by C. D. Wright
If a teacher was overly nice to me, it came back on them.
Girls who had been state champs couldn’t make the team. I was a cheerleader. I couldn’t make the squad. Never went near a dance. Or the pool. Or the bowling alley. Could only go to the movies on Monday.
RADIO MINISTRY: Every chosen one of us is guilty as sin and sin is on everything a sinner ever touched from toilet seat to doorknob to gavel to gunlock. Now get in that goddamn water and swim with the rest of them. [I must have misheard him.]
The Savoys.
Come again.
My band. We were the Savoys.
HER FRIEND BIRDIE: We couldn’t wait to go to V’s house in the afternoon. Dell would call and say, Let’s go to V’s, and I would say, I’ve got to yadayadayada, and Dell would say, Just squirt some furniture polish in the air and Joey will think you’ve been cleaning all afternoon.
The first time I met her she told me about her goldfish committing suicide.
She showed me a picture of her daddy. How old do you think he is in this picture. Hah, she said, he was an alcoholic and he was only 58 years old.
She would have on Enrico Caruso and Nina Simone and Segovia, Bach and Leonard Cohen and Joan Baez and the Man in Black, all on the same stack. We had a whole education in fine arts and literature in her living room.
You’ve got to read this and you’ve got to read that. She had a lending library going on. You’re not ready for James Joyce she told me and I never did read James Joyce. I just accepted it. We went big into T.S. Eliot; so I knew all about Cats before it ever got to Broadway. We listened to A Child’s Christmas in Wales every year. Dell and her husband, Joey, made it over to Wales and laid a rose on the drunkard’s stone.
She could have been a master teacher, but she said, No, she couldn’t. She said she had nothing but contempt for her teacher when she discovered she didn’t know Swinburne.
[One ought to admit V could rise in record time to the condition of contempt.]
HER FRIEND THE ACTOR: She once got on a wrathful tear about a particular member of Congress, or some churlish priest, and ended up on her feet in a lively enactment of how she would like to saw that MF in half. Left-handed. [I guess an untidy job of it would hurt a lot more.]
She kept her Saigon cinnamon in her purse so the fifth boychild couldn’t get his hands on it.
Dragged her sewing machine to her porch because she did not want to have to look at it.
When she had cancer, after the last child was born, and had a hysterectomy, she didn’t want anyone to know. She didn’t want them saying, That poor woman with all those children and now she’s got cancer.
The movie was Run Wild, Run Free.
Come again.
Also known as The White Colt. A little mute boy roams the moors alone. Wouldn’t you like to run wild, run free, roam the moors. Meet an albino pony. A kind colonel. A girl your age. A pet falcon. Wouldn’t you like to rescue the blue-eyed horse. Especially if it returned to you your long-suppressed voice. For the reading kids from the low-lying fields of Arkansas, the very term moors projected a mythic land where [white] children ran wild and free. The other Moors, no one ever dreamed of such a people. They were inconceivable. Nor did the Renaissance reach the western shore of the Mississippi.
She completed the circle of this life in Hell’s Kitchen
The attending doctor lived upstairs
He and his partner nailed a small brass plaque
To the barren pear outside her window
Her name, date of birth, date of death
The mule train march has been canceled
The preachers are staying home
The March Against Fear is on
The Man Imported from Memphis is walking
The combines are moving into position
LOCAL MAN: I was going to put a meat grinder on mine
THE MAN IMPORTED FROM MEMPHIS:
One thing the white folks are going to have to learn—
white folks don’t pick the leaders
for the black folks no more
MAYOR OF A TOWN ON THE MARCH ROUTE:
We are determined that they shall not ravish our homes
Our men are armed and determined
We are preparing to defend our civil institutions
the threat is coming from the east
He is a known criminal, said the mayor
probably a boaster, a braggart
We must assume that those who follow him
are of the same get
After that I would have followed Sweet Willie Wine into hell
THE MAN IMPORTED FROM MEMPHIS had never laid eyes on her before [this is not exactly a love story]:
She pulled up beside him on the curb, on the wrong side of the street.
He’s dead! she yelled. He’s dead!
Who’s dead?
Hunter Crumb! He’s dead!
[Having just seen the prosecutor in his office, having been there within the hour trying to obtain permits for the march, the Invader is taken aback.]
He says to himself, This crazy white woman thinks I killed him. Now she is going to kill me.
Come here, I want to give you something.
No, I don’t think I’ll be coming over there, ma’am.
No, come over here. I want to give you something.
[Mr. Invader thinks he’s about to become Mr. Goner and politely declines to approach.]
She flings a gold chain at him and squalls off the curb. BLINGBLING.
That’s how they met.
+ + +
IN LOUISVILLE, after the family farm was lost:
Her house, the house of her father and her stepmother, it was cold cold cold.
V’S FRIEND BIRDIE:
I always thought I would go to the university. Be a cheerleader.
Marry the captain of the football team. Have 2½ children.
And live on a cloud.
[Those were the days when people thought cars could fly
and the Russians sent their old to be melted down for candles.]
And V, well, she wanted something else.
No Russian ever called her [N-word lover].
Vines support an abandoned shack
Vines conceal abandoned farm implements
People are walking out of the ragged fields
Vines threaten the utility pole
Vines protect the copperhead from the hoe
Cottonwoods flutter as one
Bats at the cell tower
The tub in which James Earl Ray stood
to slay the King has sold online
[watch out for that phantom punch]
It’s like a river running backwards
The Man Imported from Memphis
credits a rubber shrunken head
he wears around his neck
for keeping the skies overcast
and temperatures down
If white people can ride down the highways
with guns in their trucks
I can walk down the highway unarmed
Scott Bond, born a slave, became
a millionaire. Wouldn’t you like to run wild
run free. The Very Reverend Al Green
hailed from here. Sonny Liston a few miles west,
Sand Slough. Head hardened
on hickory sticks. A reporter asks a family
of sharecroppers quietly watching the procession,
Does this walk means anything to you.
The father says, the others nod,
It means that Sweet Willie Wine is walking.
The cool water is for white/ the sun-heated for black
This chair is not for you [N-word]/ it is for the white buttock
This textbook/ is nearly new/ is not for you [N-word]
This plot of ground does not hold black bones
Today the sermon once again “Segregation After Death”
+ + +
After the pool was drained for the season, they arrested the kids who
marched to the white school. Who stood and sang “Like a Tree Planted by the Water.” They took them to the jailhouse in school buses. They took them to the drained pool in sealed 18-wheelers. The sheriff told them they were to be taken to the woods and there shot. Then the sheriff told them they were to be taken to the pool and there drowned.
GRANDDAUGHTER OF V’S BABYSITTER who was put in the pool she had never seen before then: He was one mean man. That sheriff.
A pool, a dry, drained pool, whatever else it is, is a big hole in the ground.
A sealed truck, whatever else it is, is a sealed truck.
THE SUPERINTENDENT: You people are heading for serious trouble if you don’t stop this nonsense and leave these [whites only] grounds right this moment. You students are hereby expelled from this school district and if you don’t get off the [sacred white] school grounds immediately, I’m going to have you arrested.
Headline: THE NEGROES FAIL TO MOVE
The weather could break.
The sheriff’s button says Never.
The children’s minds say Never waver.
V, rising to contempt: And that sheriff,
may he be taken to the woods and there
made to sing Like a Tree
Planted by the Water. May he
be linked to the first rib
he broke, and it be fashioned of
bronze. And run through the end
of his nose. He may then be
taken to the pool and there taught
the dead man’s float. And then be
taken to the library and there will
his hideous pink testicles be removed
by the assistant librarian and put
in the terrarium with
the resident spider.
The ethical this, what we really want, says my friend Harry, is to get the present in the present, that which is not this: to feel and transmit.
The felony logs for that period are mostly devoted to burglary and grand larceny, bad checks, attempted escapes, embezzlement; possession of a machine gun for aggressive purposes [correction, possession of three machines guns]. A man killed his wife with a hammer. A man found in possession of a fifty-gallon mash barrel and cooker. And one poor fellow was popped for having unnatural relations with a cow.
The biggest hit is Al Green. And the biggest hitter is Sonny Liston.
The Silver Fox kind of stalled.
A Quaker protesting the war in Vietnam has set himself on fire in front of the Pentagon. He dropped the baby out of harm’s way before he flicked open his lighter.
Phoenix is burning.
In August, Los Angeles burns for days, then Chicago.
Neck bones, 5 lb. a dollar.
The state’s 1929 antievolution law is thought to be impossible to repeal.
V’S HUSBAND runs a notice in the paper: I will not be responsible for any debts other than my own.
When she joined the marchers the husband’s business went directly to hell. When she was arrested. When they burned her car in the parking lot of the station house. While she was in jail her husband bought airtime and denounced her. When she was released she was served with papers for divorce and custody.
People were pointing the bone
at V. Women were supposed
to stay home. People were starving
the husband out. Men were supposed
to be in control. God’s plan
for Big Tree. They tore a page straight
from the book. When he worked
for Philco they sent him
to the Halley Bay. He was shooting
little rockets into the aurora
borealis. That was the last good time,
the International Geophysical Year.
The earth, a greenish blue ball
streaked with clouds, spun on. The sky
filled with streamers of colored light.
I never knew what misery was till I came to Arkansas
+ + +
Or: what if all you wanted was to walk across that field at the fifty-yard line on the arm of a boy wearing his shoulder pads lightly, as would you your faux stole. [O high school, steer clear. You still suck.]
+ + +
Recruiting Office/ Right Turn Here
[I hope no one falls for that one.]
New Homes/ $o Down
[I hope no one falls for that one.]
If your legs are trembling
try getting on your knees
[And they all fell down.]
DEAR ABBY,
Friends of ours have a son who has gone the hippies route. When we inquire about their children [they have others who are married and one who is in the service] should we ask about their hippie son? Or should we just not mention him like he is “dead”? We know that they are pretty sick about the life he leads.
DEAR NEEDS TO KNOW,
Knowing that your friends would be humiliated or embarrassed by the mention of their hippie son, don’t mention him.
Everybody has a problem. What’s yours.
The movie was Run Wild, Run Free.
Come again.
+ + +
Her daddy, it was V’s one and only boast, naturalized Thomas Merton.
Mother dead by the time she was three.
Father married her mother’s sister.
Life on the farm was lonely with the mute and alcoholic father, the unloving, unlovable stepmother. Her only friend, a black hand named Wordan.
HER FIRST MEMORY is of a racial incident: I am sitting in a tub in an old kitchen. Wordan is washing my back. [N-word] you got soap in my eye, I must have said. Miss Olga, Missy done called me [N-word], Wordan must have said. I hear a German voice, my grandmother’s, Wash her mouth out with soap. And he did, and to this day I hate Ivory Soap. It enrages me. She was close to four, dating by the new 1936 Chrysler her father brought home moments after her mouth was soaped. She does not know where she learned the slur but it would not burst from her again.
There are no memories of her mother. She was thirty-three. V was three. Wordan was taking her mother to the doctor and to buy a new cap for himself. She asked Wordan to drive her home. And he knew she was going to die because she forgot the cap. Coldest day of the year. She wanted the window open.
In Louisville, after the family farm was lost, her house, the house of her father and stepmother’s, was cold cold cold.
HER CHILDHOOD FRIEND AND COUSIN: V always had good-looking legs and loved to sit in the sun.
Never allowed to do anything. About only thing she could do was read. Spent the night with her a couple of times. We put on gloves and wrote a letter to the principal.
Always for the underdog, whether it was a ballgame or a race war.
Always stealing a smoke behind the barn.
Always at the library. Always commingling with books she shouldn’t have. She wrote a report on Le Père Goriot, which was on the librorum prohibitorum list [in effect until 1966].
Ask her to go anywhere. Answer always no. No, I can’t, I have to listen to Bellini. No, I can’t, I have to memorize Browning.
Read from caint to caint.
Oscar Wilde perverted me, she told me as a calcified fact.
The Brontës, Austen, Galsworthy, Cellini’s Autobiography [I love it, remarked V with relish, when he is forgiven for all murders past and to come]. Cyril Cusack came to her school to lecture on Hopkins. Macbeth came one year as did an all-girl production of Julius Caesar.
I was totally smitten, she told me, with Mark Antony.
Memorized Cardinal Wolsey’s speech. And recalls being shepherded into the auditorium to watch General MacArthur on a little snowy television mounted onstage.
Wordan kept an alligator. Built a cement pool for it in back. Drain and everything.
V kept a retired fighting cock.
Helmet was her only pleasure.
That wasn’t her favorite bird though. Her favorite bird was a shrike.
Now, you might be praying
for a fence or the ability to read
and write; you might be praying
for a better shift, a 50¢ raise;
you might be praying for a truck
