Brown

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Brown Page 8

by Kevin Young


  the dog & drought-fed

  lawn. Nothing

  for once is wrong—

  cicadas quieted,

  the rain’s metal smell,

  a train on time

  arriving

  & that sound now his—

  as if a kiss

  might make music.

  Money Road

  for John T. Edge

  On the way to Money,

  Mississippi, we see little

  ghosts of snow, falling faint

  as words while we try to find

  Robert Johnson’s muddy

  maybe grave. Beside Little Zion,

  along the highwayside, this stone

  keeps its offerings—Bud & Louisiana

  Hot Sauce—the ground giving

  way beneath our feet.

  The blues always dance

  cheek to cheek with a church—

  Booker’s Place back

  in Greenwood still standing,

  its long green bar

  beautiful, Friendship Church just

  a holler away. Shotgun,

  shotgun, shotgun—

  ——

  rows of colored

  houses, as if the same can

  of bright stain might cover the sins

  of rotting wood, now

  mostly tarpaper & graffiti

  holding McLaurin Street together—

  RIP Boochie—the undead walk

  these streets seeking something

  we take pictures of

  & soon flee. The hood

  of a car yawns open

  in awe, men’s heads

  peer in its lion’s mouth

  seeking their share. FOR SALE:

  Squash & Snap Beans. The midden

  of oyster shells behind Lusco’s—

  the tiny O of a bullethole

  in Booker’s plate glass window.

  ——

  Even the Salvation

  Army Thrift Store

  closed, bars over

  every door.

  We’re on our way again,

  away, along the Money

  Road, past grand houses

  & porte cocheres set back

  from the lane, crossing the bridge

  to find markers of what’s

  no more there—even the underpass

  bears a name. It’s all

  too grave—the fake

  sharecropper homes

  of Tallahatchie Flats rented out

  along the road, staged bottle trees

  chasing away nothing, the new outhouse

  whose crescent door foreign tourists

  ——

  pay extra for. Cotton planted

  in strict rows

  for show. A quiet

  snowglobe of pain

  I want to shake.

  While the flakes fall

  like ash we race

  the train to reach the place

  Emmett Till last

  whistled or smiled

  or did nothing.

  Money more

  a crossroads

  than the crossroads be—

  its gnarled tree—the Bryant Store

  facing the tracks, now turnt

  the color of earth, tumbling down

  slow as the snow, white

  ——

  & insistent as the woman

  who sent word

  of that uppity boy, her men

  who yanked you out

  your uncle’s home

  into the yard, into oblivion—

  into this store abutting

  the MONEY GIN CO.

  whose sign, worn away,

  now reads UN

  Or SIN, I swear—

  whose giant gin fans,

  like those lashed & anchored

  to your beaten body,

  still turn. Shot, dumped,

  dredged, your face not even

  a mask—a marred,

  unspared, sightless stump—

  ——

  all your mother insists

  we must see to know

  What they did

  to my baby. The true

  Tallahatchie twisting south,

  the Delta

  Death’s second cousin

  once removed. You down

  for only the summer, to leave

  the stifling city where later

  you will be waked,

  displayed, defiant,

  a dark glass.

  There are things

  that cannot be seen

  but must be. Buried

  barely, this place

  no one can keep—

  ——

  Yet how to kill

  a ghost? The fog

  of our outdoor talk—

  we breathe,

  we grieve, we drink

  our tidy drinks. I think

  now winter will out—

  the snow bless

  & kiss

  this cursed earth.

  Or is it cussed? I don’t

  yet know. Let the cold keep

  still your bones.

  Hive

  The honey bees’ exile

  is almost complete.

  You can carry

  them from hive

  to hive, the child thought

  & that is what

  he tried, walking

  with them thronging

  between his pressed palms.

  Let him be right.

  Let the gods look away

  as always. Let this boy

  who carries the entire

  actual, whirring

  world in his calm

  unwashed hands,

  barely walking, bear

  us all there

  buzzing, unstung.

  NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Several poems first appeared in literary magazines and publications; thank you to their editors:

  Jai-Alai: Ode to Ol Dirty Bastard

  New York Review of Books: Ode to the Harlem Globetrotters

  The New Yorker: Money Road; the sonnets “When You Were Mine” and “Housequake” (as “Little Red Corvette”). Special thanks to Paul Muldoon.

  Oxford American: Pining, A Definition

  QuickMuse: James Brown at B. B. King’s

  VQR: Repast (minus “Pining”)

  Zoland Books: Mercy Rule

  “Thataway” was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art to accompany artist Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series exhibition and catalog. “Limbo” in the “Triptych for Trayvon Martin” first appeared in MoMa’s limited-edition volume of Robert Rauschenberg’s Thirty-four Drawings for Dante’s Inferno, also commissioned. Thanks to Leah Dickerman.

  “Open Letter to Hank Aaron” first appeared as part of the exhibition on Hank Aaron at Emory University’s Woodruff Library, from spring to fall 2014.

  Both “James Brown at B. B. King’s” and “Ode to Ol Dirty Bastard” appear in the Southern Poetry Anthology: Georgia volume.

  “Howlin’ Wolf” appears in the anthology Tales of Two Americas, edited by John Freeman.

  The first line and a half of “James Brown…” is a quote from the artist.

  * * *

  —

  “Repast”: The
repast refers to the traditional African American meal following a funeral. Whether formal or for family members only, held at a house of worship or the home of the deceased, catered by a favorite local spot or a community potluck, the repast is a ritual connected to other foodways, as well as to traditions both African and American, Christian and more broadly religious. Where the wake before the funeral is primarily about the dead, the repast is also about the living, who share food and memories. The very word has come to suggest a reflection, not on the past but on the future, a final supper after the burial that leaves the circle unbroken.

  Repast celebrates the life and bravery of Booker Wright, owner of Booker’s Place and waiter at Lusco’s in Greenwood, Mississippi, a town quite near to where white racists killed Emmett Till in 1955 and others murdered civil rights workers Goodman, Schwerner, and Cheney in 1963. In 1966, for the NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait, Wright knowingly spoke out about the double standards and racism of Greenwood’s white patrons, many of whom were also featured in the show (and were White Citizens’ Council members). After the film aired, Wright was beaten up and sent to a hospital—by a local police officer, no less—and his own establishment firebombed. Both the man and the bar survived. Years later Wright was shot and killed by a bar patron. As described in the recent documentary Booker’s Place, Wright’s descendants and others in the community have suggested that the shooting had a political motivation.

  In his own words from the 1966 documentary and through the imagination, Wright speaks of life and foodways in the American South and what it means to wait. Over the course of the piece, his waiter’s serving napkin goes from bar towel to preacher’s handkerchief, as Wright literally transforms from a waiter to a barkeep to an activist—which may prove the same thing.

  The oratorio was commissioned by the Southern Foodways Alliance and debuted at its annual symposium in October 2014, and was reprised at Carnegie Hall on 4 April 2016. Thanks to John T. Edge, Bruce Levingston (pianist and musical director), composer Nolan Gasser, and baritone Justin Hopkins.

  “Money Road”: “Money Road” traces my driving the Delta with friend and Southern Foodways Alliance leader John T. Edge—we started out visiting Booker’s Place in Greenwood, Mississippi, for Repast, the oratorio the SFA had commissioned from me on Booker Wright. Turns out Greenwood is where the term Black Power was popularized at a rally by Stokely Carmichael in 1966, just a few blocks from Booker’s. Nearly fifty years later one could still see why. Driving to Money that day, it was bitter cold, snow accompanying what became the pilgrimage recorded in the poem. The site of Till’s lynching feels both holy and haunted.

  In 2017 the news revealed—at least to those who had bought the story—that the white woman at the center of the case, who had claimed Till whistled at her or called her baby, confessed that Till had in fact not done a thing. I am heartened that the poem had already said he ‘whistled or smiled / or did nothing,’ though I still wonder why had even well-meaning southern and American accounts decried the lynching but somehow believed the lynchers? Till’s murderers—who lied in court, got acquitted in no time by an all-white jury, then promptly sold their story without fear of reprisal—should not be believed. In some small way perhaps it’s because we cannot believe the whole of the truth—that evil does discriminate—much like, in more recent cases from Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown, some cling to some sense of black culpability in their own killings. The poem calls out to us to remember but also to revisit and revise what we think of the past—not in the ways of bluesman Robert Johnson’s unlikely gravesite along the Money Road, or the fake plantation there that proves almost as haunting—but in the reality of the now-crumbling storefront where Till was brought and then killed in the night for no earthly, or only earthly, reasons.

  * * *

  —

  My gratitude to Melanie Dunea for the photographs in these pages. With support from the Virginia Quarterly Review, she traveled with me to the Mississippi Delta in January 2015 to capture the spirit of that place with a poetry that enhances my own.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Kevin Young is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and poetry editor for The New Yorker. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, including Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995–2015, long-listed for the National Book Award; and Book of Hours, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Young’s most recent nonfiction book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His collection Jelly Roll: A Blues was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. His first nonfiction book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award. A University Distinguished Professor at Emory, Young is the editor of eight other collections and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.

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