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Danielle Chapman (right) and the Rev. Jack Perkins Davidson at Best Video Film & Cultural Center.
Danielle Chapman admits that she didn't have a conventional childhood.
At age three, she watched her father die in a scuba diving accident in Okinawa, a moment which catapulted her and her mother to a small town in Tennessee, where Chapman was raised by her paternal grandparents, and where she discovered her family's slave holding roots.
Chapman recently spoke about her attempts to face the complexities of her upbringing before a packed room at Best Video Film & Cultural Center in Hamden, where she sat down with the Rev. Jack Perkins Davidson for a live-streamed episode of Davidson’s podcast, “Pastor Jack’s Backpack.” The podcast can be watched here. The event was co-hosted by Atticus Booksellers and Spring Glen Church, where Davidson serves as senior pastor.
A poet and Yale University adjunct lecturer of English, Chapman is the author of a recently released memoir Holler: A Poet Among Patriots in which she mines the paradoxical characters who surrounded her during her adolescence. People, she said, whom she loved and who loved her, but whose views she often found racist and abhorrent.
“I was beginning to understand that the question to which I’d been called was ultimately a metaphysical one: How can heaven and hell exist, cheek by jowl, in a place, in a person, in a nation’s history, and in oneself?” Chapman said, reading from the preface of the book.
Chapman said she felt a compulsion to run away from these “inconvenient” views, leaving them behind as she moved out of the South for college. But, in the decade it took to write Holler, she said realized that she couldn’t simply abandon her family history.
“If you’re confronted with racism in a family member, and especially in someone you really love, your conscience tells you that you have to speak up—that that is wrong,” Chapman said. “Also your conscience tells you to get away from it. You don’t want to be associated with it.
“I wanted to be done with all of it, but I realized I couldn’t completely tell the truth if I just scribed these people as if they had no virtues,” she added. “I couldn’t write them without writing their complexity.”
Throughout the talk with Davidson, Chapman noted that while the book seeks to reckon with things that may seem far away in place and in time, this history is eminently relevant.
“In the North, some of the darker histories can be a little more hidden,” she said.
Chapman tied her experience facing her family’s racist history with her work at Spring Forward: A Taskforce for Housing Choice, an advocacy group she co-founded to investigate the legacy of housing segregation in Hamden, particularly the Spring Glen neighborhood.
In addition to supporting affordable housing policy for Connecticut, much of Spring Forward’s work concerns helping Hamden residents identify if the title deed to their house still includes racially restrictive covenants—language prohibiting property from being sold or rented to nonwhite people, implemented by real estate largely during the Jim Crow era—and guiding them through the process to formally renounce this language.
In both her memoir and her political work, Chapman said she resolves to center the importance of history.
“When it comes to some memories, one’s hope is often to stop remembering, or at least remember less intensely,” Chapman said, reading from a passage in Holler. “But as a poet this often puts me in a bind, because I believe in my memories as if they were articles of faith. That, if tested rigorously enough, will yield some meaning bigger than themselves, and maybe even the truth.”
Holler: A Poet Among Patriots is available at Atticus Bookstore Cafe on Chapel Street and online from Unbound Edition Press. Campbell's next reading will be Feb. 27 at the Yale Institute for Sacred Music’s Poetry and Spirituality Event & Reception, from 5:30 p.m to 9 p..m in the Yale Divinity School’s Marquand Chapel.