| ChickenBones: A Journal
"Empowering the
Community Towards a Literary Lifestyle"
presents
Poetry
in the Rhythm of Life
A
Benefit & Scholarship Luncheon
for
The
Michael D. Terry Memorial Scholarship
c/o
The Baltimore School for the Performing Arts
&
ChickenBones: A Journal
http://www.nathanielturner.com
November 22, 2003 -- 2pm - 6pm
Donation:
$15
Information:
Yvonne
Terry -- 410-396-6394
rudolphlewis@hotmail.com
Directions
From
Interstate 83 South, Take the 28th Street Exit Remain
on 28th to Greenmont Avenue Turn
left on Greenmont Turn
Right on 33rd Street Turn
Left onto Ellerslie Avenue Waverly
Elementary is on Left A Report from the Editor
This November 2003 ChickenBones: A Journal
will celebrate its 2nd Anniversary (with the above event). We went
online Fall 200l. Though it has been a short period of time,
it has been a wonderful and phenomenal journey. Those who direct
the activities are a small group of six devoted individuals
residing in Baltimore, Maryland: Amin Sharif, Kinya Kiongozi,
Yvonne Terry, Keith "Bilal" Shortridge, Ernestine
Holley, and me. These individuals have contributed financial
resources from their shallow pockets and a great deal of time and
energy to make ChickenBones a success.
Of course, there has been a great corps of
writers and artists who have contributed their writings and work
to make ChickenBones one of the most extraordinary sites dedicated to the free, independent, and
noncommercial transmission of inaccessible information to the
broadest number of people. Presently, we have over 1500 text files
and over 15,000 image files that create one of the more
informative, attractive websites on the Internet. Moreover, we
have bridged a lot of gaps between writers and writers, writers
and artists, and writers and readers, and so on. We are pleased
with the service and sacrifice that all have made. But there is
still much to do.
The November 22 Benefit
"Poetry in the Rhythm of Life" is our first effort to
broaden the financial base to support ChickenBones: A Journal.
It has become a necessity. Our online journal has grown in traffic
at a much faster rate than we anticipated. From January through
June 2003, we averaged over a 1000 visitors a day. There were
steady increases month by month and we began to receive warnings
of traffic overages from our ISP and in July 2003 we had over
38,000 visitors and over 460,000 hits. For the year at that time,
over 247,000 visitors and over 2.6 million hits. Presently (22
Oct.), we have had over 400,000 visitors and over 4 million hits.
The penalty for the overage for
July was over $100. Instead of paying the penalty we decided to go
from our Bronze plan to the ISP's Silver Plan, which provided us
2.5 gigs more of transfer. That suited us fine for August: we
ended the month with over 40,000 visitors and over 435,000 hits.
The September 2003 traffic of ChickenBones:
A Journal leapt forward by over a 1,000 visitors a day. It
seems many students learned about ChickenBones on their
return to school and they have found it a great resource and they
are coming back daily. For our website is a dynamic website;
materials are being added daily and there is always something
surprisingly new. But we also have visitors from over 75 countries
(all six inhabitable continents) a month who come to ChickenBones.
Persons in Canada, the UK, Australia, Japan, the Netherlands,
France, China are the most frequent visitors. But there also
visitors from South Africa and Zimbawe; Hong Kong and Brazil;
India and Israel.
In September we averaged over
2100 visitors per day and over 19,000 hits a day. Thus ending the
month with over 64,000 visitors and over 580,000 hits. There was
another overage and a penalty of $66. Our Silver Plan was not
sufficient to deal with the traffic. We expect the traffic to the
site for October to be similar to September. At this writing (22
Oct.), for the month, we have had over 53,000 visitors and 420,000
hits. So it again looks as if we will go over 64,000 visitors for
October.
In short, we need help from
friends, writers, and artists to help us in our efforts to sustain
ChickenBones: A Journal. We have need to go to the ISP's
Gold Plan. We need your help. And there is much to be done. Help
us to sustain our momentum and service.
If you cannot attend the
November 22 event, Support ChickenBones: A Journal
with your donation. Donations of any amount should be made out to
ChickenBones: A Journal. Please send your check or money order
to:
We look forward to our continued
cooperation and collaboration. As ever and always, Rudy
* * * * *
We served a great audience in 2006: nearly 2 million sessions; over
3.3 million pageviews. In 2007, we still need your active
financial support. ChickenBones is adding and supporting
daily new and established writers, scholars and publishers. We are a
unique and fresh experience in Internet publishing. Our Black
Arts files are growing and including table of contents of
anthologies of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s out of publication and not
on the Internet. We have archival material that is difficult to
access. We have current African writers and a Nigerian audience. We
have religionists of every stripe, including
Turks and atheists,
too. We have articles and materials still on the site published 5
years ago. We have free access. Artists, writers, publishers want to
be on ChickenBones because google and other search engines
put their work in the top ten hits. But they are lax in their
financial support. I cannot accomplish what we do alone: we need
your continuing support. Please send in your donations, today,
encourage your friends, also. Help
Save ChickenBones
|
Sessions: Date Range: 1 January
2011 - 3 December 2011
Range Total: 1,434,688 Monthly
Average: 119,557.33 |
Page Views Date Range: 1
January 2011 - 3 December 2011
Range Total:, 4,344,018 Monthly
Average: 362,001.50 |
Send contributions to:
ChickenBones: A Journal /
2005 Arabian Drive / Finksburg, MD 21048
* * *
* *
Not Gone
With the Wind Voices of Slavery—Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.—9 February 2003—Unchained Memories,
an HBO documentary that makes its debut tomorrow
night, provides a powerful answer to that question.
It gives us, through the faces and voices of
African-American actors, an introduction to a vast
undertaking that took place in the 1930's: the
collection and preservation of the testimonies of
thousands of aged former slaves in an archive known
as the Slave Narrative Collection of the Federal
Writers' Project. This archive unlocked the brutal
secrets of slavery by using the voices of average
slaves as the key, exposing the everyday life of the
slave community. Rosa Starke, a slave from South
Carolina, for example, told of how class divisions
among the slaves were quite pronounced:
''Dere was just
two classes to de white folks, buckra slave owners
and poor white folks dat didn't own no slaves. Dere
was more classes 'mongst de slaves. De fust class
was de house servants. Dese was de butler, de maids,
de nurses, chambermaids, and de cooks. De nex' class
was de carriage drivers and de gardeners, de
carpenters, de barber and de stable men. Then come
de nex' class, de wheelwright, wagoners, blacksmiths
and slave foremen. De nex' class I members was de
cow men and de niggers dat have care of de dogs. All
dese have good houses and never have to work hard or
git a beatin'. Then come de cradlers of de wheat, de
threshers and de millers of de corn and de wheat,
and de feeders of de cotton gin. De lowest class was
de common field niggers.''—NYTimes
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*
Nina Simone—Go
to Hell
|
Go to Hell
Lyrics by Nina Simone
If your mind lies
in the Devil's workshop
Evil-doin's your thrill
And trouble and mischief is all you live
for
You know damn well
That you'll go to hell (yeah)
You'll go to hell
Now you're living high and mighty
Rich off the fat of the land
Just don't dispose of your natural soul
'cos if you do you know damn well
That you'll go to hell (yes, you will)
You'll go to hell
Hell
Where your natural soul burns
Hell
Where you pay for your sins
Hell
Keep your children from doing wrong (if
you can)
'cos you know damn well
That they'll go to hell
They'll go to hell
Hell
Man, woman were created
Hell
To live for eternity
Hell
With an apple they ate from the tree of
hate
So you know damn well
Oh... they went to hell (yes, they did)
They went to hell
Some say that hell is below us
But I say it's right by my side
'cos you see evil in the morning
Evil in the evening, all the time
You know damn well
That we all must be in hell
We got to be in hell
We all must be in hell
We must be in hell. |
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|
Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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 |
Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
By Frank B. Wilderson, III
Wilderson, a professor,
writer and filmmaker from
the Midwest,
presents a gripping account
of his role in the downfall
of South African apartheid
as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
African law student, Wilderson reluctantly
returns with her to South
Africa in the early 1990s,
where he teaches
Johannesburg and Soweto
students, and soon joins the
military wing of the ANC.
Wilderson's stinging
portrait of Nelson Mandela
as a petulant elder eager to
accommodate his white
countrymen will jolt readers
who've accepted the
reverential treatment
usually accorded him. After
the assassination of
Mandela's rival, South
African Communist Party
leader Chris Hani, Mandela's
regime deems Wilderson's
public questions a threat to
national security; soon,
having lost his stomach for
the cause, he returns to
America.
Wilderson has a
distinct, powerful voice and
a strong story that shuffles
between the indignities of
Johannesburg life and his
early years in Minneapolis,
the precocious child of
academics who barely
tolerate his emerging
political consciousness.
Wilderson's observations
about love within and across
the color line and cultural
divides are as provocative
as his politics; despite
some distracting
digressions, this is a
riveting memoir of
apartheid's last days.—Publishers
Weekly
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 25 December
2011
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