Channeling Mark Twain

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  “You could put that in too,” she said. “About getting there. How you got there, and survived.”

  “I got a question for you, girl.” It was Sallie again. “Where you come from? In the first place?”

  Polly’s hands began trembling again, ever so slightly, I noticed.

  “I come from the river. My people are all from New Orleans, so I’m upriver North just a strong wind from my home, I know. I travel where my great-granddaddy went before. Like he said, I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest. Like the Whorehouse Bible say, ‘Blessed are those who come quick and leave faster.’”

  Baby Ain’t looked up and laughed out loud, but Darlene popped awake and sat up suddenly, furious, squinting, and shook her finger at Polly.

  “If you speak of whores and the Holy Book in the same breath, you blaspheming against God himself—and against Our Precious Lord!”

  Then she bowed her head quickly and started up the Jesus prayer again—building her familiar wall.

  “Wait.”

  Polly touched Darlene’s hand and then reached out and lifted her chin. Darlene twisted away from her, but her expression was startled up: even more awake. Then she looked frightened. I sensed Aliganth straightening up too.

  “Wait,” I heard myself echoing Polly. “Forget trying to solve this argument, okay?”

  I glanced sideways at Aliganth. How had the class slid again so quickly into anarchy? I called to Polly again but she ignored me and continued speaking to Darlene directly, still trying to look into her eyes.

  “Well, everybody know Jesus took a shine to easy-natured ladies—and saved a Fallen Woman from stoning by the horde of Holy and Righteous, but what about further back even: the story of Ruth and Naomi? When Ruth’s husband died and she traveled to a new country—her two daughters-in-law, also widows, came with her, remember? And one of them was Naomi, who said to Ruth, ‘Whither thou goest I will go.’ Now everybody think some woman deep in love said that to a man—but no. That was said by a daughter to a mother. So when they arrived in a strange country and they had barely a place to live—what did Ruth say to Naomi? She say, ‘Hey, you know Boaz, who works down on the floor where they thresh the wheat?—he’s got some years on him, but he’s a fine man. Why don’t you just drop down there, dressed up, after hours, and lay yourself down on the bed where he sleeps after work. Wear your good dress and also your pretty shawl.’ Naomi did what Ruth told her—and when Boaz went to bed, he found a beautiful young woman there holding out her shawl, saying: ‘Fill me up.’”

  Darlene crossed herself and held up her hands.

  “You saying now that Naomi and Ruth were whores?”

  “I’m saying that Boaz fell in love with a woman so bold as to show up in his bed—and, in fact, he was the one who said, ‘Hold out your shawl: I will fill it with wheat.’”

  Baby Ain’t chortled: “Hold wide, hot-pants—I got some Wheaties for you! Sugar-coat.”

  “Listen,” said Polly. “There ain’t no blasphemy to say that Naomi fell in love and opened her—shawl—to a man who could love her right.”

  A strange look crossed her face.

  “And you married a bastard jackass—a man so fearing of love as to beat you senseless.”

  Aliganth, standing now just behind my chair: “Clement. We all heard enough now of your preachin’. You listenin’, Clement?”

  Polly shook her head. “Just one more thing. You love Jesus, then you know a way to live—he said whoever give someone thirsty a cup of cold water in my name, that’s the way. A little water in a cup. That’s all.”

  Darlene pointed a finger again at Polly.

  “Who are you? Say who you are! I believe you come from Satan!”

  “Truth is, I’m a seer,” said Polly mildly. “I get fits, and I can look into the Now and the To-Come. I can see into you, one by one. See what is past and what to be.”

  She smiled at the circle of faces, all rapt except for Darlene, who had started repeating her Jesus prayer again. I noted particularly Akilah’s face. She was staring at Polly, startled and amazed, as if Polly had unfurled the wide wings of an earth-hopping angel, then soared aloft.

  “And I seen many river accidents in my dreams, and real ones too, so I would like the river to do some good. Real good. So I say: Blessed are those who ride the current what would ride them. Blessed are those who ride hard against the pull. That’s what I say.”

  North Brother Island

  I lived under the sky

  With the birds but I didn’t eat them.

  I lived wild with ten rats! Gene, I ate

  Eggs from my wing-friends. Fly me!

  Fly me! I’m Billie Dee! No people left,

  Empty hospitals and ambulances and the wreck

  Lighthouse. I caught a fish because I figured how.

  Why do you make up lies? Ask Old Man God—

  he tells some real whoppers! No, no, God is good.

  Listen now to Jesus. Here comes Jesus and the Jesus Police!

  Step in that river it play you for a fool. Typhoid Mary

  Killed folks by cooking for them. Always boil water

  And wear a hat. I never killed no one. I built the raft, set it

  in the water and when the waves got worse, I dreamed him

  at the wheel of the riverboat. Harbor captains sailed

  in the Bay of the Brothers for one hundred years.

  The river will swallow you if you don’t watch your ass.

  If you alive you got a smell. Gene/Jean look smell like a goat.

  This goat turn you into hot poontang and baa like a sheep!

  There was a terrible crash on the island. Fly me, I’m Billie Dee!

  I lived on North Brother Island so long I thought I’d never sail

  back like a chime, into the stop-clock, still run by Time.

  I never killed no one. Jesus already said that. Just ask our Lord!

  No, Marx said it first. Child, the Whorehouse Bible say it best. You

  Ride, ride the stop-clock, ride the River whenever you please.

  —POLLY LYLE CLEMENT, POET

  (IN COLLABORATION WITH THE WORKSHOP POETS)

  six

  I was at home with K.B. on a sunny-bright Saturday morning, looking up some street phrases and drug terms for an upcoming AfterCare meeting on counseling, and checking a New York City Department of Correctional Services guide just to keep myself current on what rules I might be breaking. K.B. was on the phone with a nervous intern, talking him through an E.R. complication, looking at his watch as he talked. He too was due at a meeting—at the hospital. He opened and shut the living room window blinds on bright sun as he talked, so that his profile was lit then shadowed, lit then shadowed.

  The Glossary of Drug Users’ Slang had its own pharmaceutical and social poetry, twinning in my mind with K.B.’s instructions to the intern on administering blood thinners (heparin IV, stat) and how to “keep the patient comfortable. He was close to V-fibbing last night.”

  I turned the pages of the Glossary:

  BLUE HEAVENS: sodium amytal tablets

  BLUE VELVET: paregoric and pyribenzamine

  BOMBITAS: Desoxyn, methamphetamines (Little Bombers)

  BOOT: An autoerotic masturbatory experience: feeding blood back and forth into the works once the heroin is partially injected into the vein, to obtain a more lasting effect

  CHIP: a small habit, using drugs only on weekends

  CRACK A CRIB: burglarize a home

  CRACK A SHORT: burglarize a car

  MACKMAN: pimp

  I heard K.B. hang up the phone, then open the hall closet door, looking for his jacket.

  “It’s in the bedroom closet,” I called out, and he laughed distractedly and thanked me. He found the jacket, picked up his bag, kissed me on the lips, and was halfway out the door when I spoke again.

  “I love you,” I shouted, and I heard him pause in the doorway. He turned and came back inside, then put his bag down and knelt at m
y side as I sat at my makeshift desk in the living room. I had made a decision. I wasn’t going to play with fire, Sam Glass fire, anymore. I loved K.B. and I didn’t want to hurt him. I felt powerful guilt about the little tango I’d been dancing with Sam Glass so far.

  “I love you too,” he said. Sirens and car horns sang out suddenly from Sixth Avenue. “Don’t forget that, okay?”

  We kissed again and then he was gone. I turned back to the New York City Correctional Institution for Women’s Guide for Inmates.

  “I love you, Kenny,” I repeated, whispering, and I meant it. I loved him with all my conflicted heart. I loved him, but deep inside I knew that I did not want to be a wife. It was as if I’d married a friend—we were friends, the two of us. I was content to think we’d be together always: in my mind at the time this made sense. Two friends—or brother and sister. Not a wife. The day before our wedding in Minnesota, I had been sick with doubt, sleepless. I’d gone to K.B. and told him I didn’t think I could go through with the wedding. I told him that the marriage idea had been too impulsive—or maybe not so impulsive. I’d had the idea before, I admitted, but I hadn’t concentrated on the contract: a signed document that bound us legally. He held both my hands in his. It’s just nerves, he said. Nerves. And nerves are my specialty, he said. We’ll go through with it—it will be just for us. Nobody else. I agreed at the time. But thinking back, I wasn’t sure to what each of us thought we were agreeing. I put my head in my hands. Nothing in my life made sense to me, so I turned back to the rules of a strictly ordered society:

  LINEN–Your allotment is: 1 mattress, 1 pillow, 1 pillowcase, 2 sheets, 2 blankets, 1 gown, 1 bath towel, 1 washcloth, 1 floor mat, 1 bedspread. EXCESS LINEN IS CONTRABAND. Once weekly you must clean your bed, mattress, and pillow. Linen will be collected from your room, laundered, and returned—CHECK IT. It should have machine sewn hems, no holes, burn marks, or embroidery. Report any irregularity to the officer BEFORE YOU USE IT. Do not tear linen or use it as floor coverings or cleaning cloths.

  Or, I thought, with sudden melancholy foreboding, as a noose. I flipped the page, then turned from the inmate guide and the street drug glossary to notes for a poem I’d been working on.

  I’d written:

  River, East River. Sixteen miles of saltwater ring. Silver estuary flooding the famous page: Opening lines of Moby-Dick—or Walt Whitman singing, crossing Brooklyn Ferry. River of Houdini unchaining himself underwater. River of mob informants dropped straight down in cement booties. Stretching from the Upper Bay to the Sound and through to the open sea south of Long Island. Atlantic tides shuddering round the islands. River of the Brothers: North and South. River of Randalls Island, Wards Island (where the mad were kept), Governors Island (haunted by ghosts), Hart Island (where the dead poor, those with no money to pay for a space for their bodies to lie, are buried). River of Rikers Island, Cellblock Isle—and just past it—the floating miraculous city. River of the Island of Manhattan, its illuminated script of skyline there in the Passage, its waves of burning Bright. River of the Twain, as the twain is marked: two fathoms—twelve feet, twelve feet down.

  Twin Cities, I wrote, I come from Twin Cities—and just like that (the way a poem happens!) I leaped from the East River to the Mississippi.

  I come from Twin Cities, where

  the river between, surging, stands.

  And that was as far as I could get. I tried again:

  I believed once that what I called desire

  What is desire? I wondered. “I believed once that what I called desire”—longing for someone, something fulfilling? What was desire and what did it have to do with the river which, surging, stood? Flowed in that confluence, I thought, of two things—two souls, two opposite beings who are nevertheless twinned. Flowed in that confluence between…twins. I jotted this down, then dropped my pen. Ambivalence, ambivalence: nothing certain—except departure and return, like waves.

  I opened the inmate guide again and consulted their glossary of in-house lingo:

  boosting: shoplifting, stealing

  bulldagger: homosexual woman, butch

  dragging, playing drag: conning, getting over

  flatback: prostitute

  jostling: picking pockets

  juggling paper: writing bad checks

  rap sheet: history of arrests and parole violations

  I wrote:

  capitol and columned future. I come from

  twin cities: Dark and Light. But the river…

  Then leaped again—to yet another water passage—the Red River, which flooded, unexpectedly, the page.

  My mother and father came from the Red River Valley, the legendary Red River Valley—where the river flows, perversely (against geographic expectation) straight north, where the soil is loam and clay, sixty feet down. Where farmers and cowboys lived as neighbors, but far away from each other, isolated by the great distances of the plains, by the great grieving winds, the open distances of the reservation lands of the Chippewa and Sioux. The tunes of the cowboys, the prairie dog banjo notes and the soulful cornball yodeling, flowed into the music of the farmers—Swedish, Norwegian, Czech, or German—oompah polkas, the flatulence of brass. Danube waltzes and schottisches, the high-pitched fiddles, and finally, simple-as-breath singing—pure laments, the bitter twang of defeat and lonesomeness: “Hard times, come Ye again no more” and “We do not live, we only stay / We are too poor to get away.” And the cowboy chorus about someone who did get away: “Come and sit by my side ere you leave me / Do not hasten to bid me adieu / But remember the Red River Valley / And the cowboy who loved you so true.” Muted sound of Native American voices, the chants and drums on the wind near the Dakota borders. All of this sung history was passed down to me—plus what adults sang in groups, around pianos: “Beautiful beautiful brown eyes / Beautiful beautiful brown eyes / I’ll never love blue eyes again!” Church choirs, prairie gospel…“The Soul Never Dies!” in tandem with church Latin, the sweet warbling Panis Angelicus and the off-key Bach, Gregorian chants: O Salutaris Hostia, Tantum Ergo, and the minor-chord echoing Dies Irae, a song about Judgment Day, sung at funerals. A thin-faced nun conducting the children, rehearsing the funeral liturgy, her round silver pitch pipe grasped tightly, flashing in sudden bolts of garish colored light shot through the stained glass windows of the sacristy.

  I remember the nun silencing the warbled refrains with a downward sweep of her hand as she asked me to sing a passage. I stood up and set the pattern of dark minor-key punctuation of plainchant in my mind, breathed deeply and opened my mouth.

  Dies irae, dies illa, I sang. Day of Wrath, Day of Ire. Day of Judgment, Day of Fire. Our souls will be burned by an angry God, in judgment, in hell. I sang on till her bony hand swept down again, cutting off my voice. Behind me, my pal Signe Skoglund sang in a small froggy rebellious counterpoint: “Ten thousand Svedes ran through the veeds / Chased by one Norvegian!” and someone (Wendell Moosbacher?) further back behind her offered a series of tubalike farting noises.

  I paused and stared into space for a few minutes. Was I writing a long poem or the story of my life?

  For my parents’ generation, the most ridiculed state was ignorance. The worst thing, to be dumb—there were dumb immigrants and dumb Swedes, dumb oafs and dumb farmers. Dumb was slack-jawed, dull-eyed, slow-to-speech. Smart was learning, smart was erudition, but not pretentious, self-congratulatory, “showy” learning—rather passionate love of books and the well-turned phrase. The prairie love of pure eloquence. And humor—humor was smart: sly and surprising. For example, there was my uncle Gene Klostermann—an unlikely wit and bon vivant, yet there he was. He lived just outside the little town of Wyndmere, where my mother had been born—on a dairy farm with his family.

  I remember visiting their farm when I was around twelve. Sipping lemonade, prodded by my mother, I asked him politely how things were in Wyndmere. He grinned at me. He was very fair, but the back of his grizzled neck was sunburned scarlet.

  “Well, see here, th
at’s the thing, Holly Ann. Things have been goin’ so well in Wyndmere that they had to go and shoot somebody to start a graveyard!”

  He tipped his hat at me and winked. Aunt Marie chuckled and stirred more sugar into the lemonade. Earlier, I’d downed a glass of milk straight from the stanchioned rows of swollen udders, milk tasting of green green grass. I looked at my mother, alarmed, but she put her index finger to her temple and smiled.

  “He’s kidding, Holly Ann,” she said. “The whole family’s either dumb as fence-posts or they’re smart alecks.”

  Uncle Gene winked again. “Now, you got a distant cousin, Ole—so dumb he once pulled over to the side of the road in his jalopy because he said he’d been driving with a busted cloud over his head.”

  “Trying to say it was about to rain,” my mother added.

  “He sounds like a poet to me,” I offered, trying to ally myself with the smart-aleck branch of the family. “I mean: the busted cloud. That’s poetic.”

  They all stared at me.

  “No,” said Uncle Gene. “Wish that was true. Poor Ole was just dumb-ox dumb and had a rear end five axe-handles across.”

  I understood why he needed to be funny out there in Wyndmere, out there on the plains. Somehow the obsessions of people with the internal workings of their John Deere tractors, with their grain silos, milkers, and Grange feed stores, led to dangerous humorless nonstop obsession with the Government or God. Obsession with the Government’s attempt to stanch the economic bloodbath on the plains, welfare payments to those who would take them, called The Dole. (“Eating out of the public trough!” my father snarled in cold contempt.) The question was asked often and straight-faced, in my family: “How dumb are you?”

  It was not meant to be a rhetorical question, necessarily. I wanted not to be dumb, I wanted to be smart the way it was understood by my family: quick-witted and eloquent. I never thought once about what it meant to be wise.