Mary Anna Dunn Poet And
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  • ABOUT LETTERS TO LITTLES' MILLS
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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 . 


Follow these links to learn more about the poems and the letters and spirituals that inspired them. 

Littles'  Mills and the Letters

The Reaping

The Little Brothers Stock Their Farms

Exchange of Goods

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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  • ABOUT
  • Poetry
  • ABOUT LETTERS TO LITTLES' MILLS
  • CURRICULA
  • Other Writing