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All This, and Honeysuckles Too
- The University Press of Kentucky
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DORIS DIOSA DAVENPORT Born in 1949 in Gainesville, Georgia, with a "caul," according to her great-aunt, doris diosa davenport sees with the aesthetic/politicized eyes of a working-class, lesbianfeminist , Affrilachian (Southern Appalachian African American) visionary. She is a performance poet, educator, and writer with a B.A. in English from Paine College in Augusta, an M.A. from SUNY/Buffalo, and a Ph.D. from the University ofSouthern California in Los Angeles. She has published an eclectic range of articles, book reviews , essays, and four books ofpoetry: it's like this (1980), eat thunder and drink rain (1982), voodoo chile/slight return (1991), and Soque Street Poems (1995).Writing grants have been awarded to davenport by the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Syvenna Foundation for Women, and the Georgia Council for the Arts. She is a member ofAlternate Roots, a consortium of artist-activists in Atlanta, and is available for poetry performances or lectures via SPEAK OUT!, a speakers' bureau for social change. * * * All This, and Honeysuckles Too Once, in an aerobics class, the instructor told us to check our pulses. I checked, then told her I didn't have one, so she showed me how to find it. In a similar way, external sources taught me how to find my heart: northeast Georgia. While living here, from age five to fifteen, I was aware that I enjoyed the scenery and the seasons. Other geographical areas, between age sixteen and forty-five, provided conscious acknowledgment ofand an aching need for "my" Appalachia. But even as a girl I already "had an I," defined by people, experiences, and landscapes of northeast Georgia. Like summer breeds insects, these southern mountains spawn eccentric people and behavior. Recently I received a postcard with my name and "Lesbian-feminist Anarchist Affrilachian" written under it. Some of all that, and educator-writer-performance poet, was already in place by age twelve. I have written extensively about my Affrilachian experiences. Some aspect of the people or the place appears in everything, prose and poetry, as anecdotes, allusions, single poems, and entire manuscripts (Soque StreetPoems, 1995). Northeast Georgia determined my worldview, behavior, and value system. I still prefer a live(ly) conversation or a good story to anything on the electronic highway. One of my favorite meals is greens and cornbread. In January 1996 I finished another book ofpoetry, Kudzu, written about my being home. So when I first considered this essay, I thought I had nothing else to say. But there is more. As much more as there are mountains and hollows and endless hidden highways and people. A frequent question from outsiders (foreigners) is "What's it near?" Out of laziness, we will say "eighty miles north of Atlanta," but that is still inaccurate. Northeast Georgia is an area of small towns in about a fifty- to seventy-mile radius , an area of red dirt, hills, rivers, lakes, forests, with twisting roads and twolane highways. Some ofthe towns are Cornelia, Clarkesville, Hollywood, Tallulah Falls, Helen, Sautee, Clayton, Mt. Airy, Toccoa, Cleveland, and Dahlonega. The towns that defined my growing-up world were in Habersham, Hall, White, and Stephens Counties. In the nineteenth century, northeast Georgia was a popular resort area to some people; to us, in the twentieth century, it was just home. The inhabitants that I knew then were mostly working-class, connected by orneriness, inaccessibility, and blood ties. And, although most of the Cherokee were forcibly removed from this area, many ofus do have Native American blood. Still, until recently most of us were multigenerational, generic Affrilachians or Eurolachians. Some were "drifters" who became permanent residents; others were [18.216.190.167] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:09 GMT) All This, and Honeysuckles Too 89 wealthy "summer people" and retirees. In the past fifteen years, happily, fairly large populations of Asians and Mexicans have moved into the area. Anyway, I was born in Gainesville but really lived and grew up in Cornelia. I attended Cornelia Regional Colored High School, one "magnet" school, which included grades one through twelve and all the African-American children from five adjoining counties (bused in, daily). This is an area of exquisite beauty with people living off in the woods along tricky, circuitous highways. Most ofthe people own their land with modest working -class homes (and trailers) and maintain a way oflife that seems, despite heavy traffic (cars and drugs) and increasing deforestation and pollution, unchanged in its basics. Basically, we...