She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems (10 page)

LANGSTON HUGHES

I worked for a woman,

She wasn't mean—

But she had a twelve-room

House to clean.

Had to get breakfast,

Dinner, and supper, too—

Then take care of her children

When I got through.

Wash, iron, and scrub,

Walk the dog around—

It was too much,

Nearly broke me down.

I said, Madam,

Can it be

You trying to make a

Pack-horse out of me?

She opened her mouth.

She cried, Oh, no!

You know, Alberta,

I love you so!

I said, Madam,

That may be true—

But I'll be dogged

If I love you!

NATASHA TRETHEWEY
December 1910

Miss Constance Wright

I Schoolhouse Road

Oakvale, Mississippi

My Dearest Constance,

I am not out-of-doors as you feared,

and though I've had to tuck the blue, wool suit

you gave me, I do now have plenty to eat.

I have no doubt my decision will cause you

much distress, but still I must tell you—

when I had grown too weary to keep up

my inquiries and my rent was coming

due, I had what must be considered

the good fortune to meet Countess P—,

an elegant businesswoman who offered

me a place in her house. I did not accept

then, though I had tea with her—the first

I'd had in days. And later, too hungry

to reason, I spent the last of my purse

on a good meal. It was to her that I went

when I had to leave my hotel, and I am

as yet adjusting to my new life.

This first week I sat—as required—

each evening in the parlor, unnoticed,

the “professor” working the piano

into a frenzy, a single cockroach

scaling the flocked-velvet wallpaper.

The men who've come have called only

on the girls they know—their laughter

trailing off behind them, their gowns

floating past the balustrade. Though

she's said nothing, Countess is indeed

sympathetic. Just the other night

she introduced me to a longtime client

in hopes that he'd take a liking to me.

I was too shy to speak and only pretended

to sip the wine he'd ordered. Of course,

he found me dull and soon excused himself

to find another girl. Part of me was

quite relieved, though I knew I could not

earn a living that way.

                                And so, last night

I was auctioned as a newcomer

to the house—as yet untouched, though

Countess knows well the thing from which

I've run. Many of the girls do too,

and some of them even speak of a child

they left behind. The auction was a near

quiet affair—much like the one Whitman

described, the men some wealthy “gentlemen”

from out of town. Countess announced

that I recite poetry, hinting at a more dignified

birth and thus a tragic occasion for my arrival

at her house. She calls me
Violet
now—

a common name here in Storyville—except

that I am the
African Violet
for the promise

of that wild continent hidden beneath

my white skin. At her cue, I walked slowly

across the room, paused in strange postures

until she called out,
Tableau vivant
, and

I could again move—all this to show

the musical undulation of my hips, my grace,

and my patience which was to mean

that it is my nature to please and that I could,

if so desired, pose still as a statue for hours,

a glass or a pair of boots propped upon my back.

           And then, in my borrowed gown

I went upstairs with the highest bidder.

He did not know to call me

                                        
Ophelia

MARGARET WALKER

My grandmothers were strong.

They followed plows and bent to toil.

They moved through fields sowing seed.

They touched earth and grain grew.

They were full of sturdiness and singing.

My grandmothers were strong.

My grandmothers are full of memories

Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay

With veins rolling roughly over quick hands

They have many clean words to say.

My grandmothers were strong.

Why am I not as they?

TILLIE OLSEN
(Based on a Letter by Felipe Ibarro in New Masses, Jan. 9th, 1934)

i want you women up north to know

how those dainty children's dresses you buy

at macy's, wanamakers, gimbels, marshall fields,

are dyed in blood, are stitched in wasting flesh,

down in San Antonio, “where sunshine spends the winter.”

I want you women up north to see

the obsequious smile, the salesladies trill

“exquisite work, madame, exquisite pleats”

vanish into a bloated face, ordering more dresses,

gouging the wages down,

dissolve into maria, ambrosa, catalina,

stitching these dresses from dawn to night,

in blood, in wasting flesh.

Catalina Rodriguez, 24,

body shriveled to a child's at twelve,

catalina rodriguez, last stages of consumption,

works for three dollars a week from dawn to midnight.

A fog of pain thickens over her skull, the parching heat

breaks over her body,

and the bright red blood embroiders the floor of her room.

White rain stitching the night, the bourgeois poet would say,

white gulls of hands, darting, veering,

white lightning, threading the clouds,

this is the exquisite dance of her hands over the cloth,

and her cough, gay, quick, staccato,

like skeleton's bones clattering,

is appropriate accompaniment for the esthetic dance

of her fingers,

and the tremolo, tremolo when the hands tremble with pain.

Three dollars a week,

two fifty-five,

seventy cents a week,

no wonder two thousand eight hundred ladies of joy

are spending the winter with the sun after he goes down—

for five cents (who said this was a rich man's world?) you can

get all the lovin you want

“clap and syph aint much worse than sore fingers, blind eyes, and

t.m.”

Maria Vasquez, spinster,

for fifteen cents a dozen stitches garments for children she has

never had,

Catalina Torres, mother of four,

to keep the starved body starving, embroiders from dawn to

night.

Mother of four, what does she think of,

as the needle pocked fingers shift over the silk—

of the stubble-coarse rags that stretch on her own brood,

and jut with the bony ridge that marks hunger's landscape

of fat little prairie-roll bodies that will bulge in the

silk she needles?

(Be not envious, Catalina Torres, look!

on your own children's clothing, embroidery,

more intricate than any a thousand hands could fashion,

there where the cloth is raveled, or darned,

designs, multitudinous, complex and handmade by Poverty

herself.)

Ambrosa Espinoza trusts in god,

“Todos es de dios, everything is from god,”

through the dwindling night, the waxing day, she bolsters herself

up with it—

but the pennies to keep god incarnate, from ambrosa,

and the pennies to keep the priest in wine, from ambrosa,

ambrosa clothes god and priest with hand-made children's dresses.

Her brother lies on an iron cot, all day and watches,

on a mattress of rags he lies.

For twenty-five years he worked for the railroad, then they laid him off

(racked days, searching for work; rebuffs; suspicious eyes of

policemen.)

goodbye ambrosa, mebbe in dallas I find work; desperate swing

for a freight,

surprised hands, clutching air, and the wheel goes over a

leg,

the railroad cuts it off, as it cut off twenty-five years of his life.)

She says that he prays and dreams of another world, as he lies

there, a heaven (which he does not know was brought to earth

in 1917 in Russia, by workers like him).

Women up north, I want you to know

when you finger the exquisite handmade dresses

what it means, this working from dawn to midnight,

on what strange feet the feverish dawn must come

to maria, catalina, ambrosa,

how the malignant fingers twitching over the pallid faces jerk them

to work,

and the sun and the fever mounts with the day—

long plodding hours, the eyes burn like coals, heat jellies the

flying fingers,

down comes the night like blindness.

long hours more with the dim eye of the lamp, the breaking

back,

weariness crawls in the flesh like worms, gigantic like earth's in

winter.

And for Catalina Rodriguez comes the night sweat and the blood

embroidering the darkness.

for Catalina Torres the pinched faces of four huddled

children,

the naked bodies of four bony children,

the chant of their chorale of hunger.

And for twenty eight hundred ladies of joy the grotesque act gone

over—

the wink—the grimace—the “feeling like it baby?”

And for Maria Vasquez, spinster, emptiness, emptiness,

flaming with dresses for children she can never fondle.

And for Ambrosa Espinoza—the skeleton body of her brother on

his mattress

of rags, boring twin holes in the dark with his eyes to the image of

christ

remembering a leg, and twenty-five years cut off from his life by

the railroad.

Women up north, I want you to know,

I tell you this can't last forever.

I swear it won't.

ELLEN HAGAN

Take all the metal detectors apart and build imaginary cities with them. Then my 7th graders can build a utopia and walk around in it. Tell Harold, the security guard, who sings only Tito Puente songs, that he can have his own music room, and buy gold trumpets and trombones that slide like hot oil. Buy drums that rumble the whole school: da-dum, da-dum. Build a garden as big as the football field at Taft High School and feed everything. Tell Myles he can have a quiet room to fall asleep in, because I know he is tired. I know you are tired, Myles, but you cannot keep calling Russell a fat fuck, “Yo Russell, you fat fuck,” over and over until Russell has to stand up and punch Myles where he deserves it most. And why not? Call Russell a genius, who sure knows how to write about his grandma and the shiny wheelchair she rolls in. Tell Shelquan to get down from the air conditioner. He is singing, “This is why I'm hot,” with sunglasses he stole from Crystal, whose best friend Kiara has carved the word HATE in her arm. Remind Crystal and her girl Kiara that a woman should never mark her body with a word meant to destroy. Yell at them loudly and when Crystal's nana shows up at the school, tell her anyway, even though she does not speak English and Crystal might not translate. She might. Tell Yaneira that she is a hot skillet when she writes, and not a “retard,” which is what Eduardo calls her under his breath. A fire woman. Really. And when Fatumata stops you in the street in front of the McDonald's to say good morning, tell her she is late again, but yes, good morning. And tell her to get out of 339, or ask her to help you make it better. You know she can. Listen to Racheal's poem over and over again. She needs it when Angel, who you cannot believe has turned on you, makes fun of the lilt in her voice, stare him down with your witchy eyes. Tell him, teach him how to say, “I will look at you Racheal and I will see you,” 1,000 times over. Racheal, where Trinidad and Guyana meet. Tell her the truth, that you never knew where she was from until you asked, and when you finally asked it was way later than you wanted. Put the principal in class with all the run-down teachers, no pencils, paperless notebooks. Don't give him books because you know he is lazy. Call him lazy. Because he is. Make him walk in and out of the metal detectors, saying, “Next school year I will do better, and serve you better.” Make him mean it. Show up. Pencils and papers at the ready.

PATRICIA KIRKPATRICK
after Adelia Prado

I must look like I'm confident,

white cup for tea on the table before me,

my son in his indigo bunting,

asleep in the stroller.

When I take out my pen

I must look like a woman

who knows what her work is

while citron and currant

bake in ovens behind me.

Newspaper, lily—

I read in the book that poetry is about the divine.

God came to the window while I was in labor.

Tenderness, tenderness!

I have never forgotten that

sparrow among the clay tiles.

Who knows my name knows I mash

oatmeal, change diapers,

want truly to enter divinity.

God knows it too, knows that

wherever I go now I leave out

some part of me.

I watch my son's face like a clock;

he is the time I have.

If I choose this window, this black-and-white notebook,

I must appear to be what I am:

a woman who has chosen a table

between her sleeping child

and the beginning of everything.