THE
IRON BLADE Vol. 60, No. 3
SINCE 1955
60 Years of Ferrum College News
December , 2015
Dar He: Speaking For a Murder Victim
By Alexis Witcher On November 8, 2015, Rocky Mount’s Harvester presented a monologue written and performed by Mike Wiley entitled “Dar He: The Story of Emmitt Till.” The monologue portrayed the obstacles Emmitt Till faced and the horrific social injustice that ended his life at only 14 years old. Till was an African-American teenager from Chicago. He traveled to Mississippi in the summer of 1955 to visit his aunt and distant cousins. During an outing with his cousins at the local general store, Emmitt spoke with the wife of the white man who owned the store. Till was simply trying to purchase a pack of gum. A lot of people are not aware that Emmitt struggled with a horrible stuttering problem. His mother always told him to whistle when he could not get the words that he was desperately trying to say out. So when Emmitt was trying to talk to the woman and the words
wouldn’t come out, he whistled. casket funeral to show how badly The wife immediately took this as he was beat, all because of racial disrespectful and lewd. When the tensions. woman’s husband and locals of the Till’s story is a constant reneighborhood heard what Till had minder of the social injustice that done, they set out to find him and put him in his place. Later that night, they drug Till out of his aunt’s home and took him to a tool shed where they brutally beat him and shot him. Till’s killers were never charged with his murder. To let the world know Photo by Alexis Witcher what those men did to her son, Mike Wiley perfoming a 36 character momologue in tribute Emmit Till’s mother Till at the Harvester Center. had an open-
many African-Americans faced in the 1950s and what they continue to face today. The monologue showed how prominent segregation was in the South and the unfair treatment and utter disrespect many AfricanAmericans faced, based solely on the color of their skin. It also showed how miscommunication and racial prejudice can lead to a brutal and inhumane murder. Wiley wrote and performed the monologue because he felt people deserved to know the truth about the speculation around the brutal racially-driven murder “I wanted to write a play that attempted to tell the truth of Emmitt Till,” explained Wiley. Wiley also said he wrote and performed the monologue because he believes Till’s story is withering away and becoming just another lyric in a Kanye West song. In the course of the monologue, Wiley played 36 characters. It took him six months to collect all the facts about Till’s murder and memorize his script.
Affrilachian Poets Bring Their Love of Writing To Ferrum
By Myles T. Francisco On Nov. 9, Frank X Walker and Shauna Morgan visited Ferrum College to share their love for poetry. Morgan, introduced by Kaeyln Williams, a junior here at Ferrum College, was the first speaker. Morgan read her most recent work, “The Freedom of Sunrise” which deals with women’s experiences dealing with trauma, growth, girlhood, and womanhood. She also
Photo Courtesy of Ferrum College
An advertisement for the Frank X Walker and Shauna Morgan's visit.
read some poems from “Anthology of Appalachia” which was based on her experiences working at the University of Virginia. Walker read from some of his older work as well as the new. He read a poem about his brother’s drug addiction and his goal to constantly find that same high. Walker then started talking about the day he would remember for the rest of his life, his mother’s funeral. The last poem presented was a duet by Walker and Morgan. He read the poem in English, while she translated it into Jamaican patois. Frank X Walker, professor of English and African American and Africana studies at the University of Kentucky, is the author of more than five poetry collections, recipient of the Lannan Literary Fellowship in Poetry and the NAACP Image Award for Poetry. Walker is also a former Kentucky Poet Laureate. Before going on stage, Walker and Morgan talked about their careers and their writing. “I have always loved to
write,” Morgan said, especially when she began to read Walker’s book “Affrilachia” in the summer of 2001. “Affrilachia” was Walker’s first published collection of poetry. The word, which Walker coined, represents African American culture in Appalachia. Walker and the other Affrilachian poets bely the notion that Appalachian culture doesn’t include African American culture. Walker and Morgan spoke at their performance of how one of America’s founding fathers denied perhaps the earliest African American poet a place in American culture. Phillis Wheatley was a slave in Boston, but she was also a poet. In his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Jefferson declared “[t] he compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.” Yet Wheatley and her poetry was celebrated in both America and England. Morgan is from Jamaica then moved to South Florida, “It was a different experience for me, coming from a rural community
close to the mountains.” In Jamaica, Morgan grew up without electricity or running water. Living in South Florida, she said, she never felt “in place.” So when she first read “Affrilachia,” she was amazed to see how relatable the people in the book were. She called it her “first connection to home.” Morgan names Walker the most prolific persona, which means Walker knows how to change the tone of each of his characters voices. Morgan also enjoys how he asserts a black woman’s voice Walker began writing because of his love for books, also because of an absence of television. His being a quiet child growing up also helped his listening skills. Walker said his mother is to be thanked for the person he is, but his high school teachers who told him to fix what he was not good at helped shape the writer he would be. Even now, Walker says, the fiction writer in him is not yet fully formed. “The only reason I would stop writing,” Walker said, “is if I was dead.”