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Walking Back Up Depot Street: Poems

by Minnie Bruce Pratt

Summary

In Pratt's fourth collection of poetry, Walking Back Up Depot Street, we travel to a land we have lived in, but never seen. We are led by powerful images into what is both a story of the segregated rural South and the story of a woman named Beatrice who is leaving that home for the post-industrial North. As Beatrice searches for the truth behind the public story -the public history -of the land of her childhood, she hears and sees the unknown past come alive. She struggles to free herself from the lies she has been taught while growing up - and finds others who are also on this journey. In these dramatically multivocal narrative poems, we hear the words and rhythms of Bible Belt preachers, African-American blues and hillbilly gospel singers, and of sharecropper country women and urban lesbians. We hear the testimony of freed slaves and white abolitionists speaking against Klan violence, fragments of speeches by union organizers and mill workers, and snatches of song from those who marched on the road to Selma.

Lillian Smith once wrote, "Your poet and demagogue -- and mine -- inhabit the same terrain; poet transforming, bringing new forms out of chaos, demagogue destroying. Each day, one or the other wins a small battle inside us". Walking Back Up Depot Street reclaims history from the hands of the demagogues of the twentieth century.