Jaki Shelton Green, the 9th Poet Laureate of North Carolina, wrote The Communion of White Dresses as a collaboration with Monique Luck, a visual artist and muralist for an exhibition at The Mint Museum of Art – Uptown, in Charlotte, NC. The exhibition “reimagines the tradition, symbolism, and representation of white dresses, exploring their intersection with the generational culture of white dresses and the black female body politic.”

This poem is more than a mere chapbook. By combining Sylvia Freeman’s photography as the faint background image behind the text on each page with the innovative book and cover design, Green’s long poem becomes a three-dimensional experience. The book itself is one long piece of paper, printed on both sides, and folded like an accordion. As one reads the poem to the end of the first printed side, the poem continues on the other side. The design, ingenious in its novelty, makes the reading experience more tactile and involved, like unfolding an origami swan to find a poem inside.

The poem begins:
I am a storyteller on your doorstep.
White dresses become thresholds. Shrouds for
The mangled limbs of three-year-old twin girls
discovered beneath the rubble of what they
were never allowed to call home. White dresses
become children in flight trying to outrun
poisonous winds and rain of a sinister sky.
White dresses stain the earth. Stain the fingerprints
of grandfathers who mistake sunrise for his dead
wife’s smile. We are all the white dresses.
White cotton. White rice. White plantations.
Busted red lips. Target practice. We are all
the white dresses. Paper dolls.

Notice the immediacy of the first line. By beginning with the present tense “I am,” Green evokes an almost classical Greek drama that echoes throughout the poem with choruses and call and response. But she brings the reader into the story by opening with reference to the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing in Birmingham, Alabama in September of 1963 when four black girls were murdered by terrorists in the Ku Klux Klan. The poem focuses on the white dresses the
girls wore in church and that image, as referenced by the poem and book title, becomes the image that drives this poem and unites these lines, the separate events – both specific and archetypal – of the white-ness that permeates the lives of black women and girls. Green pulls no punches as we contrast the white dresses worn by little girls in church with the white KKK robes of their murderers.

White dresses are communal wails. The served
become server. The giver becomes receiver.
I turn my skin inside out to become a white that
history cannot deny. My white shoulders sting
from slaver’s whip. I am all his daughters. Black.
White. He doesn’t remember his colors at these
weaponized borders where the currency of my
whiteness matters to no one. I am the murdered
symphony. The white gaze. To gaze. To be gazed
upon. Historical record is eroding as we speak.
The white dress understands the smell of an
1800s insurrection. The white dress gathers
particles of fire falling from a 1968 Klan burning.
The white dress is a witness of legacy.
The white dress is the legacy of witness.

In this passage, Green shows us these equivalencies and inequities not only of whiteness, but of the burden born by black women and black men under such whiteness. But she brings it to the now of this poem, too. With phrases like “weaponized borders” and “Historical record is eroding as we speak,” Green points out just how current these issues still are. For Green, the world is far from being “post-racial” but is, by all appearances, still run by a racist white patriarchy. Maybe more so now than ever.

White dresses become harsh smears. Confessional cages.
White dresses on my skin remind me of the unravelling
of crows hiding in the elderberry tree. Hiding all
things shiny. All things unborn to a womb of ink.
This is the tightness inside the throat of a white dress
that pulls stitches tighter. That threatens mutiny.

Through the use of repetition, classical dramatic structures, the tactile nature of this printed work with its accordion fold, and the alternating black and white images against which the text lies, Green creates a labyrinthian poem that folds in on itself, that expands in a fan fold, and morphs into a different experience. As a multimedia presentation, with music and dance and the surrounding art at the Mint Museum, this must have been a transcendent experience. By engaging with this beautifully crafted chapbook, the reader can capture much of that magic through multiple readings and, depending on how one approaches the manuscript, can arrange the parts in new ways, revealing a different poetic experience each time.

The Communion of White Dresses by Jacki Shelton Green, 2024 from Jakar Press. Photography by Sylvia Freeman. Book cover and design by Sadie Butterworth-Jones.

Shawn Pavey is the author of Talking to Shadows (Main Street Rag Press, 2008), Nobody Steals the Towels From a Motel 6 (Spartan Press, 2015), and Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse (2019, Spartan Press) – which was 1st runner up for the 2020 Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award – and co-author of Even If We Did, So What!? (2021, OAC Books). He co-founded The Main Street Rag Literary Journal and served as an Associate Editor.