by C. D. Wright
Parades without permits/ Boycotted stores
Funeral home turned into a Freedom Center
Kids arrested en masse and put in a swimming pool
V died during Operation Enduring Freedom
A bottle a day, she got annihilated/ Two packs a day
Always preoccupied with last things/ Always a touch eschatological
Always took a little tabula rasa with her caffeine
When I asked the neighbor if she knew the woman who lived there in 1969/
Oh yes she said/ She knew her
She didn’t trust me and I didn’t trust her
I don’t blame her though/ Everything
was so confusing/ She stayed to herself
She was overwhelmed/ That poor woman...
She was right/ We were wrong
VINDICATION
They’ve got souls/ Just like you and me
INTERPOSITION AND NULLIFICATION
The marchers are approaching the town of Hazen
where not so long ago an earth scraper turned up
a mastodon skull and a tusk on the old military road
In Big Tree: People are turning in
Only sure thing were the prices:
Grown-ups know the cost of a head of lettuce,
a fryer, a package of thighs; a $500 bag of seed
covers about 5 acres; it takes 20 square feet of cotton
for a medium-size blouse; where nothing is planted,
nothing much grows. The dirt is hard-packed.
The trees were gone by the first war. The first to go,
the most marvelous one, the red cypress,
made beautiful instruments. The fields,
not gone, but empty. Cotton turned to soybeans.
Mussels from the river turned to salvage.
Fishing for tires on the silted-up water.
Some are left digging an old bur out of their foot.
Some go up/Some go down [Big Tree church sign]
A race-free conversation hard to have back then.
Back then, the hotdog wagon doubled as a brothel.
Come again.
DEAR ABBY,
I am 11 years old but I know all the facts of life because I live in a dirty neighborhood. My problem is that in our family we get pregnate quick. My sister got pregnate when she was 16 just by sitting next to a boy in church. Can this be?
DEAR YOUNG MISS,
No, somebody must have moved.
+ + +
People study the dingy chenille clouds for a sign.
People did what they have done.
A town, a time, and a woman who lived there.
And left undone what they ought not to have did.
+ + +
I take one more drive across town thinking about the retired welding teacher easing over that rise seeing the parking lot full of white men. I wonder if he thought he would die in the jungle [where no Vietcong ever called him [N-word] ] or he would die in front of the bowling alley [without ever having been inside] or die in the swimming pool [without ever having been in it, except when drained, and the police had him in their sights]. Or if, because he was a young man, he would never die. I attach V to my driving-around thoughts.
An object unworthy of love she thought she was.
It was a cri de coeur.
Those of our get had given her a nom de guerre: V.
A simple act, to join a march against fear
down an old military road.
We were watching an old movie the night
the table started walking toward us
and there was trouble on Division.
She became a disaffiliated member [of her race].
I’m one of them now, she said, upon release
from jail. I am an Invader.
To feel in conjunction with the changes
of my time. The most alive I’ve ever been.
My body lifted itself from the chair
it walked to where I saw a silent crowd.
To act, just to act. That is the glorious thing.
Yet it has come to my attention that a whisper campaign
has been directed against the main character,
an invisible woman. She could have buried her feelings
like power lines; walked around free
and common as the air that bathes the globe or
sued the chickenshits and gone to live in Provence
smelling of Gauloises and café au lait. You have your life
until you use it. You forfeit the only life you know
or go to your grave with the song curdled inside you.
No more damned if you did and damned if you didn’t.
Not the mental lethargy in which the days enveloped her
Nor the depleted breasts not the hand that never knew
tenderness nor eyes that glistened
Not the people dragging canvas bags
through the ragged fields
Not the high mean whine of mosquitoes
Not another year of shoe-top cotton
No more white buck shoes for Henry
No peaches this year on the Ridge, and no other elevation
around to coast another mile out of the tank
No eel in L’Anguille
Not the aphrodisiac of crossing over
Not the hole in the muffler circling the house
Not a shot of whiskey before a piece of bread
Not to live anymore as a distended beast
Not the lying-in again
Not the suicide of the goldfish
Not the father’s D.T.’s
Not the map of no-name islands in the river
Not the car burning in the parking lot
Not the sound but the shape of the sound
Not the clouds rucked up over the clothesline
The copperhead in the coleus
Not the air hung with malathion
Not the boomerang of bad feelings
Not stacks of poetry, long-playing albums, the visions of Goya and friends
Not to be resuscitated
and absolutely no priests, up on her elbows, the priests confound you and then they confound you again. They only come clear when you’re on your deathbed. We must speak by the card or equivocation will undo us.
Look into the dark heart and you will see what the dark eats other than your heart.
The world is not ineluctably finished
though the watchfires have been doused
more walls have come down
more walls are being built
Sound of the future, uncanny how close
to the sound of the old
At Daddy’s Eyes
“Pusherman” still on the jukebox
Everybody’s past redacted
+ + +
What to say
to the woman given a folded flag who could not sit
and order a soda in the drugstore
to the druggist who pulled the stools out by the roots
still open for business
to the man, living in Reno now, retired, who was arrested
wrongly, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced.
Picked him up one summer evening when he was on his bicycle making deliveries for the drugstore.
Then they let him out one night. Drove him home. Told him to go. Just go.
His family collected cash. His mother made food for the journey.
He took a bus to California. Didn’t know a living soul.
People were wearing purple pants.
Or the man and his sons,
one son already a veteran, beaten by men from all the farms around. They were waiting for them outside the jailhouse.
They turned off the jailhouse lights and let them loose.
He knew every one of them. He fixed flats for the farms. So he knew every blasted one of them.
His sons took off, one jumped from an overpass.
The father beaten so badly he lost an eye. He was giv
en hot coffee at the hospital. A nurse said, If anyone comes in you can’t name, you throw this coffee at them. Anyone.
Your people will be here in no time. You have to go to Memphis.
What to say
to the kids, now scattered, on social security, passed out of this life, or looking after parents, grandchildren; still working a dead-end job
who were arrested, taken in school buses, then in sealed trucks and put in the drained pool.
Kids. Sealed trucks. Put in a cement hole. In the ground.
Held at gunpoint for three days. Parents half out of their minds.
It’s paved over now. A parking lot. But the pump house isn’t gone. Just overgrown.
I had my friend photograph the pump house, its ghost anyway.
The photographer sees a snake and scrambles up the bank with her tripod.
MR. EASTER: Probably a rat snake.
I’m about like you though about a snake. All these years on the river I only saw a poison one about three times.
The wife was afraid of spiders, but she’d skin the snakes people would bring her for a hatband, belts, and whatnot. I’d say, Take that out on the porch. I don’t want a thing to do with them.
When the wife was alive, she kept it beautiful. She loved flowers. I don’t do nothing now but fish. Used to dive for mussels then salvage.
Later the same day we met a city worker [retired] who said he once killed a cottonmouth on the streets, sold it to a restaurant owner for a dollar, who skinned, filleted, and served it back to him on a platter.
Later, the same evening, we met a bartender who told us only four people in history sweat blood and they were all women. It is a place flowing over with its peculiar feeling.
+ + +
For me
it has always been a series of doors:
if one is opened precipitously a figure is caught bolting from bed
if another, a small table, a list of demands on school paper
if another, a child on the linoleum, saying she wants a white doll
a woman sitting on a bed, holding a folded flag
a shelf of trophies behind her head
an ironing board, bottle of bourbon on the end
sewing machine on a porch
To walk down the road without fear
To sit in a booth and order a sweet soft drink
To work at the front desk
To be referred to as Gentleman
To swim in the pool
To sit in the front row and watch Run Wild, Run Free [next week: Death of a Gunfighter]
To make your way to the end of the day with both eyes in your head
Nothing is not integral
You want to illumine what you see
Fear reflected off an upturned face
Those walnuts turning black in the grass
It is a relatively stable world
Gentle Reader
But beyond that door
It defies description
I am standing in a sluggish line at the Memphis airport. It is too early. A little girl in a pink sweat suit with tawny corkscrew curls stands behind me. I wish you would just shut up, she says to the stuffed bear she holds. Her mother and I exchange holy-moly looks. I sway between standing and falling. I am flashing the black paintings [before they were transferred onto canvas], and a cock called Helmet, sweet baby JC, a frowsy bush of sweet-betsy, and an old activist with the sobriquet Sweet Willie Wine; there are endless rows of cotton and never enough shade or cool cool water, and rivers silting up and slowing to a standstill, daytime bourbon drinkers, smelly shirts and scrap dogs, clouds of malathion and moccasins in the storm cellar, mussels as big as dinner dishes, a land of lay-offs and morbid obesity, sharp-tongued undertakers, don’t-pick-up-hitchhikers correction-facility signs, gentlemen who could not be called gentlemen without it coming back on them, women who could never be called ma’am, rusted iron bridges, towheads, do-rags, tired out schoolbooks, kids put in a drained pool, a pool buried and paved over, brothers scared shitless jumping off an overpass to get away from armed, malevolent men, brothers hiding under the preacher’s pickup, blackbirds flashing their red shoulders, speckled bowling balls, segregation after death, and how the death of reason produces monsters.
The Civil Rights Movement has been not only dutifully but beautifully documented, and I am indebted to the brace of books that helped inform my own footnote to the struggle.
Allen, James, and Hilton Als, Congressman John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack. Without Sanctuary. Twin Palms Publishers, 2000. [A devastating photographic document of lynchings.]
Beifuss, Joan Turner. At the River I Stand. B&W Books, 1985. [This is the definitive day-by-day account of the Memphis sanitation workers strike. It is a guaranteed-money-back page-turner.]
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63. Simon and Schuster, 1988.
____. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963–65. Simon and Schuster, 1998.
____. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965–68. Simon and Schuster, 2006. [I mean, somebody say, Amen.]
Capers, Gerald M., Jr. The Biography of a River Town, Memphis: Its Heroic Age. Reprint of second edition by Lightning Source for Burke’s Bookstore, 2003.
Collins, Martha. Blue Front: a poem. Graywolf Press, 2006. [An affecting book-length lyric of a lynching to which her father could have been a very young witness.]
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Signet Paperback, 1968. [Masterly.]
Dray, Philip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. Modern Library Paperback, 2003. [A devastating textual account of lynchings in America.]
DuBois, W.E.B. The Negro. Dover Publications, 2001.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Modern Library, 1994.
Estes, Steve. I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement. University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Gordon, Robert. It Came from Memphis. Faber and Faber, 1995. [This book rocks. Memphis deserves a dozen chroniclers of its very own sound.]
Jones, Patricia Spears. The Weather That Kills [poems]. Coffee House Press, 1995. [Who was there, among a handful of black students entering the formerly all-white high school the first year of Choice.]
Kennedy, Randall. Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. Pantheon Books, 2002. [With a nod in the title to C. Vann Woodward, this book unearths the whole sordid history of the N-word.]
King, Martin Luther, Jr. Stride Toward Freedom. Harper and Row, 1958.
____. Why We Can’t Wait. Signet Classic, 2000.
____. I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World. Edited by James M. Washington. Harper San Francisco, 1992.
____. A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepard. Warner Books, 2001. [When people say so-and-so is a poet when so-and-so is actually a lyricist or a fashion designer or a dog whisperer or a preacher, it sets my tail on fire, but the Reverend, by any lights, was a poet.]
Lancaster, Bob. The Jungles of Arkansas: A Personal History of the Wonder State. University of Arkansas Press, 1989. [I am very attached to this smart-mouthed journalist’s tucked-up chronicle of the state.]
Rodgers, Clyde Allen. Lives of Quiet Desperation. PublishAmerica, 2004. [Novel by a white sharecropper’s son whose fictitious Uncle Sal said flatly of his native Arkansas Delta, “It is an ugly country, and it gives me a headache... the mosquitoes are bloodthirsty and bold. I am too old to contend, even with a bug.”]
Roy, Beth. Bitters in the Honey: Tales of Hope and Disappointment across Divides of Race and Time. University of Arkansas, 1999. [An independent scholar’s crucial, absorbing account of Little Rock’s infamous year.]
Stockley, Grif. Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919. University of Arkansas Press, 2001. [Not enough has been written about this unforgivable bloodletting. Stockley�
��s book begins the exhumation.]
Woodruff, Nan Elizabeth. American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta. Harvard University Press, 2003. [Hallelujah. She nailed it.]