Walking Back Up Depot Street

by Minnie Bruce Pratt

Selected as ForeWord Magazine’s   1999 Gay/Lesbian Book of the Year

In Pratt's fourth volume of poems, Walking Back Up Depot Street , we are led by powerful images into what is both a story of the segregated rural South and the story of a white woman named Beatrice who is leaving that home for the postindustrial North. Beatrice searches for the truth behind the public story-the official history-of the land of her childhood. She struggles to free herself from the lies she was taught while growing up-and she finds the other people who are also on this journey.   

In these dramatically multivocal narrative poems, we hear the words and rhythms of Bible Belt preachers, African-American blues and hillbilly gospel singers, and sharecropper country women and urban lesbians. We hear the testimony of freed slaves and white abolitionists speaking against Klan violence, fragments of speeches by union organizers and mill workers, and snatches of songs from those who marched on the road to Selma.  Beatrice walks back into the past and finds the history of resistance that she has never been taught; she listens to her fellow travelers as they all get ready to create the future.

Genres: Poetry, Queer

88 pages, Paperback

First published March 11, 1999

About the author

Minnie Bruce Pratt (b. September 12, 1946 in Selma, Alabama) is an U.S. educator, activist, and award-winning poet, essayist, and theorist. Pratt was born in Selma, Alabama, grew up in Centreville, Alabama and graduated with an honors B.A. from the University of Alabama (1968) and a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of North Carolina (1979). She is a Professor of Writing and Women’s Studies at Syracuse University where she was invited to help develop the university’s first Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Study Program. She emerged out of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s and 1980s and has written extensively about race, class, gender and sexual theory. Pratt, along with lesbian writers Chrystos and Audre Lorde, received a Lillian Hellman-Dashiell Hammett award from the Fund for Free Expression to writers "who have been victimized by political persecution." Pratt, Chrystos and Lorde were chosen because their experience as "a target of right-wing and fundamentalist forces during the recent attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts."[1] Her political affiliations include the International Action Center, the National Women's Fightback Network, and the National Writers Union. She is a contributing editor to Workers World newspaper. Pratt's partner is author and activist Leslie Feinberg.
[from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnie_B...]

Reviews

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pratt's work inhabits a very particular space around the deep South and lesbian poetics: one which can make her work harder to market than it should be. Pratt composes her longer narrative arc like a composer, which poems and sections feeling like musical movements as much as pieces of narrative. The dramatic persona is speaking but is shown: the poem's have a protagonist in Beatrice not a mask. Her journey out of the South seems to mirror Pratt's reception in it, one wants to escape but not entirely. Pratt's strength are in maintaining that vision with her precision craft and waves of linguistic and narrative layering. An excellent book.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was 24 years ago that I saw Minnie Bruce read from this, her then-new collection of poems. They’re still as powerful now as they were then—more so, even, as I know so much more now than when I first read them. The world is a dimmer place without her bright light in it.

[Devin · Rating 5 out of 5]

To know Minnie-Bruce was to love her. To listen to her speak, which I spent many countless days doing, was to be astonished that she was just as poetic in casual conversation as she is in her writing. I hate talking on the phone and everyone who knows me, knows this. But MB would call me "just to check in", as she always said, and even a quick 5 minute call would be like a poem. By the time of her untimely death in 2023, she was one of the only people I'd actively answer the phone for; I could talk to her always. And now nearly 2 years after her death, not hearing her voice anymore is like finishing a book of her poetry, but at least I can come back to the books. I miss my friend very much.

MB and I both grew up in central Alabama, 60 years apart, so the visuals she writes of in this wonderful collection, I can see, because I was there too, just in another time. The Cahaba River, I know it well. The dirt she ate, I know of, too. The feelings of loneliness and love that exudes from being a queer Southerner, I know all too well.

MB had this incredible ability to be beautifully poetic and autobiographical at the same time, not a feat everyone is capable of. You'll be pleased to know, as I said above, she was just as poetic in day to day conversations. I miss those conversations very much. But at least I can come back to the books.

[Lorraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was assigned to read this collection as an undergraduate, and I haven't looked at it since.

It is phenomenally good, probably the best volume of poetry I've read this year. All the poems are narrative and about the same character Beatrice who grows up in a segregated South and who is also a closeted lesbian. The poems deal with race (black, white, native American), gender, sexuality, poverty.

Highly, highly recommend this one.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Past the store at the corner she lingered beneath the magnolia to pick up a ripe cone with flushed folds, with scores of mouths, a tongue of seed in each. The red fingers of seed pressed into vulval curves.”

“Beatrice looked at despair and walked out. She wouldn’t lie down and die. She would act contrary somehow, like the wasps that fought the front porch screen, battered by light on the side brighter than anything.”

[Hilary Nihlen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Minnie Bruce Pratt is a talented writer who makes me want to read more poetry.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 P916w 1999