African Americans in South Texas History

“A Pearl of Great Price”

“A Pearl of Great Price” Socio-Literary Activism in the Life andWritings of Olga Samples Davis JEANETTE NyDA PAssTy rEGIONAl VErsE Is rArEly A sOuGHT-AFTEr commodity in the literary marketplace; nevertheless, A Time To Be Born, by African American poet, playwright, educator, and social activist Olga samples Davis, appeared in four editions. Palo Alto Review founding editor Ellen shull has lauded Davis’s poems as “packaged exuberance,”“black pearls,” finding in the works themselves “joy, laughter, soul, goodness, beauty, peace . . . faith, hope, love.” This study seeks to explore biocritically—on both the physical and metaphysical planes—Davis’s poems;her one-act play,Artemisia (1993); and her collaborative, multimedia, multi-ethnic art exhibit, Ageless Women,Timeless Stories (1997),a celebration of sixteen unsung regional feminist archetypes. No study of Davis is complete unless it includes a biographical perspective. Davis’s mother, Browning McKinney samples, was widowed early, but she taught her children, Olga, Carlotta, and ronald, the value of education by pursuing it for herself and imparting it to others. From her mother Davis also received a “deep spiritual base, and that was the foundation of [her] existence.” Beginning in their earliest childhood, Davis and her sister were taught the “Mamaisms” that reminded them daily “who [they] were, and Whose [they] were” (that is, the lord’s). Davis’s lifelong “Walk of Faith,” which is matrilineal, has borne fruit, not only in what she terms the “sometimes encoded spirituality” in her paintings and poems, but in her social activism as well. soup kitchens, homeless shelters, battered women’s centers, impoverished 314 JEANETTE NyDA PAssTy public schools, and nursing homes are among the “list of one hundred agencies” Davis and the st. Philip’s College students she teaches have benefited with their volunteer efforts. But it was a 1989 pilgrimage to the African motherland—to Gambia , Ghana, the Ivory Coast, liberia, senegal, and sierra leone—and especially to “the village of Juffure, where Binta Kinte, Alex Haley’s precious African relative, lives,” and to the slave castles on the senegalese island of Goree, that caused Davis to hear “all those spirits . . . calling out” to her. This biocritical journey will venture into all of the above, so as to evoke the life, explore the works, and thereby celebrate the social and literary achievements of Olga samples Davis. It is seven o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, November 7, 1995. The staff from Klru-TV in Austin is already on the set as the four poets arrive.They will be taping the third of three segments of a program called Poetry Aloud.After hours of preparation and rehearsal, the poets will read in a simulated coffee house,to musical accompaniment, before a live audience; each reading will be prefaced by a statement of the poet’s personal aesthetic.At 5 P.M., Naomi shihab Nye, her sensitive face helmeted by glossy brown hair gathered into a ponytail at the base of her neck, leads off the program:“you have to pause to hear a poem, truly.To write a poem, you pause.To read a poem, you pause. And I think that our lives are such at the end of this century that we need more pause. I think that’s what poetry can give us.”1 Nye’s reading of a poem that transmutes a colorful holiday parade through the streets of downtown san Antonio into a sequence of metaphysical metaphors meets with warm applause from her audience . susan Bright, blonde and fair—with glittering eyes, flushed cheeks, and feminist fire—then pays tribute to Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary shelley.Enthusiastically applauded in her turn,she yields the spotlight to the Byronic black curls, bronze skin, latino voice, and impish multicultural humor of Jesse Cardona, whose “muscles are monolingual,”2 and whose trip into the panaderia for pan dulce is a retrospective rite of passage back into his chicano youth, for himself and for his delighted audience. Pearl฀of฀Great฀Price฀ 315฀ In regal purple headdress and dashiki, with eye-catching earrings, caramel complexion,immutable presence and grace,Olga samples Davis arrives next on stage.Her reading is the longest and the most sensual; her audience becomes progressively more involved in the undulating rhythms of her voice—and the eloquent gestures of her arms—until it is transformed into her chorus,chanting the refrains to her poems.Her rapport with each individual in the studio grows into a...