Several poems first appeared in literary magazines and publications; thank you to their editors:
Jai-Alai: Ode to Ol Dirty Bastard
New York Review of Books: Ode to the Harlem Globetrotters
The New Yorker: Money Road; the sonnets “When You Were Mine” and “Housequake” (as “Little Red Corvette”). Special thanks to Paul Muldoon.
Oxford American: Pining, A Definition
QuickMuse: James Brown at B. B. King’s
VQR: Repast (minus “Pining”)
Zoland Books: Mercy Rule
“Thataway” was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art to accompany artist Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series exhibition and catalog. “Limbo” in the “Triptych for Trayvon Martin” first appeared in MoMa’s limited-edition volume of Robert Rauschenberg’s Thirty-four Drawings for Dante’s Inferno, also commissioned. Thanks to Leah Dickerman.
“Open Letter to Hank Aaron” first appeared as part of the exhibition on Hank Aaron at Emory University’s Woodruff Library, from spring to fall 2014.
Both “James Brown at B. B. King’s” and “Ode to Ol Dirty Bastard” appear in the Southern Poetry Anthology: Georgia volume.
“Howlin’ Wolf” appears in the anthology Tales of Two Americas, edited by John Freeman.
The first line and a half of “James Brown…” is a quote from the artist.
“Repast”: The repast refers to the traditional African American meal following a funeral. Whether formal or for family members only, held at a house of worship or the home of the deceased, catered by a favorite local spot or a community potluck, the repast is a ritual connected to other foodways, as well as to traditions both African and American, Christian and more broadly religious. Where the wake before the funeral is primarily about the dead, the repast is also about the living, who share food and memories. The very word has come to suggest a reflection, not on the past but on the future, a final supper after the burial that leaves the circle unbroken.
Repast celebrates the life and bravery of Booker Wright, owner of Booker’s Place and waiter at Lusco’s in Greenwood, Mississippi, a town quite near to where white racists killed Emmett Till in 1955 and others murdered civil rights workers Goodman, Schwerner, and Cheney in 1963. In 1966, for the NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait, Wright knowingly spoke out about the double standards and racism of Greenwood’s white patrons, many of whom were also featured in the show (and were White Citizens’ Council members). After the film aired, Wright was beaten up and sent to a hospital—by a local police officer, no less—and his own establishment firebombed. Both the man and the bar survived. Years later Wright was shot and killed by a bar patron. As described in the recent documentary Booker’s Place, Wright’s descendants and others in the community have suggested that the shooting had a political motivation.
In his own words from the 1966 documentary and through the imagination, Wright speaks of life and foodways in the American South and what it means to wait. Over the course of the piece, his waiter’s serving napkin goes from bar towel to preacher’s handkerchief, as Wright literally transforms from a waiter to a barkeep to an activist—which may prove the same thing.
The oratorio was commissioned by the Southern Foodways Alliance and debuted at its annual symposium in October 2014, and was reprised at Carnegie Hall on 4 April 2016. Thanks to John T. Edge, Bruce Levingston (pianist and musical director), composer Nolan Gasser, and baritone Justin Hopkins.
“Money Road”: “Money Road” traces my driving the Delta with friend and Southern Foodways Alliance leader John T. Edge—we started out visiting Booker’s Place in Greenwood, Mississippi, for Repast, the oratorio the SFA had commissioned from me on Booker Wright. Turns out Greenwood is where the term Black Power was popularized at a rally by Stokely Carmichael in 1966, just a few blocks from Booker’s. Nearly fifty years later one could still see why. Driving to Money that day, it was bitter cold, snow accompanying what became the pilgrimage recorded in the poem. The site of Till’s lynching feels both holy and haunted.
In 2017 the news revealed—at least to those who had bought the story—that the white woman at the center of the case, who had claimed Till whistled at her or called her baby, confessed that Till had in fact not done a thing. I am heartened that the poem had already said he ‘whistled or smiled / or did nothing,’ though I still wonder why had even well-meaning southern and American accounts decried the lynching but somehow believed the lynchers? Till’s murderers—who lied in court, got acquitted in no time by an all-white jury, then promptly sold their story without fear of reprisal—should not be believed. In some small way perhaps it’s because we cannot believe the whole of the truth—that evil does discriminate—much like, in more recent cases from Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown, some cling to some sense of black culpability in their own killings. The poem calls out to us to remember but also to revisit and revise what we think of the past—not in the ways of bluesman Robert Johnson’s unlikely gravesite along the Money Road, or the fake plantation there that proves almost as haunting—but in the reality of the now-crumbling storefront where Till was brought and then killed in the night for no earthly, or only earthly, reasons.
My gratitude to Melanie Dunea for the photographs in these pages. With support from the Virginia Quarterly Review, she traveled with me to the Mississippi Delta in January 2015 to capture the spirit of that place with a poetry that enhances my own.