The Fire This Time

Jones’s poem bridges poetry and prose. Rich in setting and rhythmic language, the text largely resembles a short story until the final moments, when Jones places abundant white space between her words. This effect slows down the reader and mimics the tension the characters feel as the alligator approaches. This alligator functions as a symbol of danger. Throughout the anthology, writers describe the constant fear of peril for African Americans, particularly in the wake of racially motivated shootings. “Homegoing, AD” occurs in a time “before GPS” (15), when a black man lost in an unfamiliar place could cost him his life. The threat of violence against African American life remains as constant then as it does in any era. 

Jones elaborates on this theme with Toya’s reference to a copperhead snake and the speaker’s evaluation of alligators: “We think we can still outrun ‘em” (17). The narrator expresses a youthful confidence here, one not afforded to a young man like Trayvon. In the final line of the piece, the speaker insists that she, her cousin, and Toya can run faster than an alligator through the woods since “children born for land” (17). This highlights that black people are only safe relative to their surroundings. The children are safer on land than in the swamp, implying that black people are safer in the hands of fellow black people—yet, the alligator can follow the children, and thus neither they nor anyone in the black community is totally safe.

Jones paints the setting with rich imagery to show a black Southern family’s relationship with their environment. The North Carolina tobacco fields outside the car window subside into the “palmetto trees and [...] paper mill” (15) of South Carolina. Inside her grandparents’ house, the speaker observes her relatives preparing food for the wake and her grandmother sitting beside her grandfather’s open casket.

The piece also references various relatives’ participation in the black nationalist movement the Nation of Islam, as its members often abstain from pork and change their names. The speaker references the tremendous heat and humidity of South Carolina’s swampy climate. Jones writes, “Our cousins know the dark and the heat, but we haven’t been home in so long” (16). The speaker reconnects not only with her family members but the landscape itself, sticky and overwhelming as it is. 

The details fold into each other as a tapestry, unique and complex, that enriches the phrase Jones repeats twice in the piece’s first half: “Here’s the down south story we didn’t tell you […]” (15). The you might indicate the reader, an absent family member, non-Southern Americans, or white America as a whole. Regardless, the speaker lets the reader into a secret, repeating this phrase to encourage an attentive reading experience connecting the reader, regardless of race, to one girl’s black experience.