Empty Vessel (In Three Pieces)

Abstract

This essay represents the work of memory. For African Americans, memory works against the cultural amnesia insisted upon by the trauma of centuries of enslavement. The effort here is to remember the dignity and the economy of a woman whose toil, like many others of her generation, wrought an enduring wisdom.

Keywords:

• African American
• family
• generations
• home
• memory
• silence

Notes on contributor

Valerie Sweeney Prince is the author of Burnin’ Down the House: Home in African American Literature published by Columbia University Press and the writer, director, and producer of a documentary titled Second Line. Her manuscript, The Daughter’s Exchange: The African American Woman’s Encounter with the Intellectual Marketplace, was selected as a finalist in Vanderbilt University’s Issues in Critical Investigations 2011 manuscript competition. Prince has been a fellow at Harvard University’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute, a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute, and the Avalon Professor of Humanities at Hampton University. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan in English Language and Literature. Prince is currently an Associate Professor of English at Allegheny College.