These are my students...

The second day of creative presentations brought the following powerful projects, and I was utterly shaken by the polish and finesse with which each student gave his or her response to the materials we had read this term. From the folktale, the rap, the singing, the baking, the building, the poetry and the short story of the fist day, the students of the second day followed with as much force and passion as those who had made me weep on the first day. These are all students who have certainly brought more to this class than they will ever take away, and I am grateful to every single one of them for their commitment and their drive to express their identification, their understanding and their connections to the materials in this literature course. I have learned more about race, humanitity and that enigmatic love that binds ALL of us during this term than I have in any other endeavor. I can only count mysef as priviledged to work with such an array of talented, big-spirited students as I have had this term in this course. Thank you all for teaching ME the enormous bounty of love that you all shared with each other and with me.

Andrew Laws read his poem "Nigger (To Call Myself a Man), a poem that asked, "Who am I can call myself a man?" when the narrator is disempowered to such an extent that he has been "Whipped/ Burned/ Branded/Bruised/Beaten and battered." The poem ends with, "I am nothing/But a nigger."

Alannah Caldwell read her poem "Are We Slaves - Then or Now," in which she challenges our notions of what makes us slaves," and showing that African Americans are just as much enslaved by popular culture as they were with chains.

Dennis Carroll read his poem "A Peace of Mind," the mind of a slave who came over on the ships and whose mind is only a "piece" until the end of the poem when his "piece of mind" becomes a "peace of mind" because of the bond he share with other African Americans who share the same ancestry and history.

Latia, a student who showed us photographs of her white mother, read her poem called "Undefeated," a passionate poet in which she looks at her identity, claiming her "ancestors, to whom she "is forever bonded together" because "we are strong" "born to endure."

Desiree Rivers depicted "Four Women," written by Nina Simone, a song she spoke as she moved from Aunt Sarah to Saffronia to Sweet Thing to Peaches, all versions of African American women. She memorized and spoke the words as she moved seamlessly from one depiction to the next, changing costumes and attitudes as the posture and representation of the women changed. Here she is Aunt Sarah, followed by Sweet Thing. Hong's focus was a portrait of a woman with mixtures of races and colors. gray in the middle of her face to represent the time when we all meld into one color and one race. His project was inspired by William Wells Brown's novel Clotel: Or The President's Daughter. Catherine stitched the most imaginative, creative quilt with images of W.E.B. Du Bois's veil, flying slaves from the Vernacular tradition of folk tales, Harrient Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and others. Many of these images were sewn inside windows of a house that held many of the authors and stories we've read.