One With Others: [A Little Book of Her Days] (2 page)

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