"Mama Say She Had A Dream" (which appears in NELLE issue #7 and won their 2024 "Three Sisters" award for creative nonfiction) is a blend of oral history and essay. It opens with my grandmother's story about the death of her baby brother in the early 1900s. My MaDear's story is one of several I culled and transcribed from the recorded kitchen conversations we had in 1989.
In 1995, I was able to publish a fictionalized version of the story in Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review, but I've longed to share the original story that MaDear told me--and in her own words. I'm thrilled that after all of these years, NELLE Literary Journal has finally granted me that opportunity.
"Mama Say She Had A Dream" is also the first chapter of a larger unpublished body of work--MaDear's Memories (of Mart Road, Johnson Sub and More)--that pays homage to both my grandmother's unique story-telling abilities and our family's roots in Johnson Sub, the 48-acre Black farming community and Freedman's settlement in Memphis, Tennessee, where Ethel V. Johnson (aka MaDear) lived most of her life (1912-1999).
by Lori D. Johnson
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