Jaycee Park is where Wayman Fuller hid
in the bushes to waylay the colored who ducked
through at night on their way home
to the Quarters. (That was 1958 in Jackson,
Mississippi, language like a coin worn
faceless.) Across Bailie Avenue
is Virgil Street. It humps up, held then
at the top by four white houses, square
as books, with attached garages, hung
with wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers
on pegs. But from there the lean
began to roll and pitch, down
to the far end of Virgil Street. Beyond that
was only City Creek, the wide sewer
where the Baptist Church quit.
Five houses up on our side lived Lucky Cade,
pale as ashes. I loved him like a brother,
but he sold his bones to queers,
slow cruising, quiet, from Bailie Avenue.
His mother had black shoe polish hair
and an old man. And this is true:
They spooned poison in the oatmeal,
fed it to his grandbabies. She got off,
but he was electrocuted.
Daddy went to watch. You could do that
then. I remember he came home,
set his teeth on the edge of the sink,
and threw up. Mrs. Cade’s next man Snooky
stacked boxes at Liberty Grocery Mart.
with a white towel, soaked with sweat
and ringed in salt. They went dancing
Saturday nights, in spite of that hand.
The house next to the creek
belonged to Mr. Thigpen, before he died.
That’s where the oak tree was,
with the wisteria, a mother of a tree,
dark, dripping with vines,
lacing black over the dirt yard.
In the spring, purple swelled
like a bruise, awesome. In back,
Mr. Thigpen had thirty-five fig trees
which he paid me to pick. Early,
just before the sun, my gloved hands
held the finest bulbs, just ripe
and sharp, from the birds
that sailed and pecked at first light.
I hired me six colored at half-price
plus a sack of figs we set outside
the fence, and I kept the difference.
Everybody was happy, except
Mr. Thigpen, when he saw those
chocolate boys in his trees
among the fruit, rescuing it
from blacker fate.
When he died, the Sullivans moved in.
(That wisteria crashed blooms
against the porch, spring
after spring.) Saturdays, his momma
made me and Robert Earl Sullivan
shell peas in the front room. One day
his daddy barged in, glued the hungry
shine of his drunk eyes
on Robert Earl, and raked his paw
down a cheek. Robert Earl pumped
a fist into his teeth. The cracks
between filled with red.
My breath dropped below the shells
of peas. The sofa leg shoved
through the floor, the shotgun
went off through the roof.
When the cops came, Mr. Sullivan
asked them in for ice tea.
Corn bread, peas, and tea,
that’s all they ever ate.
Grandma Sullivan had a boyfriend.
When he went away, there was a string
of them after that. It was glorious
when she came to stay. She would get drunk
and play the piano, and sing hymns.
Robert Earl and Tommy Dale and me,
fixed for a dance in our polished white shoes
and white shirts, had to stand
lined up for her to admire
at the piano. Fine young bucks,
she would say. When we came home
at three, she would still
be singing, “I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray.”
By then, the five-year-old was drunk,
too, on beer tea.
All of us had gardens. In the spring,
the only mule left in town brought heaps of manure
from somewhere, and the smell was rich
and thick, of things packed down, cooking
the soil, pulling onions, tomatoes,
squash, corn, and beans out of the dark.