A Local Struggle: On Danielle Legros Georges’s Last Chapbook

Acts of Resistance to New England Slavery by Africans Themselves in New England by Danielle Legros Georges. 19 pages. Staircase Books, 2025. $16.00.

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The chapbook Acts of Resistance to New England Slavery by Africans Themselves in New England—by Danielle Legros Georges, former poet laureate of Boston, whose passing we continue to mourn and whose voice we are lucky enough to revisit in her works—is set in a time of revolution, harnessing from that era a spirit of lightness while speaking, as the title says, of Africans’ resistance. “Self-emancipation,” announces the chapbook’s title poem, “by / Walking into the blackest night / Becoming the river / Running into the text.” Self-emancipation, then, has already arrived, and reveals itself with the text. But is self-emancipation so simple? In the same poem, Legros Georges identifies slavery as part of the historical movement of colonialism:

xxxxxxxxUttering:xxxxxxxOur wretchedness in consequence of slavery
xxxxxxxxUttering:xxxxxxxOur wretchedness in consequence of ignorance
xxxxxxxxUttering:xxxxxxxOur wretchedness in consequence of the preacher of the
xxxxxxxxUttering:xxxxxxxxxxxxreligion of jesus christ
xxxxxxxxUttering:xxxxxxxOur wretchedness in consequence of the colonizing scheme

Legros Georges brings to mind Frantz Fanon in these lines, who in The Wretched of the Earth writes, “The war is not one battle but a series of local struggles, none of which, in fact, is decisive.” In light of Fanon, self-emancipation is no longer just a historical fact but a truth that must be lived, displayed, as if it were a blueprint for other struggles. Legros Georges’s poetry lets both the noise and the silence of struggle be heard.

The revolutionary Elizabeth Freeman, invoked in the chapbook’s second poem, inscribes herself within the law that has excluded her, emancipating herself. From Legros Georges’s note to “The Suit of Elizabeth Freeman”:

In 1781 Elizabeth Member Freeman sought out an attorney and successfully sued for her freedom under the Massachusetts state constitution in what would be called a freedom suit, helping set a precedent for many other such suits.

Hear the poem:

Begins standing
In service

All ears, as if she
Had none

Waiting the well-
Set table

The colonel proclaiming
Mankind in a state

Of nature are equal,
free, and independent

And why not me
Standing here

. . .

Who can make
Out word

From fact. Am I
Not equal?

Fanon could be describing Freeman’s casual bravery when he writes: “The famous dictum which states that all men are equal will find its illustration in the colonies only when the colonized subject states he is equal to the colonist. . . . If, in fact, my life is worth as much as the colonist’s . . . his voice can no longer petrify me. I am no longer uneasy in his presence. In reality, to hell with him.” Freeman anticipates Fanon’s declaration with her actions, running as she does into the text of the law, setting “a precedent for many other such [freedom] suits”—saying, with barely a pause between her words and the colonel’s, “And why not me?” In staging the action rather than describing it, couldn’t it be said that the poet, having run into the text, is again saying to the colonel(-izer), “Am I / Not equal?” Legros Georges’s chapbook, too, becomes a local, non-decisive struggle against colonization, calling forth and giving itself to other struggles.

Freeman’s audible resistance became a gift that her fellow revolutionaries could use. But this exchange, Legros Georges shows, isn’t always so simple. What of those who can’t speak, who are maintained in ignorance by the machinations of colonialism? In “Poem as Bill of Sale and Site of a Fury/Sorrow,” Legros Georges brings to life the subject Violet’s imposed silence:

Bill of Sale for Enslaved 2-year-old Girl Violet
(name crossed out and changed to Nancy)

The nine lines of the bill are reproduced; Violet, submerged in an apparently lawful discourse that she cannot understand, becomes a commodity. The first half of the poem ends:

Witness my hand and seal April 22 A.D. 1740
Witnesses—
Thomas JonesxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxWilliam Wilson
Thomas Miles

But the second half of the poem finds in Violet’s name a radical site of resistance. It begins:

Bill of Sale for Enslaved 2-year-old Girl Baby Violet
(name sustained and repeating many times)

The sustained repetition crosses out the slow and methodical wording of the bill—the name moves faster than the mercantile language that once replaced it. Legros Georges wrests Violet from Nancy and asserts the self-evidence of Violet’s “equality among men”—a concept Violet did not know she had to testify for. The bill is predicated on baby Violet’s silence; Legros Georges, rather than attempting to speak for her, emphasizes the girl’s absence. The erasure of the name Violet represents a denial of the singular, unique being born with that name; the name bears the absence of the being behind it, deprived of being. Legros Georges, striking through the bill with “Violet,” gives the girl the ruins of the bill’s “lawful” discourse. Violet becomes not just a name, then, but a site of revolutionary potential demanding realization. The poem ends:

Witness my hand and seal the day she is born
Witness—
MotherxxxxxxxxxxxxxMidwife who brings this child into the world
Father

“[T]he day she is born,” “midwife who brings this child into the world—the poem concludes with a certain lightness. “Poem as Bill of Sale and Site of a Fury/Sorrow” is complete but not completed; it is “local” and “non-decisive”; it is formed of Violet’s absence and shaped from the ruins of the bill. Part of the young girl’s revolutionary potential is accomplished through the production of the book.

The “struggle” needs its “local”—each term anticipates the other: struggle shapes locality and locality shapes struggle. “Walden Woods,” the penultimate poem in the chapbook, accentuates the necessity of re-apprehending the “local” as a material, productive site. The poem begins:

Turn and you will see Brister Freeman
self-styled man of color in a field he owns
as he plants the seeds of apple trees that bear

The turn is from Thoreau to Brister Freeman: in “Walden Woods,” Legros Georges restores the land to the time before Thoreau laid claim to it. An endnote cites Elise Lemire’s Black Walden (2009), which reasserts Walden Pond as a space in which generations of freed slaves “pursued lives of freedom, promised by the rhetoric of the Revolution, and yet withheld by the practice of racism.” Here are “apple trees that bear,” the work of a “self-styled man of color in a field he owns.” Legros Georges, following a trajectory of resistance, stages the work of the emancipated man on his own land.

See Brister Freeman make up his mind and say:
Land. Land as the greatest god. As the freer of us.
Land at all costs.

See Brister Freeman preach not “of the religion of jesus christ” but of “Land as the greatest god. As the freer of us.” Land gives the promise of freedom to those tending it, in the form of what is produced. At the beginning of the poem:

as he plants the seeds of apple trees that bear

fruit, wild and tart. His wife Fenda nearby
suggests with her name a cleaving, a cracking
open, but repairs the world with the telling

Legros Georges interrupts that urgent work of farming for an examination of language—the Old French source of a name—but fundamentally she’s emphasizing the social bonds formed by working in community. “Every time the storyteller narrates a new episode,” writes Fanon, “the present is no longer turned inward but channeled in every direction. The storyteller once again gives free rein to [the] imagination, innovates, and turns creator.”

Fanon, too, is one of the historical figures carried along in Acts of Resistance . . . , though he remains implicit. Citing Fanon only through resonance preserves the poems’ immediacy: they are not subordinated to his discourse but in conversation with it. His language illuminates their stakes without absorbing them. Legros Georges diffuses the authoritative position of the “self-emancipated” person into the historical figures she narrates in her poems; the gestures toward Fanon are further instances of the dissemination of authority—a refusal to reproduce relations of mastery and an allegiance to the non-decisive character of decolonial struggle.

Fenda in “Waldman Woods” is similarly crucial and not centered. The storyteller’s narrative doesn’t simply inscribe a circle, returning back to itself; it aims outward, wanting to prime its listeners for action informed by its repairing words; it wants others to modify the conditions from which “the telling” arises, so that future tellings can posit new futures:

Bound by the law and beyond bondage.
Facing the woods’ twin torments—persistence
And sense, the gods of modest circumstances.

Defiant. Original.

No surprise, then, that the chapbook’s final poem, “To Sew a Freedom Suit,” takes the form of a blueprint:

Take measurements to determine the size of it.

How lavish the jacket and sleeves, the inseam.

Appraise from shoulder to shoulder its width.

Measure neck, chest, waist. Note

Its dimensions on brown paper. Otherwise

In the green field of your imagining.

When and where will you wear your suit.

Without didacticism, Legros Georges stages the work of sewing a “freedom suit,” work she has “sewn” all through the preceding pages. “We . . . reunite with [the people] in their recent countermove which will suddenly call everything into question,” writes Fanon. A time, then, of revolution and the limitless possibility it implies. Legros Georges writes countermove into each of her poems—Elizabeth Freeman’s freedom suit calls slavery into question, the sustained repetition of the name Violet calls contracts into question, Brister Freeman calls Thoreau into question, and Fenda, as storyteller, repairs the world. For us, of course, the storyteller is Legros Georges herself, “channeled in every direction” and “turn[ed] creator”:

Pin the paper blueprint to your

Cloth. Cut along the edges of the paper

Pattern pieces, then cut again along the flanks

Of your green field’s imagining.