Book Review: Griots: Keepers of the Story
Edited by Lenard D. Moore & Crystal Simone Smith
Published by Unicorn Press
Greensboro, North Carolina
2026, 85 pages
Paperback: $18
978-0-87775-230-1
Hardcover: $25
978-0-87775-235-6
Ordering Information
Reviewed by Rich Youmans
In West Africa, griots are oral storytellers who keep historical memories and cultural traditions alive throughout generations. As Crystal Simone Smith notes in her afterword, “Black Journeys”:
[S]torytelling is woven into Black culture. The practice is rooted in Africa, by storytellers known as griots or griottes, the female equivalent. … For African Americans, with a shared history of forced migration and forced labor, it is a vital practice that preserves our legacy. These ancestral stories not only document our history of subjugation by the white majority; they also contextualize our experiences from the richness of our food and songs to the resilience and aspirations exhibited in the face of racial oppression.
The 56 haibun in this collection testify to that legacy’s continuing vitality. All five contributors are members of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, which Lenard D. Moore founded over 30 years ago. As Moore writes in his introduction, Griots is the first anthology of African American haibun, and as such it contributes”to the extension of the American and African American literary traditions.” That extension, he hopes, will reach far and wide, spurring discussions
in barbershops, blogs, classrooms, cultural centers, hair salons, museums, nail salons, podcasts, talk shows, and videos. How have these writers interrogated American social ills as well as the beauty of the natural world and travel?
In a sense, the book is a companion to the collective’s earlier anthology of haiku, One Window’s Light (Unicorn Press, 2017), which featured the same five poets (L. Teresa Church, Sheila Smith McKoy, and Gideon Young, in addition to Moore and Smith). Even then, as Smith writes, she pictured as haibun as an extension of that book, providing “glimpses of Black life through haiku expanded to incorporate the stories that conjure these haiku. While there’s some overlapping themes in the stories these poets tell, each delivers a personal take that draws in the reader to their individual worlds.
Church’s haibun are rooted in rural Virginia. She reflects on family tales—of her grandmother stitching up a rooster’s wound; of her Uncle Henry, who early in his life “stayed gone from home weeks at a time carrying on church revivals, his knees under other women’s dining tables”; of her whole family taking on chores at sundown—filling buckets from the spring, chopping wood, tending to hogs and cows and horses. She relays the tales a man known as “Preacher,” who offered mystical prayers, potions, and rituals to bring rain, cure sicknesses, or “put fixes on foes who ran afoul of him.” And she reflects on the region her father calls Dixie:
Down South
We gather on the porch after supper, allow time for the cookstove’s heat to wane before bedtime. Moonlight brightens a ghostly thunderhead that towers so far in the distance we hear no rumbles. Lightning zags through the billows. Daddy leans back in his chair, props one foot on the bannister, says “The storm is way down in the Southland now.” That means we’re safe sitting outside, listening to katydids. The southland that comes to mind for me is the one my father calls Dixie. That place scares me far more than thunder and lightning streaking across a dog-days sky. Policemen on the black-and-white television loose dogs on Black folks Down South and water cannon streams knock children off their feet, tumbling them down the street like trash. The moon dips slowly westward. I imagine places where I might live when I’m old enough and time comes to leave home. Momma and Daddy won’t have to warn me not to go farther south than Virginia.
northbound
a freight train whistles
past the depot
The topics in Moore’s dozen haibun range widely: from his writing life (which often finds him sitting in a library, waiting for words to come) to visits with his great-great-aunt Sarah, who tells stories not found in any library book. They also include quick reflections and observations born of daily activities, as well as memories of his own early years. This last group are among his most engaging. He reminisces about his early years among “rows and rows of cornfields, tobacco fields, sweet potato and watermelon fields,” where “cornstalk leaves whisper like ghosts,” and of picking blueberries when summer arrived and school let out. And he remembers the lessons passed down from his elders:
Speaking Time
Growing up in my era, I knew not to ask why, because children had their place, didn’t hang around when grown folks had their talking sessions. I always believed in minding my elders. I couldn’t imagine where my teeth would be, if I’d said something not right or in the wrong tone. Really, mama knew I wouldn’t cross that river. I remember mama said, “You have to know when to speak and when not to speak.” How eagerly she told kinfolk that her grandmother raised her, but she said, “Momma.” It’s the way I carry myself—the urge to speak when I must or not speak when it doesn’t feel quite right to flap my jaws.
grandfather clock chimes
on the glossy mantel
sunlight wanes
Smith’s selections focus mostly on stories of her family—a mother who fled city poverty to her native South, a sister she longs to see again, a vagrant uncle given some final dignity in a eulogy. She adds in stories of her younger years: her clubbing and a friend’s unwanted pregnancy, her “work in progress” days when money was scarce and ambition high. Reading through these haibun, one gets a feel for how fragile life can be, a feeling underscored by several haibun specifically about loss and death. One of those, “The Year That Took Our Breaths Away,” is also a protest piece: it’s set in 2020, the year when Covid hit and George Floyd was killed.
The Year That Took Our Breaths Away
2020
It was as though horsemen of obliteration rode in from all four corners to claim our breaths by plague or chokeholds or with tear gas for supporting black lives. The horseman riding death circled infinite claiming all he could, even casualties like my husband’s mother, her heart so tired it burst. How we survived that loss roaming through rooms for weeks taking deep, shallow breaths—how we wondered when clear, steady breathing might return as a vaccine or perhaps a statute, one for every fallen black body in the very place they were robbed of breath, so they might be erected up forever on pedestals of justice, indestructible in apocalyptic winds.
wolf moon
hill of pines bowed
to the first snow
McKoy threads her haibun with the historical: African healing traditions, an 1801 notice about “Negro Stealers” who took two Black children, a 1962 challenge to the Jim Crow laws at Pullen Park in Raleigh, North Carolina. She also intertwines current events (Covid, George Floyd, the California wildfires of 202o) and offers insights into the resilience needed to overcomes threats not just from the outside world, but also from within families.
Rearview Mirror
She hangs the tassel of her diploma on her rearview mirror, remembers the morning that she left. Other errant thoughts: where they stayed the night they eloped; years of excuses about her going to college as promised; policing of her time, of what, of whom. The months of peace, punctuated by fights and half-apologies. She touches her cheek, remembering the time she watched his slapping hand moving in a slow-motion arc towards her face; the brightness of the sun, the morning after she left, pregnant. In the passenger seat, her son holds her diploma in his little, five-year-old lap. She smiles, thinks of Lot’s wife.
abandoned poem
magnolias weigh down
the low limb
Throughout his 11 haibun, Young seems to revel in his many roles: teacher, gardener, husband, father. He focuses on family mementos both old (a silver spoon handed from from his grandmother) and new (a banded tulip shell he finds on the beach, which breaks perfectly in half to become gifts for his two children). He relives joyous moments: “trash ball” with his students, his wife’s pregnancy (“long hugs, laughing kissses, our giant silly grins”). He even celebrates the birthday of Elston Gene Howard, the first Black player for the Yankees. There’s an appreciation for life and family that floats through Young’s pieces, but it’s leavened by haibun such as “Things I Must Consider,” revealing all that is passed down between generations:
The precise scissoring of one rectangle from an official copy of my infant daughter’s birth certificate, to remove her social security number, while preserving her name and mine. Keeping this document on my person, since I am brown and she is light and when we are out, police with eager bullets may command me to prove my daughter is mine. I must consider how even such a groveling may not be enough.
vivid moonlight
I rub a silver dollar
my father gave me
Together, these poets’ haibun weave a rich tapestry. With only a couple of exceptions, all the pieces follow the same format: one or more paragraphs followed by a single capping haiku. The haiku themselves, though, vary in how they’re applied. This can be seen even in the examples above. In “Down South,” the haiku—which calls to mind the Black disapora of the 20th century—is more of an observational statement that relies on the prose for its effect. (The use of the word “freight” is particularly effective, representing not just a means of transporation, but also the weighty history embedded in the South.) The haiku in Smith’s haibun takes, for me, a metaphorical approach: in each pine bowing under the weight of new (all-white) snow, I can’t help but see George Floyd and other “fallen black bodies.” McKoy’s haiku echoes this approach, while those written by Moore and Young present specific stand-alone moments that resonate subtly with the prose. (I especially like Young’s silver dollar as a totem of luck—I picture it as one bearing an image of Lady Liberty, which could be viewed as either ironic or hopeful.) Regardless of approach, to me all the haiku work to provide an impact that couldn’t be achieved by prose alone.
The cover image also merits special note: it features a quilt made by L. Teresa Church, titled “Rooted in Red Clay,” with layers of various fabrics that create their own narrative. In her excellent explication of the quilt’s design, Church says she was inspired by the word “keepers” in the anthology’s title, which brought to mind her hometown’s clay soil. “That is the ground in which my ancesters are buried,” she writes, “the ground I walked alongside the elders, the same ground that dusted my feet, and the feet of my co-authors, when we were children and our grandparents forbade us to forget where we came from.”
As Griots makes clear, these poets continue to honor that charge.
About the Reviewer
Rich Youmans lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Alice. His books include All the Windows Lit (Snapshot Press, 2017) and Head-On (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2018). He is also the co-author, with Roberta Beary and Lew Watts, of Haibun: A Writer’s Guide (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023), which won a Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award for Best Prose Book.