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Honorée, a milk chocolate-brown Black woman with chin-length, curly black hair, wears light pink glasses, geometric earrings, and a navy dress with tiny white polka dots.

Photo by Sydney A. Foster.

Artists

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

She // Her // Hers

Poet and Writer

Norman, Oklahoma

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Jeffers is the author of five books of poetry, including 2020’s The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan University Press), based on the life and times of Phillis Wheatley Peters, and the forthcoming novel The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (HarperCollins). Her essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, Poetry, and Jesmyn Ward’s The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, among others, and has been honored with two lifetime achievement notations—the Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction and induction into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. Jeffers is a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.

Donor -This award was generously supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

This artist page was last updated on: 07.11.2024

Writing

Video documentation of virtual program, Phillis Wheatley Peters and African Lineage and Kinship in The Age of Phillis with Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, 2020.

An Issue of Mercy #1

Mercy, girl.
What the mother might have said, pointing

at the sun rising, what makes life possible.
Then, dripped the bowl of water,

reverent, into oblivious earth.
Was this prayer for her?

Respect for the dead or disappeared?
An act to please a genius child?

Her daughter would speak
of water, bowl, sun—

light arriving,
light gone—

sometime after the nice white lady
paid and named her for the slave ship.

Mercy: what the child called Phillis
would claim after that sea journey.

Journey.
Let's call it that.

Let's lie to each other.

Not early descent into madness.
Naked travail among filth and rats.

What got Phillis over that sea?
What kept a stolen daughter?

Perhaps it was mercy,
Dear Reader.

Mercy,
Dear Brethren.

Water, bowl, sun—
a mothering, God's milky sound.

Morning shards, and a mother wondered
if her daughter forgot her real name,

refused to envision the rest:
baby teeth missing

and somebody wrapping her treasure
(barely) in a dirty carpet.

'Twas mercy.
You know the story—

how we've lied to each other.

An Issue of Mercy #1 from The Age of Phillis © 2020 by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.
Published by Wesleyan University Press and reprinted with permission.