Southern Tongues
The daughters of Zora1 are lady bards of Southern tongues, laying language bare for readers to consume raw. They are Alice2 and Jesmyn3, Cassandra4 and Kenyatta5, Tara and Tayari6. They are known and unknown scribes, delivering letters made of Magnolia and Jacaranda trees, Cape Jasmine and Forsythia Bushes, bus stops and forked roads, both concrete and dusty. Through their tellings, we witness sunlight drip on aunties and grandmas, moonlight fall on uncles and cousins. We see mirrored our very own reflections. These daughters sit on proverbial porches, showing us the present, the past, and what we can not see coming. They are magical, yes — tropes, no.
Every night, while posted up in my tub, I listened to Tara Michélle Mixon's short stories, written in verse. Her collection is gathered under the title, Your Mother Was A Panther. Bath bubbles poppin’, I learned of Sauda’s thunder, Grandmother’s Midnight, Alice’s twin towers, and Ola Shun’s boombox — all characters Mixon calls out in the accounts of Panther. Seven lyrical narratives bring the Floridian legacy of Zora Neale Hurston forward like spellwork. Her collection makes literary ballads of lineage. Her words are a séance of souls.
Seven lyrical narratives bring the Floridian legacy of Zora Neale Hurston forward like spellwork. Her collection makes literary ballads of lineage. Her words are a séance of souls.
grandmother’s suitcase
When Tara turned three-years-old, her grandmother began a death prep ritual. Possibly initiated to help her granddaughter process the very adult concept of letting go. “She showed me the dress she wanted to be buried in. It was sparkly back then, but her style evolved.” By the time the author became an adult, her grandmother had landed on a “white suit, with a broach, and a scarf”. She kept these clothes in a suitcase labeled “funeral”. Tara was forty-four when her grandmother did pass. “It was then we discovered her writings. I didn’t even know she was a writer. She didn’t write for anyone else except herself — beautiful stories and elegant letters.”
While Mixon’s grandmother chose not to make her literary imagination public, Mixon herself leaned into DIY culture to self-publish her collection. She gathers ancestral memory and crafts layered tales rooted in whispers and a seer’s insight. She tells us the things her grandmother could not. “From a young age, I had these visions, and so I catalogued them in my mind to piece together later.”
These catalogued memories take us, by way of a storm, to a nineteenth-century American south on the verge of emancipation. In Panther’s first story, “Mississippi vs The World”, a gust brings us to the Medlum estate, where we tail behind Sauda and watch her come-of-age on a post-bellum plantation. Clear streams and banks, decorated with socializing White ladies in fanciful attire, set the narrative’s stage. Mixon anthropomorphizes Sauda’s journey into womanhood by marking nature’s landmarks - the rain, flowers, trees, and springs of whom Sauda becomes both caretaker and friend. When her earth-sprung companions betray her, Sauda takes revenge “against…the grasses, and the moss, and the maple. Against the very nature she thought would rise up and protect her. Against the myrtle and the oak, that sat still and did nothing.” Until these friends turned foes beg mercy, Sauda harnesses the power, taught to her by her mother, and unleashes her wrath on creation. An innocence turned mad.
mean men
In 1926, Zora Neale Hurston warned us about Sykes, a snake toting, bastard of a husband from her short story Sweat. I don’t know from what, if any, autobiographical material Hurston formed the devil Sykes. He could have been an Eatonville neighbor or pure fiction. In either case, he was one mean dude. Like Sweat, Mixon’s short story Midnight incarnates a man whose evil ricochets. Mixon mines her biography to unearth and fictionalize a great grandmother whose husband was horrific in his abuse. When this great grandmother’s boss learned how badly she had been beaten by her spouse, the employer called upon a greater terror. “The Klu Klux Klan came and he was never seen again. We don’t know if he ran real fast or if they killed him. But he was never heard of again.”
Mixon’s Midnight is not an oversimplified tale of morality either. Where the mean man is unable to spew anything but venom toward his wife, he cloaks his granddaughter in sweetness and regards his daughter’s admonitions with a cautious kind of respect. Mixon affords this man complexity without ever betraying the trust of the woman to whom his cruelty hits hardest.
autobiographical selfie
“She had made a choice to love him, and marry him, and carry his child in the face of death.”
At age twenty-six, Tara Mixon became a widow. Thick in the throws of love, this loss, for her, was like a snatching. “It’s been almost two decades and I’m just learning who I am. I didn’t grieve well at all. The moment he passed away, I passed away.” She embodies this time of grief, when death hovered over her household, through the character Alice, in a story titled Two-Thousand One. Readers enter the narrative on 9/11. As Alice exits Eden’s garden, her country’s chickens come home to roost. An eccentric character is heard yelling through her window, “The world’s on fire!” This “world” is only America, even still, only Lower Manhattan, one half of the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Yet, the aftershock burns the entire nation, just as the sickness claiming Alice’s husband breath, torches her matrimony.
lyrical fiction
“My husband was hip hop to me. The way he walked. The way he talked. His confidence.”
“When I started writing lyrical fiction, I found my love. I could tell a story, but tell it my way. If I don’t feel that rhythm, if I don’t feel music, then the story isn’t happening.” In the fourth chapter of Panther, we walk in flow with Ola Shun. A teenager with a boombox on her head and a babe in her belly. A daughter of Black revolutionary misfortunes and a missionary mother. A daughter who entered the world at the same time as rap. A daughter whose soundtrack spanned the sounds of Philadelphia Soul to Bohemian Hip Hop. Mixon lets us know that Ola Shun “cut her teeth on her daddy’s 45’s and her mama’s 33’s. Tempo encoded on DNA.
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All seven stories from Your Mother Was A Panther can be purchased on Audible or Amazon.
Book Review written by Story Rebels Founder Malika Ali Harding
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1Zora Neale Hurston | 2Alice Walker | 3Jesmyn Ward | 4Cassandra Lane | 5Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle | 6 Tayari Jones