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Authors: C. D. Wright
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beautiful. She loved flowers. I don’t do nothing now but fish. Used to dive for mussels then salvage.
Later the same day we met a city worker [retired] who said he once killed a cottonmouth on the streets, sold it to a restaurant owner for a dollar, who skinned, filleted, and served it back to him on a platter.
Later, the same evening, we met a bartender who told us only four people in history sweat blood and they were all women. It is a place flowing over with its peculiar feeling.
+ + +
For me
it has always been a series of doors:
if one is opened precipitously a figure is caught bolting from bed
if another, a small table, a list of demands on school paper
if another, a child on the linoleum, saying she wants a white doll
a woman sitting on a bed, holding a folded flag
a shelf of trophies behind her head
an ironing board, bottle of bourbon on the end
sewing machine on a porch
To walk down the road without fear
To sit in a booth and order a sweet soft drink
To work at the front desk
To be referred to as Gentleman
To swim in the pool
To sit in the front row and watch Run Wild, Run Free [next week: Death of a Gunfighter]
To make your way to the end of the day with both eyes in your head
Nothing is not integral
You want to illumine what you see
Fear reflected off an upturned face
Those walnuts turning black in the grass
It is a relatively stable world
Gentle Reader
But beyond that door
It defies description
I am standing in a sluggish line at the Memphis airport. It is too early. A little girl in a pink sweat suit with tawny corkscrew curls stands behind me. I wish you would just shut up, she says to the stuffed bear she holds. Her mother and I exchange holy-moly looks. I sway between standing and falling. I am flashing the black paintings [before they were transferred onto canvas], and a cock called Helmet, sweet baby JC, a frowsy bush of sweet-betsy, and an old activist with the sobriquet Sweet Willie Wine; there are endless rows of cotton and never enough shade or cool cool water, and rivers silting up and slowing to a standstill, daytime bourbon drinkers, smelly shirts and scrap dogs, clouds of malathion and moccasins in the storm cellar, mussels as big as dinner dishes, a land of lay-offs and morbid obesity, sharp-tongued undertakers, don’t-pick-up-hitchhikers correction-facility signs, gentlemen who could not be called gentlemen without it coming back on them, women who could never be called ma’am, rusted iron bridges, towheads, do-rags, tired out schoolbooks, kids put in a drained pool, a pool buried and paved over, brothers scared shitless jumping off an overpass to get away from armed, malevolent men, brothers hiding under the preacher’s pickup, blackbirds flashing their red shoulders, speckled bowling balls, segregation after death, and how the death of reason produces monsters.
The Civil Rights Movement has been not only dutifully but beautifully documented, and I am indebted to the brace of books that helped inform my own footnote to the struggle.
Allen, James, and Hilton Als, Congressman John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack. Without Sanctuary. Twin Palms Publishers, 2000. [A devastating photographic document of lynchings.]
Beifuss, Joan Turner. At the River I Stand. B&W Books, 1985. [This is the definitive day-by-day account of the Memphis sanitation workers strike. It is a guaranteed-money-back page-turner.]
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63. Simon and Schuster, 1988.
____. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963–65. Simon and Schuster, 1998.
____. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965–68. Simon and Schuster, 2006. [I mean, somebody say, Amen.]
Capers, Gerald M., Jr. The Biography of a River Town, Memphis: Its Heroic Age. Reprint of second edition by Lightning Source for Burke’s Bookstore, 2003.
Collins, Martha. Blue Front: a poem. Graywolf Press, 2006. [An affecting book-length lyric of a lynching to which her father could have been a very
Later the same day we met a city worker [retired] who said he once killed a cottonmouth on the streets, sold it to a restaurant owner for a dollar, who skinned, filleted, and served it back to him on a platter.
Later, the same evening, we met a bartender who told us only four people in history sweat blood and they were all women. It is a place flowing over with its peculiar feeling.
+ + +
For me
it has always been a series of doors:
if one is opened precipitously a figure is caught bolting from bed
if another, a small table, a list of demands on school paper
if another, a child on the linoleum, saying she wants a white doll
a woman sitting on a bed, holding a folded flag
a shelf of trophies behind her head
an ironing board, bottle of bourbon on the end
sewing machine on a porch
To walk down the road without fear
To sit in a booth and order a sweet soft drink
To work at the front desk
To be referred to as Gentleman
To swim in the pool
To sit in the front row and watch Run Wild, Run Free [next week: Death of a Gunfighter]
To make your way to the end of the day with both eyes in your head
Nothing is not integral
You want to illumine what you see
Fear reflected off an upturned face
Those walnuts turning black in the grass
It is a relatively stable world
Gentle Reader
But beyond that door
It defies description
I am standing in a sluggish line at the Memphis airport. It is too early. A little girl in a pink sweat suit with tawny corkscrew curls stands behind me. I wish you would just shut up, she says to the stuffed bear she holds. Her mother and I exchange holy-moly looks. I sway between standing and falling. I am flashing the black paintings [before they were transferred onto canvas], and a cock called Helmet, sweet baby JC, a frowsy bush of sweet-betsy, and an old activist with the sobriquet Sweet Willie Wine; there are endless rows of cotton and never enough shade or cool cool water, and rivers silting up and slowing to a standstill, daytime bourbon drinkers, smelly shirts and scrap dogs, clouds of malathion and moccasins in the storm cellar, mussels as big as dinner dishes, a land of lay-offs and morbid obesity, sharp-tongued undertakers, don’t-pick-up-hitchhikers correction-facility signs, gentlemen who could not be called gentlemen without it coming back on them, women who could never be called ma’am, rusted iron bridges, towheads, do-rags, tired out schoolbooks, kids put in a drained pool, a pool buried and paved over, brothers scared shitless jumping off an overpass to get away from armed, malevolent men, brothers hiding under the preacher’s pickup, blackbirds flashing their red shoulders, speckled bowling balls, segregation after death, and how the death of reason produces monsters.
The Civil Rights Movement has been not only dutifully but beautifully documented, and I am indebted to the brace of books that helped inform my own footnote to the struggle.
Allen, James, and Hilton Als, Congressman John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack. Without Sanctuary. Twin Palms Publishers, 2000. [A devastating photographic document of lynchings.]
Beifuss, Joan Turner. At the River I Stand. B&W Books, 1985. [This is the definitive day-by-day account of the Memphis sanitation workers strike. It is a guaranteed-money-back page-turner.]
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63. Simon and Schuster, 1988.
____. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963–65. Simon and Schuster, 1998.
____. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965–68. Simon and Schuster, 2006. [I mean, somebody say, Amen.]
Capers, Gerald M., Jr. The Biography of a River Town, Memphis: Its Heroic Age. Reprint of second edition by Lightning Source for Burke’s Bookstore, 2003.
Collins, Martha. Blue Front: a poem. Graywolf Press, 2006. [An affecting book-length lyric of a lynching to which her father could have been a very
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