Listen Here (20 page)

from
Soque Street Poems
(1995)

Country: a rural, rather uncivilized area of the USA especially in the South. One who acts backwards, as in, ‘country.' No sophistication or knowledge of the outside, the real world. Provincial, limited, myopic, and zenophobic in language, appearance, actions, customs, and belief systems (superstitions, myths, folktales & collective lies).

In photos, they freeze
stiff & formal
shyly dressed in
their country dress-up
clothes. Their faces freeze
into the camera like it might
bite, all emotion erased except
for strong country personalities
too strong to be erased.

Faces un-animated.
Shoulders erect & stiff.
Sunday-best, if possible;
if not, a pose saying “Well, this me.
Take it or leave it.”
Every now and then
a face, a child, still grins
an adult caught
about to get stiff
characters so
strong they defy
attempts to make
them one-dimensional, flat…

from
voodoo chile: slight return
(1991)

(Dr. Garcia continually delayed my operation because
of the “laws” of her profession—i had to have a
“second opinion,” twice, i was told that no one could
just “request” a hysterectomy. That if there was no
“pathology in the uterus,” my doctor, Dr. Garcia
could be de-doctored [never allowed again to
practice] by the tissue committee. a committee, she
explained, of all elderly white males, who would
examine my uterus for pathology, and decide whether
or not she should have done the operation. they could,
then, decide her life, like they had been attempting to
run my life…not to mention, the irony that in the
old days, when any womon of color cld., get a hyst.
FREE
w/out even asking for it…)

ignoring the fact that i
asked for the hysterectomy
apart from the indirectly connected
issue of who
my “tissue”—my uterus—belongs to,
since, after all, it
was
in
my
body, it was a part of this
body that i fed, bathed, nurtured, &
paid rent on for
40 years, 7 months, and the last few days and
minutes too, apart from the
major issue of
control over my own female body &
female parts but connected to my
right to control my life,
i, too, have a few concerns:

1) those white male things
on the committee
never had PMS, vicious cramps, hemorrhages and
chafing between upper thighs. but
according to Chango,
at the next full moon,
they will (& one will be impregnated
against his will).

2) that hysterectomy, Dr. Garcia,
made me the happiest non-bleeding womon
in the midwest or maybe the world. additionally,
you, indirectly, saved
several lives
& enriched
many
besides mine/but
back to the
issue at hand:

when the committee inspects my
uterus for its pathology, (instead of
inspecting their inspection for
their pathology) &
can only see it's healthy (the uterus)
pure, even pretty, if they can't
see
anything
that was wrong
but therefore decide
you
are
(apart from the
question of who
owns my body / who makes
its
ultimate
decisions)
then, what they gone do?

make you
put it back?

from
eat thunder & drink rain
(1982)

in a world of
six million dollar men

and two dollar women,
psychedelic pain

and plastic people,
synthetic eggs and soybean beef,

miseducated educators and sex machines,
there is no place for

mambos.

(June 24, 1831–September 29, 1910)

Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis was the first of five children of Rachel Leet Wilson Harding and Richard Harding. She was born at the family home of her mother's Irish grandparents, the first white settlers in Washington County, Pennsylvania.

In 1837, her parents moved from Big Spring (now Huntsville), Alabama, to Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia). Her education was guided by her mother and private tutors until she was enrolled at the Washington [Pennsylvania] Female Seminary, from 1845 to 1848, where she graduated with highest honors. She then returned home to Wheeling to help her mother with the education of her younger siblings.

Davis is best known for her first publication,
Life in the Iron Mills
, a powerful story that exposed the inhumane working conditions of mill workers. Living in Wheeling introduced her to immigrant workers and their families, and she drew on her experiences to write
Life in the Iron Mills.
Published a decade before the French writer Emile Zola's naturalistic fiction, the novella movingly depicts the struggle of characters trapped in their circumstances.

In the summer of 1862, on her way home from a trip to Boston, during which she met Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Louisa May Alcott, she also met the lawyer Lemuel Clarke Davis, an admirer who was so impressed by
Life in the Iron Mills
that he had written to her and requested that they meet. They married on March 5, 1863, and eventually had three children: two sons and a daughter.

After their marriage, Rebecca and Clarke Davis moved to Philadelphia, where she worked as an associate editor for the
New York Tribune
(1869–1875) and her husband became a prominent journalist. Their son, Richard Harding Davis, also became an influential journalist.

In this excerpt from
Life in the Iron Mills
, the writer addresses the reader directly and introduces the story of Hugh Wolfe, an iron worker with artistic sensibilities, and his self-sacrificing cousin Deb. Although the setting is not named, the place is much like Wheeling, West Virginia, the novelist's hometown.

Novels:
Frances Waldeaux
(1897),
Doctor Warwick's Daughters
(1896),
Silhouettes of American Life
(1892),
Kent Hampden
(1892),
Natasqua
(1887),
A Law unto Herself
(1878),
Kitty's Choice: A Story of Berrytown
(1874),
John Andross
(1874),
Pro Aris et Foci: A Plea for Our Altars and Hearths
(1870),
Dallas Galbraith
(1868),
Margaret Howth: A Story of To-Day
(1862).
Novella:
Life in the Iron Mills, Atlantic Monthly 7
(April 1861), 430–51.
Autobiography:
Bits of Gossip
(1904).

Dictionary of Literary Biography
, Vol. 74, 92–96. Tillie Olsen, “A Biographical Interpretation,”
Life in the Iron Mills
(1972), 69–156. Harold Woodell, “Rebecca Harding Davis,”
Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary
(1979), 118–19.

My story is very simple,—only what I remember of the life of one of these men,—a furnace-tender in one of Kirby & John's rolling-mills,—Hugh Wolfe. You know the mills? They took the great order for the Lower Virginia railroads there last winter; run usually with about a thousand men. I cannot tell why I choose the half-forgotten story of this Wolfe more than that of myriads of these furnace-hands. Perhaps because there is a secret underlying sympathy between that story and this day with its impure fog and thwarted sunshine,—or perhaps simply for the reason that this house is the one where the Wolfes lived. There were the father and son,—both hands, as I said, in one of Kirby & John's mills for making railroad-iron,—and Deborah, their cousin, a picker in some of the cotton-mills. The house was rented then to half a dozen families. The Wolfes had two of the cellar-rooms….

…

I want you to come down and look at this Wolfe, standing there among the lowest of his kind, and see him just as he is, that you may judge him justly when you hear the story of this night. I want you to look back, as he does every day, at his birth in vice, his starved infancy; to remember the heavy years he has groped through as boy and man,—the slow, heavy years of constant, hot work. So long ago he began, that he thinks sometimes he has worked there for ages. There is no hope that it will ever end. Think that God put into this man's soul a fierce thirst for beauty,—to know it, to create it; to
be
—something, he knows not what,—other than he is. There are moments when a passing cloud, the sun glinting on the purple thistles, a kindly smile, a child's face, will rouse him to a passion of pain,—when his nature starts up with a mad cry of rage against God, man, whoever it is that has forced this vile, slimy life upon him. With all this groping, this mad desire, a great blind intellect stumbling through wrong, a loving poet's heart, the man was by habit only a coarse, vulgar laborer, familiar with sights and words you would blush to name. Be just: when I tell you about this night, see him as he is. Be just,—not like man's law, which seizes on one isolated fact, but like God's judging angel, whose clear, sad eye saw all the countless cankering days of this man's life, all the countless nights, when, sick with starving, his soul fainted in him, before it judged him for this night, the saddest of all.

I called this night the crisis of his life. If it was, it stole on him unawares. These great turning-days of life cast no shadow before, slip by unconsciously. Only a trifle, a little turn of the rudder, and the ship goes to heaven or hell.

…

[A group of wealthy visitors touring the ironworks encounter a sculpture created by Hugh Wolfe, an iron worker who has used korl, a by-product of the ore, for his art work.]

Mitchell started back, half-frightened, as, suddenly turning a corner, the white figure of a woman faced him in the darkness,—a woman, white, of giant proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in some wild gesture of warning.

“Stop! Make that fire burn there!” cried Kirby, stopping short.

The flame burst out, flashing the gaunt figure into bold relief.

Mitchell drew a long breath.

“I thought it was alive,” he said, going up curiously.

The others followed.

“Not marble, eh?” asked Kirby, touching it.

One of the lower overseers stopped.

“Korl, Sir.”

“Who did it?”

“Can't say. Some of the hands; chipped it out in off-hours.”

“Chipped to some purpose, I should say. What a flesh-tint the stuff has! Do you see, Mitchell?”

“I see.”

He had stepped aside where the light fell boldest on the figure, looking at it in silence. There was not one line of beauty or grace in it: a nude woman's form, muscular, grown coarse with labor, the powerful limbs instinct with some one poignant longing. One idea: there it was in the tense, rigid muscles, the clutching hands, the wild, eager face, like that of a starving wolf's. Kirby and Doctor May walked around it, critical, curious. Mitchell stood aloof, silent. The figure touched him strangely.

“Not badly done,” said Doctor May. “Where did the fellow learn that sweep of the muscles in the arm and hand? Look at them! They are groping,—do you see?—clutching: the peculiar action of a man dying of thirst.”

“They have ample facilities for studying anatomy,” sneered Kirby, glancing at the half-naked figures.

“Look,” continued the Doctor, “at this bony wrist, and the strained sinews of the instep! A working-woman,—the very type of her class.”

“God forbid!” muttered Mitchell.

“Why?” demanded May. “What does the fellow intend by the figure? I cannot catch the meaning.”

“Ask him,” said the other, dryly. “There he stands,”—pointing to Wolfe, who stood with a group of men, leaning on his ash-rake.

The Doctor beckoned him with the affable smile which kind-hearted men put on, when talking with these people.

“Mr. Mitchell has picked you out as the man who did this,—I'm sure I don't know why. But what did you mean by it?”

“She be hungry.”

Wolfe's eyes answered Mitchell, not the Doctor.

“Oh-h! But what a mistake you have made, my fine fellow! You have given no sign of starvation to the body. It is strong,—terribly strong. It has the mad, half-despairing gesture of drowning.”

Wolfe stammered, glanced appealingly at Mitchell, who saw the soul of the thing, he knew. But the cool, probing eyes were turned on himself now,—mocking, cruel, relentless.

“Not hungry for meat,” the furnace-tender said at last.

“What then? Whiskey?” jeered Kirby, with a coarse laugh.

Wolfe was silent a moment, thinking.

“I dunno,” he said, with a bewildered look. “It mebbe. Summat to make her live, I think,—like you. Whiskey ull do it, in a way.”

The young man laughed again. Mitchell flashed a look of disgust somewhere,—not at Wolfe.

“May,” he broke out impatiently, “are you blind? Look at that woman's face! It asks questions of God, and says, ‘I have a right to know.' Good God, how hungry it is!”

They looked a moment; then May turned to the mill-owner:—

“Have you many such hands as this? What are you going to do with them? Keep them at puddling iron?”

Kirby shrugged his shoulders. Mitchell's look had irritated him.

“Ce n'est pas mon affaire.
I have no fancy for nursing infant geniuses. I suppose there are some stray gleams of mind and soul among these wretches. The Lord will take care of his own; or else they can work out their own salvation. I have heard you call our American system a ladder which any man can scale. Do you doubt it? Or perhaps you want to banish all social ladders, and put us all on a flat table-land,—eh, May?”

The doctor looked vexed, puzzled. Some terrible problem lay hid in this woman's face, and troubled these men. Kirby waited for an answer, and, receiving none, went on, warming with his subject.

“I tell you, there's something wrong that no talk of ‘
Liberté
' or ‘
Égalité'
will do away. If I had the making of men, these men who do the lowest part of the world's work should be machines,—nothing more,—hands. It would be kindness. God help them! What are taste, reason, to creatures who must live such lives as that?” he pointed to Deborah, sleeping on the ash-heap. “So many nerves to sting them to pain. What if God had put your brain, with all its agony of touch, into your fingers, and bid you work and strike with that?”

“You think you could govern the world better?” laughed the Doctor.

“I do not think at all.”

“That is true philosophy. Drift with the stream, because you cannot dive deep enough to find bottom, eh?”

“Exactly,” rejoined Kirby. “I do not think. I wash my hands of all social problems,—slavery, caste, white or black. My duty to my operatives has a narrow limit,—the pay-hour on Saturday night. Outside of that, if they cut korl, or cut each other's throats, (the more popular amusement of the two,) I am not responsible.”

The Doctor sighed,—a good honest sigh, from the depths of his stomach.

“God help us! Who is responsible?”