Turn Me Loose (2 page)

Like jazz artist Rene Marie, “Turn Me Loose” aestheticizes an unlikely entanglement, creating a beautiful ambivalence that invests “Dixie” with new meaning.
⁴
“Look Away, Look Away …” as a section title brilliantly raises an ethical question regarding bearing witness. It asks: to what extent can looking away align with loyalty? In the final section of “On Collective Memory,” Maurice Halbwachs posits that sometimes looking away offers us our only chance at loyalty.
⁵
He reads Peter's betrayal of Christ as just such a moment. Halbwachs reasonably asserts that when someone we love is about to experience something brutal or horrific, our impulse is not to stare or to be consumed with longing looks; instead, our impulse leads us to look away. Halbwachs contends that from this perspective, Peter had to turn away from Jesus, who was like a brother to him. Thus, in order
for Peter to serve as a witness for Christ, he had to deny their brotherhood.

The poems in the section “Look Away, Look Away …” imagine the making of Evers into the
NAACP
field secretary who would become the necessary witness to the “strange and bitter crop” produced in his own backyard. Evers's witness identified his steadfast loyalty to the lives of those who, according to Abel Meeropol, were the by-products of a macabre southern ecology. Under the pen name Lewis Allen, Meeropol wrote a poem, “Bitter Fruit,” that would become the lyric of the song “Strange Fruit” in 1939 as an indictment of lynching as a natural feature of the South.
⁶
In the song, lynching, an extralegal, vigilante practice of killing mostly black people through burning, mutilation, and hanging, serves as an environmental, regional, and racial indictment of a grisly southern tradition made to look like an ecological norm. Where “Dixie” celebrates, “Strange Fruit” indicts.

Though Evers was brutally murdered, much like the victims whose stories he recorded, historian Taylor Branch notes that the killing of Evers was not referred to as a lynching but an assassination. Thus, “the murder of Medgar Evers changed the language of race in American mass culture overnight,” according to Branch.
⁷
Walker acknowledges this difference through the way that he deconstructs the song's text to rethink Evers's legacy. The “Gallant South,” taken from the first line of the second stanza of “Strange Fruit” emphasizes various spectacles and spectral scenes that extend the singular startling, grisly one. Through this broadened lens, the scope of violence opens to reveal other, more anesthetized forms of violence usually hidden behind other, more visible forms of brutality. Walker reveals the way that violence looks in dreams; the way it can inform how you imagine love; how it can transform lives and makes for unlikely unions. The voice of Myrlie Evers comes to stand for the living possibility of a “gallant South” as she converts the Willie and Thelma De La Beckwith cabal into a sisterhood in which her life intertwines with theirs.

The final section of
Turn Me Loose
, “Bitter Fruit,” cites the original title of the poem that would become “Strange Fruit.” Such a return becomes an act of remembrance much like the act necessary to answer the call of Medgar Evers. If we are to finally lay him to rest, to satisfy his request to
turn him loose
, we must remember. This remembrance, however, eschews the wistful recollection of a magnolia-scented South and embraces memories of the flowery scent mixed with the stench of roasting flesh. Compliance requires the recollection of putrescent truths. This remembrance would involve recognizing the on-going presence of the past in the brutal killing of James Craig Anderson. We will have complied with Medgar Evers's request to
turn him loose
when we bring all of our creative powers to bear on questioning the return of the past. Frank X Walker's collection of poems offers a worthy model for how we can deploy the imagination in service to the urgent call of history.

Michelle S. Hite

SPELMAN COLLEGE

1
. See Manning Marable, “A Servant-Leader of the People: Medgar Wiley Evers (1925–1963),” in
The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero's Life and Legacy Revealed through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches
, ed. Myrlie Evers-Williams and Manning Marable (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Adam Nossiter,
Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers
(Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2002).

2
. See Taylor Branch,
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998); Taylor Branch,
Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963–64
(New York: Touchstone, 1999); John Dittmer,
Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Chana Kai Lee,
For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Spike Lee,
4 Little Girls
(
HBO
Home Video, 2001); Christopher Metress,
The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Dorothy Roberts,
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books
, 1997); Stephen J. Whitfield,
A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

3
. See Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks,
Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993).

4
. See René Marie,
Voice of My Beautiful Country
(Motéma, 2011).

5
. Maurice Halbwachs, “The Legendary Topography of the Gospels in the Holy Land,” part 2 in
On Collective Memory
, trans. and ed. Lewis Coser, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

6
. See David Margolick,
Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song
(New York: The Ecco Press, 2001).

7
. Branch,
Pillar of Fire
, 108.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, in which earlier versions of some of the poems were first published:

The Active Voice
: “Last Meal”

Black Magnolia Literary Journal
: “After Birth,” “Arlington,” “Beckwith Dreaming III,” “Believing in Hymn,” “Evers Family Secret Recipe,” “Homecoming,” “Southern Girls”

Crab Orchard Review
: “Rotten Fruit”

Iron Mountain Review
: “Ambivalence over the Confederate Flag,” “Fire Proof,” “Listening to Music,” “Music, Niggers & Jews,” “On Moving to California,” “Now One Wants to Be President”

Jelly Bucket
: “After Birth”

The Louisville Review
: “Heavy Wait,” “White Knights”

95 Notes Literary Magazine
: “Anatomy of Hate”

Obsidian
: “Husbandry”

Reverie
: “After Dinner in Money, Mississippi”

Weave Magazine
: “Swamp Thing,” “Harriet Tubman as Villain”

A special thanks to the following for lending their eyes and hearts to early drafts of these poems and especially to those who gifted their brilliant questions, suggestions, and edits toward the final manuscript: Lewis White, Lee Newton, Ama Codjoe, Adam Banks, Debra Kinley, Tammy Ramsey, Jim Minick, CX Dillhunt, Drew Dillhunt,
Taunya Phillips, and Michelle Hite. A special thanks to Randall Horton for his interest and support and to Minrose Gwin for including
Turn Me Loose
among the important literature celebrating and commemorating Evers's legacy in her much-needed work,
Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement
.

Much of Mississippi's and the South's past is characterized by increased resistance to white supremacy in the face of overt and subtle racism that resulted in a multitude of crimes. These include crimes against the body, crimes against property, the collusion of public and private institutions in preventing access and opportunity to all people, and conspiracies of silence that continue today. This collection of poems seeks to interrupt that silence and shine a light on the important legacy of a civil rights icon all too often omitted from summaries of the era, by giving voice to a particular chapter in this history from multiple and often divergent points of view.

On June 12, 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi, Medgar Evers, the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (
NAACP
) in Mississippi, was shot in the back by Byron De La Beck-with in his own driveway and died soon after being transported to a nearby hospital by neighbors. This was the first in a series of high profile assassinations that would cast a shadow on civil rights activities in America in the early 1960s.

The primary speakers in this narrative are Byron De La Beck-with, Medgar Evers's assassin; Beckwith's wives, Mary Louise (Willie) and Thelma De La Beckwith; Medgar Evers's brother, Charles; Evers's widow, Myrlie Evers; and a sixth voice that works like a Greek chorus. Medgar Evers's voice is silent beyond lifting his final
words, “… turn me loose,” for the title, but his presence, like a ghost, speaks loudly throughout the poems.

I believe acknowledging and working to fully understand history can create opportunities to better understand racism. I offer these imagined poems in hope that art can help complete the important work we continue to struggle with—the access to economic and social justice that Medgar Evers and so many others died for, and ultimately the healing and reconciliation still needed in America.

Myrlie Evers

When people talk about the movement

as if it started in '64, it erases every

body who vanished on the way home

from work or school and is still listed

as missing. It erases the pile of recovered

bodies—some burnt, shot, dismembered,

some beaten just beyond recognition.

It mutes every unsung voice in Mississippi

that dared to speak up—fully understanding

the consequences. When people talk

about the movement as if it started in '64,

it erases his entire life's work.

It means he lived and died for nothing.

And that's worse than killing him again.

than slavery

Byron De La Beckwith

I fish for pleasure and to relax.

It's the best way

to sort out details of a plan

that needs flawless execution.

Every useful thing I know

I learned sitting in the bottom

of a boat across from my granddaddy

in one of Mississippi's finest

fishing holes. How to

pick out the best spot. How to

get there early. How to lay

low, be patient and wait.

Watching your cork disappear

in the water, bob back up and run

is as thrilling as sneaking your hand

up under a pretty girl's skirt.

They all put up a lil' fight, at first

but sooner or later a lucky man

will get his hands on a cat;

a patient man, inside a big wide mouth.

There's something about the thought

of a wet body, flapping about

and gasping for breath

that gives me chills, even now.

Sometimes we'd just sit and smoke,

swim in some ice cold beers,

enjoy the sound of no women around

or shoot at ghosts if fish weren't biting.

Sometimes we'd get drunk and argue

for hours about who would win

in a fair fight between his nigger, jack,

and that nigger, joe louis.

He rode me hard for bragging

about catching the big one,

but I know he bragged even harder

about teaching me how to fish.

Niggers are proof that
Indians fucked buffalo
.

—
ANONYMOUS

 

Byron De La Beckwith

I was raised with the word nigger

in my mouth. In this part of the south

it is considered our silver spoon.

It practically lived in every good joke

I heard growing up in Mississippi.

The only other good ones were about sex.

But I've seen bad jokes about niggers and sex

kick all the power of whiskey right off

the front porch, turn it into something so mean,

somebody would have to get smacked around

to stir that power back up again. Sometimes

it was a dog too friendly for drunks.

Sometimes it was a girlfriend or a wife

who wandered grinning into our man-talk