From Soil to Tree, Reparations Now!

Here in Reparations Now! lies the transmutation of Blackness. The soil, the land, the trees, hold just as many stories as humans who inhabit them. And of course, even these stories are just as diversified as the landscapes from which they emerge. With calculated intention, Ashley Jones, author of Reparations Now! lyricizes the souls and the bodies of Black folk. Jones, recently announced as the 2022-2026 poet laureate of Alabama (and the first Black and youngest poet laureate of the state to boot), tethers the reader to geography, yet slackens her grip in order to uplift the various speakers’ voices. Every poem sings an aria in this collection, be it somber, enraged or joyously boastful. From structure to flourish, Jones manifests space to feel all of the feelings that come with being Black in a world that constantly seeks to snuff out Blackness. In the tides of lament, Jones’s work is poignant and introspective; in moments of homegrown comfort, the detail dedicated to moments of warmth shines brilliantly. Every poem has its own purpose, but what ties them together is a sense of longing, of healing beyond historical and interpersonal hurt, of veneration of Black life. 

Reparations Now! by Ashley M. Jones. Hub City Press, 2021. 80 pages. $16.

Jones is an attentive storyteller. There is no room for platitudes or small talk. She pulls back the wool covering the lies woven into the fabric of America; the illusion that is maintained in spite of all of its bloodstains. Jones addresses the inherent hurt in land relation, but does not blame nature for being dragged into the bloody history of white supremacy. Instead, she expertly traverses the power of naming something and subsequently, the counterpower of reclaiming a neutral entity. Nature has its own rules, but cultural perspectives still personify those flowers and hills. There are natural indicators that get caught up in unnatural acts. Take for example, an excerpt from her poem “All Y’all Really From Alabama,” where Jones masterfully disintegrates the fragile distinctions between North and South. She reminds us that the South is in all of us:  “You can theorize it, wish it real, but it’s the same old/ghost—see-through, benign.”

In Jones’s impressive arsenal is the ability to weave family dynamics into a wider network of American history. The poet digs deep back into her childhood, one of a young Black girl coming of age in a world of alienation and suspicion, and how her mother gave her an endless stream of care in order to compensate for all of the hurt she knew her baby would experience at the hands of an anti-Black world: 

...knew the world outside of Barbies and Sesame St 
and songs and bubbles and hair barrettes 
was plotting my demise, that it waited 
to gulp each of my little girl giggles.
She knew it, so she filled me up to the brim 
with every every dream and every smile and every assurance 
that I was made beautiful and full of a life 
that mattered…

Through Jones, the reader witnesses how Black children can and should be cared for in the face of an unforgiving world. Jones presents possibilities that are mirrored in her own life and upbringing, extending that care to Black girls who were denied that necessary care. But beyond childhood and familial love, Jones reaches for a love that fully embraces the multilayered nature of the Black experience. Reparations Now! highlights the talents of James Brown, Al Green, Lucille Clifton, and Kanye West while paying homage to the wrongful deaths of Breonna Taylor, Stephon Clark and Mary Turner, among others. Every bit of emotion evoked in this collection is an inalienable part of our history. 

Whenever the poet is confronted with a crisis of faith, her work is reflective. God is ever present in this collection, but there are a variety of iterations of the Creator that come into question. There is, of course, the God that church goers turn to, the God in the miraculous soil, the God(s) the enslaved were cosmically bound to, the God of the colonizer, used to manifest destiny and cultural hegemony. Jones bounces back and forth between these faith perspectives effortlessly, elucidating the multiplicities inherent in belief with every line. In “Hostile Environment,” Jones attends to enslaved Africans who were forced to accept a Christian God in their hearts in order to gather in large groups. Jones turns the word “hostility” on its head, questioning who really is allowed to be hostile, and how white Gods mirror the hostility white people perpetuate: 

this morning so beautiful, so calm it makes these fields look fertile with fruit 
instead of blood, the HOSTILE thorns just glittering teeth in the distance. 
we here to praise him, HOSTILE god, 
here to hear the word, its holy HOSTILITY, its promise that there is more than    
       death in death--
...the spirit of the Lord, its HOSTILE sugartongue, will draw him to the 
      horsewhip,
HOSTILE and gentle in its quick, quiet rage—

And still, Black folks are able to gather and share community in spite of hostility, in the face of bastardized faith.  Jones dives deep back into the archive, into the history book in order to pinpoint how Black people continue to navigate the historical and present harms of white supremacy in ecological, emotional, physiological and interpersonal form. We are influenced as much as we conjure, and this push and pull is laid evident here in Jones’s third collection of poetry. Take for instance, Jones’s poem Photosynthesis, in which she writes “What you call waste, / I call power. What you call work I make beautiful again.” 

It’s different, of course, when our labor is our own. This is rarely the case, and as the reader navigates the rich text, questions of power constantly emerge. How do we reclaim our bodies, our souls, our selves? Reparations Now! is a demand. It holds historical and contemporary trauma, rage, grief up to a mirror, insisting that it bear witness to itself: “...sometimes labels are jumped in the big dark bag we call manifest destiny. Sometimes, things get lost in its velvet mouth.” What would it mean to finally accept the ugly truth of this country? What would it mean for those who have been affected by its damage to receive the support they have been denied for decades? Everything we are owed is showcased through this collection. Yes, we may never fully understand the horrors and the traumas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, even the decades that followed emancipation, which at every turn sought to destroy the psyche and physical well being of Black people. But does that mean we don’t talk about it? Could it mean, or at least be a start for some sort of cultural reckoning? 

At the heart of the collection is an attempt to make sense of pain. How can we feel the love in the earth when the earth reminds us constantly what was taken from us? How does one contend with the personal and societal harms that dictate our contemporary reality? Reparations Now! is as much a text of questions as it is of answers. Jones doesn’t claim to have all of the solutions, but she encourages the reader to think critically about the damage of forgetting history. The past lives in all of us; in “Poem In Which I Am Too Political To Read At Your School,” Jones pulls the thread of white praise, and watches as it unravels into its true form: 

except the rose was black and you killed it, black and you silenced it, black
and you raped it, black and it could not vote, black and it got in the wrong 
garden so you had to use pesticide, had to poison its water and all the 
little black rose babies, had to stop teaching it to read, it was black so you 
Pulled it up by the roots with a knife shaped just like America…

Here, Jones guffaws at the sin of ownership. In every poem, there is a rejection of that labor relation. Jones makes it impossible to delude ourselves. What is most striking about Jones’s poetry is its ability to balance all of these contending realities, these unknowns and knowns, the ghosts that exist in the margins of life, who, due to the violence of white supremacy, were silenced. The grief is ceaseless, but so is the love. Toes gracing the cliff of no return, Jones nevertheless turns her face towards the sun and soaks in the everythingness of everything: “Black as I am, I can shine anything back     even the sun     wants to cling to me.” There are pieces of us everywhere, beyond the pain, beyond the cyclical harms that terrorize. Sigh, and release.