Poetic Research Statement

 

When I was in high school, I discovered a manuscript box stuffed full of yellowed translucent vellum paper covered in typescript and handwritten corrections. My busy mother explained that it was a manuscript written by her aunt, Effie Meek Maiden (1878-1954), a somewhat fictionalized history of the progenitor of the family, James Allen Meek (1816-1877) and his wife, Mary Henley (1816-1887), and their children. I knew those names, as my grandfather had a fondness for trotting us out to the old cemetery outside of town where these and other family members lay under the hot West Tennessee sun. But the box went back into the closet, where it stayed another twenty years, at which time my mother and her cousin fact-checked the history, copyedited the manuscript, and self-published it for the genealogical community. When my mother once expressed her surprise how accurate the manuscript had been about so many facts, the local librarian was indignant. “Effie was a scholar!” she insisted.

Fast forward another twenty years, and I began to feel an increasing need to confront my family’s past as white Southerners. In spite of having lived elsewhere for fifty years, my mother decreed that she would be buried in that same ancient cemetery. She helped form an association to care for it long-term, and somehow it became a central location in our lives. Soon enough, I realized that many of the men buried there had been Confederates. One cousin suggested the best way to deal with this fact was not to mention it. Silence is never something I manage very well.

In addition, we learned that James Allen Meek’s father had been a bit of a mystery. According to Aunt Effie’s book, Home in the Wilderness, William Meek vanished about 1834, supposedly murdered along the Natchez Trace on the way home from trading down the Mississippi River. No historical account has been found of this death nor of William’s birth, since he lived in what we now call a “burned county.” (In this case, not burned during the Civil War, but destroyed by a tornado and later by a lynch mob.)

In one of many surprise turns in my life, I became a genealogist. I thought with my PhD research skills it would be easy enough for me to trace this family at least back to their arrival on American shores and to please my aging mother in the process. One thing I had not anticipated as a genealogist is how much time one spends with death in the process. Yes, there are births and weddings and degrees earned and the daily grind, but, especially before the advent of modern medicine, death loomed constantly over young and old. This is an obvious truism, but it’s different when you begin to encounter it every day in your research.

I began to feel the need to write about all the death I was encountering, not only in the form of traditional genealogical proofs and kinship articles, but in terms of the ways in which I felt these long-ago deaths within my own life. At the same time, I was running into the inevitable enslavers in the heritage of almost any white person whose family is all from the South, and the whites who went to fight for the Confederacy even though they were too poor to be enslavers. I found in the family papers an original letter written by one such man, a grandson and namesake of the mysterious William Meek, this one dying as a Confederate soldier.

 

I kept a database of the enslaved and enslavers I found, I posted to groups and websites trying to provide this information to African Americans searching for their pasts, I read several books about people dealing with similar histories, and I began to follow Coming to the Table, an organization which tries to find ways toward healing. These encounters left me confused—on one hand, I would develop sympathy for the tough lives most of my ancestors lived, and on the other I would be revulsed by their support of this system of cruelty. Who deserved my sympathy? The white woman who lost eight of her twelve children before she turned forty? Or the enslaved woman whose children were torn from her and lost to her? Did the white men deserve any sympathy at all? Of course, sympathy is not limited, and you can feel it for all humans who struggle through life and through politics and social systems they do not fully understand. But I have had to go through a frequent process of self-correction, and that involves plumbing these issues in a personal way in writing. Along the way, I have uncovered many stories of birth and death, mental illness, murder, miscegenation, heroism, error, faith, forgiveness, and fire every bit as compelling as the latest headlines.

I believe that genealogy has radically positive potential. Henry Louis Gates and his popular PBS show Finding Your Roots has gone a long way toward that, though he still maintains the tradition of hero-worship of our ancestors, which I find overly rosy, even if understandable. The first round of the genealogy craze—your grandmother’s genealogy—often started with a desire to prove how “white” someone was or to prove that somewhere in the far past—before the perceived mediocrity of your average genealogists’ lives—an ancestor was a king or prince. People today still also hope to find a gallant story, even if our designations of what is heroic have changed. Truly, however, genealogy is about valuing the lives of ordinary, working people and allowing or forcing ourselves to feel our personal connections to history, good and bad. It confronts us with the fact that those mentioned in the history books were a tiny minority of the people whose lives unfolded and impacted others every day. Even beyond the retrieval of singular people like Artemisia Gentileschi and Phillis Wheatley, the stories of the hidden still pulse and breathe around us, even the ones that aren’t positive.

 

As I conduct family history research and learn the ways in which DNA can further illuminate that, I continue to encounter stories and images that inspire me to bring some of these people out of the darkness one more time, even if just for a moment. They lived, they died, and we are the sum of their lives.

 

Committed

to Mary Jane Meek Hopkins, 1817-1893

 

In the hush of empty archives,

microfilm wheezes under my fingers.

Then, there—the scribbled court document

telling of your commitment

to the asylum, the long list of those

testifying to your lunacy—brother-

in-law, neighbors, the man who

will soon foster your children for a price

and later own your father’s mill.

 

I do not know these witnesses’ intentions.

Just you with six children under eleven

and no way to even add and subtract

yourself. Your husband dead in the ground

too soon. I imagine the impending cold,

your hands blistered now from chopping

firewood, your own hunger, the high

wailing of sniffling babies, manure

piling up in the barnlot, flies hovering.

 

Mary Jane, bless you—somehow,

you got out of that cell they put you in.

By next census, you are living

back at home with all your children,

and no man. You raise them.

Nothing else may be yours, but they are.

The force of that rises over all

the millstones grinding, the men

learning long division.

 

Under Leaves and Vines

 

Alone, I drive across West Tennessee

             into afternoon sun, quiet except

for the semis thundering through

             the trees that wink in the wind

on either side of the highway,

 

as if to prove primeval peace waits

              somewhere beyond swarming traffic

and the lingering ghosts of war.

               These forests veil the truth.

I turn north toward Lexington,

 

through Parkers Crossroads, where

                one hundred sixty years ago

men slaughtered each other

                 in the cotton fields

and fell face-first among

 

the forest’s bullet-blasted trees.

                 Hero or coward didn’t matter.

They died right here, where I pass under

                 seemingly innocent cloudless sky.

On this trip, I drive back

 

through time and breathe

                 the smoke of the burning bodies

of horses, mules, and men,

                 witness woodlands

shattered to rubble, fields riven

 

with deep-dug entrenchments bleeding

                  into the creeks, their waters retching.

All along these routes, up and down

                  towns and counties, over and over

in 1862, farms went up in flames

 

while women and children hid

                  in barns and fields, hoping there

would be something left to eat.

                  I have watched the day-by-day

on an animated map of the Civil War

 

—how the borders moved up and down,

                  back and forth across these plains. Now,

the new grass lies—flat and clean—

                  while alfalfa, corn, and soybeans reach

their apotheosis. My people,

 

most of them, come from this ground,

                   loess and fragipan, loam and silt,

site of layers and layers of suffering.

                   Along with a few remaining affections,

my heart holds this enemy, my homeland.

 

Even if I wish honeysuckle and kudzu

                   could erase the wrongs—that forests would win

real peace—I know the vegetation cannot cover,

                    much less heal, this past. There is perhaps

delusion in still hoping anything can.

 

The Wrong Cause

based on the letters of Confederate soldier

William H. Meek (1837-1864),

who fought at Brice’s Crossroads

and died a few weeks later at Grenada, Mississippi,

of gangrene after being shot in the shoulder

by a Union sharpshooter

 

Further Reading

 

Relevant Family History

Maiden, Effie Meek. Ed. Anne Meek and Marilyn Brooks Hammonds. Home in the Wilderness. Norfolk, VA: Anne Meek, 2003.

Roney, Lisa. Freeman Cemetery website. Developed from a family booklet written and created by Anne Meek and Marilyn Brooks Hammonds. 2018. https://www.freemancemetery.org/

 

Nineteenth-Century Women’s Mental Health and Property Rights

I first became aware of the use of mental health diagnoses as a way to disempower nineteenth-century women by reading the classic story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (first published in 1892 in The New England Journal) and in the literary criticism of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1979).

More direct accounts and historical focus can be found in:

Bailey, Chad. “Surnames and Women’s Rights in the 19th Century in Tennessee, Part II—The 19th Century Women.” Jonesboro Genealogical Society. 23 Aug 2018. https://jgstn.org/8-may-1991-surnames-and-womens-rights-in-the-19th-century-in-tennessee-part-ii-the-19th-century-women/

Baird, Bob. “Women’s Rights: Women, Wives, and Widows.” Bob’s Genealogy Filing Cabinet: Southern and Colonial Genealogies. n.d. https://genfiles.com/articles/womens-rights/

Bly, Nellie. Ten Days in a Mad House. 1887. Many current editions available.

Chesler, Phyllis. Women and Madness. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin Press, 2005. Orig. 1972.

Geller, Jeffrey L., and Maxine Harris. Women of the Asylum: Voices from Behind the Walls 1840-1945. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

Mitchell, Christi A. “Neither Hers Nor Theirs: Dower and Household Relationships

Between Widows, Family, and Friends in York County, Maine.” Maine History 38.3 (1 Jan 1999), 166-185. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mainehistoryjournal/vol38/iss3/2/

 

The Civil War in West Tennessee and Northern Mississippi

One visceral demonstration of the constant conflicts across the area of West Tennessee and Northern Mississippi is a video on YouTube, The American Civil War: Every Day (v. 2). 26 Oct 2018, posted under the pseduonym Emperor TigerStar.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDEK4gJBKW0

Examples of the ways in which Tennesseans, their families, and their farms were torn apart during the war, as well as the often mixed feelings they had about “the cause,” can be found in  many of the letters in the archive of the Family Papers of Charles B. Moore (1822-1901), another distant family member of mine and a Union supporter, who lived in Texas and Illinois during the war but still had family in Middle and West Tennessee. Charles B. Moore Family Papers, 1832-1917, part of The Civil War and Its Aftermath: Diverse Perspectives, UNT Digital Library, University of North Texas Libraries Special Collections. https://digital.library.unt.edu/explore/collections/CWADP/

More scholarly works focused on the conflicts that included and affected my ancestors include:

Bearss, Edwin Cole. Forrest at Brice’s Crossroads. Dayton, OH: Morningside Books, 2012.

Bennett, Stewart L., and Doug Bostick The Battle of Brice’s Crossroads. Civil War Sesquicentennial series. Charleston, SC: The History Press of Arcadia Publishing, 2020.

Daniel, Larry J. Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee: A Portrait of Life in a Confederate Army. Civil War America series. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2003.

Hubbard, John Milton. Ed. Booker Roper. Notes of a Private: Annotated. Orig. Memphis, Tennessee: E. H. Clark, 1909. Reprint 2018 by Booker Roper.

Hurst, Jack. Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography. New York: Vintage, 1994.

Lord, Walter. The Past That Would Not Die. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.

Levine, Bruce. The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South. New York: Random House, 2013.

Mitcham, Samuel W., Jr. Bust Hell Wide Open: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Regenery History, 2016.

“Myths, Legends, and the Search for Truth. Website of the Battle of Franklin [TN] Trust. https://boft.org/myths

Rhea, Godon. “Why Non-Slaveholding Southerners Fought.” Address to the Charleston Library Society, 25 January 2011. American Battlefield Trust website. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/why-non-slaveholding-southerners-fought [Please note that some of the language in this article is objectionable.]

Watkins, Sam. Ed. and intro., M. Thomas Inge. Company Aytch or A Side Show of the Big Show. New York: Plume, 1999.

Wills, Brian Steel. A Battle from the Start: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.

Woodward, Colin Edward. Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army during the Civil War. A Nation Divided series. Charlottesville: UVAP, 2014.

 

Attempts at Confrontation and Healing

Auslander, Mark. The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race & Finding an American Family. Athens, GA: UGAP, 2011.

Branan, Karen. The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth. New York: Atria, 2016.

DeWolf, Thomas Norman, and Sharon Morgan. Gather at the Table: The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.

Miles, Tiya. All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack. New York: Random House, 2021.

Mozingo, Joe. The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrier, His White Descendants, A Search for Family. New York: Free Press, 2012.

Perry, Imani. South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation. New York: Ecco, 2022.

Russell, Lauren. Descent. Saxtons River, VT: Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020.

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause. New York: St. Martin’s, 2021.

Smith, Clint. How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. New York: Little, Brown, 2021.

 

Erasure or Black-Out Poetry

Best, B. J., and C. Kubasta. “A Process of Illumination: Conversations about Erasure Poetry.” Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets website, n.d. https://www.wfop.org/a-process-of-illumination-conversations-about-erasure-poetry

Lewis, Kara. “Hidden Meanings: The Power & Precision of Erasure Poetry.” 6 November 2019. Read Poetry website. https://www.readpoetry.com/hidden-meanings-the-power-precision-of-erasure-poetry/

 

This article originally appeared in July 2025.

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Lisa Roney is the author of Sweet Invisible Body, The Best Possible Bad Luck: Poems, and Serious Daring, as well as short work in numerous journals. She spent 20 years as a professor of creative writing and five as editor of The Florida Review. She lives in Florida with her husband and three cats.