Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Several years ago, I attended the celebration for a retiring colleague at Vanderbilt University. Professor Hortense Spillers’ essays on American literature are some of the most cited. Her writings on Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison have influenced several generations of literary scholars across the globe. Many were in attendance.

I was moved to hear of the impact of her essays and the testimonials of how she interrogates black culture, gender, and racism, often through rigorous psychoanalytic and post-structuralist methods. My words here do not capture the spirit of her scholarship, born out of love and a richness of mind, nor do they capture the essence of the gathering.

As each distinguished professor expressed their full-throated gratitude, the audience laughed and cried. All the while, Hortense listened and nodded. I wondered, why don’t we celebrate scholars and thinkers more, and publicly? Despite the attacks on academic institutions, despite the diminishing power of free inquiry, scholarly work benefits us all. So much critical inquiry is born out of wonder and curiosity, like a crackling in the soul. Curiosity leads to exploration and research. This in turn results in substantive contributions that are, to use her words, their own “vocabulary of feeling.” I look forward to reading the compilation of speeches, known as a festschrift, that will emerge out of Professor Spiller’s retirement celebration.

What saddens me about the culture wars and the politicization of academia is the inadvertent defaming of thousands of brilliant people who gave shape to American letters. Today’s poem posthumously celebrates another one of those “pioneering scholar[s] of African American women’s literature.” Here, the poet fittingly elegizes their colleague with a masterful blues form. Its music renders durable the legacy of the late Dr. Cheryl A.Wall.

blues-elegy for cheryl
by Evie Shockley

cheryl wore her hair in a close-braided crown
yes, she kept her hair braided in an elegant crown 
hope she was braid-bedecked when they laid her down

she was a preacher’s daughter, a queen from queens
raised by devout parents to be a queen from queens
and you could tell by her spine she knew what regal means

now, she was one of the earliest to stake out our field
cheryl was among the early ones cultivating our field
spent years sowing seeds of study—& got to see them yield

she weeded our mothers’ gardens with tender loving care
tended hurston & cade & morrison (&&&!) all with loving care
our daughters won’t have to search hard for the bounty there

if you wanted to see her glow, call her daughter’s name
o, she beamed brightest at the sound of her daughter’s name
mothered many literary lights, but camara was her flame

spin a song of respect & let it slide into a blues
raise her a praisesong of respect with a b-side of blues
i got a tall hole full of empty, one that i’ll never lose

crystal laughter, diamond smile
wind-chime laughter, sunshine smile
when she laid ’em on you, you could fly awhile

none of us could believe that cheryl’s time had come 
we were no ways ready to hear her time had come
but she was a natural woman, & nature took her home


—in loving memory of dr. cheryl a. wall

“blues-elegy for cheryl” by Evie Shockley from SUDDENLY WE © 2023 Evie Shockley. Used by permission of Wesleyan University Press.