Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water: Poems

by E. Hughes

A debut collection of lyric poems interrogating the generational implications of the Great Migration to Northern California. 

Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water, a debut collection by E. Hughes, marries personal narrative with historical excavation to articulate the intricacies of Black familial love, life, and pain. Tracing the experiences of a southern Black family, their migration to the San Francisco Bay area, and the persistent anti-Blackness there (despite the state’s insistence that it is/was not involved in the US’ projects of imperialism or chattel slavery), Hughes illuminates the intersections of history, grief, and violence.

At the book’s heart is “The Accounts of Mammy Pleasant,” a persona poem written from the perspective of the formerly enslaved abolitionist and financier Mary Ellen Pleasant who is thought to have helped fund John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Alongside this historical account, Hughes deftly weaves in the story of a contemporary Black family navigating the generational trauma resulting from the Great domestic violence and racialized violence, familial love and loyalty, the work of parenting, and the work of being a child. Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water reveals in its pages that, while many things have changed over time, ultimately the question of what “freedom” meant and looked like for Black people in the early 20th century retains the same murkiness and contradictions for Black people today. 

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published October 15, 2024

About the author

E. Hughes is the author of the poetry collection Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water (Haymarket Books 2024). They received their MFA in poetry and MA in English Literature from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Guernica Magazine, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast Magazine, Colorado Review, and The Rumpus—among others. They are a Cave Canem fellow, a semifinalist in the 2022 and 2023 92Y Discovery Contest, and longlisted for the 2021 Granum Fellowship Prize. Currently, Hughes is a PhD student in Philosophy at Emory University, where they study poetics, aesthetic theory, literary theory, and the critical philosophy of race.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Strange is the lineage of our pain,’ writes poet E. Hughes as ‘the rivers of it’s past’ come alive in brilliant prose as recollections on historical trauma in their debut collection, Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water. As Saidiya Hartman writes—serving as the collection’s epigraph—‘history [is] an open wound’ and from this wound pours painful reflections on the poet’s individual family alongside the generational trauma of Black Americans. Hughe’s juxtaposes their personal journey away from California with their family lineage of movement from the Great Migration away from a Jim Crow south. Yet, at the center of it all is a marvelous series of poems concerning Mary Ellen “Mammy” Pleasant to further emphasize generational struggles against racism and violence. Even now, the memories / siphon through me instead of blood’ Hughes writes and history becomes a treacherous yet gorgeously rendered landscape in their vision and words.

   What I remember of
my loneliness is the wound
   of burdening others
and myself in memory,
   and the brutality of change:
It was as sudden as a cry—
   the way I became free
—from Home is a Long Cry

Poetry has an ability to make sense of the past, to transform hurt into prose that you can feel like the blade of a knife in each syllable yet, confined into words, be able to read, reflect and process it anew. ‘None of this will make sense until I look back,’ Hughes writes, yet through their poetry they begin to ‘see how the sharp edges have, somehow, // come together.’ It is a story of their family, of growing up with their siblings ‘almost destroyed / in the crossfires of our mother’s private pain,’ of an abusive father, where memory comes rather direct because— as they write in Epilogue—‘there can be no metaphors / for violence or love or violence / committed in the act of love.’ In an interview with The Arts Section, E. Hughes discusses how these poems open up the silence of a past one sometimes doesn’t want to look at.

‘In so many ways, the entire collection is about silence, about what is unsayable—but also what happens when we pursue, in literary language, the opening of silence…So much of what I wanted to say existed beyond words—and it still does. Thus, the poems had to become something more profound than the abject failure of language—they had to become about the role of affect and one’s attempt to find ground for a certain kind of violence exiled in prosaic language…which is to say they embrace a certain uncertainty—an empty fullness.’

The silence cracks open, which is often painful yet powerfully rendered in these poems. They are full of reflections on family, such as Meet-Cute in Menlo Park with a tender moment between her parents as children can be a source of pain when recognizing that the sweet child is ‘the boy who will become my drunken father’ and leads the family to ruin. ‘Their story begins much like it ends—with children trying / to understand shame—eager to feel any kind of love.’ Still, each poem is so full of heart it is impossible to turn away.

Historiography
   c. Redwood City 1950

The redwoods careen over the Santa Cruz
   Mountains with the compulsion of
stampeding herds. The expanse of pine,
   green as ache, splinters from the ground
like shrines erect for a god full of promises.
   Looking to the mountains and redwoods
as signs for progress and salvation, Big
   Mama followed her sons to this forest
by the bay. Redwood City, a refuge for Black
   folk fleeing the deathly current
of the south. Big Mama ran from Noxapater
   and that house that stat up on bricks
with holes in the subflooring that the rats
   would get through. Big Mama ran
from Big Daddy his violent, drunken stupors
   that colored her life. She left it all south.
California must be better than the north—New York,
   Detroit, and Chicago—she must have said
to herself expecting it to be true, expecting
   the unresolved past stays deadened, unalive
in the need of her grandchildren. Her past is buried
   in a capsule at the base of a cypress tree
that grows in the bay of our heart—in this ledger
   there are the groanings of women, the callous
calls of children eaten by secret and violent fathers
   and mothers, and grandmothers, heart-rhythms
of our family who would say None of us suffered—
   Yet here we are burning in the aftermath.

The poet chronicles their own movement through the country leaving family behind despite the agony of it where ‘the leaving was that destructive’ she writes in What Should We Call This Space, ‘an invisible line drawn in time between / what we were and what we can’t be now.’ But there is also freedom to be found in the struggle. In I Ran Until I Could No Longer she writes:

crossing over miles of rural
terrain until there was no evidence
of home, just the backbone of the Sierras
and everything I have failed to put
to language

The sense of language is quite lovely here though, and readers will certainly empathize with Hughes through their trials and troubles.

‘Our history refuses to forgive—even as I open
myself wide enough to hold two truths:

Love and pain.’

In the center of the collection are the series of poems in The Accounts of Mammy Pleasant, which turn back into history to examine generational trauma and strife. The poems follow the story of Mary Ellen “Mammy” Pleasant (1814-1904) an activist, Gold Rush entrepreneurm, and the American woman to be a self-made millionaire, preceding even Madam C.J. Walker. Pleasant is also believed to have funded John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. They are quite engaging, showing her path into literacy and into the legacy she would leave behind. Such as in On a Voyage to Literacy:

Do not give this world
your flesh. Make callous the feeling of her

lash, of her criticism—learn the curvature,
the ascent and descent of sound with each
stroke of a letter—learn to write your name.

It was a fascinating history lesson as I had not known of Mary Pleasant beforehand and the way in which the poems of the present and the poems of the past inform upon each other is quite impressive.

'I want the past to
tell me something different of our ending—
History tells me this is too much to ask.'
—from In San Jose, We Sliced Tomatoes

I greatly enjoyed Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water and have been rather taken with the poetic style of E. Hughes as a method towards historical investigation and processing of memory. ‘ I am trying / to make you an archive, / latch onto the stories of our bodies— / a long blanket of stars— / tell’ and this archive of memory and legacy is one not to miss. A fantastic read.

5/5

Black Women Standing Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water
   c. African American Museum & Library, Oakland 2019

The likeness of four women is rendered mono-
chrome on a white banner—the floral

patterns on their cotton dresses and their straw
sunhats, ornamented in satin ribbons,

are obscured by shutter and light. Their long sleeves
gather loosely at the elbow giving time away—

perhaps the photo was taken in the 1920s or 30s—
some forty years before my grandparents became

migrants. The women stand ankle-deep in Pacific
water, perhaps on an eastern shore

of the San Francisco Bay, hands pressed
to their caps, careful not to let the diablos

winds catch their hats, careful not to allow
a determined sun on their brown faces.

It looks as if it were a clear day—perfect
to capture this moment: a hill slowly

ascending and waning, the sagebrush grasped
in wind blowing gracefully toward tightly

packed sand, saltwater rippling gently against
the petite banks of the women’s ankles.

Each’s happiness seems simple—a warm day
by water miles from Jim Crow and history.

Now as I stand, my neck craned for my need,
looking toward this past, I want

these women to tell me something new of survival—
of the cruel way light obscures pain. In this photo,

I see mostly my dispossession—the buried story
of the west’s fathomless past—ordinary, opaque

with all of it rupturing.

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a compelling read.
.
Here’s your warning: section 1 is heavy. If you don’t want to read about child abuse (and trying to be an adult grappling with your love for the person who hurt you) then this is not for you. My favorites were “Portrait of My Father” and “Aporia.”
.
Section 2 is a first person POV account of Mary Ellen “Mammy” Pleasant’s life and I really enjoyed it. Probably my favorite segment of the book. My favorite was poem “1. Truth and Lies.”
.
“…You see, south of the Canadian
line, freedom slips the imagination and
the circadian rhythm of justice is interrupted.”
.
In Section 3, the author returns to her family history but dives deeper into the past, tracing clues to her parents’ evolutions. My favorites were “Must Have Left Its Mark,” “Elegy” (SWOON), and “Our Past Bowed Like the Branches of a Madrone Tree.”
.
Also the Epilogue:
“…we might not survive the span
of my need to say this—“
.
Try it. I think you’ll find it a powerful read.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth the read. Difficult, intense, and moving.

[Deirdre Megan Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I offered my mother the cracked alabaster jar of my child body, trying to heal the wreckage of us.” This novel had me in tears too often. The emotion and distress, beautiful writing.