**This weekend some white lady is running a tag sale at John Hope Franklin’s house**
I take this to mean no one gives a flying fuck about me. I should
have written that with greater care. I shouldn’t have cursed. I shouldn’t
have relied on expected language (like flying) and I shouldn’t have let my lines run
so long or allowed myself to make this all about me, but seriously
if some white lady can walk around the home of John Hope Franklin
and tag all the books in that great man’s library for sale, his furniture,
his paintings, even his light switch plates—ornate works of art themselves
according to the website this white lady created so she could
more easily sell off all those pieces of black art and literature
and culture and history John Hope Franklin very consciously collected
over the 96 years of his dedicated life—then it is abundantly clear
no one gives a fuck what I do or what I write or who I know or how I act or why
I believe that how I move through the world matters to this moment
or any moment after I am gone. Every time I fool myself
into believing that who we are (I’m saying black people) might be valued, America
finds a way to prove me wrong. Though, that’s not entirely fair.
Some white lady is running an estate sale at the home of John Hope
Franklin, and someone is going to profit off the trappings of his life.
When Maya Angelou died, her house was opened also. Anyone
close enough to get to Winston Salem could take what they wanted
from her library which, I learned from someone who went
to the sale, had in it my own first two collections of poetry. I want
to believe there is something I could do to stop the sale that will go on
this Saturday at John Hope Franklin’s house (when my own
grandfather led a church in Virginia, the white woman whose estate
established the town’s library made a point of writing into the deed
a clause that refused the admission of any black man, woman
or child, and so my grandfather’s parishioners saved their money
and established a fund to assure he could purchase the books
he needed in order to write the sermons they needed to hear,
which meant he died with a substantial library, though when the time came
to parcel out his effects I was too itinerant and poor to have the means
to make a viable bid for much of anything my aunt and uncle sold), but
if I think my anger matters that would be my first mistake. I want
some institution, or Oprah, or that one rich black man I once read about
who lives in North Carolina and collects black art to show up
with a check big enough on Saturday morning to keep John Hope
Franklin’s collection intact—all those books signed directly
to the historian by writers who believed in the creation of a field
of scholarship dedicated to the study of black lives. Though I am nothing
but a fool. The word field in a sentence about black history
makes me think of slavery times. Of sharecropper times. Of convict
lease programs—which really never stopped. These are the only legacies
many people can summon up where black folks are involved.
_Camille T. Dungy is the author of_ Trophic Cascade _(Wesleyan University Press, 2017) and three other collections of poetry. Her debut essay collection,_ Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History _(W. W. Norton), will be published in June._
