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South Flight

South Flight is set in Boley, Oklahoma in the peripheral of the Tulsa Race Riots of May 31, 1921. In the wake of the worst race riot in U.S. History and escalating violence towards African Americans across the South in what historians would later call the Red Summer, Jim Waters, a young Black man in his early twenties, boards the Santa Fe Train Line and flees the South to Chicago, Illinois. Like many thousands of African Americans between the years of 1916-1970, Jim Waters seeks economic and political equality in the North. He also fears for his life in the wake of the unprecedented violence towards the African American community.

In his pursuit of freedom, Jim Waters must make the difficult decision to leave behind his lover, Beatrice Vernadene Chapel, who as a Black woman must navigate the dangerous climate that produced the Jim Crow South. As Beatrice and Jim write letters to one another and hold imagined conversations with Blues musicians: Ida B. Cox, Charles Ledbetter, Robert Johnson, and Charlie Patton and the ghosts of Greenwood, the couple interrogates themes of Black femininity, fraught attachments, Black resistance through manifestations of Clyde Wood’s blues epistemology and cooperative economics, and the way in which African Americans changed their geographical regions with the hope to improve their conditions, yet often found that they still carried with them this burden.

The poetry collection South Flight is a eulogy and blues — an unabashed love letter and ragtime — to the history of Black sovereignty, community, and resistance in Oklahoma. South Flight was named a finalist 2020 National Poetry Series, the Jake Adam York Prize, and is winner of the 2021 Georgia Poetry Prize. South Flight is forthcoming with the University of Georgia Press February 2022.