by C. D. Wright
that starts right up, a pair of long legs
or the recovery of a loving mother;
you might be praying for the safety
of your twins riding the bus
with a cold sack lunch
You have to watch hear me
how you carry yourself
Festina lente my darlings
King called it a disease, segregation. [Sounds contagious.]
Then there’s the consolation of religion; whereas the promise cannot be broken if it applies only to the hereafter and thereafter; whereas herein things can remain in whatever order the ones with the most money and the most ammo say shall they stand.
RADIO MINISTRY: Now the nonrepentant homosexuals, they’re declaring war on the Gospel. Now the infidels are dying from the neck up. Now I didn’t write the Bible. Now your old-line churches are losing members. Now if I’m going to be saved, I have to be saved from something, the vile and the dirty and your low-downs. It’s not like joining the Rotary Club. Salvation, it’s a heaven or hell issue.
Now V, she wanted something
entirely different:
To feel and transmit/ The ethical this
that is not that
The Gospel helps some bear the pain/ helps
bury the hate
The swimming pool is also buried therein
and therefore this
Petition for relief/ Awaken to the task
Call for calm/ Waver never
Forever forward/ Backwards never
it says on the ex-Invader’s machine
The dirt up there
on the Ridge is called loess
Windblown stuff
good for growing peaches
Hemingway penned
some of A Farewell to Arms
on the Ridge when he was married
to Pauline [wife number two]
The marchers make fifteen miles a day in spite of the heat
I think my arches have fallen
says the Invader to the stringer
Oh yeah, I remember her, she celebrated all her kids’
birthdays on the same day
I met the retired welding teacher at the Colonel’s. We were the only customers. He had a big soft drink. We sat in the lipstick red booth. He was a veteran. He thought he would never come back to Big Tree, but he did:
This was his sky, his clouds rucked up over the fields. The blackbirds flashing their red shoulders. His country. He gave all the credit to God and His plan.
He was drafted and got arrested right before he went to boot camp, stops to add: That wasn’t the first thing we did though.
Before he left for Nam, there was something he had to do.
He and Toad and some other buddies, they were going to that bowling alley. They were going bowling. Toad had a truck, and come Sunday, come Sunday evening they were going.
There were four of us. And when we came over the rise to where you see the bowling alley on your left, there were more white people than I ever saw in my life.
Someone knew, someone told.
The bowling alley is long gone. Burned. I cruise over the rise in my rental car. There is an electrical and plumbing supply place. A collection of prefab structures.
It could not look more ahistorical.
I think of him coming over the rise, ten thousand times since then, and every single time, sensing a turbulence in the air above the surface of his skin. The way when my daddy took us back to his homestead, and we would pass a certain farmhouse, he would say, There was a murder in that house when I was a boy. It caused a great commotion.
Some thing happened on that spot. No one was shot. No one got strung up, but belligerent men glommed in a parking lot.
Some one among them said, We aren’t going to do anything to you. Whoever it was that spoke was heeded, a narrow channel formed through which the young African American men could go forward to the glass door. They are cursed, spat upon, mocked, threatened. Then they hear a tremendous crash. The truck, Toad’s truck has been hove on its side. But the one of their number in front, maybe James, opens the door, walks inside, picks up a ball [it had to be a ladies’ ball, blue and speckled like a mockingbird’s egg] and lets it drop down a lane or down the gutter [he does not linger to see if a pin falls]; turns and walks out. The four move as one to the overturned truck and hoist it upright, climb aboard, not a word spoken. Toad pops the clutch.
After that, was the bowling alley integrated.
After that, it burned.
After that, we tried to integrate the lunch counter at Harmon’s.
What happened.
They tore out the lunch counter.
The marchers are resting in the city park. They dine on neck bones, black-eyed peas, and soft drinks.
No incidents have been reported.
Well, what about so-and-so, I say. He’s not a bad sort.
Yes, but a well-meaning white man, he can just go so far. So we beat him at the polls. It was time. It did not mean we would get a better man for the job, but we would get shed of the skin of the injuring parties. It is something that had to be done.
I ask if he has any memory of any good-intentioned whites.
Had a little old cleaning job. An older man came in while I was sweeping. He called me [N-word]. Bawled me out for stirring up dust. The owner came from out behind the counter, moving fast-like and close-up. Don’t you ever call him out of his name again, you hear me. That was a stand-up moment he would not forget. He could not recall any other.
IN HELL’S KITCHEN, she is dying in her chair. We watch an old black-and-white on television; we see the man’s black arm. We see his serving arm. He carries a tray and his arm enters the screen, some tender band of wrist is exposed. With glasses balanced just so, and a white napkin draped over his forearm. He has no speaking part. And the rest of him stays out of sight. An invisible man.
Any simple problem can be made insoluble.
God’s plan. We go on thanking Him for all these benisons which are theirs. This is not His fault. Baby Jesus is not to blame. He is just a blameless little old baby. So like our own.
El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. The print on her wall, torn from a tired-out book. Goya, she would have run off with, if he’d only asked.
+ + +
FORMER STATE LEGISLATOR: I edged out the representative who introduced legislation to label the blood. White blood/black blood.
After a recount.
Got beat by the sheriff who told the kids they were to be taken to the woods and there shot.
Got beat by the sheriff who told the kids they were to be taken to the pool and there drowned.
Beat by the sheriff who told the farmers that posted the blanket bond he would call the claim on their deeds if they voted against him and then would he take their lands.
Beat by the sheriff who kept a man’s testicles in a jar on his desk until the word got around; he flushed them to the underworld from which no smoke escapes.
Bought a color TV from her husband the year the Longhorns beat the Hogs. By one measly point in the last fifteen minutes. Game of the Century it was touted.
The Big Shootout. In the stands were Lyndon Baines Johnson, George Herbert Walker Bush, and the reigning Richard Milhous Nixon, and one row back, a pair of trademark black-rims. The Very Reverend Billy Graham prayed over all. The field was all-white.
William Jefferson Clinton listened on shortwave from Oxford.
But the band didn’t play “Dixie.”
Come again.
Only that the band didn’t play “Dixie.”
Just a few days into the draft lottery. A few days after the Peace with Justice Resolution. [Peace with Justice for whom do you think.]
Clinton drew #311. [But he was already 1-A.]
Same day the Big Bear set off a nuclear test and the Stones played at Altamont. [It was the end of something was it not.]
+ + +
HER FRIEND BIRDIE: She was never a whiner or compla
iner. She might rage for a minute in the most colorful language and then that was that. Back to the more interesting conversation she preferred.
Did she have a priest at the end.
I had to tell her that I thought a priest would enter at his own peril.
Hahahahahaha, Birdie wrote back.
BIRDIE: I did not see her again after she crossed over.
This was when the hotdog wagon doubled as a whorehouse on wheels.
[Picture that if you can.]
Temperatures are in the 90s even after a shower.
The threat is coming.
This belonged to her mother. Though she had no memory
of the woman and she may have never worn it. And this,
her father’s. In his vest
when he fell, draft of a poem in the hand
of one Thomas Merton to one grey-eyed nurse, M,
his midsummer secret.
These were the pictures on one shelf in the Hell’s Kitchen apartment [from books or newspapers or postcards]. In one frame, from left to right: Wilde, Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Blake, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Proust—her gang of guy scribes.
On the same shelf: a clipping of the four girls murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing; pictures of Malcolm X, Trotsky, Castro in 1959; a Palestinian killed in Gaza, an AP image from the Louisville Courier of the last day of the Vietnam War [a picture I borrowed from V to use on the cover of the first edition of The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by the poet Frank Stanford].
Two family photos, one of her father, a prominent [besotted] lawyer who headed up the regional immigration bureau. And one of Wordan who worked on the family farm and moved with them to Louisville. He left once and moved to East St. Louis. His wife was murdered there. He was alone again. Wordan came back.
It was a lonely childhood to say the least. Mother dead. Stepmother removed. Father more remote. Grandmother severe. And Wordan, sole companion to the little blond girl. He was not Mr. Bojangles. She was not Shirley Temple.
RETIRED WELDING TEACHER at the Colonel’s: My brother had an injustice done to him. He was wrongfully accused. Wrongfully charged. Wrongfully prosecuted. Convicted. My brother was innocent. And that wasn’t the worst. They knew. They knew it all along. But he was out there. He had a little old job delivering groceries. He was on his bicycle. Sacks in the basket when they picked him up.
This boy and this girl were caught kissing. Caught by an uncle who screamed rape. And the first young man the police saw on their side of town—my brother, pedaling his bicycle, they picked him up. They picked him up. Kicked. Clubbed. Cuffed. Charged. Convicted him. Just like that. The girl never took the stand. She was never in the courtroom. Her uncle. We don’t know what he did to her. We just know what he caused done to my brother.
THE BROTHER TO WHOM A CERTAIN INJUSTICE WAS DONE [who lives in Reno]: One night after the conviction, the police let me go in the middle of the night. Just like that. I showed up on Mother’s porch. The police told me to get out of town before dawn. So the family pitched in and bought me a one-way ticket to San Francisco and I went. Believe you me, I went.
How did you feel when you first saw those golden gates.
You got me there.
People wore purple pants.
Come again.
In California, people wore purple pants.
And he did not come back and he did not come back and he did not come back. Clickety clack.
And V, lived in a box with a man who fixed clocks fixed clocks fixed clocks.
+ + +
HER OLDEST DAUGHTER, MAY, was playing at the spring across town when the word went out about the shooting at the Lorraine Motel. I best go home she told her playmate. Her mother was pacing up and down on the porch, blowing smoke. They did it she said. They killed him. The King is gone.
THE MAN IMPORTED FROM MEMPHIS, the Invader: I had only been out of prison a short time. I was making my rounds. I stopped to see some friends on Hernando Street. Stopped in L’il Ella’s. They asked what should they do if King got killed, and I said, Nothing to do but go on home.
Later, I was out walking and a woman yelled at me, Go get ’em, son. Go get ’em. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Stopped back in at L’il Ella’s and they heard it on the radio. I said, Go home, just go on home now. And the women got up with soap in their hair and left out of the shop. Next day I was sitting in the chair at home—something told me to go; my body lifted itself from the chair. I walked to Vance. I could see a silent crowd; my body carried me to Lewis & Sons where the King was laid out. Afterwards I went to the Invaders and said I was ready.
To act, just to act. That was the glorious thing.
Since I have been with the Movement, I have not committed any so-called crime. The Movement is the best thing I’ve ever been involved in.
OLDEST DAUGHTER, MAY, wanted to know: Did she tell me about her mother getting a Jheri curl.
[I have no clue what that is.]
When she crossed over, she still had to get her hair done. That was not a luxury, it was a necessity. She could not go to her old hairdresser. If she did, he would lose his shop; so she crossed over Division. Got a Jheri curl. It was a disaster. After that she wore it cropped short. She wore a Little Dutch Boy cut when beehives were big.
HER FRIEND BIRDIE: Did not see V again after she crossed over. Ever. Though she loved her. But she did not, and she could not.
Headline: WHITE WOMAN BACKS NEGROES, LOSES FRIENDS
It would be true to say, Birdie believed in V. It would be true to say, she loved her friend. And would miss her for the rest of her days.
BIRDIE: Could not confirm the long-standing rumor about the hotdog wagon.
Wildlife Federation has called off its annual picnic.
Temperatures reached mid-90s early in the day. Following a shower.
IN THE HELL’S KITCHEN APT: There were shelves crammed with votive candles and tchotchkes—most prized, a Niki de Saint Phalle powder jar with a golden serpent coiled up on its lid. Inside was a clipping of the artist’s obituary. V’s pewter crèche, her Balinese puppets.
IN HELL’S KITCHEN: She had the Harvard Classics, but she had the hots for the new stuff, same as she did the old. The Classics came from her father. Missing one volume of the English poets, though she read Swinburne at school. [She claimed the Sacred Heart library wasn’t half bad.] She also claimed to despise Browning who was her father’s favorite. On the subject of books that was her only stated instance of rebellion because she was as taken with them as was her silent, pickled old man. At the time of her death, she had made significant headway into collecting folio editions of every title she had eaten as a child.
Once, she mentioned that she was able to name the baby she gave up for adoption: Stephen.
THIS IS ONE OF THE THINGS I HEAR HAPPENED: She has just folded herself over to brush off the brown leaves covering her coleus. She has been stacking wood. She has on the work glove. She is going back inside to clean up; she bends from the waist to make a quick pass at the leaves that she might still enjoy the tart color of on her coleus a bit longer. She feels a quick sting, thinks it’s a wasp or a hornet and goes inside [the light at the sink is better]. As soon as the glove is off and she grabs the baking soda to put on the spot, she notes the rapid swelling in the webbing between her thumb and index [her hands her best feature, better than the legs even], the throb, already throbbing, and steps back outside to check if it was a hornet or wasp and glimpses as she peers into the coleus the dusty reddish thing, the sickening hourglasses along its thick length as it creeps soundlessly into the foliage, and it passes through her mind as her body is passing out that Southerners sympathizing with the North were called Copperheads.
AND, vacuuming the rag rug, listening to Nina Simone: The record had a catch in it. Always started over at “Old Jim Crow is dead.” When the phone rang, and she shut off the vacuum cleaner, not the record player, and the caller said Hunter [expletive] Crumb is dead.
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VINDICATION
After that she would have followed Sweet Willie Wine into hell.
Her husband would come home from work and she would be in a rage, and he could not understand it. He would repair to his shed to build his models.
There is a sanctuary in the mind made of balsa and glue. Perfect little gliders constructed in perfect quietude.
There is a sanctuary in the mind made of poetry and music and laughter. Whiskey and cigarettes never run out, and the ironing board is never in use.
