Since Friday, Nashville social media has been abuzz with praise for local poet and author Caroline Randall Williams, who published an op-ed in The New York Times. “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument” is an indictment of white Southern pride and an exorcism of its demons.
The opening paragraphs stopped me in my tracks: “I have rape-colored skin,” Williams writes. “My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.
“If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.”
Williams will read her essay and answer questions on Instagram Live (@caroranwill) at 6 p.m. Tuesday, June 30.
The op-ed states Williams’ truth plainly: “I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.”
Williams is a descendent of the Harlem Renaissance luminary Arna Bontemps, Tennessee state senator and Nashville civil rights attorney Avon Williams, and Edmund Pettus, a Confederate general and grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. But her essay doesn’t grapple with this complicated heritage. Williams has already had her reckoning. Rather, she asks readers to do the reckoning, to come to terms with the defiant Southern pride that is not great or noble, but “a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.”
In addition, Williams announced on social media that she will appear on MSNBC in an interview with Joy Reid at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, July 1.
Williams is one of Nashville’s greatest contemporary poets and the author of Lucy Negro Redux, a stunning book of poetry that was adapted by Nashville Ballet and scored by Carolina Chocolate Drops founder Rhiannon Giddens last year. Williams performed as the ballet’s narrator alongside ballerina Kayla Rowser — and it was the arts event of the year. Buy Lucy Negro Redux from Third Man Books here.
