One With Others: [A Little Book of Her Days]

One With Others: [A Little Book of Her Days]

C. D. Wright

Copper Canyon Press (2011)

Rating: ★★★★☆

Tags: Poetry, American, General

Poetryttt Americanttt Generalttt

Honored in "Best Books of the Year" listings from
The New Yorker
, National Public Radio,
Library Journal
, and The Huffington Post.

"
One With Others
represents Wright's most audacious experiment yet."—
The New Yorker

"[A] book . . . that defies description and discovers a powerful mode of its own."— National Public Radio

"[A] searing dissection of hate crimes and their malignant legacy."—
Booklist

*Today, Gentle Reader,
the sermon once again: "Segregation
After Death." Showers in the a.m.
The threat they say is moving from the east.
The sheriff's club says Not now. Not
nokindofhow. Not never. The children's
minds say Never waver. Air
fanned by a flock of hands in the old
funeral home where the meetings
were called [because Mrs. Oliver
owned it free and clear], and
that selfsame air, sanctified
and doomed, rent with racism, and
it percolates up from the soil itself . . . *

In this National Book Award finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, C.D. Wright returns to her native Arkansas and examines explosive incidents grounded in the Civil Rights Movement. In her signature style, Wright interweaves oral histories, hymns, lists, interviews, newspaper accounts, and personal memories—especially those of her incandescent mentor, Mrs. Vittitow—with the voices of witnesses, neighbors, police, and activists. This history leaps howling off the page.

C.D. Wright
has published over a dozen works of poetry and prose. Among her honors are the Griffin Poetry Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and lives outside of Providence, Rhode Island.

**

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This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.

I want people of twenty seven languages walking back and forth saying to one another hello brother how’s the fishing and when they reach their destination I don’t want them to forget if it was bad

—
The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You,
Frank Stanford

There are people in small rooms all over the world, in impersonal cubicles in large offices, in malls, in ghettos, and behind fenced mansions—who thrive on a little chaos, enjoy the occasional taste of 220 volts, live for the beauty of the flaw in the grain.

—
It Came from Memphis,
Robert Gordon

No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

—“How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Zora Neale Hurston

Herein lie buried many things.

—
The Souls of Black Folk,
W.E.B. DuBois

Contents

• Title Page
  
• Note to Reader
  

• One With Others
  

• About the Author
  
• Books by C.D. Wright
  
• Links
  
• Acknowledgments
  
• Copyright
  
• Special Thanks
  

Some names were changed or omitted in light of the interpretive nature of this account. Others because they still live there. People may have been rendered as semblances and composites of one another. And others, spoken into being. Memories have been tapped, and newspapers consulted. Books referenced. Times fused and towns overlaid. This is not a work of history. It is a report full of holes, a little commemorative edition, and it aspires to the borrowed-tuxedo lining of fiction. In the end, it is a welter of associations.

Up and down the towns in the Delta, people were stirring. Cotton was right about shoe top. Day lilies hung from their withering necks. Temperatures started out in the 90s with no promise of a good soaking. School was almost out. The farm bells slowly rang for freedom. The King lay moldering in the ground over a year. The scent of liberation stayed on, but it was hard to bring the trophy home. Hard to know what came next; one thing, and one thing only was known, no one wanted to go home dragging their tow sack; no one wanted to go home empty-handed.

Over at the all-Negro junior high, a popular teacher has been fired for “insubordination” for a “derogatory” letter he wrote the superintendent saying the Negro has no voice. No voice at all. It was the start of another cacophonous summer.

It smells like home. She said, dying. And I, What’s that you smell, V. And V, dying: The faint cut of walnuts in the grass. My husband’s work shirt on the railing. The pulled-barbecued evening. The turned dirt. Even in this pitch I can see the vapor-lit pole, the crape myrtle not in shadow. My sweet-betsy. That exact streaked sky. The mongrel dog being pelted with rain. Mine eyes pelted. All fear. Overcome. At last. No scent. That’s what she said. Dying in the one-room apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.

MR. EASTER, AN OUTLIER [with FISH 4 SALE]: It’s probably a rat snake. Had a couple in the old storm cellar. My son-in-law accidentally caught it on fire and it killed ever one of my snakes.

+ + +

I came in by the old road from Memphis, the old military road. Across the iron bridge. No one in the field. Not a living soul.

I drove around with the windows down. The redbuds in bloom. Sky, a discolored chenille spread. Weather, generally fair.

The marchers step off from the jailhouse at Bragg’s Spur, 8:17 a.m. More police than reporters. More reporters than police.

The self-described Prime Minister of the Invaders, 31, and five others have begun their trek. SWEET WILLIE WINE’S WALK AGAINST FEAR is on the move.

V: We had the water and the shoes in my car. There was a black man named Stiles. [He was a midget.] He kept that water good and cold [for the marchers].

The threat they say is coming from the east
[of the six Negroes walking to Little Rock and the white woman driving a station wagon].

It was something you came through that.

V: It was invigorating. It was the most alive I ever felt in my life.

FBI followed me for a long time. Stringers for the
Gazette
and the
Appeal
trailed me for a year. Once every ten or twelve years, I will get a caller. I used all of my life. I told my friend Gert, you’ve got your life until you use it.

I park in a spot of shade and walk around.

Downtown half shut down.

Cotton gin still going, not strong, but going.

Tracks working, neglected, but working.

The infamous overpass brought down.

September 15, 2004, Hell’s Kitchen, her life surrendered to her body. September 15 the day Padre Hidalgo uttered the famous
Grito
that kicked off the Mexican Revolution. She would have liked that, going off the air on a day marking a great struggle for independence.

The river rises from a mountain of granite.

The river receives the water of the little river.

The house where my friend once lived, indefinitely empty.

Walnuts turning dark in the grass. Papers collected on the porch.

If I put my face to the glass, I can make out the ghost

of her ironing board, bottle of bourbon on the end.

+ + +

HER FORMER HUSBAND: I’d come home from work and she would be in a rage and I just couldn’t understand it.

They were a poor match. He says so to this day. She said so then. They barely tolerated one another. But they were Catholic [another “error bred in the bone”]. If he looked at her, and she looked at him, in nine months she was back at the lying-in.

[My best guess: She woke up in a rage, eight days a week.]

Her friends—the musician, the poet, the actor:

GERT: She taught me how to live. Now she has taught me how to die.

And I: She was my goombah. My
rafiki.
It was the honor of my life to know her. Honor of my life.

ELLIS:

A crowd/ Will gather, and not know it walks the very street

Whereon a thing once walked that seemed a burning cloud.

[Yeats she knew inside out. Inside out.]

A MAN KNOWN AS SKEETER [his whole life]: Oh yeah, I remember her, she celebrated all her kids’ birthdays on the same day.

I talked to a number of people. In person. On the phone. Mostly, the phone. When I could get anyone to talk to me. I made so many calls:

Can we talk later because I’m trying to cook for my family

He’s not here now

He’s fishing

I’ve got to go to the hospital to see my brother