Naming the Nameless: Clifton’s attempt to right the wrong of namelessness

Lucille Clifton

In “Black Names in White Space: Lucille Clifton’s South“, Hilary Holladay attempts to shed light on some of Lucille Clifton’s work, including “at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989”. While Holladay’s work stands on its own, I am including a link to an interview I read on the Modern American Poetry Site between Bill Moyers and Lucille Clifton that also has relevance. I believe that both illuminate this poem, and my understanding of this work was both influenced by and enhanced because of both pieces. Technically, I think a critical post should only interact with one piece of critical writing, and I am adhering to that technicality in that the interview by Moyers is not a critical analysis of Clifton’s work. Please humor me as I connect the dots between Clifton’s poignant piece and our nation’s original sin – slavery. On the periphery of this is the truth that the real Walnut Grove Plantation of which Clifton bases her poem is just a few hours and barely decades away from us today.

Holladay establishes Clifton’s right to speak about the South as the daughter of people that left the South for New York during the Great Migration. Also mentioned are Clifton’s credentials as a poet (multiple volumes published), an author (National Book Award for poetry), and a teacher (visiting teaching positions and poet-in-residence at a college), and also again as an almost Southerner resettled in Maryland (a neighbor to, or part of, the South, depending on how you view that state). In this way, Holladay is cementing the idea that Clifton has skin in this game, that she doesn’t just talk the talk, but has the walk to back it up, and her walk is just barely that side of the Mason-Dixon line (120). Clifton is Southern by virtue of her family history and her upbringing, even if she wasn’t raised in the South. I understand this as Holladay’s way to lend a level of credence to Clifton’s work by basically saying that though she wasn’t born here, she has more than earned her right to speak on the topic of slavery from a linguistic perspective. I found it interesting that Holladay spent so much time establishing Clifton’s authorial credibility, and I wonder how instrumental the race of each author was in that decision. ***

One point that Holladay makes as she establishes Clifton is that “In her poems with southern settings, we don’t see much of the region’s landscape, but we do see how language, especially the language of names, can either obliterate or validate one’s identity”. Holladay argues that Clifton, possibly better than anyone else, is able to express the connection between our understanding of slavery and the descendants of enslaved people through their use of names (121). This is especially evident in “at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989”, where the buried are not even given grave markers, but are instead the nameless dead “among the rocks”. They are not named, and their final resting places are barely marked. Yet, the narrator knows deep inside that they are there, just below the rocks. Clifton’s narrator hears them “drumming”, perhaps, as Holladay suggests, as a callback to the drums of Africa, or perhaps as a collective heartbeat shared by descendants of the enslaved.

Holladay shares more personal information about Clifton, including that her memoir, Generations, was guided into existence by the incomparable Toni Morrison, and that Generations shares information about Clifton’s great-great-grandmother, who was kidnapped from West Africa and forced into slavery (123). The sharing of Clifton’s descendance here seems very specific and particularly interesting, as it could have been made earlier when Holladay was establishing credibility, but seems to have been saved specifically for this time following the mention of slavery in Clifton’s poem. It is like Holladay is again showing the reader that Clifton is allowed to speak of these things, that her family history as the great-great-grandchild of someone who experienced the atrocity lends her voice more weight or volume. Personally, it almost comes off as apologetics to me, like Holladay is trying to justify Clifton’s foray into this dark topic, make it more palatable. Maybe in 2002 that was still necessary.

There is more analysis done by Holladay. Clifton’s “at the cemetery” is broken down beautifully, including a section that says “Nobody mentioned slaves / but somebody did this work”. Holladay describes Clifton’s visit to Walnut Grove in 1989, and shares how the evidence of slavery is abundant, but it is never mentioned directly on the plantation tour that Clifton experiences (122). Not only are the slaves nameless, buried in unmarked graves, but their very existence is virtually erased. Only Clifton’s poems speak of the people that once made the plantation run as an enterprise.

At this point, I wandered away from Holladay to find out more, because it felt like there was an entire story that was missing. That’s how I came across the Moyers interview on MAPS from 1995. What a find! In it, Clifton shares her own experience of being on that plantation tour in 1989, how she was the only POC on the tour, how slavery was not mentioned once. I had to imagine this scene, because I’ve been to all of the local plantations, and I’ve learned how many of them used to whitewash their own histories to mollify the mostly white audiences on these tours. Things were watered down so much so that nobody had to feel uncomfortable for anything that happened in the past. Clifton, naturally, had questions. With Moyers, she shares that her questions led to her poetry and her poetry led to honest discussions with the descendants of Walnut Grove, and those discussions led to change on that plantation tour and how the story of the plantation is told in relation to the enslaved people that lived there. Clifton chronicles actual social justice that occurs because she asked the hard questions and wrote about the hard topics.

There is more in the Holladay piece about naming and names, and about how Clifton connects the dots in her own family lineage in a painstakingly beautiful way from her kidnapped ancestor to her own paternal moniker. I appreciate how almost reverential Holladay seems at times, recounting the links that Clifton has to both the places and the people in her poems. As Holladay mentions names both general and specific from Clifton’s writing, it is easy to imagine Clifton sitting on the ground at Walnut Grove, staring at a field of rocks, learning that the 10 slaves accounted for as property were just the tip of the iceberg because women didn’t even count as that much, and deciding to make sure that people hear those names.

“here… /

hear”

*** Edited to add: Originally, I included a picture of Hilary Holladay in this post. However, when I checked the Post 45 blog, the thumbnail of Holladay was showing instead of the photo of Clifton. That was unacceptable to me, so I removed the picture of Holladay. If you would like to see her photo, feel free to click the link to her website in the article.

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