One With Others: [A Little Book of Her Days] (4 page)

ALL-NEGRO HIGH SCHOOL ANNUAL:

Best Dancer: one of the boys beaten by the Night Riders

Biggest Wolf: son of one of the boys blinded by the Night Riders

Friendliest: his brother who jumped from the overpass

Best Running Back: his cousin, went pro [in Canada]

Smartest: her cousin had his own car—he drove her to Ohio still wearing her cap and gown

Atmospheric washes of sound

Play it muddy

Play it freaking loud

Light sputtering and crackling

The only sure thing in those days were the prices:

Jack Sprat tea bags only 19¢.

A whole fryer is 59¢.

A half-gallon of Purex, 25¢.

Two pounds of Oleo, 25¢.

Ivory Soap 10¢ a bar.

Cherokee freestone peaches, 5 cans for $1.

And the temperatures:

Los Angeles enters its sixth day of rioting, 32 dead; Chicago’s

rebellion ends in two.

KKK’s lawyer dies in Birmingham.

Hurricane Camille sacks Pass Christian.

The president of the Cosmos Club holds a tea.

Soybean cyst nematode puts the county’s crop under quarantine.

Three Brinkley children die in an icebox.

It is time to pick the cotton.

Come see, come touch this Frigidaire, this two-door wonder.

B-r-r-r-r.

It is not for you to see, not for you to touch [N-word].

G-r-r-r-r.

Elsewhere in the news, troths have been plithed to thee

and thee and thou and thine.

Nothing happens without mayonnaise.

An elusive local Negro is found in Chicago.

The difference in the sexes is liked by most people.

Two trains derail.

A $33,000 blanket bond is posted by three Negro farmers

for the children put in the pool.

GRADUATE OF THE ALL-WHITE HIGH SCHOOL, first year of Integration-By-Choice: No homecoming games. There were two or three of us on the team but we could not be in the stands.

Things we were unsure about, we found out to be true. We had new books at the all-white school, and the books they no longer used went to the all-Negro school.

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