Title: The Fire Beneath the Cotton.
In the deep South of 1923 Mississippi, a 14-year-old girl named Lena Mae Carter lives with her grandmother, Miss Hattie, on a sharecropping plantation. Though surrounded by oppression and injustice, Miss Hattie a former enslaved woman secretly teaches Lena to read by the firelight, using a tattered copy of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography.
When a traveling preacher visits their church and shares news of the Harlem Renaissance, Lena’s imagination is lit. Inspired by poets like Langston Hughes and activists like Ida B. Wells, she begins writing secret poems about the struggles of her people. Her writing becomes an act of rebellion, especially when the plantation owner discovers her growing literacy.With her grandmother’s guidance and the help of a formerly-enslaved veteran named Elijah, Lena smuggles out her writings and connects with a Black newspaper in Chicago. Her words begin to stir hope far beyond the cotton fields. But resistance comes at a cost.
Lena faces a difficult choice: stay and protect her family, or flee to the North to raise her voice louder.The power of education and storytelling as resistance
Intergenerational knowledge and strength
The untold voices of Black Southern women
Bridging the South and the promise of the Great Migration
In the deep South of 1923 Mississippi, a 14-year-old girl named Lena Mae Carter lives with her grandmother, Miss Hattie, on a sharecropping plantation. Though surrounded by oppression and injustice, Miss Hattie a former enslaved woman secretly teaches Lena to read by the firelight, using a tattered copy of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography.
When a traveling preacher visits their church and shares news of the Harlem Renaissance, Lena’s imagination is lit. Inspired by poets like Langston Hughes and activists like Ida B. Wells, she begins writing secret poems about the struggles of her people. Her writing becomes an act of rebellion, especially when the plantation owner discovers her growing literacy.With her grandmother’s guidance and the help of a formerly-enslaved veteran named Elijah, Lena smuggles out her writings and connects with a Black newspaper in Chicago. Her words begin to stir hope far beyond the cotton fields. But resistance comes at a cost.
Lena faces a difficult choice: stay and protect her family, or flee to the North to raise her voice louder.The power of education and storytelling as resistance
Intergenerational knowledge and strength
The untold voices of Black Southern women
Bridging the South and the promise of the Great Migration
Topic Live
