Brown
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the dog & drought-fed
lawn. Nothing
for once is wrong—
cicadas quieted,
the rain’s metal smell,
a train on time
arriving
& that sound now his—
as if a kiss
might make music.
Money Road
for John T. Edge
On the way to Money,
Mississippi, we see little
ghosts of snow, falling faint
as words while we try to find
Robert Johnson’s muddy
maybe grave. Beside Little Zion,
along the highwayside, this stone
keeps its offerings—Bud & Louisiana
Hot Sauce—the ground giving
way beneath our feet.
The blues always dance
cheek to cheek with a church—
Booker’s Place back
in Greenwood still standing,
its long green bar
beautiful, Friendship Church just
a holler away. Shotgun,
shotgun, shotgun—
——
rows of colored
houses, as if the same can
of bright stain might cover the sins
of rotting wood, now
mostly tarpaper & graffiti
holding McLaurin Street together—
RIP Boochie—the undead walk
these streets seeking something
we take pictures of
& soon flee. The hood
of a car yawns open
in awe, men’s heads
peer in its lion’s mouth
seeking their share. FOR SALE:
Squash & Snap Beans. The midden
of oyster shells behind Lusco’s—
the tiny O of a bullethole
in Booker’s plate glass window.
——
Even the Salvation
Army Thrift Store
closed, bars over
every door.
We’re on our way again,
away, along the Money
Road, past grand houses
& porte cocheres set back
from the lane, crossing the bridge
to find markers of what’s
no more there—even the underpass
bears a name. It’s all
too grave—the fake
sharecropper homes
of Tallahatchie Flats rented out
along the road, staged bottle trees
chasing away nothing, the new outhouse
whose crescent door foreign tourists
——
pay extra for. Cotton planted
in strict rows
for show. A quiet
snowglobe of pain
I want to shake.
While the flakes fall
like ash we race
the train to reach the place
Emmett Till last
whistled or smiled
or did nothing.
Money more
a crossroads
than the crossroads be—
its gnarled tree—the Bryant Store
facing the tracks, now turnt
the color of earth, tumbling down
slow as the snow, white
——
& insistent as the woman
who sent word
of that uppity boy, her men
who yanked you out
your uncle’s home
into the yard, into oblivion—
into this store abutting
the MONEY GIN CO.
whose sign, worn away,
now reads UN
Or SIN, I swear—
whose giant gin fans,
like those lashed & anchored
to your beaten body,
still turn. Shot, dumped,
dredged, your face not even
a mask—a marred,
unspared, sightless stump—
——
all your mother insists
we must see to know
What they did
to my baby. The true
Tallahatchie twisting south,
the Delta
Death’s second cousin
once removed. You down
for only the summer, to leave
the stifling city where later
you will be waked,
displayed, defiant,
a dark glass.
There are things
that cannot be seen
but must be. Buried
barely, this place
no one can keep—
——
Yet how to kill
a ghost? The fog
of our outdoor talk—
we breathe,
we grieve, we drink
our tidy drinks. I think
now winter will out—
the snow bless
& kiss
this cursed earth.
Or is it cussed? I don’t
yet know. Let the cold keep
still your bones.
Hive
The honey bees’ exile
is almost complete.
You can carry
them from hive
to hive, the child thought
& that is what
he tried, walking
with them thronging
between his pressed palms.
Let him be right.
Let the gods look away
as always. Let this boy
who carries the entire
actual, whirring
world in his calm
unwashed hands,
barely walking, bear
us all there
buzzing, unstung.
NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Several poems first appeared in literary magazines and publications; thank you to their editors:
Jai-Alai: Ode to Ol Dirty Bastard
New York Review of Books: Ode to the Harlem Globetrotters
The New Yorker: Money Road; the sonnets “When You Were Mine” and “Housequake” (as “Little Red Corvette”). Special thanks to Paul Muldoon.
Oxford American: Pining, A Definition
QuickMuse: James Brown at B. B. King’s
VQR: Repast (minus “Pining”)
Zoland Books: Mercy Rule
“Thataway” was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art to accompany artist Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series exhibition and catalog. “Limbo” in the “Triptych for Trayvon Martin” first appeared in MoMa’s limited-edition volume of Robert Rauschenberg’s Thirty-four Drawings for Dante’s Inferno, also commissioned. Thanks to Leah Dickerman.
“Open Letter to Hank Aaron” first appeared as part of the exhibition on Hank Aaron at Emory University’s Woodruff Library, from spring to fall 2014.
Both “James Brown at B. B. King’s” and “Ode to Ol Dirty Bastard” appear in the Southern Poetry Anthology: Georgia volume.
“Howlin’ Wolf” appears in the anthology Tales of Two Americas, edited by John Freeman.
The first line and a half of “James Brown…” is a quote from the artist.
* * *
—
“Repast”: The
repast refers to the traditional African American meal following a funeral. Whether formal or for family members only, held at a house of worship or the home of the deceased, catered by a favorite local spot or a community potluck, the repast is a ritual connected to other foodways, as well as to traditions both African and American, Christian and more broadly religious. Where the wake before the funeral is primarily about the dead, the repast is also about the living, who share food and memories. The very word has come to suggest a reflection, not on the past but on the future, a final supper after the burial that leaves the circle unbroken.
Repast celebrates the life and bravery of Booker Wright, owner of Booker’s Place and waiter at Lusco’s in Greenwood, Mississippi, a town quite near to where white racists killed Emmett Till in 1955 and others murdered civil rights workers Goodman, Schwerner, and Cheney in 1963. In 1966, for the NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait, Wright knowingly spoke out about the double standards and racism of Greenwood’s white patrons, many of whom were also featured in the show (and were White Citizens’ Council members). After the film aired, Wright was beaten up and sent to a hospital—by a local police officer, no less—and his own establishment firebombed. Both the man and the bar survived. Years later Wright was shot and killed by a bar patron. As described in the recent documentary Booker’s Place, Wright’s descendants and others in the community have suggested that the shooting had a political motivation.
In his own words from the 1966 documentary and through the imagination, Wright speaks of life and foodways in the American South and what it means to wait. Over the course of the piece, his waiter’s serving napkin goes from bar towel to preacher’s handkerchief, as Wright literally transforms from a waiter to a barkeep to an activist—which may prove the same thing.
The oratorio was commissioned by the Southern Foodways Alliance and debuted at its annual symposium in October 2014, and was reprised at Carnegie Hall on 4 April 2016. Thanks to John T. Edge, Bruce Levingston (pianist and musical director), composer Nolan Gasser, and baritone Justin Hopkins.
“Money Road”: “Money Road” traces my driving the Delta with friend and Southern Foodways Alliance leader John T. Edge—we started out visiting Booker’s Place in Greenwood, Mississippi, for Repast, the oratorio the SFA had commissioned from me on Booker Wright. Turns out Greenwood is where the term Black Power was popularized at a rally by Stokely Carmichael in 1966, just a few blocks from Booker’s. Nearly fifty years later one could still see why. Driving to Money that day, it was bitter cold, snow accompanying what became the pilgrimage recorded in the poem. The site of Till’s lynching feels both holy and haunted.
In 2017 the news revealed—at least to those who had bought the story—that the white woman at the center of the case, who had claimed Till whistled at her or called her baby, confessed that Till had in fact not done a thing. I am heartened that the poem had already said he ‘whistled or smiled / or did nothing,’ though I still wonder why had even well-meaning southern and American accounts decried the lynching but somehow believed the lynchers? Till’s murderers—who lied in court, got acquitted in no time by an all-white jury, then promptly sold their story without fear of reprisal—should not be believed. In some small way perhaps it’s because we cannot believe the whole of the truth—that evil does discriminate—much like, in more recent cases from Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown, some cling to some sense of black culpability in their own killings. The poem calls out to us to remember but also to revisit and revise what we think of the past—not in the ways of bluesman Robert Johnson’s unlikely gravesite along the Money Road, or the fake plantation there that proves almost as haunting—but in the reality of the now-crumbling storefront where Till was brought and then killed in the night for no earthly, or only earthly, reasons.
* * *
—
My gratitude to Melanie Dunea for the photographs in these pages. With support from the Virginia Quarterly Review, she traveled with me to the Mississippi Delta in January 2015 to capture the spirit of that place with a poetry that enhances my own.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kevin Young is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and poetry editor for The New Yorker. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, including Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995–2015, long-listed for the National Book Award; and Book of Hours, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Young’s most recent nonfiction book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His collection Jelly Roll: A Blues was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. His first nonfiction book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award. A University Distinguished Professor at Emory, Young is the editor of eight other collections and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.
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