Molly Lynn Watt, Poet & Educator
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contact Molly: 617-354-8242 or MollyWatt@comcast.net
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Still struggling with Jim Crow
On Wings of Song, A Journey Into the Civil Rights Era
By Molly Lynn Watt, Ibbetson Street Press, 2014
Poet’s new collection explores racial prejudice, offers challenge to readers.
Reviewed By Wendell Smith (Published in print: Thursday, December 11, 2014)
 
Lynn Watt’s memoir of her part in our struggles with Jim Crow, “On Wings of Song,” is that rare book of poetry that is a page-turner. I began it about 9:30 and by the time she had been arrested, thrown (with her two babies) into jail and escaped with her family the clock was approaching midnight.
Although Molly uses the first person, these poems are not about her or heroism, rather in them she bears witness to what, if it happened to her, happened to many others and, by extension, to all of us. Her poetry provides an opportunity for us to contemplate our history and ask ourselves, given current events, what we need to do to meet the challenge of her witness.
Perhaps we should begin, as Molly begins On Wings of Song, with a confession:
Yes
My people owned slaves
split husband from wife
traded parent from child
worked folks like mules
…
Yes
this is the stain
my forebears
passed to me
slaves bought at auction
slaves sold for profit
yes …
She follows this confession with her introduction to our racist reality, when, at the age of eight, she watches as a small girl, the daughter of an African American soldier, is dragged by a bus in Washington, D.C.:
The bus rumbles into motion
drags the child along the gutter
…
Daddy runs into the street
…
shouts stop for God’s sake stop
brakes screech the bus halts.
The driver calls out black or white?
…
She breathes
she will recover
Daddy grasps the soldiers hand
God be with you and your daughter
I brought mine to meet Abe Lincoln
but she met Jim Crow instead
She continues, in poetry as lucid and compelling as those opening verses, to acquire a family, train in Vermont at the Putney School, and to set off to Tennessee with an integrated group to start a summer work camp for the legendary Highland School. They barely arrive before they are terrorized at 3 AM by a deputized mob and thrown in jail. The legal resolution and their escape back to Cambridge are worthy of Kafka.
She begins the book’s final section with this assertion,
Jim Crow Lurks When
they say he’s uppity
they say that’s very white of you
…
they say but you don’t even look –
they say I don’t even think of you as –
they say I’m colorblind
then, before she concludes by quoting “We Shall Overcome,” she gives us this description with its implicit challenge,
the girl in skin-tight jeans
strains toward the mirror
mascaras her lashes
…
she knows the story –
her grandmother
not much older than she
packed up two babies…
…
 
this girl owns her civil rights
but cannot imagine her vote counts
she does not know she is living the dream
but must keep dreaming it
or the movement will stop
Jim Crow still tramps the street
 
So, my friends, how shall we meet the challenge of these poems?
 
Molly Lynn Watt was an active member of the Peterborough community for many years. She and her husband, Dan, lived on Gregg Lake in Antrim. She taught at Antioch New England in Keene, was on the board of the Lyceum, active in the Unitarian
 

Order On Wings of Song now!

Amazon Author Page for Molly Lynn Watt

Ibbetson Street Press, 2014

"Local writer releases a lyrical memoir of the Civil Rights Movement"
Review by Bert Stern in the Somerville Times, Dec. 17, 2014


Picture
"I want to write poems
the way a jazz man
composes on his feet
sways in rhythm
taps a syncopated beat

I want to howl and growl
to a bottleneck slide
pulse with rage and heat
rap a wild wind run
to blast away injustice..."


 



On Wings of Song…


… flies over Democracy's strange and bitter crop; a Baltimore Postman delivers the news: Read All About It!

—Bob Moses, Director of SNCC's Mississippi Project 1961-1964

… is a journey into the heart, the place of deep caring for the state of being human.  Watt has written with the sincere and sympathetic hand to mark a path for the reader to return to the Civil Rights Era of the 50's and 60's, a history that never leaves us.  As she writes, there is no time for fear.  In the inscape of her journey we see the time for caring is now.  These are gentle but sure lines of conviction, lines worthy of a standing applause. 

                                           --Afaa M. Weaver, The Plum Flower Trilogy

 

… foregrounds one family’s experience against a choral background of history scored for multiple voices, both lyrical and documentary. Out of what she calls a minor episode, Watt has created a major contribution to our emotional understanding of the Civil Rights movement. You will find this account both informative and deeply moving; you will not be able to put it down, except to ponder what you have just read.

—Martha Collins, Blue Front and White Papers

… offers an important reminder that history isn't just an abstraction. Like a play narrated by multiple characters, these poems show the profound impact the ongoing struggle for Civil Rights had on the lives of ordinary people. With grace and skill, and a fine-tuned ear, the poet illuminates the tragedies and triumphs of America's march toward the still-elusive goal of racial equality. Ultimately this collection is testimony to the dignity and resiliency of the human spirit.       

— Charles Coe, Picnic on the Moon and All Sins Forgiven: Poems for My Parents

… is a deeply moving memoir rendered in a collection of poems. It is an account of the vicissitudes of a courageous woman and her young family in the context of the social and political turmoil that transformed the United States in the latter half of the 20th century. Her unflinching recovery of the intimate details of their day-to- day lives as they journeyed through the racial strife of the 1960s is a stellar achievement. Repulsed by the whites only imperative in Tennessee, Watt engages in a long skirmish to end Jim Crow. Her poems sing songs to freedom’s beat.           

 —Florence Ladd, Is That Your Child? and The Spirit of Josephine

… explores a subject that most white and African-American poets avoid; but race, guilt and atonement are an important aspect of American history, brought to light with considerable clarity and truth.

                                    —Sam Cornish, An Apron Full of Beans and Cross a Parted Sea

… does a marvelous job juxtaposing the personal with the political to reveal the ways those worlds intersect.

 —Pam McMichael, Director of Highlander Center

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