South Flight

Bridging an extended South and the tapering grasslands of the Great Plains, Oklahoma isn’t often the central focus of discussions about Black migration in the 20th century. Enter Jasmine Elizabeth Smith’s debut collection, an epistolary love story set in the aftermath of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, when Jim Waters is forced to move north for work, leaving his beloved Beatrice Chapel behind. Smith gives us a sense of 1920s’ Oklahoma with a rangy vernacular embodied in the voices of Jim and Beatrice, whose letters evince both authentic expression and poetic innovation:

[…] how might I chorus
hornets into sonnet
when my mouth feels
a containment? my tongue stiff,
an unsoaked reed, I keep
tryin to play […]

Elsewhere, we observe sharecroppers and bootleggers, cypress swamps, fields thick with sorghum, chickasaw, tickseed, and ryegrass. Smith’s expansive lexicon and penchant for listing gives the collection as a whole an atmospheric weight, but it yields mixed results in specific poems, and at times, such listing can feel dry and uninspired. But in “Bodies Seen at or Disposal Sites: In Lack of Carnations,” Smith enumerates the sites of the Tulsa murders by listing the street names, sometimes pointing to the specific corner and cross-street(s) where those who were killed had lived, to chilling effect. 

Smith calls out the larceny that was central to the founding of the state of Oklahoma, and shows how such violent acts of appropriation are embedded in our cultural history and remain tragically pervasive. We read about white settlers (called Sooners) who stole land from native nations, and about the white supremacist rioters who took everything from Black communities across the United States during the Red Summer of 1921. In “Zouzou,” a poem named for the eponymous French film starring Josephine Baker, the speaker asks: “Do they call you beautiful / for one of your kind? Pocket your songs / and measure your skin for couture?” It’s a fitting, final indictment that brings Smith’s book into conversation with our own moment of reckoning.