Annonces

I cover Louisiana culture for a living. I know what gets written about and what doesn't. New Orleans gets the ink. The festival circuit gets the coverage. The names that travel get the profiles.

Nobody writes about Kellyland.

Kellyland is a neighborhood in Alexandria, Louisiana. Good, hardworking Black families. The kind of block where everybody knows everybody and love is the one resource nobody is short on, even when everything else runs thin. That is where Jerrica "Jae" Franklin is from. Not just where she grew up — where her grandparents lived, where her mother grew up, where the roots go all the way down.

She was born there. By six months old she and her mother were in Karst Park, a Section 8 project in Alexandria. By five she was in Hickory Hill apartments. When she was eight, her mother bought a house. Which is something. But her mother had hyperthyroidism and it was bad enough that she couldn't work. The house got foreclosed on. They moved into a one-bedroom apartment off Jackson Street.

"I knew things were bad then," she has said, "because I never not had my own room."

No cable. VHS tapes. Baby dolls. Paper. She entertained herself the same way she always had: by writing.

She had a speech impediment. Reading aloud in school was hard. Writing was not. She could write her heart out.

Her mother was her best friend. Her mother passed when she was ten.

She went to live with her grandparents. Her grandfather was the late Reverend Clarence Dupar Jr. — a popular Baptist church pastor in Alexandria, a community leader, a man the community knew and came to. He and her grandmother raised her the rest of the way, with her aunts and uncles all around.

She is a preacher's kid. Her grandparents made sure she had the most exquisite clothes church girls could own and a seat in every auxiliary the church had. Every choir. Every single one. That is where she found her roar — projecting without a mic, the same way her grandfather did from the pulpit. That is where she learned people. Community. Leadership. Character. Culture. The whole formation happened inside those church walls.

That is the origin story of Storytellers.

What you learn about legacy when you're ten years old

Most people don't sit with the legacy question until they're old enough to feel time moving. Jae has been sitting with it since she was a child watching the most important person in her world leave too soon.

"What's Your Legacy?" is the theme of this year's Storytellers: Bayou Le Blanc. For Jae, it is not a prompt. It is the question she has been answering her whole life, out loud, on stage, in her writing, and now in the rooms she builds for other people to do the same.

A testimony, not a brand

Jae describes her work as a testimony. Love. Truth. Healing. Divine femininity. God's grace working through a long line of generational errors. She is not performing a persona on stage. She is standing in front of people and telling the truth about where she came from, what it cost, and what it produced.

Jae is from Alexandria. The poets and musicians on that stage come from places like Opelousas, Marksville, St. Martinville, Franklin, New Iberia, Jonesboro. None of those towns have enough rooms built to hold this kind of truth. The entertainment industry routes around rural South Louisiana like it routes around everything that doesn't have an airport with direct flights.

Jae builds from the inside out. The girl who drew the invitation cards and called her family to the living room never stopped doing that. She just scaled up.

The room on April 26

Storytellers: Bayou Le Blanc. An intimate evening of poetry and live music in Opelousas. Sunday, April 26. Doors at five. Showtime at six. Sold out. And then some.

The response was so large that Jae moved the event to a bigger space. The venue is the Charming Event Center in Opelousas. If you're coming, don't type the address into your maps app — it'll send you wrong. Type in the name: Charming Event Center. That gets you there.

Featuring Jae alongside Abby, Nina², and Vee Marie. Hosted by Javashia Guy. Complimentary Southern food catered by Ms. Lisa. Signature drinks by Southern Flavas Mixology. Live band. Door prizes.

The aesthetic is Bayou Le Blanc — soft, elevated, Louisiana. All white attire, gold accessories encouraged. The Sankofa concept carries the whole night: you look back at where you came from not to stay there, but to understand what you're carrying forward.

For people driving in from small towns across the state, that is not a philosophical exercise. That is Tuesday morning. That is the phone call you made to your grandmother last week. That is the person you still miss.

Every seat is gone. The room got bigger and filled right back up.

What the cousins-as-a-band girl built

I think about the invitation cards she drew as a child in Kellyland. The handwritten ones. The talent show nobody asked for. The cousins recruited as a band.

That little girl is still running the production. She just has a real stage now, a real band, and a room full of people who drove from across Louisiana because what she built is the only room like it close to home.

She had a speech impediment. She couldn't read aloud. She wrote instead.

She has been writing ever since. Now she builds rooms where the writing gets to breathe out loud, with a band behind it, in a room full of people dressed in white, sitting with the question she's been sitting with since she was ten years old. My name is Jerrica Jae Franklin. My legacy looks like this.

Share