Paul McAllister
Please introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about yourself as a researcher.

Chet’la Sebree
I am Chet’la Sebree. I am a Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Bucknell University, where I teach poetry to undergraduates. I have been writing for the past, I would say 12 years seriously, but I come to history and research through my creative writing practice. My first book was about Sally Hemings an enslaved woman who had at least six of Thomas Jefferson’s children. And so through that process is how I sort of developed a love for history and developed a love for research because I really tried to reimagine her voice in my first poetry collection. In order to do that, I felt like I needed to understand where she lived the time period in which she lived what it looked like, tasted like smells like that’s sort of the lens through which I come to history.

Paul McAllister
How can the study of history help us understand our present and change the future? How do you see that connection?

Chet’la Sebree
I think that the past really informs our present. I know that is a really common thing to say. But we can’t understand the way we move through the world now if we don’t understand how we got to be where we are. And so I find it really important, particularly studying contemporary blackness and writing about contemporary blackness to talk about historical blackness and the way in which it was construed in this country, the way in which people felt. And so I like looking at history as a way of seeing where we came from, what worked and didn’t work, and how we can maybe change the future.

Paul McAllister
Why do you believe it’s important to explore some of these lesser known moments of black history?

Chet’la Sebree
I think, you know, we all turn to specific things in black history, like we turned the Civil Rights movement, we turn to slavery, we turn to specific things that have been given to us, I will say in K through 12, education, a lot of the time there is these specific sort of mile markers in American history where black people and black history comes up. But there’s such a rich and wider history to be explored. Particularly, I think about the fact that, you know, lots of people didn’t know that there were Civil Rights Acts before the one in the 1960s. And so I think it’s important to know, again, sort of what happened before so that we can understand what’s happening now. And those lesser known moments are equally as important. They’re all part of a patchwork of how we got to be in this moment.

Paul McAllister
Your piece, The Revolution of Being specifically talks about, I guess, lesser highlighted moments in black history, important figures, but lesser known highlighted moments, in particular, black women and girls and the joy they expressed by being themselves by living through their own experience. Can you talk about how you kind of settled on this topic, and why you decided to write about it the way that you did?

Chet’la Sebree
I definitely thought about how black women are often somewhat erased in black history. And so I knew going into this project that I really want to look at black woman specifically in the archive, and I didn’t want to focus primarily on our struggle. You know, I think that that’s a big part of Black History Month. And black history in general is like the struggles from which we come. And I think they’re absolutely an important part of the conversation. But what I think is really revolutionary is joy. And so I went into the archive looking for black women living in their full selves. And what I found was joy, what I found was, yes, on the other side of difficulties was a radiance and a celebration. And I really just, I think I stumbled upon this particular topic. And like this particular focus, when I saw that image of the four black girls in Chicago, because I thought about how when I think of four little black girls, I think of the young ladies that were murdered in Birmingham, and what a juxtaposition to think about them, and then see these four black girls on a summer day, experiencing joy and celebrating and being in company with one another. And I thought, like, what a great way to think about black girls being actually black girls, as opposed to being symbols for the struggle and symbols of suffering. And so that’s really, that image is really how I framed it, then looking for pictures of Nina Simone and Audrey Lorde. And looking at how we could think about black woman’s joint celebration.

Paul McAllister
That’s really wonderful to hear. So just to clarify, did you find this specific topic first, and then stumble upon that image and decide that’s how you wanted to frame it? Or was it more so you already had the framework in place and just found the kind of the perfect image that sort of a piece?

Chet’la Sebree
No, I stumbled upon the image. I was just looking at images of black women and girls in the archive and seeing what I saw, I saw a lot of pictures of black women and family spaces. And so for a while, I thought about sort of like a conversation about domesticity and the home space and the private sphere. But then when I saw these four girls sort of just like fully celebrating summer and sunshine that really pivoted the focus of what I was going to write.

Paul McAllister
I guess it’s a different kind of question, but how do you think I guess the focus of your piece might have changed. How do you focus on the domestic sphere? Because obviously, that is something I think we’re all familiar deeply familiar with. And it’s highlighted a lot. How does this focus on girlhood specifically change the conversation around joy and kind of experience of life.

Chet’la Sebree
I mean, I think the domestic space is often tethered to servitude, and like the service and what we can give of ourselves to other people. And so I think it was really looking at the private sphere, and the domestic space is really going to be sort of another an essay sort of about black woman as pillars of the community. And, you know, I think we get pushed into that role in that position a lot. And so I kind of had some hesitancy, even when I was looking around, the archive of that was gonna be an essay that I wanted to write, I think I wanted to sort of position us a little differently. But I saw so many images of not just like in a kitchen, but like I saw images of, you know, black woman putting down things for picnics, with their families or black woman on the beach with their children and with their, with their partners and spouses. And so, you know, I just thought of black women as caregivers. And I felt like, you know, that’s kind of a narrative that we see a lot, whether we want to see it or don’t want to see it. And so I think I was really going into the archive open minded, but that’s a lot of what I was seeing. And so I was like, Well, okay, how could I frame this essay in a way that also is celebratory, and that looks at that space a little bit differently, until I saw the image of the four little girls.

Paul McAllister
Makes a lot of sense. So I guess a question related to the structure of the piece, you start off, recalling this instance of this black woman book club, that gets kicked off the Napa Valley Wine train for laughing loudly, just kind of experiencing that joy and obviously, these are grown women. And then you use that to transition to quoting Audrey Lourde’s Litanies for Survival, what was kind of the line of thinking that you try to draw from that specific recent experience in 2015, to Audrey Lorde, to the just ballooning into the joys of black girlhood in that lived experience?

Chet’la Sebree
You know, once I found the picture of those girls, I sort of kind of started to reverse engineering the essay, so I started thinking about like, okay, so why do I feel like this is so revolutionary, and then I thought of that Napa wine train incident where I was like, It’s revolutionary, because our even our joy is policed, like our bodies are policed. But even our joy is policed, even living in the full breadth of ourselves is policed. And so I thought about that Napa Valley Wine Experience, and then thought about how, yes, our joy is revolutionary because of what Audrey Lorde says, like, our silence will not protect us. So like, why are we being silent, you know, we were never meant to survive and be fully present and who you are. So I went from the Wine train to Lorde, and then saw this great image of Nina Simone, and was like, Oh, look at her like being joyful with the champagne flute, just like being fully present in herself. And I think from there, I just kind of ballooned outwards like, what does it look like for us to be fully present in our joy as women? What does it mean for us to be not only fully present in our joy as girls, but actually, little girls, like I think of that Ruby Bridges photo where we think of her in this really expansive way that she revolutionized the world for us that she was this first child to integrate schools. But I’m like, she didn’t even know what was going on. Ruby Bridges was like, I’m going to school, I’m going to a new school, and I have to be well behaved. You know, she didn’t have a full understanding and what a gift that her parents gave her, not putting on her shoulders, you are changing the world as we know it, but you’re going to a different school. And you must do as you must do anywhere you go, which is behave. And so like, there’s something really powerful about choosing girlhood for her as opposed to choosing that she must stand for all of these things like all of these women that are photographed here, other than the four girls really stand for something much bigger than themselves. And some of them knew it at the time, some of them didn’t. And I just really wanted to celebrate, not only just the joy, but like what it means to allow little girls to just be themselves and be children.

Paul McAllister
I really, I appreciate that a lot. Just because you hear so many discussions about, well, just how how the experience of childhood, many people are living as themselves fully in themselves with joy without even fully realizing that and it’s only until you get into adulthood and force yourself to conform to certain things, that you kind of struggle to reclaim that joy in that full realization that you already knew as a child. So I think that that’s a really wonderful way to go about structuring that piece. Do you have any other I guess pieces or projects that look on similar subjects?

Chet’la Sebree
I think my focus of a lot of my work really looks at black woman’s experiences and looks at us not as a monolith. But as individuals and like what does it mean to follow an individual woman on her journey and so you know, Like I said, my first book features the imagined voice of Sally Hemings. But it also features a contemporary speaker. And the two are kind of having this back and forth conversation about what it means to be black women navigating their own landscapes and how their stories sort of converge and diverge over questions of motherhood, violence, relationships, etc. And so I think I’m always doing the work to try and uncover what it means to be a black woman living in the United States. I’m working on an essay collection right now that looks at both historically and contemporarily. What it means to try and travel this country as a black woman, in you know a general state of fear, and what it means to continue forward and try and find my path and find not only my path, but also find like where I feel rooted and safe and at home in a place that feels so dangerous all the time.

Paul McAllister
Well, we’ll certainly be looking forward to reading that when it comes out. Yeah. So to go back to a topic, we’ve already touched on this idea of exploration of black history, and what that looks like. So what was your first introduction to Black History Month?

Chet’la Sebree
My first introduction of Black History Month, was probably actually my parents. You know, I went to predominantly white schools, I went to Quaker school for a while. And then I was in public school. And I think most of my Black History Month education really came from my parents, my mom grew up outside of Philadelphia. She was born in the 60s. And she was just like, you know, you’re not getting enough of what I find to be foundational information in school. So I think my first real introduction to it was through the home space, and my mom taking time, not just that month, but throughout the year to make sure I knew things that I wasn’t learning in school.

Paul McAllister
How do you think it impacted your understanding about the breadth of black history as you grew up and, and learned certain things and discovered others for yourself?

Chet’la Sebree
You know, I think a big part of my like relationship to black history really had to do with self exploration. My mother is a scientist and a lawyer. And so it always felt like she knew all these things that I was never going to understand. And so when she was trying to impart knowledge, it was like, Okay, sure. These are the things that you want me to learn because you think that they’re important, like a child and teenager does. I’m not proud of those things. But I think, you know, she really instilled in me a foundational knowledge that then as a late teenager, or early adult, I was like, oh, I want to I don’t really know that much about Dred Scott. That was a name. My mom used way back, when who is that? How do I figure out more about him. And so she instilled in me a love of reading and a love of research and a love of exploration. And so I think I actually learned most of my sort of black history through remembering these little tidbits that she brought up, and then later recognizing, you know what, those were actually really important. Let me go read about them.

Paul McAllister
As you’ve gone about that process, as you’ve learned more as you’ve researched more, how do you celebrate the holiday today? How do you commemorate it? What is your relationship to the holiday and the idea of the holiday to begin with

Chet’la Sebree
my relationship to the holiday is really, it’s complicated, because I think, as a scholar, and as a writer, I get invited to do a lot of things during Black History Month that feel like this is the one program we will have per year. And I think I spent a lot of the lead up to and Black History Month negotiating. What actually do I feel like is a meaningful use of my time in that month? And what actually feels like me investing, celebrating, honoring that month that doesn’t feel performative or doesn’t feel like this is the one thing that someone’s going to do this month for their company, to acknowledge black people’s lives and that they exist. And so recently, what that looked like, is that, you know, right before the pandemic, in February 2020, I put on an exhibition with a photographer, and it was a poetry in photography exhibition, in which we featured her work that was in response to my poetry. And that for me felt like a commemoration of celebration, we were talking about the, it was in 2020. So it was not 400 years since the first enslaved Africans were documented coming to this country, but it was we called it 401. Because it’s a continuing conversation. It’s not just those big years that we commemorate. We’re living in the aftermath of slavery, continually. And so the exhibition kind of looked at that and what that means for black women. And so I think I try and find really meaningful ways to engage with history and culture and other contemporary artists during that month.

Paul McAllister
That’s really interesting. And you said the name of the exhibit was 401?

Chet’la Sebree
401, And the photographer was Shannon Wood Lowe.

Paul McAllister
Is there a online archive of the exhibit anywhere? Or was there any sort of documentation that our readers can go and research for themselves? Sounds very interesting.

Chet’la Sebree
I think she’s still redoing her websites. I don’t know if it’s available on her website at this moment, but there are prints from the show available at the Delaware Art Museum.

Paul McAllister
Wonderful. Good to know.

Chet’la Sebree
And I’ll double check with her about the website.

Paul McAllister
Thank you. In our contemporary moment Black History Month is acknowledged and celebrated, as you said, by a host of different organizations and institutions. Why do you see it as a relevant holiday today? Do you see it as a relevant holiday? How do you wish that people would engage with it?

Chet’la Sebree
I think one of the things I wish most is that people engaged with it outside of just February of every year. I think for me, what feels fraught primarily is when predominantly white institutions invite other invite black people to do the work for them, like, invite black people into a space to say, Okay, we’re trying to grapple with whiteness, how do we grapple with whiteness in this moment, that for me is always really fraught, because whiteness is a white people problem. Black History Month, for me should be a celebration of like, black history and culture and just sort of like the, the lineage and the time between then and now. And all that’s happened, and all that’s occurred and all that we can see and celebrate in art, in film and culture, all the things and not just like, how do we grapple with whiteness in this moment, I think that for me, it’s always a hiccup in sort of like the Contemporary Conversation of Black History Month, I really want it to be a celebration of us in our culture, without whiteness playing a role, if that makes sense, like to really shine a light on all that we do and our culture and what we’re capable of as opposed to simply engaging with, not to say that there’s not time and space and importance in dismantling whiteness. There absolutely is, I just wonder if there is more like space for joy and celebration, and what we do as well.

Paul McAllister
I guess the final question we have you spoken about Sally Hemings, Audrey Lorde, Nina Simone, and several other historical figures, but what are some figures, events or moments in black history that you’ve come across? Be they both very, I guess, small in the sense that they’ve gone unnoticed? Or even larger events that you wish people would know more about and know in more detail? What do you think is important?

Chet’la Sebree
I wish more people spent time on arts and culture. And I know, I’m probably saying that because I’m an artist and poet. But I think that they’re just like so many beautiful things that we’ve created and constructed. And I just wish people spent more time with that. And I think, you know, part of the issue is that in our sort of scrolling culture, it’s hard for people to hold on to those things, or, you know, we don’t spend our time that way. But I think, you know, there’s just such a wide breadth of artists and what they were doing in, like, in times where the odds were insurmountable, I think about Alvin Ailey and his work and, you know, yes, we, a lot of us have seen revelations, or a lot of us have seen maybe his work today, but like, what does it mean to look at the the original works, and to think about the time in which he was creating those things, to think about the time in which Baldwin left in New York City to move to France and the work that he did, while living abroad and grappling with American culture? So I think, you know, as my as, as my essay leans into Nina Simone, and Audrey, Lorde, I think I am really interested in the artists and the voice that really shaped generations in terms of the music, the culture, the visual art, like Carrie Mae Weems and the kitchen table series is what I thought about when I thought about looking at the domestic space and the images in the archive. And so I just think there’s so many artists that I love, and I’d love to see further explored.

Paul McAllister
On that note, thank you very much for joining us for this interview, Professor Sebree and we look forward to reading what you have coming out, but also your piece, The Revolution of Being which is on Picturing Black History right now. So thank you very much.

Chet’la Sebree
Thank you.