Just One Thing with Cree Pettaway

Cree & Rosa Pettaway

Darrell Grayson and Michael Donald—the men featured in Cree Pettaway’s September issue flash “Yellow Mama, Take Me Home”—were both real people. Darrell Grayson was executed in 2007 for murder, despite his pleas for a DNA test that may have proven his innocence; Michael Donald was one of the last reported lynchings in the United States, in 1981. Here Cree shares just one thing about her piece:

“Cutting Michael Donald’s mother out of this work in an early draft is the most bitter edit. There are so many Black women with untold lives living in the Heart of Dixie. On some level, leaving out Beulah Mae Donald felt dishonest to the Black women who’ve raised me and to Michael.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a Black mother seeing your child strung up with a 13-knot noose. Or what it feels like to hear that a Titan of the United Klans allegedly said, ‘A pretty sight. That’s gonna look good on the news. Gonna look good for the Klan’ while police collect evidence from Michael Donald’s lynching scene. Or what it feels like for Beulah Mae to wake up at two in the morning after having a dream of a steel-gray casket in her living room, a man inside dressed in a gray suit, guest saying, ‘You don't need to see this.’

Is it truly betrayal to keep Beulah Mae on the sidelines and condense focus to two males? Are there not already enough Black, Dixie women sidelined? What do you think?”