The poet traces her roots back to the magnolia trees that taught her how to grow.
By Khalisa Rae Thompson
Illustration by Andie Freeman
Khalisa Rae Thompson is an award-winning poet, essayist and cultural organizer. She is the author of Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat and co-founder of the Griot & Grey Owl Black Southern Writers Conference in Durham. Her work exploring Black identity, memory, faith and the body has appeared on NPR and in The Rumpus, Callaloo, Obsidian and PANK. “I wrote this poem thinking about the women I come from and the traditions they carried — how their lives, their prayers and their ways of surviving are still present in me. The magnolia became a kind of ancestor, holding memory in its body the way we do. I wanted to explore how we are shaped by what we inherit, and how, even in harsh conditions, something in us is always preparing to bloom. Each line is a way of tracing lineage, of understanding how memory lives not just in people, but in land, in trees, in the quiet things that outlive us.”
Working from found photographs and direct observation, Andie Freeman paints ordinary life caught unaware — a figure mid-turn, still life holding the memory of a space recently occupied, people in relationship and alone, living their day without awareness of being observed. Freeman grew up the youngest in a large family, more comfortable observing than participating. That early instinct, to find the quiet vantage point and witness without interrupting, shapes everything she makes. She’s interested in what an ordinary day looks like when nobody is performing it. Freeman works in alla prima oils, en plein air and in the studio. Alla prima painting, wet into wet, completed in a single session, fits these subjects because it shares their nature: immediate, unrepeatable, alive. Freeman’s subjects are primarily naturally lit, whether by window light or open air, painted with energetic brushstrokes that negotiate realism and abstraction. What she’s after is the unrepeatable moment, caught before it disappears.
This article first appeared in the September 2026 issue of WALTER Magazine.
