Three Women

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a room tone, a single low organ note)
Three names. Say them first. Say them before anything else.

[Verse 1]
Nancy Green was born enslaved in Montgomery County, Kentucky,
eighteen thirty-four, and lived to be near eighty,
and she was a cook, and she was a caretaker, and she was
a woman with a life that had a shape and had a cause.
And a company hired her face in eighteen ninety.
And that is the part the world remembers. Only that.

[Chorus]
Nancy Green. Lillian Richard. Anna Short Harrington.
Say them slow. Say them like they're people, which they were.
Not a trademark. Not a costume. Not a kerchief on a box.
Three women with addresses and families and church.
Nancy Green. Lillian Richard. Anna Short Harrington.
The brand is gone. The names are what remain.

[Verse 2]
Lillian Richard was from Fort Bend County, Texas,
and she worked it twenty years, and her family will tell you
she was proud of the work and the work was not the whole of her,
and they put a marker up in Hawkins, where she's from.
Anna Short Harrington was hired in Syracuse in 'thirty-five,
raised her children, sent them onward. Twenty years she gave it.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
Now I am not here to lecture and I am not here to scold.
I am here because the story that gets told is not their story.
The argument was had. The box came off the shelf.
And in all of that arguing about a picture and a name,
three actual women stood behind it with their real and only lives,
and hardly anybody ever asked them how it was.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the organ note releases)
Nancy. Lillian. Anna.
That's the ode. That's all the ode has to be.