Joy Junket #34 | The Southern Route
November 17-20, 2025
Notes from an Alabama Joy Junket
Inspired by some Philly girls on Mary’s Dirt Road Tour
The kitchen has collards
Fresh hewn from the field
Plenty Black
women clean and cook
The greens
Crochet and quilt the air
Flagrantly fragrant
Souped up on unwritten recipes and secret ingredients
Ignited and simmering with ancient determination
dreamlike—
Mother Mary Pettway puts her hand to it
Whatever it is—
Mother Mary Pettway gives
With both hands
Gifts sown and sewn
Into the Black belt of Alabama
Straight Outta Gees Bend
With her Black self
Black husband and sun
Spelling us down the river
Like Black time and times been sold down
the river has some explaining to do—
Who holds the account
Of every watery grave
Fit for Black bodies who refuse
To sink, swim or drown with the dammed
Projects of America
Where even the land at the bottom of the river
Done been ours
Been took
—anyway
Who’s that dancing the funky broadway
In the middle of the world
Barefooted and free
Between a sink, a cracked window and
A washing machine?
If you can’t/won’t/don’t believe
Ask the goat, the donkeys and that blond Tennessee Walker
Chewing on the stalk
And remains of that day
Tune in tomorrow
Cuz this poem ain’t finished
This poem
This poem
This poem
ain’t for everyone
You best check
Your ancestors credentials
—OF BLACK WOMBHOOD: A GATHERING—
Project Notes, Pictures & Recommended Reading
April 5, 2025 | Museum of Black Joy | Philadelphia | A Celebration of Black Womb-Bearing Persons | In collaboration with:
With generous funding from Writers Room: UnMapping Project via Mellon Foundation
A Collective Practice:
Workshop participants shared womb words and demarcations between girlhood and womanhood, piecing them together to create a visual map from which to write.
Breathe. Create. Embody.
We gathered to share a wholesome meal with red raspberry and nettle teas, known female tonics.
Misty Sol led us in an embodied breath exercise.
We Wrote—Considering our womb-words, remembering ourselves on either side of the womanly divide: before & after the blood.
Who was I as a girl?
Who am I as a woman?
Val Ifill led us in an embodied dance, centered in a deep awareness of our wombs and hands and how they move from our spirits into the world.
A Shared Experience
Photos by Tanya Latortue
A Reflective Response:
^^^ A poem inspired by the collective energy of Black women who gathered to remember and imagine a woman’s womb-work as a source of joy. ^^^
Intentional Writing, Reflections, Gratitude & Impact
Recommended Reading
Lucille Clifton
Audre Lorde: Uses of the Erotic
June Jordan: Poem About My Rights
Gwendolyn Brooks: The Mother
Saidiya hartman: The Belly of the World
Alice Walker and her daughter. Photo by Gordan Parks
“American women are now to be pregnant because their government demands they be.”
Karintha, from Cane, by Jean Toomer