by C. D. Wright
She loved: Words. Cats. Long-playing records. Laughter. Men.
Alcohol. Cigarettes. The supernatural. It makes for a carnal list. Pointless to rank. Five in diapers at once—a stench, she claimed, she never got used to.
+ + +
AMONG HER EFFECTS, a bourboned-up letter:
Dear Callie,
This grandmother of yours is an intoxicant and you are not. It makes me proud that you study calculus.
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Anyway, there is one thing that happened that I want you to know about. One Arkansas summer, the summer of 1967? The boys came running in the house and said they saw an accident and we all ran down the road and there was this old man walking around in a daze and I asked if I could help him. There was a car in the ditch and Rudy and Will, I think, said no one was in it. The man said his name, which I forget, and asked me to call Mrs. Hand [an aristocrat with an elevator in her house] and ask her to send help.
I did. She took the message, thanked me and hung up.
About a month later, her son, a prominent town attorney, called me up and asked me to be a witness, and I told him that I hadn’t seen anything. And he said, Come to court anyway. So I went.
The prosecutor, the D.A., was a man named Hunter Crumb. So I’m sitting in the witness chair, telling what happened and I referred to the dazed man, and I quote myself:
And that gentleman, I’m sorry, I have forgotten his name, came up to me and asked me to call Mrs. Hand.
Okay, I do not exaggerate, the D.A. got red in the face and said, “Did you call that [N-word] a gentleman?” and went on at length yelling at me. Face on fire, yelling. I looked at the judge. I looked at Mr. Hand, but they would not look at me. Finally I was allowed to step down. I was shocked.
The second thing I want you to know is that in mid-June of 1969, Sweet Willie Wine [aka, the Man Imported from Memphis or the Prime Minister or the Invader] and Mrs. Oliver called on Hunter Crumb, to present the proper permits for the boycott and ten minutes after they left that man’s office Hunter Crumb dropped dead of a heart attack. I don’t have the news accounts of that, but it happened, and it was like electricity in Big Tree.
After that, I would have followed Sweet Willie Wine into hell.
+ + +
It gradually turns from clear to coffee;
the river receives another river near its mouth
and joins the mighty river to the south of Helena.
Yoncopin are the lilies in the ditches [pretty bloom
for a filthy drainage ditch isn’t it now]. An Arkansas arc
is not a rainbow but an old iron bridge over troubled
brown waters. The cornea’s collection of the earliest
rays ordering an entirely different distribution
of light and shade, I could imagine my friend V:
being blind and seeing everything, marrying a dozen
men and living alone, having seven children and
being barren, toting an M16 that looked
like a hoe, whistling down a taxi in a cold
capital; I could see the faded and ragged fields
replaced by blue shadows on hills of snow or
turning from a stag at the edge of the interstate
into a freshwater pearl before more sediment
entered the river than flowed from its mouth.
[Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s a rat snake.]
+ + +
Correction Facility Area
No Stopping
Stay Away
Stay Away
Remain Calm
You Watch
How You
Carry Yourself
I Told My Babies
My Beauties
And Don’t You Go
Getting In That Line
Don’t You Dare Go
Getting In That Line
Festina Lente
My Darlings,
Never Waver,
My Dears.
No more than blood:
There is black blood and white blood. There is black air and white air. And this selfsame lie takes aim, even if by indirection, at the stifled lives of those inflicting the harm, the lives of witting and of unwitting ignorance, and those who must live among the stiflers, as if one of them, by all outward and visible signs one of them, but on the reverse side of their skin lie awake in the scratchy dark, burning to cross over. Not to become one of the harmed but to shed the skin, you get my meaning, the tainted skin of the injuring party.
Just to act, was the glorious thing.
And those so grievously harmed, who do the forgiving, do so, that they not be deformed by the lie, must call on reserves not meant to be tapped except for a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, a sudden death or what disclaimers call Acts-of-the-Almighty such as a twister tearing over the land on which a plain frame house stands, or if, in town, it will be of cinderblock, a yard of raked dirt, a stand of day lilies, their withering heads lopped off.
But in this case, the reserves are needed every day, every hour of every day, because the warp is everywhere, because one is supposed to look at one’s reflection and see an inferior, uncomely, unwantable thing, because those are the terms for living, that is the conditioning. It is in fact, the law.
And a most elaborate system has been built up to ensure that the manchild and the womanchild see a lesser face than the one that is there. It requires the long crooked arm of enforcement, the duplication of services and facilities, with one set being far superior to the other set, which of course does not even aim to duplicate, but underscores the shoddiness of the second set of services and facilities, that they be “deservedly,” emphatically unequal.
So, you will find the answers on page 51; though the answers are etched in bloodied ink on paper that has been torn out by your tormentors and dragged into a crawdad hole. Being a measure of society’s distortion, in truth, the answers could have provided little inspiration for the rest of your life. Rather, their absence provides the inspiration, as a pop bottle flies toward a lightbulb and the Savoys commence stomping in the basement.
It also entails the complicity of the leaders of the faithful who are obliged to advance this doctrine as the Word of the Almighty, some of whom probably are believers in this malevolent reading, while others sign on for efficacy’s sake and others by dint of intimidation.
And it enjoins the participation of merchants and professionals, and law enforcers and the extralegal forces of men known as Whitecappers, Night Riders, Klansmen, and Birchers [the latter termed by its local spokesman to be strictly an educational society dedicated to the defeat of communism]; men who openly congregate at a service station owned by the deputy or a city barbershop or outbuilding of a big farm to conspire and collaborate or call themselves Concerned Citizens and so can assemble in public buildings or even the Legion Hut, the swell green slope of which has been used as a setting for a cross in flames, facing the road, you see where I’m coming from, public and semipublic places from which more than half the population is blatantly barred.
DEAR ABBY,
When Daryl and I were first married, he asked me to IRON his undershorts. His mother always did. At first I didn’t mind because we had no children, but now have two, and I could save a lot of time tossing them in the dryer and folding them, but I tried that once and I never heard the end of it. Daryl says he could “feel” the difference. What would you do?
DEAR TOO MUCH IRONING,
I would iron his underwear. You are wasting more energy complaining and arguing than it takes to iron seven pair of shorts once a week.
Everybody has a problem. What’s yours.
+ + +
When I show the granddaughter of my friend’s babysitter a picture of the swimming pool taken when it was built in 1935, printed in a special promotional edition of the paper to entice [white] people to move to the Jewel of the Delta, her eyes flash/ fill/ clear:
We were not allowed to swim there/We had
never seen the dressing rooms/ We had never been near the locker room/ We had never seen the lights on their playing field except from the other side of Division.
+ + +
In Big Tree
People are reading their Bibles in bed
Their laces hang by their walking shoes
People are dreaming money semen
And boll weevils on the creep
Some could be soothed by a mourning dove
Some would be soothed by the Prince of Peace
UNDERTAKER: The night a threat wrapped in a brick came through that window, my mother, a mortician herself, said, Girl, forget calling the sheriff. Get the dustpan.
Some people want to lift you up and some are like a crawdad, they just want to drag you down.
[And there are those among the injured who cannot forgive the harm done because they have borne it since they opened their eyes, since the moment their perfectly good-seeing eyes made contact with the delusional eyes of their fellow citizens and lived to see this ignominy passed on; they cannot because the injury is inherently repugnant and because it feeds on a lie that appears to be alive and marked for service into perpetuity; so that not only must they endure its consequences, but so must their flesh, their blood, their firstborn.]
[Thus, the practice begins before the period of quickening before the crochet needle and catheter can be employed to prevent the quickening.]
[Where was it you wanted to bury this hatchet. Your land or mine.]
+ + +
V’s bush was sweet-betsy. I broke off a twig in her oldest daughter’s yard. Over the coming months, I break it over and over for a quick hit of camphor.
And offshore Camille brought rain that September. The year they put the kids under arrest and put them in the swimming pool.
King called “it” a disease, segregation. [Sounds contagious.]
It’s cradle work is what it is. It begins before the quickening.
When V ended up back in Kentucky after her expulsion from Big Tree, she kept a retired fighting cock. It was her only pleasure, Helmet. No one else could get near him.
Long before this black and white issue, she said she was going to make up a coat of arms and the motto on its heater would read:
I never knew what misery was till I came to Arkansas
Why wake up in this torpor—unless you happen to be from here. Which requires less than volition. It requires only inertia.
Or blood ties, where everyone you ever knew or were kin to lies buried.
Or, the long-lingering olfaction of home, whether from the faint cut of walnuts spoiled in the grass or a sour work shirt on a rotted railing. When the ones who are from here come home in the evening and get out of their car, and rise on tired legs, the barbecued night they smell is theirs—that exact streaked sky, that turned dirt, that crape myrtle, that dog chained to the clothesline.
+ + +
Love then, she was all but dying for, except the love of Catholic men, who did not live to love [from whom it was an article of faith that life is and forever shall be, for suffering].
V liked to say: It makes martyrs of the women and emasculates the men.
If religion, she also liked to say, is the opiate of the masses, fundamentalism is the amphetamine.
[That busted us up.]
The hierarchy, indisputable. The hereafter, actual. Sin, she believed in. That she was born in and bound to do it; she was likewise accepting of being sinned against. Injustice she rejected. Through and through.
Something else—LIE, was not in her vocabulary. The pure inflammatory truth she could take it, and Gentle Reader, she knew how to inflict it.
The night the town erupted, the night they beat the Memphis organizer, the Man Imported from Memphis, the City of Good Abode, the self-named Invader [the tag was picked from a sci-fi show; it stuck, and it sent its message straight to the eighth nerve].
The night they put some of the strangers in jail [in Swahili, stranger is mgeni. It also means “guest.” Hereabouts, it means outside agitator; it means godless communist; it means Invader], a crazed white woman turned her hose on V and the Invaders through the bars, and a mad white mob set her car ablaze [the only car she would ever have];
and a little twig of a white kid went to the Bijou with his father.
The reel had just sputtered into action when the lady left the projection booth and ran down the aisle to the boy and his father. You’ve got to get out of here, this town’s about to blow. And it was rare to go to a movie, rare for his daddy to take him, and he did not want to leave, he wanted to see the show, he wanted to see, but the lady had already stopped the projector and everyone else had cleared out.
It was all black. It was all white. It was black and white. No, it was in living color.
What was playing.
VETERINARIAN: You got me there.
You tend big animals or cats and dogs.
I’m small, I just take care of the small. If a heifer or a mare rolled over on me, that’d be all she wrote. I wouldn’t be able to work anymore. So, I stick to small. My father treated every one of her cats, the Persians, the blue point Siamese. Long before the black and white issue. He knew them all.
Two of their descendants made it to Hell’s Kitchen. They were ill-tempered, overweight, and generally obnoxious.
So, who would you rather live with, V asked, Al Capone or Mahatma Gandhi.
You got me there.
GRADUATE OF THE ALL-NEGRO HIGH SCHOOL: I did not participate [in the uprising]. I was in the band room, practicing. Keeping time. Our mother was very strict.
What was your band called.
Come again.
Your band.
You got me there.
GRADUATE OF THE ALL-WHITE HIGH SCHOOL, first year of Integration-By-Choice: I did not participate. I was in the theater, practicing.
I was a smart kid, and I sort of knew I was going to leave, and that high school was just something you had to go through to get to the rest of your life.
ALL-NEGRO HIGH SCHOOL ANNUAL:
Best Dancer: one of the boys beaten by the Night Riders
Biggest Wolf: son of one of the boys blinded by the Night Riders
Friendliest: his brother who jumped from the overpass
Best Running Back: his cousin, went pro [in Canada]
Smartest: her cousin had his own car—he drove her to Ohio still wearing her cap and gown
Atmospheric washes of sound
Play it muddy
Play it freaking loud
Light sputtering and crackling
The only sure thing in those days were the prices:
Jack Sprat tea bags only 19¢.
A whole fryer is 59¢.
A half-gallon of Purex, 25¢.
Two pounds of Oleo, 25¢.
Ivory Soap 10¢ a bar.
Cherokee freestone peaches, 5 cans for $1.
And the temperatures:
Los Angeles enters its sixth day of rioting, 32 dead; Chicago’s
rebellion ends in two.
KKK’s lawyer dies in Birmingham.
Hurricane Camille sacks Pass Christian.
The president of the Cosmos Club holds a tea.
Soybean cyst nematode puts the county’s crop under quarantine.
Three Brinkley children die in an icebox.
It is time to pick the cotton.
Come see, come touch this Frigidaire, this two-door wonder.
B-r-r-r-r.
It is not for you to see, not for you to touch [N-word].
G-r-r-r-r.
Elsewhere in the news, troths have been plithed to thee
and thee and thou and thine.
Nothing happens without mayonnaise.
An elusive local Negro is found in Chicago.
The difference in the sexes is liked by most people.
Two trains derail.
A $33,000 blanket bond is posted by three Negro farmers
for the children put in the pool.
; GRADUATE OF THE ALL-WHITE HIGH SCHOOL, first year of Integration-By-Choice: No homecoming games. There were two or three of us on the team but we could not be in the stands.
Things we were unsure about, we found out to be true. We had new books at the all-white school, and the books they no longer used went to the all-Negro school.
