A Review of Patricia Spears Jones’ The Beloved Community — October 9, 2023 by Arden Levine
Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series, sixty painted panels depicting scenes of Black migration in America between the World Wars, is split between two locations: the thirty even-numbered panels at the MoMA, in northerly New York; the other thirty, odd-numbered, at the Phillips Collection, in southerly Washington D.C. Evoking a crucifixion, Panel 57 suggests the angular shape of a woman at the center of the image, bisected by the straight line of a stick stirring a tessellated abstraction of submerged laundry. A descriptive caption serves as the panel’s title: The female workers were the last to arrive north. The female worker was also one of the last groups to leave the South.
Patricia Spears Jones, newly-appointed New York State Poet Laureate, introduces this woman in “Lave,” the prologue poem in her fifth collection, The Beloved Community. Using the Lawrence caption as an epigraph, Jones asks:
And her extra money, how will she make it? What will she do for? How will she get there? Will she find her old friends, her lovers? She is lonely.
The artist says in Panel 57 that the female worker (not Negro, not migrant) is the last group to leave the South.
One woman is her own group?
Here and throughout, Jones reveals the American Black woman, like the set of Lawrence panels, as halved and whole. The woman is a community in a single body cohering the community body, a source of continuity between (re)constituted collectives, a split nucleus at the center of a geographic and cultural atom. She represents the dual definition of cleaving: carved apart, also holding everything and everyone together. Navigated by Jones, readers follow Black women and their communities across cities and eras distant and local, but return regularly to modern Brooklyn (Jones’ home and the spiritual center of the book). In “Morning Glory,” the poem following “Lave”, we are planted there, along with Jones herself and the unruly named flower. Jones’ encourages her neighbor to prune it, but the neighbor “refuses. She likes the way the vine has / Curled around her fence with a ferocity / That cannot be so easily cut back. I get that.” That wrought-iron-clinging ferocity (to homes, histories, loves, lives) defines the cause of both suffering and survival for Jones’ journeying characters, and Jones honors each in turn with both halves of her broken heart as we tread New York along with her: In “Fortune’s Wheel,” subway-traveling homeless youth “heard, seen, but not helped”; in “Morning Story,” street-ferrying bottle collectors “dragging / the weight of others’ waste”; and in “Poverty,” all who endure American-imposed destitution and addiction:
Who are you Is really Why did you come here?
American geology is harrowing An unlikely loveliness grows In cracks beside crack houses
A community-cohering woman-narrator, Jones holds her subjects together and sacred, demonstrates their roles in a rich, continuous, grinding urban ecosystem of indirect and immediate influence, removes part of their intrinsic isolation by reverently etching them into a collective story. Yet she applies a particularly sensitive attention to her individual women characters, laments the exploitation of their bodies, labor, voices, and vulnerability. Cleaved and cleaving, moved and moving in every venue and version of America, they are variously tortured by predation, physical overexertion, one or another humiliation in the context of love or sex. Sometimes this humiliation becomes public, such as in “Something’s in the air”, in which a Black woman wanders naked and disoriented down a neighborhood block. Onlookers find the scene grotesque but, ultimately, empathic, possibly a spectral symbol for a community’s distress, and they refrain from casting stones:
Where did she come from, where is she going?...
She is a walking excavation of hurt. The boys Bike away, amplifying the atmosphere with mute Gestures, their laughter. Again, the naming As she moves shirtless and shoeless, sweat screaming. We know some of her anger. We see her shamelessness. Some call her crazy. Some gesture at the shape of her breasts. But no one, not one boy, calls her bitch.
This first-person plural “we”, complicit and invested, returns repeatedly, such as in “First and Last Night in Virginia, January and May 2020”; here, Jones meets a convenience store worker who, like the plastic shield at her checkout counter, is
…More symbol than reality. She wears her mask and behind it smiles—she has a job and that’s good, but this is yet another display and she is expendable. We all are.
As the collection progresses, the geographic and thematic focus dilates. We always come back to the borough, but we venture further out (from ancient Mongolia to Nicaragua to late 20th century Chicago) and deeper in (through American legacies of immigrant exploitation, state-sanctioned violence, and miscegenation laws). And Jones’ women continue marching and embracing, their sorrows and spheres of influence widening.
In “Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt sing ‘Telling Me Lies’,” Jones invokes Supreme Court plaintiff Mildred Loving, cleaved north-to-south between her devotions, a pilgrim in American legal history:
Not even a prize like Helen, just a hellion Trying to get away from the men who cut her speech in half…
And if you’re the dark girl, pretty and smiling If you’re the brown girl walking down the road
And if the blond boy who loves you wants to marry you What could you do before 1964?
How many Walked away from their mothers, sisters, cousins, Passed into another land, just to have an ordinary life
Where their name meant what they wanted it to be.
And in “Crying in Cassis for the Queen of Soul—Aretha Franklin dead at 76,” Jones presents an international community united and triumphant, even as it grieves. Aretha’s voice becomes a Black Everywoman in perennial motion towards a version of true home in America:
The Queen of Soul. The voice that marked and framed A generation of citizens American, then global SOUL In Dakar, Accra, Tunis, Johannesburg, SOUL in Marseille Manchester, London, Paris, Berlin on the radio In Cologne, Santiago, Tokyo, and Chiang Mai. Her voice trails Memphis, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Great Migration in chords and harmonies, melodies memorable Choruses repeated. Trails of tenderness and terror. Woman on the road. Body loved, betrayed, slapped about, Salved with new kisses. Woman on the road. Queen of the train tracks, bus routes, plane rides, Car trips. The Great Migration’s circles of motion Moving in her voice, a legacy…
For all the distance covered in The Beloved Community, Brooklyn, “green as the grass in Lorca’s fingers,” emerges as the real beloved, the book’s compass rose, and the language, timbre, and tempo of the poems reflects this: when jovial, a casual conversational cadence, like a holler from the bodega; when mournful, the meditative somberness of a Sunday sermon. These poems could easily sag under the weight of their grief, yet Jones’ short, sharp-talking lines, staccato sentences, and light-on-feet litanies propel the reader down the paths she has paved. In conversation with forbears in an enduring literary lineage, Jones pinches and stretches the virtual map between micro and macro: E.B. White city, Walt Whitman county, Betty Smith block, Spike Lee stoop.
Whitman in particular, perhaps: In her 1981 essay, “For the Sake of People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us” feminist author and activist June Jordan (a mentor, friend, and contemporary of Jones), praises a style of poem where there is “nothing obscure, nothing contrived, nothing an ordinary straphanger in the subway would be puzzled by”; she goes on to champion a poetry that “begins with a reverence for human life… aspirations to a believable, collective voice and, consequently, emphatic preference for a broadly accessible spoken language. Deliberately balancing perception with vision, it seeks to match moral exhortation with sensory report.” In The Beloved Community, Jones responds to a call across decades from her own sisterhood / fellowship / community of writers, and in so doing, gathers us all.
