Turn Me Loose (4 page)

Myrlie Evers

Medgar, Charles, and men like them

survived Jim Crow Army,

the Blitzkrieg, and Messerschmitts.

They returned home and fought

for a Double Victory

against the axis powers

of poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence.

The battle now was to have some say

in their own lives.

I once was blind, but thank God I
can see

It was because grace and mercy
came along and rescued me
.

—
MISSISSIPPI MASS CHOIR

 

Myrlie Evers

Whenever we needed more confidence

than we woke up with in the morning

God would come in a song

wearing a black woman's voice

a voice that sounded like that far away

look in Reverend Martin Luther King's eyes.

When she opened it up, it wrapped its arms

around all our fears, our doubts;

it lifted our hearts and spirits and took up

so much space there was no room to hate back.

Every time she laid down a verse over the roar

of fire hoses, attack dogs, and police batons,

our own voices would join hands, pick it up

and let the chorus carry us as far as we needed to go.

white men would say they were
going out to the quarters to
have their luck changed
.

—
ANONYMOUS

 

Willie De La Beckwith

When our grandfathers strutted back

from the slave quarters

still unzipped and whiskey-eyed

and on occasion forgetting

it was a sweet southern belle

they were now wringing

when the mongrel evidence of their sins

crowded the edge of the front porch

or tiptoed around our kitchens

with swollen bellies—thus began

our great tradition

of not knowing and not wanting to know

of never ever asking about

what happened

out there     in the dark

but, if you really know a man

you know what he loves

and you know what ignites his lust

whether that be the peal and chime

of a black woman's body

or the silent one of her man.

… racism is a mental illness
brought on by the fear of white
genetic annihilation.”

—
DR. FRANCIS CRESS WELSING

 

Byron De La Beckwith

We do what we do to build a fort around our women

and to protect America from mongrelization.

Allowing the free mixing of colored and white

is worse than too much pepper on a bowl of grits.

Have you not seen what one drop of black

paint will do to a gallon of white?

I ain't afraid of niggers, but I have nightmares

about the end of whiteness

and waking up one morning, pulling back the sheet

only to find my Willie is Aunt Jemima.

Willie De La Beckwith

There was a scary ol' black woman ghost

that carried a shotgun and snuck into the quarters

at night to steal little picaninnies an' field hands.

She carried each one of 'em down to the creek

and covered 'em with mud to hide their scent,

then sang a magic song that made 'em all invisible.

They ran away so quickly even the bloodhounds

couldn't catch 'em. She came back night after night

until she'd stole nearly every nigger in the quarters

and come spring there was hardly anybody to break

the ground and drop the seeds. In the summer

there was almost nobody to chop the cotton

when harvest time come, the poor old farmer and his wife

picked what they'd planted by themselves, worked

every day 'til sundown and even took supper in the fields.

They were both found on Christmas day, bent over

and frozen to a cotton bush, fingers and hands cut up

and still bleeding, after working themselves to death.

The registration of Negro voters

and demonstrations for civil rights

is strictly prohibited.

Violators will be punished

with racial epithets, harassing

phone calls, rocks, and eggs

(thrown from cars and trucks)

and firebombs when necessary.

Repeat offenders run the risk

of being immediately separated

from places of employment

and having mortgages called in.

Organizers of said activities

will be dealt with harshly

outside the highest limits of the law.

Myrlie Evers

When they unearthed

each new corpse,

we couldn't speak for days.

We came back

from that dark place

in tears—not for ourselves,

but for all the mutilated

and charred remains that were not

Goodman, Schwerner, or Chaney.

We could only find solace

looking out over the Mississippi,

watching that dark woman

swallow the sun.

Up north, nobody thought

it necessary to teach

Dixie decorum

Did he whistle or

flirt, forget the Negro's place?

Was it eyeball rape?

The all-white jury

guzzled beer, while his mamma

shed tears on the stand

They looked at his skull

his disfigured face, smiled, and

still voted not guilty

Fourteen is too soon

to visit Mississippi

come home    in a box

Myrlie Evers

Three months before Emmett Till arrived

Reverend George Lee was killed

by a shotgun blast to the face.

It was ruled a traffic accident.

He had been the first to register

to vote in his county.

One week before Emmett Till arrived

Lamar Smith voted in the democratic primary

and was shot at high noon

in front of the county courthouse.

There were no arrests.

Medgar cried when he heard about young Till.

Then he dressed as a sharecropper

helped find witnesses

and smuggled them out of town

for their safety.

When Uncle Mose stood up in court,

pointed right at J. W. Milam, identified him

as the killer, we thought the air would split,

but it didn't.

Instead a seam opened up in that place

where we kept all our fears.

Myrlie Evers

It attached itself to our lives, first

like an unplanned pregnancy,

then like our fourth child.

We didn't talk about its disfigured face

or its crooked limbs and spine.

We went about the people's business

tried to pretend that it wasn't really there,

though some nights it filled every open space

in the room, often crawling into bed between us,

making it difficult to sleep.

Every new registered voter, successful boycott,

demonstration and prime-time television minute

put fat on its face. Images of Medgar

escorting James Meredith into Ole Miss

were celebrated with new front teeth.

When it crawled to the front door, and spoke

its first cuss words

it sounded like a car backfired twice.

I unzip my pants to piss,

and my fingers pull out a long black snake.

Willie reaches over, strokes it,

and smiles. I squeeze my eyes shut,

clear my head, enjoy the weight of it

in my hands, open my right eye to a squint,

line up the crosshairs,

take a deep breath              and smile back.

Killing that nigger gave me no
more inner discomfort than
our wives endure when they
give birth to our children
.

—
BYRON DE LA BECKWITH

 

Like them, a man can conceive

an idea, an event, a moment so clearly

he can name it even before it breathes.

We both can carry a thing around inside

for only so long and no matter how small

it starts out, it can swell and get so heavy

our backs hurt and we can't find comfort

enough to sleep at night. All we can think

about is the relief that waits, at the end.

When it was finally time, it was painless.

It was the most natural thing I'd ever done.

I just closed my eyes and squeezed

then opened them and there he was,

just laying there still covered with blood,

(laughs) but already trying to crawl.

I must admit, like any proud parent

I was afraid at first, afraid he'd live,

afraid he'd die too soon.

Funny how life 'n death

is a whole lot of pushing and pulling,

holding and seeking breath;

a whole world turned upside down

until   some   body   screams.

Myrlie Evers speaks to Willie
and Thelma De La Beckwith

My faith urges me to love you.

My stomach begs me to not.

All I know is that day

made us sisters, somehow. After long

nervous nights and trials on end

we are bound together

in this unholy sorority of misery.

I think about you every time I run

my hands across the echoes

in the hollows of my sheets.

They seem loudest just before I wake.

I open my eyes every morning

half expecting Medgar to be there,

then I think about you

and your eyes always snatch me back.

Your eyes won't let me forget.

We are sorority sisters now

with a gut-wrenching country ballad

for a sweetheart song, tired funeral

and courtroom clothes for colors

and secrets we will take to our graves.

I was forced to sleep night after night

after night with a ghost.

You chose to sleep with a killer.

We all pledged our love,

crossed our hearts and swallowed oaths

before being initiated with a bullet.

Both of them were history, even before one

pulled the trigger, before I rocketed through

the smoking barrel hidden in the honeysuckle

before I tore through a man's back, shattered

his family, a window, and tore through an inner wall

before I bounced off a refrigerator and a coffeepot

before I landed at my destined point in history

—next to a watermelon. What was cruel was the irony

not the melon, not the man falling in slow motion,

but the man squinting through the crosshairs

reducing the justice system to a small circle, praying

that he not miss, then sending me to deliver a message

as if the woman screaming in the dark

or the children crying at her feet

could ever believe

a bullet   was small enough   to hate.

Myrlie Evers

During the flag ceremony

soldiers folded, creased, tucked,

smoothed, and then folded again

with such precision and care,

I imagined they were wrapping

a body

a red, white, and blue

mummy

which they passed, and saluted

and honored so much so

everybody stopped looking

at the casket

by the time they placed that triangle

of husband in my arms,

they left no doubt

I was holding his future

and what we were burying

was only his past.

Byron De La Beckwith

What good would it do to own a whole orchard

and not make preserves out of the fruit?

Any fool with money and a passion for guns

is at most, a collector. Only a marksman like me

could truly own a rifle like that or any gun.

Owning a gun is like driving a fast car.

Hell, it's like raising prize cocks. You gotta keep

'em healthy and mean. You gotta let 'em out

of they cage sometimes and rev the engines

just to see 'em strut. Now, I ain't saying I did it,

that's for the state to prove, but you gotta be a fool

to own a car and not know how fast it'll go.

And whatever I am, I ain't no fool.

Thelma De La Beckwith speaks to Myrlie Evers

You are wrong to think my man a monster

or a lowly coward 'cause he grins at you

from across the courtroom. Your shallow

Faith won't let you see his generosity

or his compassion. Don't you see the courtesy

he extended to you by opening up a hole

in that boy's black back and not his face,

allowing you and your children the dignity

of an open casket, a vision of perfect sleep

instead of a bloody stump, where his head rests now?

Byron De La Beckwith

I have no problem with colored who know

their place, but it's easy to hate troublemakers

an' integrationists, uppity monkeys in suits'n ties,

little more than pet dogs for northern scum

pissing on our proud Heritage. Yeah, I shot that boy

in the back. But not 'cause I hated his color.

I hated how clean he kept his car. I hated

his always-pressed clothes and shiny shoes. I hated

that he parked in front of his own house. I hated