One With Others: [A Little Book of Her Days] (10 page)

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 given 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.]