“So the only thing you’re locked up for is prostitution?”
Aliganth had been sufficiently relaxed to nod off a little, leaning against the wall by the door. I noticed that she opened her eyes at my question and glanced at me, then at Baby Ain’t.
“I met up with a cop need his quota—so I come in, Jump Street, on a pros collar. But then, ’cause they say drugs involved, I miss to have a date set and I fall off the calendar. Now I gone zip to two hunnert fifty days.”
“She’s a Detention inmate. She has been charged with no crime at this point. Because the pigs say their courts are backed up, women who come in on a nothing arrest end up without a fascist-pig court date listed on the calendar. They rot here innocent. Sometimes for years. Till they rise up. Till they won’t take it anymore and they tear the walls down. Or the System destroys them completely. Like Billie Dee.”
This information came from Akilah, who as usual had seated herself across the table from me, staring at me in a manner that I sensed was meant to unnerve me. She sometimes smiled a mysterious smile or snorted at something I said. I appeared to amuse her. I now wished I’d never asked the question about Baby Ain’t’s charge—there were, obviously, reasons for not inquiring in front of others.
“Miss Kohler, you been requested not to proselytize anywhere within the institution walls. You havin’ a little lapse in memory?”
Aliganth was standing up very straight now, her chin jutting forward, in charge. Akilah half closed her gamin light eyes and peered out from beneath her long lashes. Darlene kept spinning her wheel, her voice barely audible. “Jesus. Jesus.”
“Screw, I believe you the one having a memory lapse: Kohler was my slave name? It’s Akilah Malik now, it’s Islamic, my name—think you can get your ofay mind around that? You got yourself a civil service job out here, monkeyed up in a uniform—oppressin’ your own? While the white man pull your strings from Downtown?”
“You sure seem to enjoy appearing before the Disciplinary Board, Kohler. I can set that up for you again right now.”
Aliganth stepped forward, her keys clinking. Akilah slowly pushed back her chair, starting to get up, her eyes still amused. I looked over at Darlene. Her praying had become white noise, I realized—I’d finally stopped hearing it, like the planes overhead. Akilah stood up.
“You may need the assistance of a few of these bulldaggers to get me to lay down, Screw.”
Suddenly Gene/Jean pitched forward, then back, then heaved over the side of her chair, vomiting violently. A thin string of green bile dangled from her mouth, dripping from her goatee.
Everyone jumped up from the table, backing away. A chair fell backward with a crash. Gene made horrible gagging sounds.
Aliganth went into action, directing the entire class, including Akilah (who for some reason acquiesced), to back up against the wall. A thought occurred to me: perhaps Gene/Jean’s episode had given Akilah an out? Aliganth nudged me into place behind her, putting her body between me and Gene/Jean and the rest of the class as she examined the slumped figure—pulling a cloth from her belt, wiping Gene’s face. Then she dropped the cloth on the small splat of vomit on the floor.
“Are you done now, tell me, are you done? Where the hell this come from? You been to the Infirmary? You steal shit from the med truck?”
Gene/Jean groaned. Gasping for breath, she told Aliganth, in her inimitable way, that the “male and female sides” of her couldn’t stand confrontations. The male side got hugely aggressive and the female side filled with fear and desire for compromise. The result of this internal imbalance was that Gene/Jean got nauseous—it was like being seasick, she cried as she rocked back and forth. “Jerkin’ me two ways at once,” she yelled, then lowered her head again and gagged, but nothing happened. I watched Aliganth push a button on one of the keys on her ring.
I wondered if Gene’s reaction could be patented. “Hey, this might be a way to end world wars!” I called to Baby Ain’t across the room. I still hadn’t grasped how close we’d come to an Incident.
Baby Ain’t flashed me a V sign and called to me in a mock-whisper.
“She stand up to piss. That why she seasick, it put her off her feed—she always got that one wet leg, poor Jean.”
A heavyset sour-faced C.O.I’d never seen before appeared in the doorway. She picked up Aliganth’s cloth from the floor and put it in a plastic bag, produced a small spray bottle, spritzed the floor, and righted the fallen chair. Then she, along with Aliganth, helped Gene/Jean to her feet, her head lolling a little on her neck, and led Gene away, coughing. Aliganth ordered everyone to return to their seats.
“Gene just got a little confused—maybe at the Infirmary earlier. She be back.”
We sat down again and Aliganth stood at the head of the table, behind me—directly across from Akilah—and said that she was going to let things “return to normal.” She would allow “each member of the class” to continue. For now. If there was any further questioning of authority, there would be “repercussions.” Akilah’s face remained unchanged, a steady dead-calm hate-glare radiating back at her. I couldn’t tell who, if anyone, had backed down earlier. After a long minute, Aliganth moved away from my chairback and returned to her place at the door.
A change of subject seemed in order.
“Okay—I forgot to tell you that I looked up the history of ‘Two Dead Boys,’” I noted brightly. “I looked under Folklore and Folk Songs of the British Isles at the Forty-second Street library and I found out that it comes from a tradition called Impossible Ballads or Miracle Verse. You know, where blind men see and deaf people hear and the dead get up and fight. ‘Two Dead Boys’ was sung by children on playgrounds all the way back in the nineteenth century in stanzas like the ones Baby Ain’t recited.”
I looked around at their unreadable faces.
“Anybody else have a poem to recite? Then we’ll go back to our own writing.”
Dead silence. I was losing them. Darlene wasn’t even calling on Jesus. Akilah’s eyes were on me, mocking.
Suddenly Billie Dee piped up, singing out a non sequitur, her version of a poem—a sexist airline commercial jingle in her rock-back gospel voice.
“Fly me! Fly me do: I’m Billie Dee!”
Her jingle turned flat in the dead air. A plane ascended overhead, suddenly loud. Then Polly Lyle Clement began to speak. As she spoke, her voice changed tone and accent—it sank lower, and a Southern drawl crept in.
“Well, I do know that song you mention there. It just slipped my mind. I damn near forgot to own up to it!”
Everyone turned to stare. She was so very peculiar-looking, with her very light brown skin and her white hair. Scrawny but muscled. The left side of her face was smudged with a slight reddish shadow, a rose-colored blotch, as if she’d been burned once, long ago. Her eyes were piercing and gold-flecked, like a bird’s. Roxanne frowned at her.
“So what does that have to do with anything?”
Polly smiled back. A very sweet smile.
“I sang that poem ‘The Two Dead Boys’—or one just like it—back in my schoolyard days, far away and long ago, children. And that ain’t a lie.”
She shifted in her chair and chuckled a little.
“’Course, the strikin’ difference between a cat and a lie is that a cat got only nine lives.”
She laughed to herself again. “Got it? A cat only got nine lives and a lie can live forever.”
Then she looked directly at me. “’Course you can’t pray a lie, that’s true!”
I must have looked back at her strangely (Why was the phrase “pray a lie” ringing dimly in the back of my memory?), because she smiled indulgently at me and straightened up even more, as if gathering, clarifying, her thoughts.
“I can offer you a poem of my own composition and I can speak it from memory, I believe.” She rubbed her eyes.
“I been given soporifics,” she confided, suddenly whispering. “But now I’m wakin’ up. I’ve taken to hidin’ them under my
tongue, then tossin’ them down the drain later.”
Aliganth leaned in to listen more closely, but someone had been shouting in the hall and luckily she’d missed what Polly had just said.
I felt a slow chill ripple through my blood. Polly’s weird abrupt animation seemed to be giving everyone else the jitters too. Even Akilah raised an eyebrow, and Baby Ain’t glanced around from face to face, smiling nervously. Sallie Keller turned her sad split owl’s face to stare at Polly.
“Would you all like me to recite my poem?”
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”
What next? I thought. I noticed that Aliganth was back on alert. She had a look of seriously exaggerated patience on her face. I knew she’d have a whole lot to say to me after class. We listened to Polly as her voice deepened and drawled. Darlene was mouthing her Jesus prayer now, her lips moving soundlessly.
“Well, here it is, an ode. It was actually written by a person I made up in a little book of mine. Her name is Emmeline Grangerford—a melancholic eulogizer, quick on the draw. Nobody could write heavenly farewells faster than Emmeline. She hung about the funeral parlors and graveyards, mainly for inspiration.”
Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Deceased
And did young Stephen sicken,
And did young Stephen die?
And did the sad hearts thicken,
And did the mourners cry?
…
No whooping cough did rack his frame,
Nor measles drear with spots;
Not these impaired the sacred name
Of Stephen Dowling Bots.
Despised love struck not with woe
That head of curly knots,
Nor stomach troubles laid him low,
Young Stephen Dowling Bots.
O no. Then list with tearful eye,
Whilst I his fate do tell.
His soul did from this cold world fly
By falling down a well.
I flashed on my mother in her apron, standing in the kitchen, reciting Milton and Tennyson as the dog and I sat listening attentively—then I remembered how she would pull up a funny poem for us, her flour-covered hand on her hip, laughing, her other hand flapping nervously. Emmeline Grangerford. Stephen Dowling Bots. A boy on a raft floated up before my eyes. I lifted my hand to stop Polly mid-line.
“Wait. Emmeline Grangerford is not somebody you made up, Polly. She’s a character in Huckleberry Finn. By Mark Twain.”
“A book steeped in racism,” noted Akilah.
I blinked at her.
“‘Nigger’ every other word.”
“Jesus. Jesus have mercy.”
“I got no problem with the word ‘nigger.’ Hey, nigger, y’all, all you niggers, hey up! You listenin’, niggers?”
This from Sallie Keller. Akilah opened her mouth to answer Sallie, then closed it. They stared at each other, not with hate but a fierce reluctant regard, weighing each other’s resolve. Sallie’s ravaged face was alight with a weird look of triumph. Then Akilah laughed, a short bitter sound.
I noticed that Aliganth had moved just a fraction closer to the table.
“Polly,” I said. “You recited this poem brilliantly, but it’s not yours. It’s by Mark Twain.”
“I have to plead guilty to writin’ that claptrap myself. Though I admit that Emmeline got a habit of takin’ things almost entirely into her own hands when she got the chance.”
Suddenly everyone was talking at once.
“That’s a lie she’s tellin’ about writing!” cried Darlene, suddenly abandoning her prayer. Her high thin voice cut through all the others.
“Look,” I said. “Let’s deal with the Mark Twain thing later. Why don’t we just focus on the poem about Stephen Dowling Bots for a second? Tell me something: What makes it funny?”
“No,” said Sallie. “That ain’t cool. And anyway, what so funny about some stupid honky fallin’ down a dark hole? Baby Ain’t told out ‘Two Dead Boys’ and everybody know she didn’t come up with it by her own hand. Now you sayin’ we can boost any poem we want and say it mine?”
Aliganth had stopped zeroing in and had been prowling aimlessly around the room. Now she stopped, her head cocked, listening to what I would say.
“Boosting poems,” I said, “is not cool, and no, you shouldn’t do it. I wasn’t saying that. Stealing someone else’s words is wrong.”
I had a sudden surreal image of inmates lifting poems from typewriters and unbound manuscripts, stockpiling them for later reference, filing them in their underpants.
“You take someone else’s words, you be blessed by them—by the one who’s gone on. The words keep goin’ on by themselves. Anyway, children, we don’t need to fall down a well over this point of difference,” said Polly suddenly. “You were sayin’, I remember, that poems tell not only one truth, am I right?’
“Right,” I said uncertainly. Very strange, this Polly Lyle Clement.
“Well, what I put before you is the truth but, as the fine poet Emily Dickinson says, it’s Truth Told Slant. I wrote down Emmeline Grangerford, but it was my great-granddaddy who wrote it first and I took it up.”
“What are you saying?” I asked.
Darlene revved up her prayer again.
“I’m telling you the truth a bit slantwise”—she smiled at everyone around her and twirled a strand of her white hair—“that Mark Twain is my great-granddaddy and that he speaks through me.”
Snow
Snow is just dead rain—
I walk slow, like a bride train.
A hooker is like dead rain—
No Snow-White—but a slow cold pain.
No man ease her walk in fear—no gun.
She pay him to strut in the sun—
But she shines in the dark, she falls slow—
Like dead rain, like icy snow—
She stays out, she keeps comin’ down.
—BABY AIN’T MASON, POET
four
Sam Glass touched my shoulder, then ran his fingers quickly down my forearm. I was wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt and jeans, he was dressed in a sort of smoking jacket and loafers. We were in the audience at the reading of a rather prim nature poet, Frances Beatrice Francis, at Chumley’s, a literary pub in the Village. The reading had gone on for nearly an hour and we were seated on hard wooden benches. I looked up at the walls covered with literary graffiti. I did not brush Sam Glass’s hand away.
Pastoral crows leave furrows in the sky
Above the bright-leaved box elder trees
the poet intoned, adjusting her granny glasses, stepping back dramatically from the mike, then returning, clearing her throat:
I imagine Wordsworth calling out to them,
Plow birds! Plow birds of the clouds!
Sam Glass leaned close and whispered into my ear:
I imagine Farmer John
Plowing through the muck of
Cow turds! Cow turds among the clods!
“Shut up, Glass.”
He didn’t really annoy me—what threw me off balance was how he just presented himself to me like a fact of my life: Here I am. You dig me, of course. And the sexual charge: maybe I felt it, but did not want to acknowledge it. At last I pushed his hand away. He grinned and winked at me.
The poet at the lectern shook back her hair and smiled out at her restless audience. I’d heard that she’d once been bitten in the nose by a badger while taking notes for a poem. How had she gotten that close to a badger?
“For my next poem, I’ll read a sestina which takes its six repeating end-words from a Yoruba chant about tree frogs and also from words used in classifying types of protozoa.”
I’d met Sam Glass at the New School. He was teaching a course in Editing the Literary Magazine—just down the hall from the personnel office, where I went to apply for my first teaching job in New York City. I had my graduate degree and a forthcoming book of poems, but I was wildly nervous. I dropped my manila-folder dossier, papers fell to the floo
r and scattered everywhere. The dean-type older woman who had come out to greet me in the outer office looked impatient as I knelt down to pick up my file. Just then a tall figure appeared in the doorway, grinning.
“Well, hello! How are you?” he boomed. I nearly spoiled his effect: I hurriedly looked behind me, thinking that he was addressing someone else. Luckily, I was crouching, picking up papers below the eye-line of my interviewer, and she didn’t see my confusion.
Sam turned his smile on the impatient administrator.
“You’re interviewing her? What a stroke of luck!” He glanced downward at me, hazel eyes amused.
I stood up slowly, a little shocked, a lot embarrassed, fighting against a feeling of vertigo, a slow downward spiral, as in a dream. It was crazy, but undeniably thrilling. He went on and on, singing the praises of a person he didn’t know. Finally the dean, smiling, shaking her head, told me she’d call me the following day after looking over my dossier (now reassembled) and consulting with other personnel administrators.
“Don’t take too long, Mrs. Parteman.” He bowed to her and she actually tittered a little.
“I’ll be happy to provide a written recommendation tomorrow,” he added.
“Thank you, Sam,” she called after us as we left the office together.
The door shut and I faced my unknown advocate. He was startling-looking, tall and stocky, with a wild halo-cumulus of dark curly hair, which he casually referred to as a “Jewfro.”
“The least you can do,” he said, cranking up what I came to think of as his Artful Dodger smile, “is tell me your name and have a drink with me.” I looked closer at his expression—a sketch for my notebook: at once haughty and accessible.
“Who are you?” he repeated.
“I’m nobody,” I quoted, “who are you?”
He smiled again. “Right. Got it: Emily Dickinson. So you’re a poet—the worst kind of trouble.”
“I have never been through anything like this. I don’t know how to describe it!” wailed Vicky Renslauer in a terrible stricken voice—and began to cry. A large white bandage rode across the bridge of her nose (her glasses perched precariously on top) and layers of flesh-colored gauze were wrapped tight around one of her wrists.
Channeling Mark Twain Page 7
