Madness Like Morning Glories by Doris Davenport (review)

Doris Davenport. Madness Like Morning Glories. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2005. 58 pages. Hardback $26.95; paper $18.95. In Madness Like Morning Glories, Doris Davenport has arranged a reunion of voices and spirits that recreate one of the many lost communities of days gone by. But this is no maudlin affair! Oh no— Davenport had given new life to Soque Street, a black community in South Appalachia that recalls the poet'sown hometown in North Georgia. In so doing, Davenport has resurrected the people who gave life to Soque Street and invites them to tell their stories. And do they ever tell stories! That is whatisso delightful about the collection.Its narrative poems are arranged so that they confirm or contest other stories and give new perspectives on commonly held truths—or carefully kept secrets—of this tightly knit community. AU of the characters claim a certain authority that others do not have and when they all start talking at the same time, it is indeed a cacophonous multivocal feast! Some of the more compelling voices are those of Lutesha Brown, a "conjure woman with attitude," and Miz Clio Savant, a refugee from Charleston who finds sanctuary of sorts in the North Georgia hills. Lutesha Brown "fixes" the handsome and devilish Claude Davenport because he makes love to her but marries someone else. Miz Clio 77 leaves Charleston to save her brother who got mixed up with the wrong girl, but in order to do so she must leave behind the girl she herself loves. Added to these are other testimonials about Claude Davenport and Claude's own story told in his positively arrogant and beautiful way: "Tm a grown man, don't take no/ stuff from nobody. Never have, never will." Enough said. One of the important revelations Davenport makes about Soque Street is its heritage—its peculiar mix ofAfrican American, Caucasian, and Native American bloodlines, a rather common occurrence in the hills of Appalachia but one of the aspects that is often left unexplored if not unmentioned altogether. Davenport gives the etymology of Soquee ("Sak-wi-Yi") and traces the meaning of Soquee to the "Cherokee word for the Hill, /cross the railroad track, /in the Appalachian foothills, /where madness runs like the Chattahoochee River. / Like kudzu in the mind." In reconstructing the town, Davenport recalls the typical mix of those African American communities before integration where black people of all persuasions, educational levels, and socio-economic standings lived and interacted among each other on a daily basis, not without conflict certainly, but always with a sense of community. There are the churches (Shady Grove Baptist Church), the school (Cornelia Regional [Colored] High School), the cafes (Sally's Cafe), and a host of interesting characters that populate the place. These are compelling stories about a time and place now gone but whose spirits, voices, and legacies continue to live in its sons and daughters wherever they happened to reside. Although the collection of poems is both moving and compelling, I am often struck by the lack of poetry in many of the individual poems. While Davenport captures beautifully the rhythms of black speech— from its most vernacular forms to its most pretentious degrees—much of what she writes is decidedly non-poetic. The place is both real and magical, but, again, not rendered in poetically. Frankly, I often found myself wondering why someone as accomplished as Davenport would mangle many perfectly beautiful prose narratives by arranging them to look like poems. The shorter poems are perhaps the most poetic, but despite their lyricism even they tend to be cryptic. Even so, Madness Like Morning Glories is a tremendously important contribution to Appalachian literature. For far too long its minority voices have been silent. Doris Davenport has remedied that silence in a very vocal and provocative way. —Warren J. Carson 78 ...