In the meantime, in the poetry workshop, the matter at hand was to find (as it always is in poetry) not just a way to hint at expression, but rather a way to find the right words for it all, as we live. The right words for confusion and desire, for rats as big as dogs, for the wilderness of stars, the pennies and the mirror, the Red River Valley, a name in a Bible, for Twin Cities, for Switch, for the man/woman, for the shawl and the gun, for the gift of Sight. As Polly’s great-granddaddy said, “The difference between the almost-right word the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning-bug the lightning.”
My Horoscope
So my horoscope said today
I’d voyage to exotic isles: I’d
Meet up with a snazzy Romeo,
Sip cocktails under the stars.
From this exotic isle, I’ve traveled
from prison to court and back. My
pay has rocketed from zip to a
few red cents per hour.
Weird freaks have tried to sell me
rolls of toilet paper, weird freaks
try to make out with me in the showerstalls.
Weird stars, stay away. Strange days
under strange stars. Where is the tall dashing Romeo,
You weird freaks?
Where is the cocktail on the balmy isle?
Weird Jupiter: what’s the rising sign in this house?
—ROXANNE LATTNER, POET
seven
“Your mother called,” K.B. said. He was at the hospital, I could hear doctors being paged in the background and harried voices outside his office in the hall.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll call her back.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. I can tell by your voice.”
“What the hell can you tell by my voice?”
“Holly. What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
I didn’t know. I didn’t know. But something was wrong in the vague enormous way the poet Shelley (and my mother) had it: “Wail, for the world’s wrong!” I’d thought more about Sam Glass. I was still attracted to him and I couldn’t seem to separate my feelings for him from my feelings for poetry, the world of poetry. I’d stopped trying to write, as I felt guilty about K.B. every time I jotted something down.
It was as if using my imagination was a betrayal. I loved K.B.—what terrible poem of my life was I writing?
And then there was the Bail Fund. I had definitely decided not to go back there, but I took no satisfaction from having made that decision. I had gained no insights from the time I’d spent bailing women out of jail. Freeing women from prison had had about as much rehabilitative effect as AfterCare Services, which appeared to have almost none. Nobody seemed to want to hire ex-offenders—and conversely, what argument could be made to an ex-inmate to join the workforce at Ma Bell for peanuts when a night’s dirty work could produce a bankroll? (“We all sittin’ on our money-makers,” Baby Ain’t was fond of saying, her sweet bright face shrewd. “We all sittin’ on our livin’.”)
I felt a little sorry for myself then, sitting there on my money-maker at my desk in the AfterCare office, reading the falsely hearty House of D newsletter with my money-loser. And I felt sorry for the women who cranked out the fake news. The newsletter was ostensibly produced by inmates, but it was more or less an administration mouthpiece. Boosterish articles about how well the prison was running, with sudden dark undercurrents of melancholy, dissatisfaction.
The women who work in the kitchen—inmates as well as the staff—are no doubt the most underrated group of workers in this institution to say the least.
The kitchen workers’ day begins at 5 AM and runs till 9 PM. The kitchen workers must serve the entire population, as well as the staff. There are three feedings. Then every eating utensil must be washed and inspected.
The Laudatory Reporter, Stellene J. Mattson, bustled about interviewing other inmates at their jobs:
I visited the institutional laundry and I was quite impressed to see the women working in such a harmonious attitude.
While there I interviewed Juletta Ponder, and I asked her this: “Approximately how many garments do you press per day?” Her answer was “Ninety Sentenced women’s dresses per day.”
One had only to watch her professional performance to know that she was an experienced presser.
Juletta said she would work on the outside as a presser, but only if she were paid union scale wages.
Well, good for you, Juletta; and how many days can you stand to keep folding, catching, and popping in a laundry basket the repetitive tedium of your hopeless life—this job of pressing life into garments—knowing that, by the way, you are certain to be denied union wages in the future?
Ninety garments stacked, then:
Elizabeth nimbly catches, folds and deftly places each item in a laundry basket, as it comes off the mangle.
And shouldn’t she be given a union contract? A woman who could turn out ninety uniforms a day and not slow her pace? A nimble wonder at the mangle?
I glanced at the file numbers in the Rolodex. I had made calls to the union offices. I had heard what they had to say. No one who had served time, no one convicted of a crime or misdemeanor. Great, I thought. Jimmy Hoffa needs to consult on this.
Just as I was about to pick up the phone (someone at the local to explain union policy again), an inmate entered. I thought (surprising myself), Here’s what’s wrong, walkin’ in the door.
“Hi,” I said. “You’re not supposed to be here. It’s lunchtime.”
“You the poetry lady?” she asked.
She was tiny, with a baby face and an arresting head full of elaborately set plaits, strands of dyed-blond and blond-brown hair woven into her own. Her eyes were bruised-looking. A sidelong pickerel smile, as a famous poet once said about a student of his who had died tragically. She held out her hand. She was wearing a too-big detention uniform blouse, but I could see a familiar sight—scars on her arms. Probably drug tracks.
“I’m Lily Baye.”
I shook her hand, wondering what was coming.
“I want you to help me,” she said. “I just want to go to my baby’s funeral. That’s all I ask.”
“When did your baby die?” I asked Lily Baye.
“My baby die yesterday.”
On closer inspection, I saw that her eyes were bloodshot, bright red from crying, not bruised. She looked so small and frail and waif-like, it was all I could do not to hug her.
“I wrote a poem,” she said, blinking back tears. “I brought it to you so that you could read about how my baby die.”
“How come you’re not in the poetry class?”
“I just got here. I been brought in on an Aiding and Abetting, and while I here the first night, last night, I was told about Lil Bit. It the cops’ fault she dead. They took me out my house when she was still calling for me, and hurt. You want to hear this poem?”
She didn’t wait for my response and began to half read, half recite, swaying in place:
My baby girl lyin’ in a cold steel drawer, dead.
She fell down through a rotted hole.
Slumlord wouldn’t fix it,
’Cause I’m a whore.
Two years old, like her mama small.
She had the gift to sing. Call me wrong,
Why she in a crib of cold steel?
My baby girl could sing.
She could sing, Lil Bit.
Now I can’t touch her, I still hear her cry.
They lock me up—and why?
I don’t know where my baby gone.
My baby could sing.
I hear her voice,
I hear her singin’ to me
Under the ground, singin’
Tell how I shoot my way to her—
One for the warden, two for the dep!
Find my way to her over the dead bodies,
Over
the screw blood that oppresses our people.
But I’ll be kneelin’ at your grave, Lil Bit.
They can’t stop your sweet voice singin’ to me.
“Do you like it?” she asked, and looked ready to cry again. She wiped her eyes and I saw that she wore a thin gold wedding ring on her left hand, a pattern of intertwined hearts.
“It’s pretty powerful,” I said. “Are you saying that your little girl died because she fell through the floor?”
“I am sayin’ so. And when the cops came to arrest me and my baby father—they took us and left her there, callin’ for me—they just left her there to die. Old auntie I had takin’ care of her run off when the cops come.”
She began to sob, terrible wrenching sobs, and I finally hugged her. Her small body shook in my arms.
“How can she be dead?” she cried. “How can she be dead and her mama not with her? How?”
She opened her mouth then sobbed without sound, like a small animal panting.
“I need a furlough,” she said. “I need forty-eight hours or seventy-two hours—just so I can see my baby one last time, before they lay her in the ground. To hold her in my arms like she still alive.”
I let her go and she wiped her eyes.
“You a mama?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t have any children.”
“I thought only a woman bear a child understand this. But you look like you can see what I’m tellin’ you.”
It was true. I kept seeing the baby trapped alone and crying out, dying as her mother was taken away from her forever.
“Where is the funeral?”
“At the Baptist church, the ladies there seein’ to it. But it set for three days from now. So I need to hear fast.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I tried to think clearly. I doubted if the warden would agree to let her go on furlough. Plus I knew nothing about her.
“I just read in the newsletter that last November they did initiate a furlough program: seventy-two hours. But it’s for sentenced inmates who’ve already served some of their time. So I’m not sure. I should make a file on you here in Social Services and we can figure out a strategy.”
She began to cry again, the same terrible sobs.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll go see the warden. She’s out today—but I’ll try to meet with her as soon as I can. I’ll see if I can find your intake file before I talk to her.”
She smiled at me through her tears.
“And my poem,” she said. “You say you like it, then? You believe I should let the sisters here Inside hear it?”
“Why not?” I said. “You wrote it to be heard, right?”
Later, still sitting in my office, I read over the ballads the workshop poets had written and I found that I could not stop thinking about Lily Baye and her lost baby. Darlene had written:
I once was a mother,
Now I walk alone.
I once held my children by the hand.
Now I walk alone.
Alone is how I walk
Down a path made of footsteps.
Now I walk alone.
Later that day I stopped by the Sam offices, still thinking about Lily Baye and her baby, though I didn’t mention her to Sam Glass, who was in a contemplative mood.
“I think what fascinates you about it all,” he said, “is the language. You know, it’s like a code they speak. They say, you know, ‘Sally Go Round the Roses’ and that’s supposed to mean something else: roses are protection or drugs or something. Or ‘C. C. Rider’—the white guys who recorded that song didn’t know that—”
“A c. c. rider is a pimp,” I interjected, finishing his thought. “The guys who recorded that song were a fifties college band—I read this somewhere. They knew one black guy named Rider and they wrote the song for him. Without knowing.”
“You see a lot of riders out there on the Island?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“It’s fascinating how they get women to do what they do. Especially since you know what the sexists say, don’t you? ‘Men don’t pay prostitutes to come, they pay them to leave’?”
“Typical male respect for women,” I said, “for that ever-so-holy state of matrimony. But hey, these women know how to even the score! Out at the Women’s House they say they’re sittin’ on their money-makers.”
Sam Glass did an ironic double take as if he were shocked. We were in the Sam office after hours, reading through submissions.
“Say what?”
“You heard me. In some ways it’s a horror, in other ways it’s a kind of skewed feminism.”
Sam Glass touched my cheek.
“You can’t,” he said, “have it both ways.”
But he was wrong. A woman could have it both ways. Baby Ain’t, for example, proved it. She was a flatback and a pleasure boat but also a businesswoman.
“I got a little sugar bowl made by my own sugar bowl—put away,” she told me once, “where ain’t nobody find it but me.”
Sam Glass smiled at me and opened an anthology: a test. He would read lines of great poems to see if I could guess the authors. He loved quizzing his friends and fellow writers. Because he prided himself on having read almost everything, as he said, he had to set himself up as a kind of human quiz show of poetry, the Groucho Marx of literary reference.
The first poem excerpt floated an image of a white bed in a white room with sun pouring in through translucent white curtains. And lit by sun on a polished bureau-top: a key.
…and the immaculate white bed
I knew that bed, that room, that key. I suddenly realized that it was a rented room and the key seemed to hint at an illicit affair. I’d never understood the poem that way before.
“It’s ‘Nantucket,’” I said. “William Carlos Williams. I always thought I’d like to find that room and never leave. Hide out. Die there.”
“Here’s another,” he said, and moved closer and read “Queen-Anne’s-Lace,” a poem by Williams that lifted off the page, describing a white flower with a “purple mole” at its center. (“Wherever/ his hand has lain there is / a tiny purple blemish.”) A poem about sexual desire, in its close-up of the flower and its broader image of the field of white nodding blossoms, rooted as wild carrot, delicate as nerve endings. It was also a poem about stubbornness, I realized, about refusing to give in, even as pure humming instinct took over the field. When had I learned that Queen Anne’s lace, also known as wild carrot, had been ground up and brewed as a morning-after tea for centuries, counseled by midwives? That women imbibed it when their monthly bleeding was late? It had estrogenic properties, Queen Anne’s lace, it was an abortifacient. To the doctor-poet it was a dream of wildflowers nodding in the drowsy summer field, a dream of bowing-down blossoms, acres of bride-white stitchery, tumescent as clitoral flesh. To the woman exhausted by and fearing birth, it was a midnight solution, bitter distillate drunk down in swift gulps—an escape from Nature through nature: an urgent detour out of time, out of the prison of the body—through the tunnel-passage backward, back out past the wet reddened lips, past the ambivalent heart of the flower, past the entrance through desire
until the whole field is a
white desire, empty, a single stem
“Try another one,” I said to Sam Glass. “I know Williams better than my own poems.”
Our previous workshop meeting had featured a poem by Never Delgado as well as Roxanne. Never stood up to read her poem and made a loud trumpeting noise to get everyone’s attention.
“Da-da-ta-da!”
“Never Delgado has no guilt,” she began. “We can start right there.”
Polly grinned at her.
“Guilty or innocent,” she mused. “The Whorehouse Bible say you only as guilty as the person who lay down with you.”
“Forget your Whorehouse Bible!” cried Never, stung. “I’m only talkin’ about how a young girl could get sucked into some scheme without knowin’—being asked to carry a suitcase bac
k and forth on a plane to and from Bogotá. How could she know what was inside?”
“I hear you carried a chunk of H in your pussy.” Gene/Jean winked at her. “About the size of Newark.”
“How much more I’m expected to put up with this horny sow-pig?” Never pointed at Gene, appealing to Aliganth. “Everybody know I am a lady!”
“Can it, Keeley! You lookin’ at an infraction. Miss Delgado? You set to read what you wrote?”
Then she glanced away, distracted, and left briefly to talk to an officer in the hall.
“Drug runner,” murmured Akilah under her breath, apparently referring to Never—and we locked eyes. Next to her, Gene/Jean abruptly laid her head on her arms on the table and was instantly asleep, breathing loudly through her mouth. Darlene was chewing on Jesus. A typical workshop session, I thought.
“My poem is not about, anyway, what I did or did not do.”
“Just read the damn thing,” said Sallie.
Never read it slowly, in her lovely low voice with its delicate, soft, barely-there Puerto Rican accent.
When she was finished, and after a few suggestions for revision, Polly sat up straighter and said: “I don’t see you in your poem—where are you?”
Channeling Mark Twain Page 13