by Toni Jensen
“Your allergy spray?” he asks. “Every day?”
“Not every day,” I say.
“Every day!” he says in a voice that is almost a shout. “You breathe every goddamn day. Use your nose spray every day.” He grins at me, that hair standing on end.
“Okay,” I say, throwing my hand into the air. “Fine.”
“Okay,” he says, throwing his hands into the air, mirroring my gesture.
It was the perfect thing to do and to say, a regular and profane thing to get me to my car without falling apart, to get me all the way home.
I want to think he was there that night and into the next day, holding space for the families of the grieving. I want him to have been there with those families in the building that houses the only written record of my family’s imprint on my body—the only written record till now.
Later when he is home with his own family, I hope someone says just the right thing to him to make him wave his hands around in the air, to make him laugh/cry, instead of crying only.
IV.
That summer, as the news confirms the name and some history about the shooter, I am planning a trip to Standing Rock, to the Dakota Access pipeline protest, to the water protector camps.
Omar Mateen, who shot and killed forty-nine people in Orlando and hurt so many others, once was employed by G4S, the private security firm that begins providing security forces for Dakota Access that summer. They will be the ones who bring the attack dogs to Standing Rock. Mateen was employed by G4S in 2007 and spent time each year of employment going through their weapons training.
On June 12, 2016, as peaceful water protectors were making camp at Standing Rock, Omar Mateen took his training, took his body, took his guns into Pulse nightclub in Orlando and shot and killed forty-nine people and wounded fifty-three others. I keep repeating the numbers because they stagger me. Orlando is sometimes called the City Beautiful, and I sometimes have called it my city. Pulse is the nightclub where my students went to drink, to dance, where they converged after workshop.
On Saturday, May 30, 2020, the Pulse memorial site also becomes the site of Orlando’s largest protest over George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. Another protest takes place that weekend in Windermere, an Orlando suburb, in front of a home owned by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, charged with second-degree murder in Floyd’s death. The protest at Chauvin’s home ends with the arrest of two women for throwing paint at the house. The protest downtown that began at the Pulse memorial ends with police using tear gas against unarmed protestors.
I don’t know where to put these connections—I don’t know where to put my grief and my rage sometimes in this, our America.
Sometimes I think of the rage and grief like a road through traffic and there’s nowhere to turn off and there’s nowhere to park.
In the days after the shooting in Orlando, I can’t stop thinking about the neighborhood that houses Pulse—how it is mostly a driving neighborhood, not a walking one, meaning most of those there that night would have driven their cars. Meaning, it’s possible nearly a hundred family members and friends had to drive there in the days following the shooting to collect the cars of the dead and the wounded.
How do you enter that car? How do you collect yourself for that drive home? How do you make your knees fold like they’re meant to or your hands hold the key?
What I want for everyone there is to have the will to do this everyday, regular act under these terrible, irregular circumstances. What I want is for everyone all across this, our America, to say no more, to say this will be the last time anyone will have to make a drive like this, to say this will be the last time anyone will have to feel the weight of holding those keys.
V.
After the list of names, my students are doing what they are so good at—making art and making themselves useful.
Curtis makes himself busy organizing, as is his way. When the parishioners from Westboro Baptist, an organization best known for hate speech, show up to the funerals, Curtis puts his body between the mourners at the funerals and the intruders. Before the funerals start, he instructs his peers on the etiquette of that task, reminding them that though this is to some extent a counterprotest, what it is first and foremost is someone’s funeral. He instructs his friends to show up in dress shirts, offers that, if need be, he will teach them how to knot their ties.
Pedro offers up his poems and pictures of himself in drag, alongside makeup tips too complex for anyone but him ever to master.
Ashley offers the work of other queer writers, posting them online, using her position as an editor to showcase work of newer queer and Latinx writers from Orlando.
This is another way to make a list. This is another way to get to grief and through it, to get through mourning.
VI.
By a few months later, in the time I spend going to Standing Rock and returning, there are so many additional mass shootings I lose count. My then-husband and I have not found a way to talk about the Orlando shooting or my time at Standing Rock or the election; we won’t find a way.
On election night, we’re with our daughter at a party at the home of acquaintances—the parents of one of our daughter’s friends. As the results roll in, state by state, and some of the children begin crying, I begin to drink too much. Most of the adults at the party are beginning to drink too much or are already long since drunk or going outside to smoke weed or some combination of all.
The children’s faces, especially the girl children, are hard to look at straight on. Many of the girls are wearing pantsuits, and someone’s brought blue eye shadow, which they’ve been applying to all—grown-ups, male and female alike, babies and toddlers, et al.
The blue-shadowed eyes by the end of the night are a grotesquerie. Webster’s says this word dates back to 1666, and its synonyms include “monster, monstrosity, ogre.”
Technically, it’s a school night, and before we can be a hundred percent certain of the results, of the outcome, my then-husband starts telling me it’s time to go home. Our daughter lobbies to stay a little longer. She and I both want to see this to the end or to something closer to it.
I drink in front of my daughter, but this night is the first and last time I ever drink too much in front of her. Later, she’ll say it was fine—that I was hilarious—and her face will show no trace of any other meaning, and for this, I will be glad.
That night, eventually, we do go home, and I awake in the morning early and with the kind of headache most often described as splitting. My then-husband is surprised to see me up so early and says he thought last night he was going to have to leave me there, and when I say, “Ha, ha,” the look he gives me makes it clear he does not mean this in a ha-ha sort of way.
When I say leaving me there would have been unacceptable, terrible, that it also would have been scary and strange for our daughter, he says, “Well, it was a school night, and you didn’t want to go home.”
I get dressed then and wake our daughter for school. I realize I’ve slept through both 3:14 and 4:14 A.M. for the first time in a very long time. On the drive to school, I sing along with my daughter to a song she likes, and we laugh together a little, and I start to feel like though the world is falling apart on the macro level, though my head and other parts of me feel split wide open, perhaps at the level of the micro, starting this moment, I will begin to put my world back together and to make it once again mine.
Chicken
I.
The news vans swarm the neighborhood. Women with microphones and over-sprayed hair huddle with cameramen, considering angles. I approach from the park, which sits at the bottom of a tall hill. We’re having an over-warm day for October, with lush green leaves from the tall trees giving way to gold and red, the damp-wet of their fall underfoot. The air holds no crisp, only the still and humid-thick of autumn in Arkansas.
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The house, two-story, white, is maybe a mansion, depending on your definition. It’s older construction, a foursquare with a wide front porch that sits atop the hill. From the porch, I imagine, you could sip coffee, look down at the dog walkers and joggers circling Wilson Park. Instead, since Carla Tyson’s moved into the house, the maybe-mansion, a wrought-iron fence rings the property. Carla is the daughter of Don Tyson, who founded the Tyson Chicken and then Tyson Foods empire, which in 2018 had a net worth of just over $40 billion.
Carla to and fros exclusively through the garage, which is tastefully tucked off to the side. Her standard poodles are the only life I’ve seen in the yard today or most days—they’re curious and fast, one well-behaved, the other down for mischief.
In this, our second year in Arkansas, my family and I rent the last affordable place in the neighborhood, a light blue ranch-style house with good hardwood floors and total wrecks for bathrooms and kitchen. The neighborhood features proximity to the park, to campus, to downtown. When we move out later that year, the landlord will raise the rent by about half. Someone will pay it and then another someone and so on.
It’s also the sort of neighborhood to have block parties and ice cream socials, semi-regular gatherings around holidays and long weekends. Children run the streets in small packs. People have backyard chickens and walk their dogs and wave.
As I make my way up the hill toward the news vans and lights, a neighbor greets me and answers my question with “Haven’t you heard? It’s all over the news and the Facebook group.”
I’ve been at work on campus all day. I didn’t know we had a neighborhood Facebook group.
“She pulled a gun,” the neighbor says, “a shotgun—on the kids who live next door.”
“Who?” I say.
“The chicken princess,” she says, smiling.
II.
The first day I arrive in Fayetteville, my first in the neighborhood, I meet Carla Tyson at an ice cream social two doors down. From visiting campus to interview for my job, I already know the three big names in Arkansas are Tyson, Walton, and Hunt—of chicken, Walmart, and shipping fame, respectively. Campus buildings hold their names on shiny placards; our graduate students compete to be Walton Fellows, to have the relative luxury of a year off from teaching while still receiving their stipends.
That first day, the moving truck parked out front, taking over the street, we’re unloading our last box when two children arrive at our door.
“A girl! A girl! It’s true, you’re a girl!” the older one says to my daughter.
Her feet are bare and so are her sister’s. The older girl bounces up and down as if on springs, her brown hair flapping up and down with her arms.
She quickly informs us there are only boy children in the neighborhood—and tonight, there’s ice cream. She hands over the flyer and bounces homeward.
I have not had homemade ice cream since I was about my daughter’s age. My grandmother would make it sometimes in the summer when my cousins came over, and I remember the big spoons, the churning and churning. I have never been to an ice cream social and am having a hard time believing they exist outside very small towns, outside the 1950s.
That night, at the social, Carla Tyson is recovering from knee surgery and we make pleasantries about a colleague of mine she knows. I figure out she’s from those Tysons when the bouncing girl calls her Miss Tyson and ma’am when all the other grown-ups have first names only.
Carla has the kind of eyes that never stop moving. She traces the flow of people from living room to kitchen to the backyard where children swing and grown-ups congregate near the chicken coop.
Carla and I seem to be rare in our disinterest in the backyard chickens. Though this hobby becomes popular in the mid-2000s and its popularity escalates through the present day, I don’t understand the desire for backyard chickens. The eggs the chicken produce, no doubt, are superior to factory-raised eggs. But in order to get the eggs, you have to give over your backyard space to strutting, pooping, squawking creatures.
Too, before the millennium, backyard chickens were largely the province of the poor or some combination of the rural and poor. Both sides of my family had small family farms; both my parents grew up cleaning chicken coops, plucking feathers, collecting eggs, or wringing necks.
According to Webster’s, the word chicken is defined first as “a: the common domestic fowl (Gallus gallus) especially when young, b: any of various birds or their young,” secondarily as “a young woman,” third as “a coward,” fourth, “[short for chickenshit] slang: petty details,” and fifth, “slang: a young male homosexual.”
As an adjective, Webster’s defines chicken as “scared, timid, cowardly,” and “insistent on petty details of duty or discipline.” I had no idea chicken could be verbed, but Webster’s lists chickened and chickening as meaning “to lose one’s nerve,” usually combined with the word out, as in “chickened out.”
I grew up with my mother’s constant refrain that chickens were dirty, and my father’s that chickens were both stupid and mean. My mother, as a child, was expected to catch and pluck, my father, to catch and wring. Living in town meant an escape from chicken labor, a shift into a slightly higher economic class.
That upper-class and wealthy people want backyard chickens is too far a bridge for me to cross. My reaction always is visceral—recoil and head shake and more recoil.
The people who host the party, the parents of the bouncing child, will become our good friends. My daughter and I once will chicken-sit. One of the chickens will not want to return to its coop, and we will chase it with a stick, laughing and swearing and laughing some more. We will not know till later that our friends have a chicken cam. We are not asked to chicken-sit again.
III.
The land that houses Wilson Park’s nearly twenty-three acres was once used as hunting grounds by the Osage and was inhabited after by the Cherokee.
Wilson Park becomes the first official park in Fayetteville in 1944 and before that is owned by a private citizen, A. L. Trent, who maintained it as a private park starting in 1906. A part of the park’s history and a favorite of mine is the hundred-year-old Osage orange tree. Given a plaque as one of town’s “Amazing Trees,” the structure and stature of it stuns. Its branches tower over all the other trees and some nearby houses, its gnarly roots twist and turn like something out of one of the darker fairy tales.
Technically called Maclura pomifera or Bois d’Arc, this tree and others like it are more commonly known as Osage orange trees. The Parks Department reports it’s one of the most photographed trees in the city, and that it’s considered a “Witness Tree” for all it has seen: the tourist camps that used to be a part of the park through the 1920s, A. L. Trent’s swimming hole, which became a formal swimming pool years later, the Great Depression, the tenure of seventeen U.S. presidents.
According to the Parks Department site, “the name Bois d’Arc or ‘bow-wood’ was given to this tree by French explorers because the Native Americans used its extremely hard, durable wood in crafting their bows. The tree’s green, pebbly fruit (which grows only on the female trees) resembles an orange, but is hard and inedible by humans, though horses and squirrels do eat it. The fruit has also been used as a traditional pest management remedy: placed around a home’s foundation, the fruit is said to repel bugs.”
History books and a quick survey of my Osage friends confirm the Parks Department account. Osage people did and do use the wood from the tall trees to make bows, clubs, and other things, and the wood is prized for both its strength and flexibility.
I like the neighborhood when we live there, for proximity to the park and its tall trees, for the mix of back-to-the-landers who moved to the neighborhood in the 1960s and ’70s and the newcomers, mostly university professors, lawyers, and doctors now that the neighborhood’s homes have increased sha
rply in price. Also, to avoid the narrative of past-ness, the fallacy of past-ness, while I live there, I have both Chickasaw and Cherokee neighbors, which is likely to be true in most neighborhoods here. I like this mix of people and am sorry when we begin to get priced out, when the balance begins to shift in favor of the wealthy.
IV.
That later fall day, Carla Tyson’s weapon of choice is a sixteen-gauge double-barreled shotgun. When the young couple, age twenty-one and twenty-two years old, parks in front of Tyson’s house on Cleburn Street, one block from Wilson Park and its tall trees, Carla taps their car window with the shotgun and reportedly says, “You need to move or else.” The house they live in is a few doors down. It’s a public street. She reportedly tells them they’re on private property before backing away from their car, before telling them they’re scaring her.
The couple later reports being afraid, but they have the presence of mind to leave the window up, to stay in the vehicle, to call the police. When she learns they’re calling the police, in a sort of odd game of chicken, she calls the police, too.
When the officers arrive, Tyson reportedly tells them she’s “worth a billion dollars” and “was afraid of being kidnapped.” She’s charged with two counts each of terroristic threatening and aggravated assault, all of which are felonies. She’s released on a $2,500 bond.
It might not seem odd or unusual to outsiders for an Arkansan to pull a gun on a neighbor. I know, from the outside, many view the state as full of poverty and backwoods characters. Poverty does exist in the state, of course—we rank forty-sixth on the poverty index—and there are many woods and even some real pockets of wilderness left, and people who live there in those pockets out of choice or necessity.
But our corner, the northwest corner, holds more wealth than any other part of the state. If the stereotype of the state doesn’t quite hold in our corner, though, we still do meet a statistical probability for high gun ownership: despite how most people think of rednecks or hill people toting shotguns, statistically speaking, all across the country, those at higher income levels have a much higher gun ownership rate than do the poor.
