Marilyn Nelson, Rhonda M. Ward, Antoinette Brim-Bell, and Kate Rushin on the Collaborative Process

What birthed this collaboration?

Although the four of us did think of ourselves as a “team” of poets, our project is less a collaboration among the four of us than a collaboration of each of us with the brilliant and generous historian who was our guide: Carolyn Wakeman. Carolyn is a former professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as faculty chair of the Graduate School of Journalism and director of the Asia-Pacific Program. Our collaboration grew from a larger collaboration with the Witness Stones Project, started in 2017 in Guilford, CT, with the mission to restore the history and honor the humanity of the enslaved individuals who helped build our communities. The Project provides research assistance, teacher development, and curriculum support to help middle and high school students study the history of slavery in their own communities. The students explore the lives of enslaved individuals through primary source documents, doing original historical research with the aim of remembering. And, of course, everyone involved in the project knows that we are collaborating not only with each other, but also with long-gone enslaved individuals who were denied voices during their lifetimes.
—Marilyn

Could you describe the process?

I was honored to be invited to collaborate with such fine poets. Meeting with them throughout the project created camaraderie and support. We discussed the known histories with Carolyn, the historian, and amongst ourselves, we poets discussed craft and form. These discussions became the impetus for our fellowship with the enslaved people we were to write about. We spent hours researching their world, understanding the laws and language of the time. We sat with the weight of their everyday struggles. Having each other to share the process helped us to carry the responsibility we felt. Generally, writing is a very solitary vocation, but through this collaboration, I learned the power of a community to preserve history and to create a more complex perspective of how the present is informed by the past. 
—Antoinette

How was it made?

Many thanks to Marilyn for the invitation to join her on the Witness Stones Old Lyme Project. We each chose the formerly enslaved people we would honor from the list selected by the committee to be the first group of individuals commemorated with plaques at or near the site of their residence. Each one of us was drawn to some aspect of the life of these long-ago African Americans, however small of a fragment of their story was available to our imaginations. An especially powerful part of this collaboration for me was being able to go together to see some of the homes where “our people” served and to be able to make a pilgrimage to the graves where others were laid to rest. I was inspired by hearing the work of the other poets. I learned, once again, that “the past” was not so long ago, it is intimately connected to the present.
—Kate

What did you learn from this collaboration?

While slavery in the US has generally been seen as a southern exploitation of Africans and their descendants, the northern states have a more complicated history of enslavement. Supported by churches across the northern states, the enslavement of Africans and Native peoples was widespread and ongoing with Connecticut being the last state in New England to abolish slavery. And while plantations were rare in the north, they were not non-existent. The Browne Plantation, located in what is currently known as Salem, CT, but was, at the time, a part of Lyme, CT, housed as many as sixty enslaved people with overseers in charge of the operations. We are so appreciative of the Witness Stones Project for their efforts to bring light to the history of enslavement in Connecticut and to the town of Old Lyme for acknowledging the reality of its history.
—Rhonda