After a conversation with her new boyfriend whom she now calls husband, Stacey Brown sat down and wrote a poem. The poem she wrote turned out to be far more complex than she would have imagined.
“We were talking about the south and he made a statement saying he was never going back to the south again because of racist experiences there—he’s African American,” Brown said. “I thought about how he’d never go to the south to meet my family or see where I grew up.”
Brown, who grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, was raised in a Caucasian family that employed an African American caretaker. After moving away from the south and noticing racist themes throughout her childhood, she was surprised when, after talking to her boyfriend, she got defensive and started defending her home.
“There’s people in the south that are capable of kindness,” Brown said. “But there’s also an issue of horrible racism.”
In her book-length poem, Cradle Song, the author talks about her experiences regarding race relations in her childhood in the south—which wasn’t standard, but still had a lot of stereotypical elements.
“There was a lot of collateral damage when looking at that time when predominantly African American women would leave their own children during the day to take care of white children,” Brown said.
Brown talks about the confusing elements of race and love the sense of loss and that happens in those situations, as well as the confusion for children on either side of the spectrum.
“There’s this sort of racial ignorance and prejudice that was a longstanding dialogue when I was growing up,” Brown said. “I was really struggling with some of the racist signals my family and the older generation were giving me.”
When writing her story, Brown focused less on the concrete facts about her childhood and more on her emotional truth about life in the south. Throughout the process, she found herself grappling with the overarching racist dynamic of the area.
“What does it mean to have an African American caregiver?” Brown said. “No one spoke about the irony of being racist and then trusting an African American with their children. I was confused and pulled apart by that.”
Brown explains that when she finally left the south—after living there for 23 years—she saw the situation from a different context that changed her entire perspective of race, cultural identity and even family.
“The tangled up confusion of race and love and identity are things I grapple with in the book,” Brown said.
In addition, significant changes happened in the author’s life between when she wrote the book and the time it was being published.
“I also had a child of my own, and once I became a parent the true center of the story wasn’t so much about my relationship with the south, but my relationship with the woman that nurtured me in the south,” Brown said. “My mother and the caregiver made me want to understand what it means when we can and cannot give to each other in relationships.”
If there’s one thing Brown wants you to take away from her book, it’s that these issues of race that her and others deal with are not something that are just going to go away.
“It’s not a problem that’s going to be solved easily,” Brown said. “It’s a conversation that needs to happen. I just wanted to contribute my experience—my voice—to the conversation.”