Читать книгу One With Others - C.D. Wright - Страница 6
ОглавлениеSome names were changed or omitted in light of the interpretive nature of this account. Others because they still live there. People may have been rendered as semblances and composites of one another. And others, spoken into being. Memories have been tapped, and newspapers consulted. Books referenced. Times fused and towns overlaid. This is not a work of history. It is a report full of holes, a little commemorative edition, and it aspires to the borrowed-tuxedo lining of fiction. In the end, it is a welter of associations.
Up and down the towns in the Delta, people were stirring. Cotton was right about shoe top. Day lilies hung from their withering necks. Temperatures started out in the 90s with no promise of a good soaking. School was almost out. The farm bells slowly rang for freedom. The King lay moldering in the ground over a year. The scent of liberation stayed on, but it was hard to bring the trophy home. Hard to know what came next; one thing, and one thing only was known, no one wanted to go home dragging their tow sack; no one wanted to go home empty-handed.
Over at the all-Negro junior high, a popular teacher has been fired for “insubordination” for a “derogatory” letter he wrote the superintendent saying the Negro has no voice. No voice at all. It was the start of another cacophonous summer.
It smells like home. She said, dying. And I, What’s that you smell, V. And V, dying: The faint cut of walnuts in the grass. My husband’s work shirt on the railing. The pulled-barbecued evening. The turned dirt. Even in this pitch I can see the vapor-lit pole, the crape myrtle not in shadow. My sweet-betsy. That exact streaked sky. The mongrel dog being pelted with rain. Mine eyes pelted. All fear. Overcome. At last. No scent. That’s what she said. Dying in the one-room apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.
MR. EASTER, AN OUTLIER [with FISH 4 SALE]: It’s probably a rat snake. Had a couple in the old storm cellar. My son-in-law accidentally caught it on fire and it killed ever one of my snakes.
+ + +
I came in by the old road from Memphis, the old military road. Across the iron bridge. No one in the field. Not a living soul.
I drove around with the windows down. The redbuds in bloom. Sky, a discolored chenille spread. Weather, generally fair.
The marchers step off from the jailhouse at Bragg’s Spur, 8:17 a.m. More police than reporters. More reporters than police.
The self-described Prime Minister of the Invaders, 31, and five others have begun their trek. SWEET WILLIE WINE’S WALK AGAINST FEAR is on the move.
V: We had the water and the shoes in my car. There was a black man named Stiles. [He was a midget.] He kept that water good and cold [for the marchers].
The threat they say is coming from the east [of the six Negroes walking to Little Rock and the white woman driving a station wagon].
It was something you came through that.
V: It was invigorating. It was the most alive I ever felt in my life.
FBI followed me for a long time. Stringers for the Gazette and the Appeal trailed me for a year. Once every ten or twelve years, I will get a caller. I used all of my life. I told my friend Gert, you’ve got your life until you use it.
I park in a spot of shade and walk around.
Downtown half shut down.
Cotton gin still going, not strong, but going.
Tracks working, neglected, but working.
The infamous overpass brought down.
September 15,2004, Hell’s Kitchen, her life surrendered to her body. September 15 the day Padre Hidalgo uttered the famous Grito that kicked off the Mexican Revolution. She would have liked that, going off the air on a day marking a great struggle for independence.
The river rises from a mountain of granite.
The river receives the water of the little river.
The house where my friend once lived, indefinitely empty.
Walnuts turning dark in the grass. Papers collected on the porch.
If I put my face to the glass, I can make out the ghost
of her ironing board, bottle of bourbon on the end.
+ + +
HER FORMER HUSBAND: I’d come home from work and she would be in a rage and I just couldn’t understand it.
They were a poor match. He says so to this day. She said so then. They barely tolerated one another. But they were Catholic [another “error bred in the bone”]. If he looked at her, and she looked at him, in nine months she was back at the lying-in.
[My best guess: She woke up in a rage, eight days a week.]
Her friends—the musician, the poet, the actor:
GERT: She taught me how to live. Now she has taught me how to die.
And I: She was my goombah. My rafiki. It was the honor of my life to know her. Honor of my life.
ELLIS:
A crowd/ Will gather, and not know it walks the very street
Whereon a thing once walked that seemed a burning cloud.
[Yeats she knew inside out. Inside out.]
A MAN KNOWN AS SKEETER [his whole life]: Oh yeah, I remember her, she celebrated all her kids’ birthdays on the same day.
I talked to a number of people. In person. On the phone. Mostly, the phone. When I could get anyone to talk to me. I made so many calls:
Can we talk later because I’m trying to cook for my family
He’s not here now
He’s fishing
I’ve got to go to the hospital to see my brother
He’s about to pass
I’ve got to go to Memphis
I’ve got to work the night shift
Out at the big pen
I work there since the plant shut
Can we talk later
I’m on Neighborhood Watch
And the kids are walking out
There’s no food here
I’m left holding the baby
You’ll have to speak to the hand
This was my rest day
He’s fishing
I’m working at the polls I’m on poll watch
I’ve got to go to Little Rock for my checkup
My pressure’s gone up
Since he got laid off
He’s always fishing
When he can’t go he’s home watching
The fishing channel
So, how is the fishing
Oh well, you know
It’s lots worse elsewhere
The woman who lived next door to the old house came outside to pick up her paper. I asked if she had known my friend V who lived there in the 1960s, and she allowed that she did.
Flat out she says, She didn’t trust me and I didn’t trust her.
Then she surprised me, saying, She was right. We were wrong.
[I heard just a fraction of the terrible things that happened back then. A fraction.]
Then she shocked me, saying, They have souls just like us.
I see my friend, midthirties, waking up in stifling heat. Her seven towheaded children balled up in their dreams. Socks and shorts dropped across scuffed-up floors. The funk of high-tops bonding with the wallpaper.
She wakes up seething but eases the screen door to. I see my friend breaking a stem off the bush at the side of the house and breathe in, sweet-betsy. She nudges a slug with her toe.
MR. EASTER: I’m about like you though about a snake. All these years on the river I only saw a poison one about three times.
The chaplain for the state police brings up the rear in his own car with refreshments for the men.
The only sure thing were the prices [and the temperatures]:
2 pounds of Oleo costs 25¢.
And 5 cans of Cherokee freestone peaches are $1.
The Cosmos Club president held a tea at her lovely lakeside home.
Two more Big Tree boys make fine soldiers.
A Rolling Stone was found in the bottom of his swimming pool.
Rufus Thomas and his Bear Cats will headline at the Negro Fair.
And Miss Teenage Arkansas [a comely young miss] is saluted once again for her charm and pulchritude.
Sunshine fresh Hydrox cookies, 1 lb for 59¢.
The assistant warden, at 300 pounds, is the one identified for administering the strap at the Arkansas pen [a self-sustaining institution]. Several say they were beaten for failing [to meet cotton quotas]. Others more often than not did not know why [they were beaten]. One testified to more than 70 [beatings]. The strap is not in question. In question is when it is to be administered.
THE VERY REVEREND PILLOW [at Bedside Baptist]: The injury that the rock-hard lie of inequality performs is unspeakable; it is irremediable, can be insurmountable. And very very thorough. No peculiar feeling to the contrary can be permitted to gain hold. You get my meaning.
Back then, in case of rain, I would be lying if I did not say to you—you would be ill-advised to step under the generous eave of certain stores or [in the unforgiving heat] to take a drink from a cooler or even try to order catfish [at Saturday’s]. And don’t even think about applying for the soda jerk job [at Harmon’s] or playing dominoes [at the Legion Hut].
Back then we could not be having this conversation. You get what I’m getting at.
Back then I would not be at this end of town unless I was pushing a mower or a wheelbarrow, the teacher [retired] told me over a big Coke at the Colonel’s; even at that, back then, I would not be here, if the sun was headed down.
[How far did a man have to walk just to pass his water, back then?]
The river is impounded by
the lake; below the lake the river
enters the lowlands, it slithers
through cypress and willow. And the air
itself, cloudy or clear, stirring
with smoke or dust or malathion,
if you get my drift, must not
be construed to be indivisible. No more
than blood. There is black blood
and white blood. There is black air
and white air; this includes
the air in the tires blowing out
over the interstate between town and
river, the air that riddles the children
when a crop duster buzzes
a schoolyard, the air that bellows
from the choir of robes
when the Very Reverend Pillow
bids, Be seated, and even the air socked
from the jaw of the champ, born
seventeen miles west, in Sand Slough,
when he took that phantom punch
the year in which this particular round
of troubles began.
Today, Gentle Reader,
the sermon once again: “Segregation
After Death.” Showers in the a.m.
The threat they say is moving from the east.
The sheriff’s club says Not now. Not
nokindofhow. Not never. The children’s
minds say Never waver. Air
fanned by a flock of hands in the old
funeral home where the meetings
were called [because Mrs. Oliver
owned it free and clear], and
that selfsame air, sanctified
and doomed, rent with racism, and
it percolates up from the soil itself,
which in these parts is richer than Elvis,
and up on the Ridge is called loess
[pronounced “luss”], off-color, windblown stuff.
This is where Hemingway penned some
of A Farewell to Arms, on the Ridge
[when he was married to Pauline]. Where
the mayor of Memphis moved after
his ill-starred term. After they slew
the dreamer and began to slay
the dream. Once an undulant kingdom
of Elberta and Early Wheeler peaches.
Hot air chopping
through clods of earth with
each stroke of the tenant
boy’s hoe [Dyess Colony] back
when the boy hadn’t an iota
of becoming the Man in Black.
Al Green hailed from here;
Sonny Liston, 12th of 13 kids,
[some say 24th of 25]
born 17 miles west,
in Sand Slough. Head hardened
on hickory sticks. [And Scott Bond,
born a slave, became a millionaire.
Bought a drove of farms
around Big Tree. Planted potatoes.
When the price came back up,
planted cotton. Bought gravel. Felled
his own timber. A buy-and-sell individual.
When you look close at his picture, you
can’t tell if he was white
or black. You can just tell he was a trim,
cross-eyed fellow.] And the Silver Fox,
he started out in Colt.
Mostly up-and-down kind of men.
[Except for Mr. Bond, he went in one
direction when it came around
to making money.]
+ + +
GRADUATE OF THE ALL-NEGRO SCHOOL: Our teacher would tell us, Turn to page 51. That page wouldn’t be there.
GRADUATE OF THE ALL-WHITE SCHOOL, first year of Integration-By-Choice: Spent a year in classes by myself. They had spotters on the trampoline. I knew they would not spot me. You timed your trips to the restroom.
+ + +
She woke up in a housebound rage, my friend V. Changed diapers. Played poker. Drank bourbon. Played duplicate bridge. Made casseroles, grape salad, macaroni and cheese. Played cards with the priest. Made an argument for school uniforms, but the parents were concerned the children would be indistinguishable. She was thinking: affordable, uniforms. You can distinguish them, she argued, by their shoes. It was a mind on fire, a body confined.
And on the other side of Division, a whole other population in year-round lockdown.
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live[d] to bear children to a dunce.
[Yeats she knew well enough to wield as a weapon. It would pop out when she was put out. Over the ironing board. Over cards. Some years the Big Tree Catholic foursome would all be pregnant at once, playing bridge, their cards propped up on distended stomachs. Laughing their bourbon-logged heads off.]
She had a brain like the Reading Room in the old British Museum. She could have donned fingerless gloves and written Das Kapital while hexagons of snowflakes tumbled by the windowpanes. She could have made it up whole cloth. She could have sewn the cotton out of her own life. While the Thames froze over.
She loved: Words. Cats. Long-playing records. Laughter. Men.
Alcohol. Cigarettes. The supernatural. It makes for a carnal list. Pointless to rank. Five in diapers at once—a stench, she claimed, she never got used to.
+ + +
AMONG HER EFFECTS, a bourboned-up letter:
Dear Callie,
This grandmother of yours is an intoxicant and you are not. It makes me proud that you study calculus.
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Anyway, there is one thing that happened that I want you to know about. One Arkansas summer, the summer of 1967? The boys came running in the house and said they saw an accident and we all ran down the road and there was this old man walking around in a daze and I asked if I could help him. There was a car in the ditch and Rudy and Will, I think, said no one was in it. The man said his name, which I forget, and asked me to call Mrs. Hand [an aristocrat with an elevator in her house] and ask her to send help.
I did. She took the message, thanked me and hung up.
About a month later, her son, a prominent town attorney, called me up and asked me to be a witness, and I told him that I hadn’t seen anything. And he said, Come to court anyway. So I went.
The prosecutor, the D.A., was a man named Hunter Crumb. So I’m sitting in the witness chair, telling what happened and I referred to the dazed man, and I quote myself:
And that gentleman, I’m sorry, I have forgotten his name, came up to me and asked me to call Mrs. Hand.
Okay, I do not exaggerate, the D.A. got red in the face and said, “Did you call that [N-word] a gentleman?” and went on at length yelling at me. Face on fire, yelling. I looked at the judge. I looked at Mr. Hand, but they would not look at me. Finally I was allowed to step down. I was shocked.
The second thing I want you to know is that in mid-June of 1969, Sweet Willie Wine [aka, the Man Imported from Memphis or the Prime Minister or the Invader] and Mrs. Oliver called on Hunter Crumb, to present the proper permits for the boycott and ten minutes after they left that man’s office Hunter Crumb dropped dead of a heart attack. I don’t have the news accounts of that, but it happened, and it was like electricity in Big Tree.
After that, I would have followed Sweet Willie Wine into hell.
+ + +
It gradually turns from clear to coffee;
the river receives another river near its mouth
and joins the mighty river to the south of Helena.
Yoncopin are the lilies in the ditches [pretty bloom
for a filthy drainage ditch isn’t it now]. An Arkansas arc
is not a rainbow but an old iron bridge over troubled
brown waters. The cornea’s collection of the earliest
rays ordering an entirely different distribution
of light and shade, I could imagine my friend V:
being blind and seeing everything, marrying a dozen
men and living alone, having seven children and
being barren, toting an M16 that looked
like a hoe, whistling down a taxi in a cold
capital; I could see the faded and ragged fields
replaced by blue shadows on hills of snow or
turning from a stag at the edge of the interstate
into a freshwater pearl before more sediment
entered the river than flowed from its mouth.
[Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s a rat snake.]
+ + +
Correction Facility Area
No Stopping
Stay Away
Stay Away
Remain Calm
You Watch
How You
Carry Yourself
I Told My Babies
My Beauties
And Don’t You Go
Getting In That Line
Don’t You Dare Go
Getting In That Line
Festina Lente
My Darlings,
Never Waver,
My Dears.
No more than blood:
There is black blood and white blood. There is black air and white air. And this selfsame lie takes aim, even if by indirection, at the stifled lives of those inflicting the harm, the lives of witting and of unwitting ignorance, and those who must live among the stiflers, as if one of them, by all outward and visible signs one of them, but on the reverse side of their skin lie awake in the scratchy dark, burning to cross over. Not to become one of the harmed but to shed the skin, you get my meaning, the tainted skin of the injuring party.
Just to act, was the glorious thing.
And those so grievously harmed, who do the forgiving, do so, that they not be deformed by the lie, must call on reserves not meant to be tapped except for a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, a sudden death or what disclaimers call Acts-of-the-Almighty such as a twister tearing over the land on which a plain frame house stands, or if, in town, it will be of cinderblock, a yard of raked dirt, a stand of day lilies, their withering heads lopped off.
But in this case, the reserves are needed every day, every hour of every day, because the warp is everywhere, because one is supposed to look at one’s reflection and see an inferior, uncomely, unwantable thing, because those are the terms for living, that is the conditioning. It is in fact, the law.
And a most elaborate system has been built up to ensure that the manchild and the womanchild see a lesser face than the one that is there. It requires the long crooked arm of enforcement, the duplication of services and facilities, with one set being far superior to the other set, which of course does not even aim to duplicate, but underscores the shoddiness of the second set of services and facilities, that they be “deservedly,” emphatically unequal.
So, you will find the answers on page 51; though the answers are etched in bloodied ink on paper that has been torn out by your tormentors and dragged into a crawdad hole. Being a measure of society’s distortion, in truth, the answers could have provided little inspiration for the rest of your life. Rather, their absence provides the inspiration, as a pop bottle flies toward a lightbulb and the Savoys commence stomping in the basement.
It also entails the complicity of the leaders of the faithful who are obliged to advance this doctrine as the Word of the Almighty, some of whom probably are believers in this malevolent reading, while others sign on for efficacy’s sake and others by dint of intimidation.
And it enjoins the participation of merchants and professionals, and law enforcers and the extralegal forces of men known as Whitecappers, Night Riders, Klansmen, and Birchers [the latter termed by its local spokesman to be strictly an educational society dedicated to the defeat of communism]; men who openly congregate at a service station owned by the deputy or a city barbershop or outbuilding of a big farm to conspire and collaborate or call themselves Concerned Citizens and so can assemble in public buildings or even the Legion Hut, the swell green slope of which has been used as a setting for a cross in flames, facing the road, you see where I’m coming from, public and semipublic places from which more than half the population is blatantly barred.
DEAR ABBY,
When Daryl and I were first married, he asked me to IRON his undershorts. His mother always did. At first I didn’t mind because we had no children, but now have two, and I could save a lot of time tossing them in the dryer and folding them, but I tried that once and I never heard the end of it. Daryl says he could “feel” the difference. What would you do?
DEAR TOO MUCH IRONING,
I would iron his underwear. You are wasting more energy complaining and arguing than it takes to iron seven pair of shorts once a week.
Everybody has a problem. What’s yours.
+ + +
When I show the granddaughter of my friend’s babysitter a picture of the swimming pool taken when it was built in 1935, printed in a special promotional edition of the paper to entice [white] people to move to the Jewel of the Delta, her eyes flash/ fill/ clear:
We were not allowed to swim there/We had never seen the dressing rooms/ We had never been near the locker room/ We had never seen the lights on their playing field except from the other side of Division.
+ + +
In Big Tree
People are reading their Bibles in bed
Their laces hang by their walking shoes
People are dreaming money semen
And boll weevils on the creep
Some could be soothed by a mourning dove
Some would be soothed by the Prince of Peace
UNDERTAKER: The night a threat wrapped in a brick came through that window, my mother, a mortician herself, said, Girl, forget calling the sheriff. Get the dustpan.
Some people want to lift you up and some are like a crawdad, they just want to drag you down.
[And there are those among the injured who cannot forgive the harm done because they have borne it since they opened their eyes, since the moment their perfectly good-seeing eyes made contact with the delusional eyes of their fellow citizens and lived to see this ignominy passed on; they cannot because the injury is inherently repugnant and because it feeds on a lie that appears to be alive and marked for service into perpetuity; so that not only must they endure its consequences, but so must their flesh, their blood, their firstborn.]
[Thus, the practice begins before the period of quickening before the crochet needle and catheter can be employed to prevent the quickening.]
[Where was it you wanted to bury this hatchet. Your land or mine.]
+ + +
V’s bush was sweet-betsy. I broke off a twig in her oldest daughter’s yard. Over the coming months, I break it over and over for a quick hit of camphor.
And offshore Camille brought rain that September. The year they put the kids under arrest and put them in the swimming pool.
King called “it” a disease, segregation. [Sounds contagious.]
It’s cradle work is what it is. It begins before the quickening.
When V ended up back in Kentucky after her expulsion from Big Tree, she kept a retired fighting cock. It was her only pleasure, Helmet. No one else could get near him.
Long before this black and white issue, she said she was going to make up a coat of arms and the motto on its heater would read:
I never knew what misery was till I came to Arkansas
Why wake up in this torpor—unless you happen to be from here. Which requires less than volition. It requires only inertia.
Or blood ties, where everyone you ever knew or were kin to lies buried.
Or, the long-lingering olfaction of home, whether from the faint cut of walnuts spoiled in the grass or a sour work shirt on a rotted railing. When the ones who are from here come home in the evening and get out of their car, and rise on tired legs, the barbecued night they smell is theirs—that exact streaked sky, that turned dirt, that crape myrtle, that dog chained to the clothesline.
+ + +
Love then, she was all but dying for, except the love of Catholic men, who did not live to love [from whom it was an article of faith that life is and forever shall be, for suffering].
V liked to say: It makes martyrs of the women and emasculates the men.
If religion, she also liked to say, is the opiate of the masses, fundamentalism is the amphetamine.
[That busted us up.]
The hierarchy, indisputable. The hereafter, actual. Sin, she believed in. That she was born in and bound to do it; she was likewise accepting of being sinned against. Injustice she rejected. Through and through.
Something else—LIE, was not in her vocabulary. The pure inflammatory truth she could take it, and Gentle Reader, she knew how to inflict it.
The night the town erupted, the night they beat the Memphis organizer, the Man Imported from Memphis, the City of Good Abode, the self-named Invader [the tag was picked from a sci-fi show; it stuck, and it sent its message straight to the eighth nerve].
The night they put some of the strangers in jail [in Swahili, stranger is mgeni. It also means “guest.” Hereabouts, it means outside agitator; it means godless communist; it means Invader], a crazed white woman turned her hose on V and the Invaders through the bars, and a mad white mob set her car ablaze [the only car she would ever have];
and a little twig of a white kid went to the Bijou with his father.
The reel had just sputtered into action when the lady left the projection booth and ran down the aisle to the boy and his father. You’ve got to get out of here, this town’s about to blow. And it was rare to go to a movie, rare for his daddy to take him, and he did not want to leave, he wanted to see the show, he wanted to see, but the lady had already stopped the projector and everyone else had cleared out.
It was all black. It was all white. It was black and white. No, it was in living color.
What was playing.
VETERINARIAN: You got me there.
You tend big animals or cats and dogs.
I’m small, I just take care of the small. If a heifer or a mare rolled over on me, that’d be all she wrote. I wouldn’t be able to work anymore. So, I stick to small. My father treated every one of her cats, the Persians, the blue point Siamese. Long before the black and white issue. He knew them all.
Two of their descendants made it to Hell’s Kitchen. They were ill-tempered, overweight, and generally obnoxious.
So, who would you rather live with, V asked, Al Capone or Mahatma Gandhi.
You got me there.
GRADUATE OF THE ALL-NEGRO HIGH SCHOOL: I did not participate [in the uprising]. I was in the band room, practicing. Keeping time. Our mother was very strict.
What was your band called.
Come again.
Your band.
You got me there.
GRADUATE OF THE ALL-WHITE HIGH SCHOOL, first year of Integration-By-Choice: I did not participate. I was in the theater, practicing.
I was a smart kid, and I sort of knew I was going to leave, and that high school was just something you had to go through to get to the rest of your life.
ALL-NEGRO HIGH SCHOOL ANNUAL:
