My new country rock single, “Lightning Rider” is now out on Spotify and Apple Music. The song is an homage to one of her three times great grandmothers, Harriet Stroope Knox, who was born enslaved in Clark County, Arkansas in 1825. Harriet was dubbed a “slave for live” in the will of her enslaver/rapist, yet she lived to see Emancipation in 1863. In her landmark anthology, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Alice Walker spoke of the erasure of Black women’s artistic and creative dynamism in the face of enslavement, racial capitalism and sexual terrorism, whereby their productive and reproductive labor were brutally stolen by white enslavers and their families:
“What did it mean to be an artist in our grandmothers’ time? Did you have a genius of a great grandmother who died under some ignorant and depraved overseer’s lash? Or was she required to bake biscuits for a lazy backwater tramp, when she cried out in her soul to paint watercolors of sunsets…or was her body broken and forced to bear children (who were more often than not sold away from her)—eight , ten, fifteen, twenty children—when her one joy was the thought of modeling heroic figures of rebellion, in stone or clay?”
Grandmother Harriet birthed nine children. At least one, Isom Stroope Knox (who went on to serve in a Black civil war regiment) was the child of her enslaver/rapist, Jacob Stroope a plantation holder in Clark County. Walker’s lament ponders the lost and untapped creative genius of enslaved Black women whose bodily autonomy was stripped from them to generate white wealth, profit and capital:
Lightning rider’s up at the break of dawn
Jack o’ lantern buzz of summer sun
Baby on her hip, plow in her hand
Tilling stolen Arkansas land
Dubbed slave for life
In the blood of a treacherous pen
Deeded to white wives
And all their shiftless kin
Lightning rider does not sleep
On the wings of divine providence
Charged the “Almighty” with treason
Generations weep and burn
And the wind behind their dreaming eyes calls
Twenty first century deliverance
