Showing Face

In more than fifty poems, Nancy Dew Taylor's Showing Face can be compared to a powerful film about the Jim Crow era in South Carolina. This seamless series of episodes merges flawlessly researched state history with aching personal confession. Part memoir, part local history, part heartfelt apology, Showing Face tells a vital story that our nation would rather forget. As the poet imagines the separate-but-unequal worlds of Mabelle Hanna McCray (her family's black maid) and Joseph Armstrong De Laine (a black minister driven out of Lake City, South Carolina after his church was burned), she knows that what she offers is "too little, too late." But she also knows that she must "show face" to honor "two amazing individuals" who might otherwise be unremembered. This powerful book will make Americans of a certain age ask themselves, "How did we not see? Or if we did see, why did we not speak? Or if we did speak, why did we not act sooner?"