A poet's migration. (poetic license).

I've lived nearly all my life down South and it shows in my poetry. The cadence of the lines, the historical subject matter I choose, and my attention to narrative--that probably comes from sitting by an oil drum barbecue grill listening to my Uncle Vess tell lies. Except for four years--I can't remember at the beginning of my life, and another year in my twenties teaching college in Cleveland--I'd never really been anywhere else except down South and I never really wanted to.

Recently, I had an opportunity to teach creative writing at a small liberal arts college in Illinois. It would mean a move of more than a thousand miles, away from my mother and family in Talladega, Alabama, where I was teaching at my alma mater, Talladega College. My mother told me "you need adventure," and urged me to leave and advance my academic career. I didn't understand what she meant. What could be more adventurous than seeing how long I could stay outdoors on any given Alabama summer day without developing heat stroke?

Friends urged me to leave my "comfort zone." But what did they know? Most of them had parents who had migrated North from the South. As far as I was concerned, my friends had unfaithfully discarded their true identity and were trying to drag me along with them into forgetfulness.

I loved Alabama and its black inhabitants: the crowd of dark faces at the grocery store in the evening, the chicken wing shacks across the railroad tracks, the white shoes black folks loved to wear long after Labor Day. The clapboard churches in the middle of the woods and the way the holy spirit tipped those buildings to and fro on Sundays.

A languor, a delicious sense of predictability had invaded my blood. After years of turbulent and painful soul-searching during adolescence and my twenties, I finally knew who I was. My friends were right. I had found a comfort zone, a home both within and without. And my poetry showed this sense of peaceful place, in a good way, I hoped. I was worried about my writing and what it would amount to if I left this place of comfort after struggling for so long to find it. What would happen to my poems? Could I "truly" be a southern poet if I didn't live in the South anymore? If the ground beneath me didn't vibrate with the actual history of my people, how could I record the poems I knew I was meant to write?

I remember the day that I left Talladega; it was a typical mid-August scorcher. Even with the windows up and the air blasting on high, the heat tapped slyly at the glass. "You can run but you can't hide," the sun seemed to be saying to me. The countryside was lovely and rolling in that wild Alabama way, but as I neared the Tennessee state line, the landscape flattened into cotton fields, the sinister beauty of the creamy blossoms deceptive to any outsider. This was the real South, the "dirty South" those fierce brothers rap about on the radio. If I closed my eyes, I knew I could see the backs of my ancestors bent nearly double as they tried to pluck the cotton from the bush. Perhaps, I could even picture my mother as she was 60 years ago, a child in Georgia cotton fields identical to these of Alabama, except for a small technicality of geography.

A sadness came over me. From someplace deep in me I felt a song, tears, and words trying to escape. As I drove past those fields, I sent up a short prayer. I kept on going, taking a journey thousands of black folk, maybe even millions, had taken before. Like the red dirt of the place I was leaving behind, I would cradle those folks, their memory, their story--at least that is what I prayed for. I held on to the belief of the faithful, that I would not forget those voices whispering their poems to me.

--Honoree Fanonne Jeffers is the author of The Gospel of Barbecue and the forthcoming Outlandish Blues.