Article: The Chinaberry Trees in Niggertown.(Poem)

Editor's note: In the 1920s well-to-do New Yorkers enjoyed "slumming" in Harlem, where they could hear the latest music and be protected by the hue of their skin. Andrew Hudgins uses a quote from a letter Eudora Welty wrote to Katherine Ann Porter in 1941 ("and oh, the chinaberry trees in niggertown!") to create a southern version of slumming in the '40s, showing that things had not changed a lot in two decades. The subtle yet significant distance between the speaker of this persona poem and its author asks at the beginning of the 21st-century whether much has changed since the '40s.

   Under the flowering chinaberry 
   we parked and closed our eyes 
   to the ...

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