Alabama’s First Black Poet Laureate Is Making Her Mark
Words by Moni Basu | Photos & Video by Darnell Wilburn
May 31, 2022
On a late-January flight from LaGuardia to Birmingham, the poet Ashley Jones peered out the plane window to take in the sky. It was all-knowing, the same vastness that had blanketed history’s atrocities. It had loomed over slavery and Jim Crow; borne witness to Black bodies hanging from trees and the murder of four girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church; and absorbed the venom of Bull Connor and George Wallace.
Yet the sky was luminous. Sweet, even. And when Jones saw it, she knew the plane would be descending soon. She knew she was home.
She had returned to Alabama, where she was born and raised, where she makes her life now as the state’s first Black poet laureate and, at 31, also its youngest. It’s a place, she knows, that is often seen as rigid or backward or shameful. Or all three. And certainly, a place that was or is most cruel to its Black citizenry and still struggling to reckon with racism.
And yet, for Jones, the warmth of that Alabama sky is as palpable as the fear that once consumed the streets of her native Birmingham. She chose to come back after escaping all those things people say Alabama is. Now, she sees no contradiction in loving a place that has murdered and pillaged her people. And it is because of that love that her poetry pierces its very soul.
this here the cradle of this here
nation—everywhere you look, roots run right
back south. every vein filled with red dirt, blood,
cotton. we the dirty word you spit out your
mouth. mason dixon is an imagined line—you
can theorize it, or wish it real, but it’s the same
old ghost—see-through, benign. all y’all from
alabama; we the wheel turning cotton to make
the nation move. we the scapegoat in a land built
from death. no longitude or latitude disproves
the truth of founding fathers’ sacred oath:
we hold these truths like dark snuff in our jaw,
Black oppression’s not happenstance; it’s law.
— “All Y’all Really From Alabama”
Jones’ poems are fierce. Her words string together damnations of discrimination and injustice, rooted not just in the long tentacles of slavery but also very much in her own experiences. Her poetry is as deeply political as it is personal, a reflection of how she sees the way forward. She called her third published collection Reparations Now! and wrote the title poem after reading the entirety of George Wallace’s 1963 inaugural address, in which he infamously said: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
Jones explores the traumas of yesterday and those of today: police violence, white silence, and new problems created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Through her words, she forges a way forward. And that involves a lot more than cutting a check for the sins of the past.
“Reparations. For me it means not just financial repairs to be made,” she says in a recent interview. “Of course, that is part of it. But it also means going back to that initial idea that someone snatched people from their own countries and brought them forcibly here as property. It’s understanding what our ancestors lived.
“It’s about changing the conditions in which we live,” she continues. “Leaving Black people alone. Letting us wear our hair the way we want. Letting us not feel scared when there is a police car behind us. We have been trying to show white people how to treat us right for 400 years.”
She lays down her challenge to white America: “Now it’s up to you.”
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She recalls trying to go up an airport escalator when a white man looked at her as though she were a murderer and put an arm out to protect his family.
“That’s the work I am talking about,” she says.
Government is not necessarily the place by which change needs to happen, and now the public and politicians alike are engaged in what Jones calls “the great whitelash.” It encompasses laws that restrict voting rights and bar the teaching of critical race theory or the myriad attempts to ban books like Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me.
“I mean, if you are not moved by a video of a man being murdered in the street, there is nothing to be done,” she says, referring to former police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Reparations. It’s about repair. Repairing the country, the community — and oneself.
My eyes were too small
to swallow that far-off, bright country where Kunta lived. Too small
to open around the whole sea and its ships that sailed and sailed. No
one explained that I would not become a slave, too …
— “The First Time
I Heard About Slavery”
Jones was raised by a social worker mother and a firefighter father who worked for the Birmingham Fire and Rescue Service for 26 years. He retired in 2020 and then was hired as the first Black fire chief in Midfield, about 15 minutes southwest of downtown Birmingham. Her parents, she says, were very focused on the education of their three girls and boy, and her mother taught a young Jones to read and write. She was reading by the time she was 3 and later obsessed over “Harriet the Spy.” She watched “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and “Sesame Street,” and, by the time she was 7, she had abandoned her plans to become a mystery writer and opted instead for poetry.
She attended a pioneering elementary school that embraced diversity. There were no stairs in that school, Jones recalls; only ramps. And everyone learned sign language in an attempt to erase boundaries. At 7, she was placed in a self-contained class of about 10 students who were learning at higher grade levels than their peers. She says she was one of the lower-performing kids in that class, which began a battle with self-esteem.
Jones was 5 when she first felt the sting of discrimination. Her best friend in kindergarten was a white boy with whom she often played “house.” He was the husband, she the wife. They had the same last name. They served up toy food carved from wood. Then one day his family came to visit the school. Jones caught them staring at her. The next day, her best friend had chosen a new playmate: a white girl with blond hair and blue eyes.
“I ended up internalizing that,” she says. “I thought, it must be because I am bad. It started a journey of struggling with my own worthiness.”
She was a Black girl growing up in Birmingham, and there was no sheltering her from the realities of race in America. She learned about slavery sitting on a scratchy yellow couch, sandwiched between her parents, watching the television miniseries “Roots.” She was too young to comprehend the depth of Alex Haley’s story, but at a tender age, she realized her skin color could mean something dangerous to somebody.
“I was always afraid of darkness,” she says. “I thought, someone is going to come get us.”
The fear remained throughout her formative years. So, she wrote. The little girl in her was inspired by Eloise Greenfield’s poem “Harriet Tubman” from the children’s book Honey, I Love.
“Harriet Tubman didn't take no stuff. Wasn't scared of nothing neither. Didn't come in this world to be no slave. And wasn't going to stay one either.”
Jones penned angst-ridden poems, like so many girls do, about how no one understood her. She wrote about the sky and rain. And racism.
“I have a book I made when I was 10,” she says. “I did not have the language back then. But it was still about the past and how to move forward.”
She looked at some of those poems after she’d earned an English degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and finally felt the need to move away from Alabama.
“All of us who are born in the South are eager to leave,” she says. “I mean, we grew up learning about this very difficult history. … My dad desegregated a school in Bessemer. White students threw rocks at him and his siblings.”
But Jones did not go north. Instead, she went south — to Miami, where she earned her MFA.
“Geographically, it is further south, but culturally, it is nowhere near the South,” she says. “That’s when I understood my view of the South was not the best. I had this idea that the South was to blame for everything. In truth, the South was my home, it was a place of a lot of love. I didn’t realize it until I wasn’t in it.”
She also realized that Alabama was a mirror for the 49 other states. What happened here happened elsewhere, too. Alabama did not have a monopoly on racism.
Her love of Alabama had come into plain view. For all its ugliness, it was still beautiful. And it was home.
After earning her MFA in poetry at Florida International University, Jones returned to Birmingham in 2015. Since then, the accolades have piled up. She founded the Magic City Poetry Festival and now teaches in the creative writing department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts.
On Valentine’s Day, she went to school wearing a yellow ochre jumpsuit, crimson earrings, and a feather to match in her hat — she has been a fashionista since she was a little girl. “I can’t draw or paint like my sister or dad. But I can put together an outfit,” she says.
Her mother bought her Barbie dolls. They were all Black. Jones spent hours dressing them and then re-dressing them; matched the shoes and bags. Then she translated those styles on herself. “As I went through self-esteem struggles, I found that getting dressed and enjoying that process helped. This way, I could not tell myself I was ugly. … I [was] coming to terms with my own body.”
She wrote about her dolls in “She Is Beauty, She Is Grace,” a poem dedicated to “Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, and Oluwatoyin Salau and so many killed Black girls.”
My mother always told me I was beautiful.
She oiled my scalp with proud-mother care.
She bought me baby and Barbie dolls
who shared my skin — brown beauties
who smiled back at me, whose infinite stories
I told each day in my playtime heaven.
“Black women: Everything about us is under such constant scrutiny,” she says.
Do I look angry? Are my hips too wide? Is my hair not straight enough? Is my skin too dark? Am I to blame for the things that are wrong with me, my family, society? These are questions Black women grapple with. “All this stuff the white patriarchy puts on me. Repairing is about loving myself in a more whole way,” Jones says.
Reparations are about repair.
Jones kept her Barbies, tucked away in her parents’ house in Birmingham. She took them out last summer, at the height of the Delta variant surge, and started putting outfits together again, finding empowerment in that simple act. The weight of the pandemic lifted and she could feel wrapped in the love of her parents, the love felt only at home.
Dad, every blade of grass wears your name,
on the wind, you laugh great swaths of air.
Now, the days feel more like years because you’re gone,
only memories hold your voice
and the crack of your knees stretching in the night.
— For Donald Lewis Jones
If Jones weren’t writing poetry, she’s sure she would be burning things down. She needs words to process her world. One of the most difficult poems in Reparations Now! is about Mary Turner, a pregnant Black woman in south Georgia who vowed to press charges against the men who lynched her husband. Her punishment was particularly brutal. She was hung, burned, and shot, and her baby was cut out of her womb and stomped to death.
maybe mary and her baby flew up from death
in sweaty georgia — her shallow grave shaken loose. finally free,
resurrected — it turns out, all along hell was earth …
“That is a hard story,” Jones says. “There is no other way to slice it. But it ended up with empowerment. It helps me process what happened.”
Poetry acts as a supportive mirror that allows Jones to look long and deep and find answers to the sometimes unanswerable — from lynchings, to George Floyd, to her own fight to stand tall, even amid recent losses. Her cousin died of COVID-19. Then, last April, her father, Donald Jones, died of a heart attack while on his lunch break. He was 59 and did not get to see the highest poetry honor in Alabama bestowed upon his daughter a few months later in August. She is the sole Black poet laureate in the 91 years the state has named one.
Jones fears that poetry, like classical literature or music, has become inaccessible to many ordinary Americans. She is on a mission to rectify. To give poetry a chance.
“In America, there is this way of making literature uninhabitable for regular folks,” she says. “One way to break some of that down is to change the way we show people art. It matters who you are exposed to at first.”
She thinks of her heroes, the Black women poets who paved the way for her: Rita Dove, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton. And how Eloise Greenfield’s book was the first to speak to Jones’ life as a little Black girl growing up in Birmingham.
“I don’t think art is made to hide stuff. And we shouldn’t be making it an Olympic sport to understand one line of poetry,” she says.
Jones wants to showcase poetry in Alabama. To help people see poetry everywhere, whether it’s on a popsicle stick or in the trail of a jet that has just taken off into the sky. The same Alabama sky that reigns luminous over brutality — and beauty. That Alabama sky that watches over her, always.
Moni Basu is a journalist, teacher, traveler, and red wine drinker. She worked for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and CNN. She now teaches narrative nonfiction at the University of Florida. Her ebook, Chaplain Turner's War, was published by Agate Digital in 2012.
Darnell Wilburn is a photographer, teacher, and gallery owner in Atlanta. He was born in Fort Hood, Texas. He worked as a cartoonist for The Cincinnati Herald, an African American newspaper. He’s spent the last 16 years as a freelance photographer, working for various publications and commercial clients including Essence, Ebony, Marie Claire Australia, “Shaq’s Comedy All Stars,” and GoDaddy.
