for my family—
blood, adopted, imagined
RUN AWAY from this sub-
scriber for the second time
are TWO NEGROES, viz. SMART,
an outlandish dark fellow
with his country marks
on his temples and bearing
the remarkable brand of my
name on his left breast, last
seen wearing an old ragged
negro cloth shirt and breeches
made of fearnought; also DIDO,
a likely young wench of a yellow
cast, born in cherrytime in this
parish, wearing a mixed coloured
coat with a bundle of clothes,
mostly blue, under her one good
arm. Both speak tolerable plain
English and may insist on being
called Cuffee and Khasa respect-
ively. Whoever shall deliver
the said goods to the gaoler
in Baton Rouge, or to the Sugar
House in the parish, shall receive
all reasonable charges plus
a genteel reward besides what
the law allows. In the mean
time all persons are strictly
forbid harbouring them, on pain
of being prosecuted to the utmost
rigour of the law. Ten guineas
will be paid to any one who can
give intelligence of their being
harboured, employed, or enter-
tained by a white person upon
his sentence; five on conviction
of a black. All Masters of vessels
are warned against carrying them
out of state, as they may claim
to be free. If any of the above
Negroes return of their own
accord, they may still be for-
given by
ELIZABETH YOUNG.
Start with the sun
piled weeks deep on your back after
you haven’t heard rain for an entire
growing season and making sure to face
due north spit twice into the red clay
stomp your silent feet waiting rain
rain to bring the washing in rain
of reaping rusty tubs of rain wish
aloud to be caught in the throat
of the dry well head kissing your back
a bent spoon for groundwater to be
sipped from slow courting rain rain
that falls forever rain which keeps
folks inside and makes late afternoon
babies begin to bury childhood clothes
wrap them around stones and skulls of
doves then mark each place well enough
to stand the coming storm rain of our
fathers shoeless rain the devil is
beating his wife rain rain learned
early in the bones plant these scare
crow people face down wing wing
and bony anchor then wait until they
grow roots and skeletons sudden soaking
rain that draws out the nightcrawler
rain of forgetting rain that asks for
more rain rain that can’t help but
answer what you are looking for
must fall what you are looking for is
deep among clouds what you want to see
is a girl selling kisses beneath cotton
wood is a boy drowning inside the earth
for Keith
SUNNYMAN:
look there past
those bitter figs
in the pasture you can
barely make it out now
but all that you see
all that green once
was ours
MAMA LUCILLE:
it must have been the summer
before Da Da seemed taller
than everyone the year your Uncle
Sunnyman was born the season Keith
stole all your father’s well-worn
hard-won wooden marbles
from a drawer and shot
them from a slingshot
at the cows what slow
moving barns
they were
KEITH:
Da Da left out in the heat
his share of mornings only
to return from the market
in Plaisance with nothing a hog maybe
sometimes a good sow
but we never had enough
to raise it on so he slaughtered
what we couldn’t keep
gave up the best meat
though he might save
some pigsfeet
for us
MAMA LUCILLE:
when whitemen came with fear
in the night
they told Da Da he had
to leave
that was right
before the war
and land was so tight
people just got crazy
the mosquitoes that June flew big
as horses
we burnt green wood
and the smoke kept them away
KEITH:
the old house stood
about three four mile across the way
you know
where the road runs now
it was one of those
old shotgun homes
you could have blasted
right straight through it
in one door and out another
but no one never did
SUNNYMAN:
no one really told me
when it was they tore
the empty thing down
Mama had waited a long time
in that house
been so many things
mother wife sister queen
guess it wasn’t long after Da Da passed on
from that oversized heart
of his that she weaned me
in this new place boy, consider yourself
warned: his condition
runs in our family
like you wouldn’t believe
MAMA LUCILLE:
it was sunny and my skin ripened
to oranges I didn’t
even have a proper dress
for the funeral
me being pregnant
with Robert and all
so I wore the one with daisies
figured Da Da would like that
just as much wasn’t nearly
as hot that way
but was it ever sunny
KEITH:
there never was a will
Da Da didn’t believe in one
he just said the earth
was for whoever needed it most
said we never could own
the land we just ate
out an ever-emptying hand
some pale man
at the funeral
said the X
by the deed was his
and not Da Da’s and he
could prove it
said we’d have to move
or fight him
and the entire state
of Louisiana
of course we let it go
SUNNYMAN:
folks say this land will never be Young again
that we have lived too long without
so many things that having
seems too hard but there’s one thing
we can never forget: how the land we were
promised is gone how home for us
is wherever we’re not
before the Sixth Annual
Coushatta Parish
World Fair
& Spectacle
you run
the hotcomb right
through tight,
crowish hair
a smell of lilacs burning
of ripe, half-bitten plums
of waiting by the fire
for the comb to turn colors
once blue
you take the forked iron out
and pull it through until
your roots come straight
or pull out in plugs baked big
as fists, as hands which made
pies from rotting fruit
and ate them while still warm
your hair keeps on
changing to coal
cooling, quiet beneath
your feet
near pig-tailed sisters
who watch and yearn for
the time
they too will burn
in a light this beautiful
for Colson Whitehead
It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it.
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS
THE THIN MAN’S APPRENTICES
Little men born with three heads
of hair, boys of unbroken bones, milk-haters,
boys of lawns & barking roosters, beanpoles
at the sideshow taut holding tents, young men
tying locusts with string, a poor boy’s yo-yo.
Father of soft brush, tender-headed boys heading
to barns & avoiding mama’s comb, men of prison
haircuts, that bowl around their heads, boys whose ears
outsoar their body, paper airplane kin. Boys of slim
sleep, beds filled with cousins, child of sweet cracklin
& summer spice, boys who ain’t hungry, boys living
on love, slipping beneath doors, tightrope
runaways, boys seeing men lynched, boyhood
gone with the circus. Willow men eating soap
to miss the war, seventy-pounds wet, dusky crossing
thresholds, men of harmonica kisses, husbandry,
stomping zydeco night, cigarettes-for-breakfast men,
men of the empty hunt, returning featherless,
hatchet-lunged. Family men, handy men, sturdy
& skinny as rails, hammers waking, John Henry men
racing engines, making do, like love. Men the shade
of bitten apple, red, brown, withering, such wondrous
kite men losing wind, all skin, still soaring, a cross
stretched clear cross the weight of this world.
THE ESCAPE ARTIST
beyond the people
swallowing fire past the other acts
we had seen before we found the escape
artist bound to a chair hands tied
behind his back we climbed onstage
to test the chains around his ankles
and tongue watched on
as they tucked him in a burlap sack
and lowered it into a tank of water
he could get out of in his sleep
imagine the air the thin
man his skin a drum drawn
across bones picture disappearing
acts the vanishing middles
of folks from each town
the man who unsaws them
back together again dream
each escape is this easy that all
you need is a world full of walls
beardless ladies and peeling white
fences that trap the yard that neighbors
sink their share of ships over sketch
each side gate the dirt roads leading
out of town the dust that holds
no magic here your feet are locked
to the land to its unpicked
fields full of empty
bags of cotton that no one
ever seems to work
his way out of
after the hands
on the clock met seven
times in prayer they drew
the artist up unfolded his cold
body from the sack and planted
it quietly on the way out
of town at home we still hear
his ghost nights guess he got free
from under the red earth but what
no one ever asked is why
would anyone want to
PACHYDERM
just within the circus
of the tattooed man’s
skin stood a still bull
elephant brought
and tamed from
the plains of greyest
Africa nails painted red
acrobats with flesh
colored costumes lying
beneath his harmless dark
foot he worked for applause
and peanuts until he grew
used to the weight of clowns
washed white until their feet
seemed tongues
or pendulums on his back
until he grew silent and
toothless a parlor piano
ATLAS
unveiled he stood
before us a living
map to every
thing he thought
he’d seen each side
show or thirsty
mirage tattooed
to his canvas skin
he stole into the colored
half of each town
the Spectacle went
downing white
lightning & nigger
jazz or even stone cold
sober he’d dance
across invisible tracks
to where the gypsies
drew what they
wanted on him covering
the naked stranger
in sphinxes & pearly
devils for his silver
he began to love
the babylon they
were building he
felt at home filling
his arms & stomach
with their story or
holding the negresses
until dawn showing
them the painted heaven
of his arms the pictures
of dead africans winging
their way home or
seizing the wrists
of whores their O my
lords among feathers
& dragonflies
still he never went
past the bounds
of good taste no
design ever slipped
past wrist or adam’s
apple no quadroon
ever took his arm
in public with a shirt
on he was quite
respectable it was
only pants off that
they couldn’t stop
kissing the thin
underworld of his
legs one buried in
thick jaundice
flame the other
draped in burning
snow that bluish
shade of winter
rarely seen
this far south
but as we circled
around that day
the sun beating
down on the seas
of his shoulders
no one offered
him a mirror no
body showed him
the pale horizon
of his spine or
the boundless
blue of his back
none of us pointed
out the ships full
of people their future
stowed with small seeds
of okra among thick
rooted hair
with his back
to us we wanted
more than any
thing to reach
into the very small
of his spine stirring
the shallows reaching
down among stones
& voiceless shells
diving past that white
hot core to the other
side to where folks
walked on their hands
hoping to find that
continent drowned
beneath calm sight
less skin
later in our kitchen
we told grandma
about the man who
was drawn she stopped
shelling peas & called
us to her undoing
the unmatched buttons
of her shirt she said
when I was carrying
my first & tried
to run the horse
men caught me dug
me a hole for my
child & laid me
belly down in it then
gathered round
like the Spectacle
they whipped me
inside out slowly she
took off her blouse
baring her back
that long ladder
of scars climbing into
her hair listen she
continued what he
believes he been holding
all these years that aint
a world at all: it’s me
came early with
June, each tent a hot
angel of healing, the Spirit
catching in women’s throats
and anointing the lazy eye
of an uncle. You wanted
nothing more than for that
preacherman from way
out west to lay golden
hands upon you, making
your pain that thing
he spoke of
until you became
a testimony circling
the tent on your own. Lord
how you prayed that week
your knees turning into
the hard-backed pews of early
service, each with a brassy
name in its side; how you
went back each
and every night
filling the aisles with
bodies better left
behind. Back then sin
was a coin rubbed
faceless in the pocket
an offering given
gladly, that clear silver
sound everyone
listened for.
for my mother
THE LIVING
1.
After Independence Day
all our toys began to tear
up, school growing sweet
on our tongues. We had
already cut & hoed
the cotton into rows, weeds
piled useless as Confederate
bills. September meant picking
& half-days at Springfield, us colored
grades let off at noon to pick
the valuable white till
nightfall. My hands, civil
& slow, didn’t even deserve
my behind on the picking truck,
but Unc Chock ran the thing
& Mama would’ve killed him dead
if he’d dreamt of trying
to get salty. The money was bad
like all money then, not near
as green or wide. Three dollars
for a hundred pounds, better part
of a day. I barely kept up, hands swole up
like unpicked fruit. No matter when
she started, Frankie plucked fifteen pounds
more, food for two, a new
Easter dress. Summers I turned
so black & bent, all because I’d rather
pick with friends than sling weeds
alone, than stuff my mattress green.
2.
Winters, when the white king
had gone, we slept like fish, still
moving. We walked back home
for lunch & retraced after school, changing
into our other pair of drawers
before we chored the stove’s ash. No one
got gas till after the War. Each November
brought a boxcar from the Atchison
Topeka & Santa Fe; for a share,
Lopez balanced it home on his flatbed,
a whale from the hunt. Once full
of hobos, that belly we burnt kept us
from freezing all season long. Before
tossing each board in, I would run
my hands across the wood speech
of bums, carvings warning
Unfriendly Conductor, Town of No
Sleep. Leftover wood turned
to toys; three boards & somebody’s
old rollerskate became a summer
scooter. Bored, what was that?
We were too busy being poor
in that house air-conditioned all winter,
too busy sharing everything, even
bathwater evenings by the pipe stove.
No plumbing, no rats, only mice thick
enough to believe we had more
than they did.
THE SLAUGHTER
1.
Everything we ate was on foot. We didn’t have
the Norge or the Frigidaire, only salt to keep.
Autumn’s hog went in brine for days,
swimming. You had to boil forever
just to get the taste out. I loved winter
& its chitlins, but boy I hated cleaning.
If not from the hogs, we got fresh bucketsful
from our slaughterhouse kin. White folks
got first pick, even of guts. They loved
that stuff, but to us it was only a season, just
making do. Home, you cut innards in strips,
put water in one end, held the other tight
then seesawed them back & forth. Afterwards
we dumped the excess in a hole dug out
back. I always make sure folks clean them
a second time. Don’t eat chitlins
at just anyone’s filthy old house.
2.
Chickens went like dusk. Before
twilight, Mama said go get me a hen
& me in that swept yard, swinging one round
by the neck, the pop, then dropping it.
We wrung, but some folks chopped, the chicken
flapping awhile before it fell, headless, a sight.
Feathers we plucked told us that soon
cold would come indoors like greens after
first frost. Everything then tasted so different
& fresh, a sister’s backtalk, but I wouldn’t want
back those days for all the known world.
No sir. Some nights dinner would just get up
& run off cause I hadn’t wrung it right,
others we’d eat roosters tougher
& older than we were, meat so rough Mama
couldn’t cut it with her brown, brown eyes.
THE KITCHEN
Heard tell Mama’s
white folks were fair
cause they didn’t turn her
to bone—only later
did I understand good
wasn’t just Unc Chock’s hair
but meant the father
didn’t want to make her,
meant they paid her decent
so’s Mama didn’t need
to smuggle home silver,
knife tucked between cuff
& wrist. Still drove me
crazy the way no one
saw clear to pick her up—
then again she probably
would have refused, saying
she liked the walk, more likely
not wanting their family
to know our business. Even now
the son calls her Aunt
as if she never had a whole
nother house full
of mouths. After she’d dusted
& cooked & the dog’d been fed
she fixed herself a little
something, wrapping us
a plate of what whites
called leftovers, but we
knew as leavings:
fugitives of fat dark
meat the mother didn’t like;
brown bags of broken cookies
we weren’t allowed
to eat till we cleaned
our plates. No matter
how nice Mama’s whites were,
the father made her enter
the back way like a cat
burglar, black dress & all—
she’d stay in the kitchen,
the same place her naps hid
between visits to the salon,
back of her head where the heat
couldn’t reach, where we knew
she stowed a second set of eyes.
THE QUENCH
Thirst kept with us all
year. Yellow
hands rolled till soft
enough for lemonade, pulp
mixed with sugar
to stop us from wincing.
Water then was clean
as Fifth Sunday sermon.
We weren’t the Nehi family
that Frankie’s was, heavy
bottles of Coke & orange
nosing against each other
in her icebox, glass pressed
like noses at toyshop
windows. Such swallowed
luxury, small as it was, never got
opened for guests. Guess
that made me kin, her cola brown
flowing in my blood too. Cherry,
grape, my house swam mostly
in Kool-Aid, red staining
our mouths like play
draculas often enough
I don’t much
care for it now.
Nickel a packet, six
for a quarter, each flavor
made two honest quarts. Enough
to fill us children with silence
long after the wake, well
past the summer Frankie fell
down the well & stayed
there, soaking up that clear,
careless sky.
THE PRESERVING
Summer meant peeling: peaches,
pears, July, all carved up. August
was a tomato dropped
in boiling water, my skin coming
right off. And peas, Lord,
after shelling all summer, if I never
saw those green fingers again
it would be too soon. We’d also
make wine, gather up those peach
scraps, put them in jars & let them
turn. Trick was enough air.
Eating something boiled each meal,
my hair in coils by June first, Mama
could barely reel me in from the red
clay long enough to wrap my hair
with string. So tight
I couldn’t think. But that was far
easier to take care of, lasted all
summer like ashy knees.
One Thanksgiving, while saying grace
we heard what sounded like a gunshot
ran to the back porch to see
peach glass everywhere. Reckon
someone didn’t give the jar enough
room to breathe. Only good thing
bout them saving days was knowing
they’d be over, that by Christmas
afternoons turned to cakes: coconut
yesterday, fruitcake today, fresh
cushaw pie to start tomorrow.
On Jesus’ Day we’d go house
to house tasting each family’s peach
brandy. You know you could stand
only so much, a taste. Time we weaved
back, it had grown cold as war.
Huddling home, clutching each
other in our handed down hand-
me-downs, we felt we was dying
like a late fire; we prayed
those homemade spirits
would warm most way home.
for Arnold Kemp
This could be a good day. It starts
without you, as usual; you haven’t seen
dawn in years. By noon it hits half-
boiling & the air breaks down. After lunch
even the fans turn lazy, not moving you
or wind. Is it the Negro in you that gets
in the car & just starts driving, keeps
the windows down, your music
bouncing off station wagons, power
windows? Whatever you want
to call it, it makes you feel you own
everything, even the creeping heat. Spin
the radio looking for summer, for love
songs with someone somewhere worse
off than you. Why doesn’t anyone
advertise for rain? Instead the personalities
keep talking to prove they are indoors,
cool. By seven the temperature outsails
the price of gas, the movies are all sold out
& you can’t get cool for the heavens.
So peel away, head for the edge
of town where the roads turn thin & alone,
speeding to prove you can summon death
like tortoises cracked open in the road
up ahead, the water stored in their shells
running free. Keep on trying to out-race
heat’s red siren until radio sings out
Come home, come on home black boy
to your chimney full of birds, to this house
of flame. Evening, the heat holds you
with its aching, unavoidable fingers;
you sleep naked, dreamless to heat.
Windows thrown open as mouths, fan on,
it still feels like a ghost is baking sweet
potato pies through the night. Your favorite.
You must admit it’s natural
that while waiting for the three o’clock
informational reptile handling & petting
show, we all imagined a few choice tragedies,
maybe a snake devouring one of the six
identical blond children in the front row,
or the anaconda choking on all five
badly braided girls. I confess openly
we discussed ways in which the obnoxious
crying child in the third row actually wriggled
free of daddy’s constricting arms, his head opened
against the ground like a melon & a ripe one
at that. See, in the end the tragedy is all
in the telling, not at the moment when the gator
slips out of Ched Peeling’s trusty, thoroughbred
hands & gobbles down a few select
youngsters—preferably the really loud or
beautiful ones—but later, after the ambulances
have sped away & no one breathes
a word. Even when everything is said
& done, I don’t know whether only the loud
& really beautiful things get remembered
or most things just grow loud & beautiful
when gone. I can only tell you
that later I thought for hours about Irvy
the Alligator’s smooth underbelly & the way
it drove him nearly extinct, how folks once
looked at him & called him desire, a handbag
in waiting. How you won’t drive past any Negrolands
on your way through Pennsylvania, or anywhere
else in this union. How while learning about lizards
that grow their tails back, bloodless, I kept
thinking The Colored Zoo may be exactly what
we need, a pleasant place to find out how They eat
watermelon & mate regularly, a cool comfortable
room where everyone can sit around
& ask How do I recognize
one or protect myself? or Their hair,
how do They get it to clench up
like that? A guide dressed in unthreatening
greens or a color we don’t have to call
brown could reply Good question,
then hold one up & demonstrate, show
all the key markings. But you must
believe me when I say there is not really
such a place, when I tell you that I held
my breath with the rest at Reptiland, listening
to Ched recite his snakebite story for the four-
hundredth time, waving around his middle finger
where the rattler sunk fangs. You must forgive
how we leaned closer as he described venom
eating green & cold through his veins, pictured
perfectly its slow nauseous seep, like watching
the eleven o’clock footage of someone beaten
blue by the cops, over & over, knowing you could
do nothing about this, only watch, knowing
it already has all happened without you
& probably will keep on happening, steady
as snake poison traveling toward the heart,
the way these things go on by, slowly,
an ancient turtle we pay
to pet as it walks past,
souvenir, survivor.
for Maceo Parker & the JB Horns
Beanville. Tea
party. Five black cats
& a white boy. Chitlin
circuit. Gravy colored suits,
preacher stripes. Didn’t
know you could buy
muttonchops these days.
Afros. Horns slung
round necks like giant
ladles. Dressing. Uptempo
blessing: Good God
everywhere! We bow our
heads before the band
lets loose. Drummer unknown
as a hymn’s third verse.
Older woman pushes toward
the front, catching the spirit
like the crazy lady at church
six scotches later. Communion
breath. Hands waving. Sweaty
face rags, post-sermon
mop, suicidal white girls crying
like the newly baptized. All that
water. Play it. Swing
it. Be suggestive. Request
“Chicken” & “Pass the Peas”
like we used to say. Have mercy!
Thanksgiving’s back in town
& we’re all crammed in the club white
as the walls of a church basement. Feet
impatient as forks. Only ten bucks
a plate for this leftover band. Thigh,
drumsticks, neck. Dark meat.
Closed Mondays
is music is men
off early from work is waiting
for the chance at the chair
while the eagle claws holes
in your pockets keeping
time by the turning
of rusty fans steel flowers with
cold breezes is having nothing
better to do than guess at the years
of hair matted beneath the soiled caps
of drunks the pain of running
a fisted comb through stubborn
knots is the dark dirty low
down blues the tender heads
of sons fresh from cornrows all
wonder at losing half their height
is a mother gathering hair for good
luck for a soft wig is the round
difficulty of ears the peach
faced boys asking Eddie
to cut in parts and arrows
wanting to have their names read
for just a few days and among thin
jazz is the quick brush of a done
head the black flood around
your feet grandfathers
stopping their games of ivory
dominoes just before they reach the bone
yard is winking widowers announcing
cut it clean off I’m through courting
and hair only gets in the way is the final
spin of the chair a reflection of
a reflection that sting of wintergreen
tonic on the neck of a sleeping snow
haired man when you realize it is
your turn you are next
for Thomas Fox Averill
Pull over. Your car with its slow
breathing. Somewhere outside Topeka
it suddenly all matters again,
those tractors blooming rust
in the fields only need a good coat
of paint. Red. You had to see
for yourself, didn’t you; see that the world
never turned small, transportation
just got better; to learn
we can’t say a town or a baseball
team without breathing in
a dead Indian. To discover why Coronado
pushed up here, following the guide
who said he knew fields of gold,
north, who led them past these plains,
past buffaloes dark as he was. Look.
Nothing but the wheat, waving them
sick, a sea. While they strangle
him blue as the sky above you
The Moor must also wonder
when will all this ever be enough?
this wide open they call discovery,
disappointment, this place my
thousand bones carry, now call home.
Dear you: the lights here ask
nothing, the white falling
around my letters silent,
unstoppable. I am writing this
from the empty stomach of sleep
where nothing but the cold
wonders where you’re headed;
nobody here peels heads sour
and cheap as lemon, and only
the car sings AM the whole
night through. In the city,
I have seen children half-
bitten by wind. Even trains
arrive without a soul
to greet them; things do
not need me here, this world
dances on its own. Only bridges
beg for me to make them
famous, to learn what I had
almost forgotten of flying,
of soaring free, south,
down. So long. Xs, Os.