One With Others: [A Little Book of Her Days] (9 page)

The air itself was heavy upon them, the forward-marching folks who seemed small in number and dwindling in spirit. The King was dead; the laws were in place, but nobody said BOO about enforcement. [Well, yes, they did, they said INTERPOSITION AND NULLIFICATION.]

V: In high school, you are crazy for boys then. A cousin had a boy I sort of liked. He talked anti-Jewish. I told him I was half-Jewish. And that was that.

Concealed her pregnancy until she was seven months. I’m glad your mother is dead, her stepmother told her, her mother’s sister.

I tried to get her first semester transcript, but there was none. She either did not finish the term or the records were lost or destroyed. I just wanted to see those easily won high marks. Who knows, they may have been punitively low. There was the book report from the pope’s banned books list; the teacher who didn’t know Swinburne; the biology teacher who said Jesus had 23 chromosomes and was the spit and image of his mother. Hahahahaha.

[That one busted her up.]

Walking they are just walking

Play the situation by ear

Inspiring fear/ Dispelling fear

Hateful words survive in sticky clumps

+ + +

MAYOR OF A TOWN ON THE MARCH ROUTE: With his twisted, diseased mind you don’t know what he’s going to do.

THE GOVERNOR calls for the march to be ignored.

AN UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN carries a small red Bible.

Along the route, ARMED MEN IN FERTILIZER BINS.

MAYOR: It gives a man a place to stand so he won’t be tempted to hurt them.

[They would kill us if they had the chance.]

V: We had the water and the shoes in my car. Stiles kept that water good and cold.

COUNCILMAN: We got good [N-word] here except for a few teens.

It is something you came through that.

It is the most alive I ever felt.

+ + +

HELL’S KITCHEN: I don’t know what we’re watching. She’s in her puffy chair, a few feet from her designated deathbed. When she sleeps it’s in the pleather chair, in front of her television. The bed has gathered dust and old hair and the bugs that live on our slough. The leading man is dying. He is fitted in a silk robe with tuxedo lapels. He lies in a big poster bed. He has but a handful of breaths left in him.

She says to me, He doesn’t want to leave his monogrammed pillowslip.

She says to me, I am Rafferty, the poet/ Eyes without sight

Mind without torment/ Going west on my journey

HER OLDEST DAUGHTER, MAY: Daddy caught a crow once. On the way to school [apropos of nothing].

Wordan kept a pet alligator.

Mother kept a fighting cock [retired].

Called him Helmet.

BIRDIE: Did she have a priest.

He would have had to enter at his peril.

Hahahahaha.

+ + +

V is propped up and alert. A man lately helped with a little problem of a romantic nature has sent a white rose for every year of her life. Big old-fashioned smelling roses. She stays conscious until they drop their last petal. She stays with us for them.

We have come together in Hell’s Kitchen, the old Memphis crowd. We stay up eating and drinking and talking more than either, and sleep in a heap; then some of us go to the demonstration. V is animated and tries to eat to humor us. We remind her of her kids crammed in their beds, telling the same old ghost story, the man with the hook, giggling in the dark, until the farting begins.

August 29. It feels good to come together in front of Madison Square Garden on the eve of the Republican National Convention. It is so squalid hot the only shade we get is when the zeppelin drifts overhead. We break up and go back to her apartment to watch the rest of the demonstration on television.

It’s one reason [the War, the New World Order] she says she’s glad to be on her way out. [That’s a low point.] She was almost see-through; she sat in the half-dark sort of self-cancellating.

A crowd/ Will gather, and not know it walks the very street

Whereon a thing once walked that seemed a burning cloud.

Whose ghost that is. Steals across the room in alcoholic light. Hers. Not the specter of her favorite she-cat. The one that often hauled socks from the laundry by their scruff taking them for her drowned litter. The men’s socks, when damp, the right measure and weight. Since the cat was color-blind, being cat, it didn’t matter if they were all black, the socks, that is.

+ + +

So they drove my friend V out of her home. They drove her out of the town. They drove her out of the state. Until they burned up her car, she drove herself. Burned her car right next to the police station. She had just begun to drive, I mean she just learned to drive and she had many miles to go. Then whoa, Gentle Reader, no more car. The white man burned that MF to the struts. The governor’s bodyguard, Jim, or was he a trooper or was he a trooper whose trooper duties were to safeguard the governor. Anyway he drove her to the state line. Drove her across the bridge to Memphis. One thing he knew. He didn’t want her getting killed in Arkansas. The governor didn’t want that and the bodyguard didn’t want that. After all he was the one driving, he would likely as not be killed alongside her. His job was to protect and to serve. It wasn’t part of his plan for her to get killed on his watch. She said he dropped her off at a cafe on the other side. Under the bridge. I don’t know what was there then. That whole area has turned. Condos and fine houses line the bluff overseeing the big brown working river.

Some would say she was in full pursuit of her ruin

Some would call it her pathetic adventure

I would say you did not understand the magnitude of her longing

I say where was the suitor to her senescence

Another disaffiliated member of her tribe

I say do we have to go through this every time/ This shunning thing

Any simple problem can be made insoluble

Such as how to share an Elberta with the fuzz still on it

Crickets in the house are good/ A crow is a bad sign

Empty rooms love the dark

The key to tranquillity is equal opportunity

When the siren sounds

It’s time for our curfew

Old moon a wrecking ball

The town under demolition from within

Color provides a structure, albeit soul-sucking

The woods were felled by Chicago Mills

An Arkansas arc is not a rainbow

But an iron bridge over troubled waters

+ + +

It was hotter then. It was darker. No sir, it was whiter. Just pick up a paper. You would never suspect 66% of the population was invisible. You would never even suspect any of its people were nonwhite until an elusive Negro was arrested in Chicago or the schedule for the annual Negro Fair was published or a popular Negro social studies teacher was fired for an insubordinate letter to the superintendent and a spontaneous rebellion sprang up in a Negro classroom in the form of flying chairs and raggedy books and a pop bottle thrown at a light fixture, and then, the lists of long long suffered degradations backed up and overflowed:

Parades without permits/ Boycotted stores

Funeral home turned into a Freedom Center

Kids arrested en masse and put in a swimming pool

V died during Operation Enduring Freedom

A bottle a day, she got annihilated/ Two packs a day

Always preoccupied with last things/ Always a touch eschatological

Always took a little tabula rasa with her caffeine

When I asked the neighbor if she knew the woman who lived there in 1969/

Oh yes she said/ She knew her

She didn’t trust me and I didn’t trust her

I don’t blame her though/ Everything

was so confusing/ She stayed to herself

She was overwhelmed/ That poor woman...

She was right/ We were wrong

VINDICATION

They’ve got souls/ Just like you and me

INTERPOSITION AND NULLIFICATION

The marchers are approaching the town of Hazen

where not so long ago an earth scraper turned up

a mastodon skull and a tusk on the old military road

In Big Tree: People are turning in

Only sure thing were the prices:

Grown-ups know the cost of a head of lettuce,

a fryer, a package of thighs; a $500 bag of seed

covers about 5 acres; it takes 20 square feet of cotton

for a medium-size blouse; where nothing is planted,

nothing much grows. The dirt is hard-packed.

The trees were gone by the first war. The first to go,

the most marvelous one, the red cypress,

made beautiful instruments. The fields,

not gone, but empty. Cotton turned to soybeans.

Mussels from the river turned to salvage.

Fishing for tires on the silted-up water.

Some are left digging an old bur out of their foot.

Some go up/Some go down
[Big Tree church sign]

A race-free conversation hard to have back then.

Back then, the hotdog wagon doubled as a brothel.

Come again.

DEAR ABBY,

I am 11 years old but I know all the facts of life because I live in a dirty neighborhood. My problem is that in our family we get pregnate quick. My sister got pregnate when she was 16 just by sitting next to a boy in church. Can this be?

DEAR YOUNG MISS,

No, somebody must have moved.

+ + +

People study the dingy chenille clouds for a sign.

People did what they have done.

A town, a time, and a woman who lived there.

And left undone what they ought not to have did.

+ + +

I take one more drive across town thinking about the retired welding teacher easing over that rise seeing the parking lot full of white men. I wonder if he thought he would die in the jungle [where no Vietcong ever called him [N-word] ] or he would die in front of the bowling alley [without ever having been inside] or die in the swimming pool [without ever having been in it, except when drained, and the police had him in their sights]. Or if, because he was a young man, he would never die. I attach V to my driving-around thoughts.

An object unworthy of love she thought she was.

It was a
cri de coeur.

Those of our get had given her a
nom de guerre:
V.

A simple act, to join a march against fear

down an old military road.

We were watching an old movie the night

the table started walking toward us

and there was trouble on Division.

She became a disaffiliated member [of her race].

I’m one of them now, she said, upon release

from jail. I am an Invader.

To feel in conjunction with the changes

of my time. The most alive I’ve ever been.

My body lifted itself from the chair

it walked to where I saw a silent crowd.

To act, just to act.
That
is
the glorious thing.

Yet it has come to my attention that a whisper campaign

has been directed against the main character,

an invisible woman. She could have buried her feelings

like power lines; walked around free

and common as the air that bathes the globe or

sued the chickenshits and gone to live in Provence

smelling of Gauloises and café au lait. You have your life

until you use it. You forfeit the only life you know

or go to your grave with the song curdled inside you.

No more damned if you did and damned if you didn’t.

Not the mental lethargy in which the days enveloped her

Nor the depleted breasts not the hand that never knew