The collective of Feminary: A Lesbian-Feminist Journal for the South, included (clockwise) Eleanor Holland, Mab Segrest, Cris South, Helen Langa, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, in this picture from the early 1980s on Mab’s back steps
MY MAMA’S DEAD SQUIRREL:
Lesbian Essays on Southern Culture
(Firebrand Books, 1985)
In her first book of essays, Mab Segrest worked to explain the place of the lesbian writer in the world, looking for that place for herself within her family, with other women, and in the global struggles for justice and freedom she felt intensely as a child in the midst of the Civil Rights movement in the South.
“Beautifully written essays,” Booklist called them.
The essays move across a range of genres and subjects. Segrest begins with a feminist manifesto to set out a new reading of southern literature beyond the white male writers understood as its entirety, following this essay with another establishing a genealogy of the astounding queerness of the southern literary canon. She records her journey to the Florida Keys with the poet Minnie Bruce Pratt to interview the late Barbara Deming (pacifist, anti-racist, lesbian feminist writer and activist). She explores how her grandmother and mother both connected with and betrayed the Black women who worked for them. Segrest writes movingly of teaching – as a closeted lesbian in a southern Baptist college, and with Haitian workers on the porch of a North Carolina migrant camp. The collection ends with Segrest’s work as granddaughter of a Klansman documenting and organizing with others against an emerging Far Right movement in North Carolina so disturbingly reminiscent of her apartheid childhood.
“Through laughter, tears, logic, and emotion, Segrest educates in the masterless way she most admires – learning as she teaches,” Booklist wrote. The essays in My Mama’s Dead Squirrel lay out her themes and intentions for the next thirty-five years.