by C. D. Wright
King said no one could be an outsider who lived inside these borders. There are no Invaders.
What the white man wanted, no less than complete control.
Who expected the sidewalks cleared when they came down them [as in the days of the Raj].
+ + +
The boys hid under the reverend’s vehicle. I can’t say if the reverend knew they were there. I can’t say if he didn’t know. He probably knew. They hid on the concrete slab under the block. They held their breath and listened. One of them was hurt pretty bad. And the patriarch, the flat-fixer, lost an eye.
Hateful words survive in sticky clumps
Furry thoughts skid across the yellow line
And over the muddy embankment.
Big enough to hunt, being hunted.
Says the sheriff, Nowadays you can’t
Even say chigger you have to say Cheegro.
They fired the flat-fixer. They fired him after they put out his eye. The eel in the L’Anguille never were. The flat-fixer who said he’d get the radio fixed. He knew who could fix it. They fired him. Never held an eel, she just slithered. The fixer, they said, stole their shortwave. He had it fixed. They fired him. But first they put out his eye. So they named it L’Anguille. And the Mississippi receives them both, but you wouldn’t notice now. It’s casino to casino from here to the Big Easy. The other river, that would be the St. Francis.
They said they would take this harm. They would take it this time, would move on. They would walk away, walk away. Turn a blind eye. They would go forward into the seasons of their lives. They would see the sun shiver as it disappeared behind willow and cottonwood, the blackbird threading the phone lines, the combine continuing to rust on its haunches. They would not be deformed by this hatefulness. Nor be comforted by religion [though would be their women]. But if anyone ever touched any of them ever again. They would put this town on the map. They made their pact. They took the no-quarter oath. They were eight men strong. And they meant it, Gentle Reader. They meant it.
Outside of North Little Rock they are joined by a Quaker.
From ONE TOO YOUNG TO JOIN THE UPRISING: The all-Negro elementary school was behind the all-Negro junior high. They were letting us out early. The troopers were there. We wanted to see. We wanted to see the goings-on. I got to watch a couple of chairs fly out the window is all. And here come my loving mother to keep her baby out of harm’s way.
THE RETIRED WELDING TEACHER: After they put us in the pool, they taunted us. With chimp chants. They brought a TV and set it up and made us watch Tarzan. They wouldn’t let us sleep. They made us watch.
ONE OF THE STUDENTS ARRESTED AND PUT IN THE POOL: They arrested us in the morning and drove us around until dark. They told us all kind of things. But we didn’t know what they were going to do with us. The last thing my mother said before I left the house—Don’t you get in that line. Don’t you get in that line, girl. Stay away. Remain calm. I won’t even come see you if you go to jail. But later I found out she did try to see me. They gave us hand-me-down books. Turn to page 51, the teacher would say. It would be torn out. Lunch was slabs of butter between two pieces of bread. Milk usually spoiled and it cost 2¢.
GRADUATE OF ALL-WHITE HIGH SCHOOL, First Year of Choice: You have to understand about my mom, if she calls us up at three in the morning, and says, she wants ice cream, you get dressed and go buy ice cream. Even if you have to drive to Memphis. If she says talk to this woman, you talk.
Teachers’ kids stuck together. We were the only ones with a telephone, a TV, a record player.
Blew the front of our house off the day before my father’s funeral.
I see someone from that school now and think, I wonder if your father is still alive and if he is still wearing his little Klan outfit on Saturday night.
All of us who went to the white school have a story. Houlie went to Liberia. My husband never went back in the building.
HER MOTHER: I accept nothing less than respect. You hear me.
I haven’t seen the lightning bugs yet but I do enjoy them. And by day I enjoy the butterflies. I sit on my step; they flutter around me. And I think, well maybe somebody is paying me a visit.
A teacher sent a note home saying she couldn’t understand my oldest daughter. I told her I curse better than you speak. My daughter is not going to flunk English because you cannot speak it. No less than respect, you get what I’m saying.
The department store hired a couple of light-skinned blacks to work in the back [Saturdays only].
I remember her. Bought an Emerson from her husband for the Big Shootout.
Parents came down with food for the kids when we found out where they were. Police threw the burgers over the fence.
The former legislator said he fished with a man who told him the school wouldn’t be there when he came to teach in the fall, first year of Choice.
They march along here, the military road
The road they walk built by humpers
Those were the Irish
They pass Blackfish Lake
Ditch #1 about where they crossed
Gerstaecker slept here bundled up in a buffalo’s skin
But first the Choctaw Removal; then came the Creek with ponies;
Then Chickasaw; then Cherokee, maybe Sequoyah among them his syllabary nearly finished
Now stood another anonymous racist calling them names
His rod extended/ his line hung up in his own ignominy
THE MAN IMPORTED FROM MEMPHIS: When you get change you keep pushing and you get more. The hardest thing is to get the ball rolling.
We are marching to get this fear out of your hearts. You must remember the white man puts his pants on the same way you do, one leg at a time.
Since I have been involved with the Movement I have not committed any so-called crime.
The Movement is the best thing I’ve ever been involved in. It channeled my energy into constructive efforts.
My aunt raised me. She worked as a domestic for the family of Judge Bailey Brown.
If white people can ride down their highways with guns, I can walk down the highway unarmed.
Old enough to hunt, hunted.
When people have anticipated something and they have been let down, you must find some way to let them use up this excess energy. [That, Gentle Reader, is the accursed share.]
My walk will help do this for the people of Arkansas. Not a question of violence or nonviolence. Survival is the point. We are going to survive one way or the other. Sweet Willie Wine, V, and the Invaders are
Walking we are just walking
Dead doe on the median
Whoever rides into the scene changes it
Pass a hickory dying on the inside
A black car that has not moved for years
Forever forward/ backwards never
+ + +
IN HELL’S KITCHEN: Her apartment is smaller by half than the shotgun shacks that used to stubble the fields outside of Big Tree. Stained from decades of nonstop smoking. The world according to V was full of smoke and void of mirrors.
She was not an eccentric. She was an original. She was congenitally incapable of conforming. She was resolutely resistant.
Her low-hanging fears no match for her contumacy
Grappling hooks in the mud leaf out in the mind
She was my goombah.
Cats, Catholicism, alcohol, and men. She served them all.
Children—she failed her own. Of that she was acutely aware. It was the grief of her existence.
If I could summon her L’wha now. If this were her book of days. If she were still able to sit back on her double-joints and read my cards: “Sometimes you feel rather alone in the world; times of stress and dissatisfaction are likewise times of passion...” If she were to pass through that wall this very second...
V, what spurred you to get involved.
It was when they put the kids in the swimming pool. My babysitter’s granddaughter. They put her in the pool.
I knew some kids over at Memphis State and they put me in touch with the Invaders. I met one Invader and he wouldn’t have anything to do with me. I wanted them to come over and help.
After I was driven out of Arkansas I went to the FBI office in Memphis. He said, What are you going to do. You know, you’re not stupid. I said I don’t know. He said why don’t you take the civil service test. I took the civil service telephone operator’s test and I was the top passer.
I got a letter back that said, With your infamous acts there is no way we would employ you. It was creepy. I wish I’d kept that letter. I could probably have sued them. I could have gone to Europe and lived awhile.
She was guilty of no fear, no envy, no meanness, and when if once-in-a-knocked-up-again moon she felt a twinge of desire for a certain silk blouse, she was sure to touch the wearer, to touch the other on the sleeve that she not be afflicted by any such shallow tendencies.
I remember her in livid color. Her with the radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy. The best mind[ ] of [a] generation in an era, a place that thought nothing of a woman, even a white woman—and of a black woman, thought even less than.
The air itself was heavy upon them, the forward-marching folks who seemed small in number and dwindling in spirit. The King was dead; the laws were in place, but nobody said BOO about enforcement. [Well, yes, they did, they said INTERPOSITION AND NULLIFICATION.]
V: In high school, you are crazy for boys then. A cousin had a boy I sort of liked. He talked anti-Jewish. I told him I was half-Jewish. And that was that.
Concealed her pregnancy until she was seven months. I’m glad your mother is dead, her stepmother told her, her mother’s sister.
I tried to get her first semester transcript, but there was none. She either did not finish the term or the records were lost or destroyed. I just wanted to see those easily won high marks. Who knows, they may have been punitively low. There was the book report from the pope’s banned books list; the teacher who didn’t know Swinburne; the biology teacher who said Jesus had 23 chromosomes and was the spit and image of his mother. Hahahahaha.
[That one busted her up.]
Walking they are just walking
Play the situation by ear
Inspiring fear/ Dispelling fear
Hateful words survive in sticky clumps
+ + +
MAYOR OF A TOWN ON THE MARCH ROUTE: With his twisted, diseased mind you don’t know what he’s going to do.
THE GOVERNOR calls for the march to be ignored.
AN UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN carries a small red Bible.
Along the route, ARMED MEN IN FERTILIZER BINS.
MAYOR: It gives a man a place to stand so he won’t be tempted to hurt them.
[They would kill us if they had the chance.]
V: We had the water and the shoes in my car. Stiles kept that water good and cold.
COUNCILMAN: We got good [N-word] here except for a few teens.
It is something you came through that.
It is the most alive I ever felt.
+ + +
HELL’S KITCHEN: I don’t know what we’re watching. She’s in her puffy chair, a few feet from her designated deathbed. When she sleeps it’s in the pleather chair, in front of her television. The bed has gathered dust and old hair and the bugs that live on our slough. The leading man is dying. He is fitted in a silk robe with tuxedo lapels. He lies in a big poster bed. He has but a handful of breaths left in him.
She says to me, He doesn’t want to leave his monogrammed pillowslip.
She says to me, I am Rafferty, the poet/ Eyes without sight
Mind without torment/ Going west on my journey
HER OLDEST DAUGHTER, MAY: Daddy caught a crow once. On the way to school [apropos of nothing].
Wordan kept a pet alligator.
Mother kept a fighting cock [retired].
Called him Helmet.
BIRDIE: Did she have a priest.
He would have had to enter at his peril.
Hahahahaha.
+ + +
V is propped up and alert. A man lately helped with a little problem of a romantic nature has sent a white rose for every year of her life. Big old-fashioned smelling roses. She stays conscious until they drop their last petal. She stays with us for them.
We have come together in Hell’s Kitchen, the old Memphis crowd. We stay up eating and drinking and talking more than either, and sleep in a heap; then some of us go to the demonstration. V is animated and tries to eat to humor us. We remind her of her kids crammed in their beds, telling the same old ghost story, the man with the hook, giggling in the dark, until the farting begins.
August 29. It feels good to come together in front of Madison Square Garden on the eve of the Republican National Convention. It is so squalid hot the only shade we get is when the zeppelin drifts overhead. We break up and go back to her apartment to watch the rest of the demonstration on television.
It’s one reason [the War, the New World Order] she says she’s glad to be on her way out. [That’s a low point.] She was almost see-through; she sat in the half-dark sort of self-cancellating.
A crowd/ Will gather, and not know it walks the very street
Whereon a thing once walked that seemed a burning cloud.
Whose ghost that is. Steals across the room in alcoholic light. Hers. Not the specter of her favorite she-cat. The one that often hauled socks from the laundry by their scruff taking them for her drowned litter. The men’s socks, when damp, the right measure and weight. Since the cat was color-blind, being cat, it didn’t matter if they were all black, the socks, that is.
+ + +
So they drove my friend V out of her home. They drove her out of the town. They drove her out of the state. Until they burned up her car, she drove herself. Burned her car right next to the police station. She had just begun to drive, I mean she just learned to drive and she had many miles to go. Then whoa, Gentle Reader, no more car. The white man burned that MF to the struts. The governor’s bodyguard, Jim, or was he a trooper or was he a trooper whose trooper duties were to safeguard the governor. Anyway he drove her to the state line. Drove her across the bridge to Memphis. One thing he knew. He didn’t want her getting killed in Arkansas. The governor didn’t want that and the bodyguard didn’t want that. After all he was the one driving, he would likely as not be killed alongside her. His job was to protect and to serve. It wasn’t part of his plan for her to get killed on his watch. She said he dropped her off at a cafe on the other side. Under the bridge. I don’t know what was there then. That whole area has turned. Condos and fine houses line the bluff overseeing the big brown working river.
Some would say she was in full pursuit of her ruin
Some would call it her pathetic adventure
I would say you did not understand the magnitude of her longing
I say where was the suitor to her senescence
Another disaffiliated member of her tribe
I say do we have to go through this every time/ This shunning thing
Any simple problem can be made insoluble
Such as how to share an Elberta with the fuzz still on it
Crickets in the house are good/ A crow is a bad sign
Empty rooms love the dark
The key to tranquillity is equal opportunity
When the siren sounds
It’s time for our curfew
Old moon a wrecking ball
The town under demolition from within
Color provides a structure, albeit soul-sucking
The woods were felled by Chicago Mills
An Arkansas arc is not a rainbow
But an iron bridge over troubled waters
+ + +
It was hotter then. It was darker. No sir, it was whiter. Just pick up a paper. You would never suspect 66% of the population was invisible. You would never even suspect any of its people were nonwhite until an elusive Negro was arrested in Chicago or the schedu
le for the annual Negro Fair was published or a popular Negro social studies teacher was fired for an insubordinate letter to the superintendent and a spontaneous rebellion sprang up in a Negro classroom in the form of flying chairs and raggedy books and a pop bottle thrown at a light fixture, and then, the lists of long long suffered degradations backed up and overflowed: