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Going Home
GOING HOME charts a journey of travel and return as experienced by Sista V (a.k.a. Vaughnette Goode-Walker) creator of the popular Footprints of Savannah Walking Tour and a long-time hostess of poetry open mics in Savannah, Georgia, and elsewhere.
70 pages, Paperback
First published May 12, 2010
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About the author
Sista V
1 book1 followerA native of Savannah, Georgia, Sista V, who is known as Vaughnette Goode-Walker, is the creator of the Footprints of Savannah Walking Tour, which covers the “complete story of slavery in Savannah,” and the director of cultural diversity for the world-famous Telfair Art Museum. In addition, she is a former journalist for CNN and a renowned poet whose first book, Going Home came out in May 2010.
Her resume also includes work as a broadcast journalist and producer for Chicago’s WVON Radio, and serving as a news writer for ABC Radio Network. In recent years, she has published articles in the Savannah Morning News and was among the contributing authors for the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Facts On File).
Her resume also includes work as a broadcast journalist and producer for Chicago’s WVON Radio, and serving as a news writer for ABC Radio Network. In recent years, she has published articles in the Savannah Morning News and was among the contributing authors for the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Facts On File).
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 26, 2010
A Worthy Addition to Savannah's Literary Legacy
Precisely as the humble title implies, the thirty-three lyrically-styled poems that comprise Going Home, by Savannah poet and historian “Sista V” (a.k.a. Vaughnette Goode-Walker) demonstrate one of the most powerful kind of journeys that an individual can take. It is the journey from childhood beginnings in the poet’s ancestral homeland of the American Southeast to travels and discoveries in the larger national and international community.
In the twelve-stanza title poem, the author recalls days spent “crabbing from Miss Mary’s dock” with her grandmother:
It’s low tide and that sandbar
is showing itself again.
Grandmama says that’s why we crab
from the dock, instead of taking
the little boat out.
She says the boat got stuck
on the sandbar once.
I think the real reason is--
she can’t swim and I can’t either
and those crab[s] can swim
up to the dock just the same.”
--© Sista V
Her moving word images provide lasting portraits of the kind of heritage that Gulf Coast residents are referring to when they speak of “the way of life” endangered by the BP oil spill. It isn’t only about the harm inflicted upon the natural environment but that done to human traditions which allowed one generation to pass on values and customs and love to the next.
Memories and culture throb like living breathing things, or their very insistent spirits, throughout the pages of Going Home. Poems such as “The Mulberry Trees,” “Miss Melissa’s Grandson,” and “A Coffeehouse Memory” escort readers deep into the shared ancestral consciousness of the people and the land.
The journey recorded by Sista V also takes readers beyond the people and neighborhoods of the Southeast to the mango-scented streets of Jamaica, where the poet observes the following:
Missed traditions,
like family, brothers in control
with no one to interfere.
Had all this as I grew up
in the segregated South.
Now, here it is again…
Readers travel as well when “An Ex-Reporter Goes to the Audubon Ballroom, Harlem, USA, 1996.” There, she recalls with quiet pain and horror of the day when, “A little past three, Malcolm [X] came out and gave the ‘greeting’” just before losing his life to the bullets of assassins.
Perhaps the ultimate journey that any individual must undertake is that which leads to a definitive realization of self. Sista V illustrates the significance of such a journey for her in the boldly titled “Black Giantess,” in which she stakes claim to personal empowerment “with all the strength from within her breasts.”
The journey to self is also evident in “Good Morning Life…,” a poem which many who attended the Gallery Espresso open mic readings might recognize as the poet’s signature piece. In it, she acknowledges a hard-won lesson: “in order to live life and love life/ one must have the patience/ to learn life.” The rewards of such patience are celebrated on page after page of Going Home in the form of rare community snapshots, timeless folk wisdom, and a deep passion for life as the poet knows it.
by Aberjhani
author of The River of Winged Dreams
and co-author of ELEMENTAL The Power of Illuminated Love
Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Precisely as the humble title implies, the thirty-three lyrically-styled poems that comprise Going Home, by Savannah poet and historian “Sista V” (a.k.a. Vaughnette Goode-Walker) demonstrate one of the most powerful kind of journeys that an individual can take. It is the journey from childhood beginnings in the poet’s ancestral homeland of the American Southeast to travels and discoveries in the larger national and international community.
In the twelve-stanza title poem, the author recalls days spent “crabbing from Miss Mary’s dock” with her grandmother:
It’s low tide and that sandbar
is showing itself again.
Grandmama says that’s why we crab
from the dock, instead of taking
the little boat out.
She says the boat got stuck
on the sandbar once.
I think the real reason is--
she can’t swim and I can’t either
and those crab[s] can swim
up to the dock just the same.”
--© Sista V
Her moving word images provide lasting portraits of the kind of heritage that Gulf Coast residents are referring to when they speak of “the way of life” endangered by the BP oil spill. It isn’t only about the harm inflicted upon the natural environment but that done to human traditions which allowed one generation to pass on values and customs and love to the next.
Memories and culture throb like living breathing things, or their very insistent spirits, throughout the pages of Going Home. Poems such as “The Mulberry Trees,” “Miss Melissa’s Grandson,” and “A Coffeehouse Memory” escort readers deep into the shared ancestral consciousness of the people and the land.
The journey recorded by Sista V also takes readers beyond the people and neighborhoods of the Southeast to the mango-scented streets of Jamaica, where the poet observes the following:
Missed traditions,
like family, brothers in control
with no one to interfere.
Had all this as I grew up
in the segregated South.
Now, here it is again…
Readers travel as well when “An Ex-Reporter Goes to the Audubon Ballroom, Harlem, USA, 1996.” There, she recalls with quiet pain and horror of the day when, “A little past three, Malcolm [X] came out and gave the ‘greeting’” just before losing his life to the bullets of assassins.
Perhaps the ultimate journey that any individual must undertake is that which leads to a definitive realization of self. Sista V illustrates the significance of such a journey for her in the boldly titled “Black Giantess,” in which she stakes claim to personal empowerment “with all the strength from within her breasts.”
The journey to self is also evident in “Good Morning Life…,” a poem which many who attended the Gallery Espresso open mic readings might recognize as the poet’s signature piece. In it, she acknowledges a hard-won lesson: “in order to live life and love life/ one must have the patience/ to learn life.” The rewards of such patience are celebrated on page after page of Going Home in the form of rare community snapshots, timeless folk wisdom, and a deep passion for life as the poet knows it.
by Aberjhani
author of The River of Winged Dreams
and co-author of ELEMENTAL The Power of Illuminated Love
Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Displaying 1 of 1 review