Unfinished Business

               The first two lines of May Miller’s poem “The Scream,” announce

I am a woman controlled.

Remember this: I never scream.

may be autobiographical. In life, she never screamed, but she did as she says later in that same verse

Beaten by words and wounds

Make in silence a mighty scream –

So I begin this blog to provide the lips she says her silent scream was denied, right a wrong and honor a promise. May Miller, I believe, has ink droplets in her DNA strands. The ink imprinted on her very soul words so prolific that she could do nothing if she did not write. She won a children’s poetry contest when she was still a wisp of a girl and continued to write and publish her poems for the rest of her life. But poetry was only one of the many ways May met her manifest destiny as a writer. She kept a diary in college, she called Pal; her notes on teaching the short story I still refer to when I want to take a different approach to teaching elements of the genre. I treasure May’s personal writing all the more because much of it is done in her own hand, with a fountain pen. Not only do I treasure her ideas and perspective on topics that are just as relevant today as they were then, but I also treasure the art of her cursive writing more today than ever before because the craft of cursive writing and the subject of penmanship have fallen victim to technology. So while she lements a paper that she has due in Professor Locke’s class the next day or her concern for a young woman who had been denied access to her sorority, I welcome the nostalgia her everyday musings herald. 

               While May Miller is well known for her plays and her poetry, few of her contemporaries and fewer of those born after her lifetime know that she was also a novelist. If she ever allowed herself the luxury of a gut wrenching scream, it would have been when she realized that a man she trusted had pilfered many of her treasures including the hundreds of typed pages that lay in the bottom drawer of her childhood desk. The one thing she treasured most in her last years was the novel she wrote set in 1900 Baltimore. Her characters, Marthy and Jonas, like so many other Negroes of the time had migrated north and settled in the downtown area of Baltimore. Fine Market is their story, and a fine story it is, not only for its rich description of Negro life in Baltimore at the turn of the last century, but also for its use of Negro dialect as the standard of speech of that time. So, it is my hope, that May Miller will find redemption in her blog as she shares her masterpiece with her readers. Every week, May Miller will post a new chapter of her book and serve her guests a literary digest that has been all but lost in the historical fiction genre. You will be reading May Miller’s original manuscript complete with her annotations for possible edits. The manuscript written in the 1930s and typed on her father’s Underwood typewriter, by my grandmother, (May Miller’s sister by marriage) awaits your reading pleasure.