Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound

by Crystal Simone Smith

Overview

Crystal Simone Smith’s new poetry collection, Runagate, reimagines the experiences of enslaved and formerly enslaved persons in a stark and chilling response to the archives of chattel slavery: bills of sale, interviews, narratives, and fugitive runaway ads. Embodying the aesthetics and Japanese poetic forms haiku and tanka, her poems bear witness to the brutal and horrifying treatment of enslaved people and contrast their humanity with the inhumanity of their enslavers. In these poems, fugitive persons evade slave patrol hounds by climbing magnolia trees, use the cover of night and the detritus of a shipwreck to swim to freedom, and find temporary refuge in a cabin where a woman offers bread and water. Throughout, Smith poignantly envisions their flights to freedom—passages that were fueled by love, hope, and impossible dreams. She unceasingly gives voice to those who found courage in both bondage and freedom. In Runagate, the enslaved regain their stories and return to the sensory world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478028581
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	05/16/2025
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.38(d)

About the Author

Crystal Simone Smith is Instructor of the Thompson Writing Program at Duke Universityand author of Dark Testament: Blackout Poems.

Table of Contents

Foreword / Ce Rosenow  xiii
Prefatory Note  xix
Prologue. Runagate: What to the Slave Is the Semiquincentennial?  1
Freedom on the Move: Rediscovering the Stories of Self-Liberating People
Haiku Sequences
Henry & Maria  5
Jemmy  7
Lucy  9
Asko or Glasgow  11
Clinton  13
Jack (and Paul)  15
Peter  17
Dave  19
Grace (and Tom)  21
Mariah Frances  23
Peggy  25
John Bull  27
Austin  29
Ely or July  31
Robbin  33
Sam  35
Anderson  37
Emily  39
Harriett, Bella, Elsey, and Milly  41
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States, Part 1
Tanka
hard worked days  44
one pair of shoes  45
we spent nights  46
for breaking dishes  47
oh my brother’s  48
dead slave woman  49
the worst sales—  50
hit in the head  51
our mama cooked  52
Mistress Mary was kind  53
I was awakened  54
day the Yankees came  55
I had sixteen children  56
Smithfield slave market  57
allowed no pleasures  58
Master made me go  59
we worked winter  60
Christmas Eve  61
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States, Part 2
Tanka Sequences
Ain’t You My Child  64
After the Stars Fell  66
Confederate Lieutenant Robert Walsh  68
Joe High  69
Sarah Anne Green  70
Essex Henry  72
Epilogue. Haibun for Ancestor Ernestine Turner (b. 1827)  75
Acknowledgments  77
Freedom on the Move: A Note  79

Editorial Reviews

Runagate is a collection of poems that looks the harsh truths of slavery in the eye and turns its savagery into sorrow songs and temples of beauty. Crystal Simone Smith refuses to abstract the dead. She illuminates our human capacities to be virtuous or lethal, to still ourselves or steal our freedom. Her artful narratives about slavery are powerfully imagined because the poet deals in facts and truths about American slavery that few have told with this much clarity.

The Blood of Emmett Till - Timothy B. Tyson

"This book is a singular achievement by one of our best poets. It is also a powerful collaboration between the poet, her colleagues who helped with the manuscript, the documentarians who collected the advertisements and narratives, and the ancestors who lived these stories and passed them on to us."

North Carolina Haiku Society - Dave Russo

In this engaging experiment in archive interpretation and poetic form, Crystal Simone Smith centers the voices of freedom seekers and survivors of US chattel enslavement with an intimacy and simplicity that gives these ancestors room to breathe. Each poem quiets the reader and bids them to listen longer.

Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde - Alexis Pauline Gumbs

The voices of the ransomed African Americans that Crystal Simone Smith reclaims in Runagate are resolutely alive. Smith captures the emotive and embodying possibilities of haiku and tanka to invite readers to reckon with their rejection of ‘the laws of slavery’ and invite us to imagine their lives beyond the confines of the posters and capture notices that once held their histories. This is the poetry of destiny, revealing Smith’s grasp of the infinite possibilities of formal poetics and of the living spirits who dared to claim freedom for themselves and for those of us who are blessed to hear their stories.

The Bones Beneath - Sheila Smith McKoy

Crystal Simone Smith’s poetry sparkles with clarity—haiku allows nothing less. She offers searing attention to the wounds of the past. The imagery and formal look of each poem on the page also reveal her gifts as a visual artist. Here are poems our ancestors deserve.

Mother Tongues - Tsitsi Jaji