Mary Anna Dunn Poet And
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ABOUT LETTERS TO LITTLES' MILLS

The original Fanny and John Little home-place. Courtesy of The North Carolina Library. 

Most of the spirituals I used in the poems were collected by musicologists during and just after the Civil War.  They can be found in Slave Songs of The United States. The musicologists tried to be true to the dialect in their transcriptions.  I understand their decision, but chose to use traditional spellings, because for me their phonetic spellings had echoes of black-face minstrel shows that used dialect to mock African-Americans.  All art incorporated into these pages is either public domain (usually {PD-1923} – published anywhere before 1923 and public domain in the U.S.) or is used with permission.
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​Follow these links to learn more about the poems and the letters and spirituals that inspired them.
Littles'  Mills and the Letters
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The Reaping

The Little Brothers Stock Their Farms

Exchange of Goods
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I Could Not Stay in Newark

The Lord in the Mists

Aprons Are Very Fashionable

The Wedding Gift

Cry Holy

It Must Have Been the Muscadines

Three Women by the Pee Dee River

Miss Fanny is Needed Back Home


Free as a Bird

One Hundred Hams and Sam's Two Sons

Shrapnel

Columns


Epilogue: February 12, 1983

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                 An Encounter With My Dominant Culture Mindset 
     While listening to Oxford American’s first podcast of Points South, I was mortified by this description of Thomas Hart Benton’s painting, The Sources of Country Music: “You also have a black man sitting on a log playing a five string banjo by himself. You have either enslaved people or recently freed people painted pretty much in the background.”  Wow. That is exactly how I had painted Bill in the poem it “It Must Have Been the Muscadines”:  Bill had a banjo that he played alone/but when Texanna played piano/Bill would hide outside her window….
       This dominant culture mindset in my writing appalled me, but the whole process of addressing racism is a process of increasing awareness.  Awareness of course, is never enough.  When we are surprised and dismayed by our biases, it’s time to make changes. And we should expect to continue this process of recognition and response ad infinitum. The poem is published.  I cannot go back and change the published copies, but I am posting this revised version of the poem.
 
                         
                   It Must Have Been the Muscadines

       While Texanna played her scales, Bill, enslaved,
                                         ate muscadines.
      Texanna learned to play etudes. Soon
                                        waltzes and sonatas followed.

       Bill had a banjo that his father made,
                                        but when Texanna played piano
       Bill, outside her window swallowed 
                                       muscadines like quarter notes. 

      Late nights Texanna listened
                                       to the banjo in the distance. 
      Night songs and sonatas blended.
                                      In her dreams they seemed the same.

      What afflicted Texanna afflicted Bill
                                     though Adeline blamed muscadines
      for the slave's  demise. Absalom and Adeline
                                    buried their daughter in view of the house 
     and built a fence to hold her there. 
   




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