One With Others: [A Little Book of Her Days] (12 page)

M. Lowe, known as Tex, the SNCC worker [who escaped eastern Arkansas by the hair of his chinny chin chin].

Tom Rountree, veterinarian, whose father, a postman and minister of gentle disposition, took his son to the movies the night the town erupted; the first spool was no sooner reeling than it was brought to a smoky halt.

Rosie Stewart, owner of the Blue Flame, who fed and sheltered the group that dubbed themselves the Invaders, but who held no illusions about their personal conduct.

Evans Seawood, retired police captain, who could identify the man in the photo who found himself in possession of damning audiotapes of interrogations that did not make their way to the county museum as promised.

Harvey Hanna, who ran the county museum with the voluntary assistance of his wife, Carolyn, preserving as much of the town’s history as it seemed collectively willing to contribute to the record.

H. Ford Hunt, whom I happened to meet in front of Oscar’s; who was arrested and put in the pool; whose mother told her not to get in that line, not to even think about getting in that line, that she would not come see her in jail, though later HFH learned that her mother had in fact tried to see her.

Story L. Matkin-Rawn, whose doctoral thesis historicizes the recent struggle for human rights in the Arkansas Delta.

James T. Easter, who lives on the bank of the river. Who watched the river he had fished all his life turn from a place to haul mussels to a dredging site for big tires; and spoke so kindly of his late wife who could skin snakes and tend flowers with equal ease.

Joe Williams, retired welding teacher, who met me at Colonel Sanders for syrupy soft drinks and ranging conversation. Who was in the second wave of marchers who were put in the drained pool; who on the eve of military induction, with his friends James Nesbitt and Robert Smith, known as Toad, determined to integrate the bowling alley. Soon after, it burned. Who moved to integrate the drugstore. Soon after, the booths and stools were yanked out. His boss at T-C who stood up for him once when a white customer started abusing him while his broom stirred up a little dust.

L.C. Poole [brother of Joe Williams] of Las Vegas; to whom a great injustice was done.

Sue Saunders or Sanders, whom I was never able to locate, the redheaded
Gazette
stringer whispered to have been a federal agent.

Charlene Warren, retired teacher, who lent her scarce-as-hen’s-teeth 1967 LHS yearbook to the town museum.

Arlisa Price and Carolyn Sanders, of the public library, helpful in the patient, hands-on practice of librarians.

John Greeley and Marcos Rivero, who put up a plaque in V’s memory on the barren pear outside her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.

Deborah Luster, who drove and flew up several times from New Orleans to meet me in the Arkansas Delta to provide me with the evidentiary image, at a time when her own life was much distressed.

The late Reverend Vernon Johns, rousing pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, prior to MLK, from whom I cribbed the title of one of his famous sermons, “Segregation After Death.”

About the Author

C.D. WRIGHT was born in the Arkansas Ozarks, almost exclusively white at that time [except for a pocket of African American hill people in the university town of Fayetteville, and a lone hermit in Eureka Springs, Richard Banks]. Harrison, the town in which Wright mostly grew up, carried out two violent cleansings, in 1905 and 1909. Until very recent years it remained a sundown town. In 2003 a small collection of white citizens in Harrison initiated a recognition and reconciliation task force focused on opposing all forms, signs, and traces of racism. Their efforts included a bus trip from the Ozarks to an African Methodist Episcopal church routed from Harrison a hundred years earlier that had reestablished itself in the Arkansas Delta. The West Helena church had just launched a campaign to raise funds for repairs. The parish warmly received the Harrison delegation’s offer of in-kind support. One church member commented, “It’s like a situation where a bone is broken. When healing is complete, the bone is stronger at that break than it was before the injury.” Even if the science is iffy, the symbolism wavers not.

AN OLD CLASSMATE OF WRIGHT’s: “It’s mostly outsiders, the task force.”

Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, P.O. Box 2222, is currently headquartered in Zinc, near Harrison.

I want people of twenty seven languages walking back

and forth saying to one

another hello brother how’s the fishing

and when they reach their destination I don’t want

them to forget if it was bad

Books by C.D. Wright

One With Others [a little book of her days]

Rising, Falling, Hovering

One Big Self: An Investigation

Like Something Flying Backwards: New and Selected Poems

Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana,

photographs by Deborah Luster, with text by C.D. Wright

Steal Away: Selected and New Poems

Deepstep Come Shining

Tremble

The Lost Roads Project: A Walk-in Book of Arkansas,

with photographs by Deborah Luster

Just Whistle: a valentine,

with photographs by Deborah Luster

String Light

Further Adventures with You

Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues

Links

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june11/poet_04-26.html

http://www.radioopensource.org/c-d-wright-in-triumph-one-with-others/

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/04/one-big-self-finding-the-noble-vernacular-cd-wright-deborah-luster/

Acknowledgments

The Civil Rights Movement has been not only dutifully but beautifully documented, and I am indebted to the brace of books that helped inform my own footnote to the struggle.

Allen, James, and Hilton Als, Congressman John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack.
Without Sanctuary.
Twin Palms Publishers, 2000. [A devastating photographic document of lynchings.] Beifuss, Joan Turner.
At the River I Stand.
B&W Books, 1985. [This is the definitive day-by-day account of the Memphis sanitation workers strike. It is a guaranteed-money-back page-turner.]

Branch, Taylor.
Parting the Waters:
America in the King Years 1954– 63. Simon and Schuster, 1988.

____.
Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963–65.

Simon and Schuster, 1998.

____.
At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965–68.

Simon and Schuster, 2006.

[I mean, somebody say, Amen.]

Capers, Gerald M., Jr.
The Biography of a River Town, Memphis: Its Heroic Age.
Reprint of second edition by Lightning Source for Burke’s Bookstore, 2003.

Collins, Martha.
Blue Front: a poem.
Graywolf Press, 2006. [An affect- ing book-length lyric of a lynching to which her father could have been a very young witness.] Douglass, Frederick.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself.
Signet Paperback, 1968. [Masterly.]

153

Dray, Philip.
At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America.
Modern Library Paperback, 2003. [A devastating tex- tual account of lynchings in America.] DuBois, W.E.B.
The Negro.
Dover Publications, 2001. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Modern Library, 1994. Estes, Steve.
I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement.
University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Gordon, Robert. It Came from Memphis. Faber and Faber, 1995. [This book rocks. Memphis deserves a dozen chroniclers of its very own sound.]

Jones, Patricia Spears.
The Weather That Kills
[poems]. Coffee House Press, 1995. [Who was there, among a handful of black students entering the formerly all-white high school the first year of Choice.]

Kennedy, Randall.
Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.
Pantheon Books, 2002. [With a nod in the title to C. Vann Woodward, this book unearths the whole sordid history of the N-word.]

King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Stride Toward Freedom.
Harper and Row, 1958.

____.
Why We Can’t Wait.
Signet Classic, 2000.

____.
I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World.
Edited by James M. Washington. Harper San Francisco, 1992.

____.
A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Edited by Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepard. Warner Books, 2001.

[When people say so-and-so is a poet when so-and-so is actually a lyricist or a fashion designer or a dog whisperer or a preacher, it sets my tail on fire, but the Reverend, by any lights, was a poet.]

Lancaster, Bob.
The Jungles of Arkansas: A Personal History of the Wonder State.
University of Arkansas Press, 1989. [I am very attached to this smart-mouthed journalist’s tucked-up chronicle of the state.]

Rodgers, Clyde Allen.
Lives of Quiet Desperation.
PublishAmerica, 2004. [Novel by a white sharecropper’s son whose fictitious Uncle Sal said flatly of his native Arkansas Delta, “It is an ugly country, and it gives me a headache... the mosquitoes are bloodthirsty and bold. I am too old to contend, even with a bug.”]

Roy, Beth.
Bitters in the Honey: Tales of Hope and Disappointment across Divides of Race and Time.
University of Arkansas, 1999. [An independent scholar’s crucial, absorbing account of Little Rock’s infamous year.]

Stockley, Grif.
Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919.
University of Arkansas Press, 2001. [Not enough has been writ- ten about this unforgivable bloodletting. Stockley’s book begins the exhumation.]

Woodruff, Nan Elizabeth.
American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta.
Harvard University Press, 2003. [Hallelujah. She nailed it.]

Woodward, C. Vann.
The Strange Career of Jim Crow.
Reprint of third revised edition, Oxford University Press, 2002. [Sometimes re- ferred to as the Dean of Southern History. Fluid/ solid from his earliest writings. Pounds.]

The Memphis
Commercial Appeal,
the
Arkansas Gazette,
and the
Daily Times-Herald
were copiously consulted.

Copyright 2010 by C.D. Wright

All rights reserved

Cover art: Deborah Luster, “Pump House, Forrest

City, Arkansas,” 2006.

ISBN: 978-1-55659-388-8

eISBN: 978-1-61932-016-1

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