Born in Lynchburg, Virginia, Carrie Allen McCray was an educator and social worker before turning to writing later in life. McCray is the author of Freedom’s Child: The Life of a Confederate General’s Black Daughter, which details her discovery that her mother was the child of a Confederate general and his black servant. McCray is the author of the poetry chapbook Piece of Time, and her poems have been published in Ms. Magazine, River Styx, Point, and the Squaw Review, and in the anthologies Moving beyond Words and The Crimson Edge: Older Women Writing.|Kevin Simmonds is a writer, musician, and filmmaker originally from New Orleans. He is the author of Mad for Meat and editor of Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality. Simmonds’s collaborations include the Emmy Award–winning documentary HOPE: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica and Voices of Haiti: A Post-Quake Odyssey in Verse, both commissioned by the Pulitzer Center. His genre-defying films include Singing Whitman and feti(sh)ame. He divides his time between San Francisco and Japan.
“In a narrative that moves like a classical tragedy, Ota Benga is
‘caught in a web / of flawed science,’ but emerges as a complex and
real figure, a man out of time, out of place, whose dignity and
humanity have left us with a harrowing story shared here by one who
knew him best. Carrie Allen McCray weaves a rich tapestry in this
cultural epic. We hear African rhythms and tribal voices, we
encounter poems that seem like plays and chants and rituals and
journal excerpts, and we witness the ‘birth of anthropology’ with
an awful, embedded racism in its infancy. In McCray’s loving
portrait of Ota Benga, we come to relish the small touches as much
as the large ones—the landscape of turn-of-the-century Virginia,
the manners of folks at work and play, the sense of tribal and
familial loyalty, and the voices that accumulate into a cultural
symphony, sometimes broken into grief, sometimes sustained by
joy.”
—David Baker, poetry editor, Kenyon Review |“From the deep forests
of the Congo, to the black churches of Virginia, to the steel cages
of the Bronx Zoo, to the hearth of the McCray household, Ota Benga
wished only to be seen as a man. When we read Carrie Allen McCray’s
beautiful, haunting poems, we share her great empathy and devotion
to sharing the life of another human being once here, but now gone.
This is a story about humanity, cultural differences, the
beginnings of anthropology, the middle of racism, and how sweetly
we used to take each other in and care for the stranger walking the
earth just as we cared for our own. McCray carried Ota Benga in her
head and heart until she was ready to craft his cautionary tale
into something truly wonderful. Now it is our turn to bear this
story, to remember who we are, and to act as who we wish to
be.”
—Nikky Finney, National Book Award winner for Head Off & Split
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