So I zoomed in, and I recognized that between her first and last name, it said her mark. There was an X. And then I zoomed out. And then next to the X, there were always two witnesses. I did some quick math and realized that, you know, she was illiterate, and she had to have two witnesses, as was the custom at this time, to validate that this was actually her signature. That was her mark. So she was making the X way before I was, and I'm like, I'm like, oh, she's reaching across time. The first X in the family, you know.
Then I'm going through these affidavits, and early on there are just names that are kind of barely readable, but toward the end of the affidavits, I recognize that two of the co-signers to witness her signature are two of her sons. Which means that they were literate. And then you can look at the quality of the sons’ penmanship and see that one’s penmanship was much stronger than the other’s. And it made me look closer at the family tree stuff and figure out that's the older brother and the younger brother, by ten years even, so more educated. So I’m at the point where I'm no longer interested in trying to do my original assignment. I want to know more about these people, you know, so I just dive in.
At the same time, I'm so moved by these documents. Some of these documents are basic census tables—our people as their color or occupation or age. This is very dehumanizing, a way of making them chattel. I wanted to make them more human. So I started writing poems. Then, instead of just quitting the project, I asked them if I could turn poems in for the research material response instead of just the bios. They were like, yes, yes, of course. I think I probably gave them about a dozen poems. Early versions of some of these [in Load in Nine Times]. And then once I completed that assignment, I was hooked. I started reading as much about the Civil War as I could. I'm a pacifist. I've never been a fan of war. And I didn't know that much about the Civil War and or the Civil War in Kentucky. But the closer I got to the information about what it meant for Black people during the Civil War, the less it was about war.
JAT: What was it about for you?
FXW: It was about Black families and what we were doing as Black families—before the war, during the war, and after the war—to hold our families together. I got intoxicated by reading about the refugee camps. People talk about Black soldiers or the U.S. Colored Troops. But you rarely hear about the refugee camps that were around the country. (Enslaved people who could escape and make it out of Confederate territory were often housed in camps established by the U.S. Army. During the Civil War, these camps housed as many as a half-million people.)
It turned out that I had two relatives whose families were part of one of the largest refugee camps in the United States—Camp Nelson [in Jessamine County, Kentucky], which I'd been driving by my whole adult life and had visited once. I didn't know this information. They didn't teach this to us in school, and as the information kept being uncovered, the poems were like, say this, talk about this, mention this. This is important. You've seen the opening with my family's names. I want to acknowledge that that's where the energy started, at least the turn from just some kind of dry bios of unknown people to something personal that I thought was worth poetry. That’s my long answer.
“Once they said, ‘We'll pay you $100 a year to fight, and your children and your wife and your mother also become free,’ now, you got my attention, right? So there was a parade of Black men and their families who just showed up for that freedom.”
JAT: No, no, no, that's an amazing answer. You have these poems in which a woman is giving up her property, and then you have “Mother to Mother,” which seems a nod to Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son,” though in your poem, a woman talks back to those who have enslaved her, saying I'm going to talk to you, mother to mother. I'm going to tell you what you have done to me. I'm a human being. I am not property that you can just give away. And I'm going to tell you what your comfort has cost me. This book weaves together literary history, historical ways that Black people have been documented, and then how you have had these people tell their own story, and talk to people that they would not have had an opportunity to talk to during that period of time. It's really, really ingenious, the way the ancestors speak.
FXW: The goal initially was to bring these soldiers’ voices to the present, to the surface. But then as I as they came to the surface, I recognized how whole families were going to the refugee camps, at least Camp Nelson, and had a chance to live on-site, live in barracks, go to school for the first time, attend church of their own, get medicine. The first kind of hospitals, schools, and institutions to support Black families were happening as a consequence of the Black soldiers making that choice to pursue their freedom by fighting for this country. But fighting for their families was really the motivation. Once they said, “We'll pay you $100 a year to fight, and your children and your wife and your mother also become free,” now, you got my attention, right? So there was a parade of Black men and their families who just showed up for that freedom. I was looking for every opportunity to make sure that it was a holistic telling of the experience, so the women were important. And I was also looking for, I think, little-known connections to Kentucky so that it strengthens my family story. I was born in Kentucky. My people are from here. But what people know about Kentucky is limited to what's been told about it. There are all these brand-new stories that people don't know.
JAT: One of the earliest poems in the book is “Ain't No Plantations in Kentucky,” a marvelous poem which comprises a diabolical list of Kentucky plantations. Was that a direct response to stories left out of Kentucky history or a direct response to something being said?
FXW: Yes. Part of the mythology of this place is that I grew up being taught that Kentucky was a great place to be a slave because “ain't no plantations in Kentucky, just small farms.” That was the narrative K through 12. It seeped into our consciousness. And I think some of us believed it. So you peel off these layers and find out this was one of the worst places in the world to be a slave. It changes the tenor of everything we've been taught, like that song, “Old Kentucky Home.” All these places in Kentucky are famous for other reasons now—malls or five-star B&Bs or historical spaces to visit, but at one time they were plantations. And so, I'm just yanking off scabs early, as early as possible in that first section. That's about enslavement, introduced by actual newspaper ads.
(Each of Load in Nine Times’ three parts begins with a reproduction of an actual newspaper ad. The first offers rewards for the return of enslaved people who had escaped. The second encourages “men of color” to join the U.S. Colored Troops. The third shows ads placed by formerly enslaved people looking for information about family members from whom they were separated.)
JAT: Those ads are extraordinary. There’s a phrase in one of them that says about George, an enslaved man, “affects to be witty; and is rather insolent or careless in conversation,” suggesting that it was a character defect that he thought too well of himself.
FXW: I wanted to find ads that weren't just about traditional runaways, but that implied some resistance or spoke to the importance of family.
JAT: There is a reward offered for a mother and her two children in one of them.
FXW: Each one of those ads is a whole story. These are real people. And you get so much from how a person in an oppressive position is describing them. Using actual newspapers is a homage to archival research. This is not fiction. I create fictionalized voices, persona voices, but they're all born out of authentic archival documents that I was given or found as part of the research of this.
JAT: There are several found poems here. In “Why I Don’t Stand,” you intersperse the lyrics of “My Old Kentucky Home,” which tells a happy story, with language from an advertisement from a human trafficker (or “agent” in the ad) looking to sell human beings. It suggests a vastly different reality and exposes a deep-rooted hypocrisy.
FXW: Yeah, that'll get me in trouble in the state. The reason that is still our state song is people are attached to a version that's purely nostalgic and about this benign experience of somebody being homesick. I found that advertisement written in the same year as the song was written. And so they were both published in newspapers in the same year in Kentucky. So it made sense to me to mash them together but to keep the texts separate so that you're clear about which one is which. I'm not a singer, but when I share the poem in public, I try to sing a little bit. The ad part of it hits so hard that people don't know how to respond. When I get to the very end, it's just quiet in the room and I'm like, “Yeah, I know that's hard to clap to.”
“When I was an undergraduate at my university, we would go to football games as a Black student union, and they would play [‘My Old Kentucky Home’] before the game, and we would cross our arms and not move. ... We were like, this is our protest. No. Not that song.”
JAT: I was clapping. The poem is brilliantly done, like most of the poems in this book—poignant and pointed.
FXW: I recognize I can hear my voice when I'm trying to read the poems or sing them—my own emotional conflict with being in Kentucky and having the state song that's about enslavement that people have romanticized to not be about enslavement. When I was an undergraduate at my university, we would go to football games as a Black student union, and they would play that song before the game, and we would cross our arms and not move. And we're surrounded by 80,000 people there looking over like, why aren't y'all standing up? Shame on you. They're trying to eyeball us and shame us. We were like, this is our protest. No. Not that song. So if I was going to tell this story about Kentucky, there's no way I could skip over the song and how we feel about it and this connection to this whole story.
JAT: I want to talk about the title poem, “Load in Nine Times.” This poem moves. It is a three-column contrapuntal. The first column shouts directions, the second column gives instructions, and the third column imagines the soldiers’ motivation. All three lines coalesce with “Fire!” What figured into your decisions about how to put it on the page?
FXW: I rewatched the movie Glory. Several times. There's a scene where a white sergeant is trying to teach a formerly enslaved man how to fire a gun under pressure. While he's loading and firing, the sergeant is in his ear with a pistol, and it gets to the point where the man cannot complete the task. It's just too much pressure. He can't do it. Nobody would be surprised that the original argument against letting Black men join the Civil War as soldiers versus workers was, they didn't have the courage and the strength to go into battle and perform under pressure. They didn't have the mettle to do it. That always bothered me. And that scene always bothered me. And I thought about. what that scene would look like if that particular man had the right motivation to walk in the battle, to stand there in the face of danger and to see an enemy and to want to respond. In the research, I found out that “load in nine times” was the actual way they taught soldiers how to fire a Civil War rifle. [It was a nine-step drill for learning how to reload and fire a musket.] I found the actual orders. And then I added the layer of this internal dialogue of this imagined soldier. I came across several accounts where former slaves talked about having seen their former masters in battle. And I thought about what would motivate a man who’s committed to protecting his family. So I tried to shape it on the page, and very early on, I wasn't sure it even worked. And the first time I tried to read it, I struggled making the three voices sound different, but still in the same poem. And even now, I think I usually read it twice. I read the first two columns and then I read the first and third columns. But it still has the same power when you get to “fire!”
And even now, I think I usually read it twice. I read the first two columns and then I read the first and third columns. But it still has the same power when you get to “fire!”
JAT: This poem turns on the soldier’s motivation that you spoke about. In the end, it’s not freedom, but the desire to protect one’s family. In that third column, the soldier imagines “Massa” at the “business end of my musket.”
FXW: Standing there.
JAT: And the soldier will “remember/how many times/he beat” his wife to keep from hesitating to shoot.
FXW: That's the exit. I think the first time I read that poem, there was an older Black sister in the front row, and she threw her hand up. She said, oh, it's like a church for her. That's what I was trying to do, you know? And she came up to me after, and she said, “that poem....” We both just had the feels, you know.
“I'm doing this as a poet. I'm doing this as a would-be historian. I'm doing this as a teacher, and I'm doing this as a Black activist. I'm doing this as a father, somebody who wants to explain how we're still here. How is it that we made it this far?”
JAT: This poem demonstrates exactly what you're talking about in terms of peeling back the layers, because it starts with something that's just very straightforward—a set of instructions—yet in its entirety embodies a whole history and a whole different perspective of a whole people. It's like we're doing the same action, but underneath, we ain't thinking the same thoughts. And so it's beautifully done.
FXW: I don't know how subtle they come across, but I try to sneak in allusions to our kind to African American history. Things that you know are in the family. There are people who are going to read these poems like about Margaret Garner and not even get to Toni Morrison at all. But everybody who has devoured Beloved and knows that story will see Margaret Garner and say, “Wait a minute, she’s from Kentucky? I didn't know.” But yes, she was. And the same thing with Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose poem is quoted at the beginning. His father escaped from Kentucky and joined the war in Ohio so his son could be free. Dunbar has this famous poem about these Civil War soldiers. How do I tie all this together? My wife’s critique would ask, how can we celebrate Paul Laurence Dunbar because of his history with his wife?
JAT: So I get that.
FXW: How do I treat these people fairly? My logic was, all right, I'm going to let this be an ode to his mother, who was the victim of his father as well, and where he learned this behavior. And because it's still about Black families and the challenge of how do you maintain sanity inside this horrible institution? And how do you keep families together? What does marriage look like? Given all this, being used as a breeding tool and instrument, how do you keep that? So I wanted to touch on that as often as possible. And for me, when people talk about enslavement, I always thought that there's too little conversation about what was happening to Black women. There's a reason there's all these biracial children, and people talk about them as if they made themselves.
JAT: Fell from the sky.
FXW: Yeah. They fell from the sky. They were picking cabbages and there's another mulatto baby right next to the cabbage. There's one poem where a woman who appears white, because she’s like 1/64th Black, was actually sold to settle her father's debt in a place in Lexington called Cheapside. Cheapside was the old slave-auction block. There's a street called Cheapside in Lexington, and it used to hold two Confederate monuments. Local protests finally got them removed, and they renamed the space Tandy Park after the first Black architect in Kentucky, who helped design and build the first courthouse in downtown Lexington that's now a cultural institution and a restaurant. All that history around that space, you know? So I'm like, I can't write a whole history book, but I can put stuff in the notes and afterword to send people in a different direction. I'm doing this as a poet. I'm doing this as a would-be historian. I'm doing this as a teacher, and I'm doing this as a Black activist. I'm doing this as a father, somebody who wants to explain how we're still here. How is it that we made it this far? I hope that ultimately this book shows what we were doing as a Black family before to survive during the war, and then afterwards how hard it was to survive here, given the commitment to return us to the past.
JAT: One of the things I love about the book is there is a sly humor here in that African American tradition of calling out, clapping back. And even though it does not undercut the serious overtone, I was thinking in particular about that poem “Two Soldiers Who Can't Sleep Tell Jokes.” Such a great poem. What are your favorite poems in the collection?
FXW: If I had to list my favorite poems, what would they be? I would go with the title poem first. Then I really like the work the [three “Two Soldiers”] poems do. I'm a fan of humor, but I also understand how the use of humor in Black culture has kind of helped us maintain our sanity. The capacity to laugh about hard, difficult, traumatic things. It’s a kind of therapy. “Two Soldiers Who Can’t Sleep Tell Jokes” ends with “And after a while they both laugh,/a little.” And does that pause there.... First you laugh like, wait a minute, I'm laughing. It ain't funny, but I'm laughing, and I think Black people understand that. And I like “Golden Shovel for Matilda Dunbar” (a persona poem, using the words “We Wear the Mask” as the ending of each line, written in the voice of Matilda Dunbar, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s mother, about his father’s struggles and his abusive ways, probably spurred by the racism he endured). Now we're to master the grins and lies. Those connections in our kind of literary history. Retelling. These aren't new stories, but I love it when the stories connect or overlap or call back. You know, I think that's a nice rhetorical tool in comedy when you kind of plant this thing and then you reach back, clap back and hit it again. Or reach back because you already made a reference in the first joke. And then you can hit it again in a slier way that adds even more humor and a level of seriousness at the same time. I was trying to do a lot.
JAT: I think you did a lot. I think you did a lot. For me, this book held a joy of discovery both in familiarity with what I knew and in the surprise of what I didn't know. When I enter a poetry collection, I think I should come out different, changed in some way. So here’s a big question: how do you hope this poetry collection changes your readers?
FXW: Yeah, that's a good one. And I think I'm going to take the long way there. All my father's brothers joined the armed services, except him. All my brothers joined the armed services. Except me. Maybe because of my father's DNA, I'm naturally a pacifist. At the same time, I think people have been critical of why Black men would go to war and in most cases end up doing battle against other people of color. That's such a narrow view of the choices they were making. In a lot of cases, particularly my brothers and uncles, they were trying to improve their circumstances. And, in a lot of those cases, they were also trying to improve their whole family circumstances.
I'm hopeful that people can use this book to look at this particular time in history and understand that the choices Black men were making in that time period were complicated, but included a commitment to the Black family and trying to find ways to advance themselves and us collectively. And somehow see that as an example. And I think that their example has been repeated. I think many Black men still go to war or join up for those same reasons. I hope this book will be useful to a variety of audiences. I think people who are Civil War buffs will pick it up and see the cover and say, oh, that's a uniform, that's a soldier. Let me read this and maybe learn something different about the war and Black people's contribution to the final result, learn something about the history that is tied to that. They may feel like they know what happened before the war and enslavement, but there's a whole dark period—post-Reconstruction—that is full of a decade plus, at least in Kentucky, of domestic terrorism against the former soldiers, to try to put them back in their place. I don't sugarcoat that at all.
JAT: People say things like, um, well, you know, Black people were enslaved, but then we had the Civil War and then everything was okay. I think you made it very clear that everything was not okay.
FXW: In some ways worse.
JAT: In some ways even worse. What you've done, though, is sort of laid it out. And because you have used history, the stories of real people, it is hard to refute. We are living in this time where there is a resurgence of efforts to erase or corral history. To support the original narrative of the old Kentucky home. Right? Like, can't you black folks just get over it? This is about nostalgia and heritage, not about racism.
FXW: Not hate. Yeah.
JAT: If I have to hear that one more time. . .but what can you do?
FXW: I worry that all these narratives will be dismissed because it's a book of poetry. “They're just poems.” Hearing that way in the background, when I swing, I gotta swing hard, and I gotta support my swing. That's why there's the timeline in the back of the book and pages and pages of notes. I just want to keep it grounded. This is not about soldiers and a war. It’s about whole families’ motivation for being in the war, of what they were trying to get, to be freed from, what they did to get that freedom and then the challenges that they faced even after that get lost in history.[There are] ads from a newspaper in Nashville, Tennessee, of black people trying to find their relatives after the war [who had been] sold off or run away, or had disappeared. And in those cases, the examples I have, they're all trying to find children. Once you see the ages of the children and you hear their names, these are real people. This isn't imagination. These are real children. Their parents are trying to find [these children] they haven't seen for nine years. That's a whole movie. We haven't even made that movie yet.
About the author
Dr. Jacqueline Allen Trimble is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, a Cave Canem Fellow, and a two-time Alabama State Council on the Arts Fellow. Her first collection, American Happiness, won the Balcones Poetry Prize, and her latest collection, How to Survive the Apocalypse, was named one of the ten best poetry books of 2022 by the New York Public Library. Her work has appeared inPoetry, The Offing, The Rumpus, Poet Lore,and other journals and has been featured by the Poetry Foundation and Poetry Daily.Trimble is a professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University in Montgomery.
- Jacqueline Allen Trimblehttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/jacqueline-allen-trimble/
- Jacqueline Allen Trimblehttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/jacqueline-allen-trimble/
