I’m gonna figure out how to grow myself a pecan tree.
God gives you what you need, my grandmother says.
Best not to ask for more than that.
Hmph, my grandfather says. And goes back
to working the land, pulling from it all we need
and more than that.
gunnar’s children
At dusk, just as the fireflies flicker on, my grandfather
makes his way
home.
We see him coming slow down the road,
his silver lunch box bouncing
soft against his leg. Now,
as he gets closer, we hear him
singing:
“Where will the wedding supper be?
Way down yonder in a hollow tree. Uh hmmm . . .”
Good evening, Miz Clara. Evening, Miz Mae.
How’s that leg, Miz Bell?
What you cooking, Auntie Charlotte, you thinking
of making me something to eat?
His voice ringing down Hall Street, circling
round the roads of Nicholtown
and maybe out into the big, wide world . . .
Maybe all the way up in New York,
Aunt Kay’s hearing it,
and thinking about coming on home . . .
Then he is close enough to run to—the three of us
climbing him like a tree until he laughs out loud.
We call him Daddy.
This is what our mother calls him.
This is all we know now.
Our daddy seems taller than anyone else
in all of Greenville.
More handsome, too—
His square jaw and light brown eyes
so different from our own
narrow-faced, dark-eyed selves. Still,
his hand is warm and strong around my own
as I skip beside him,
the wind blowing up around us. He says,
Y’all are Gunnar’s children.
Just keep remembering that.
Just keep remembering . . .
This is the way of Nicholtown evenings,
Daddy
coming home,
me
jumping into his arms,
the others
circling around him
all of us grinning
all of us talking
all of us loving him up.
at the end of the day
There are white men working at the printing press
beside Daddy, their fingers blackened
with ink so that at the end of the day, palms up
it’s hard to tell who is white and who is not, still
they call my grandfather Gunnar,
even though he’s a foreman
and is supposed to be called
Mr. Irby.
But he looks the white men in the eye
sees the way so many of them can’t understand
a colored man
telling them what they need to do.
This is new. Too fast for them.
The South is changing.
Sometimes they don’t listen.
Sometimes they walk away.
At the end of the day, the newspaper is printed,
the machines are shut down and each man
punches a clock and leaves but
only Colored folks
come home to Nicholtown.
Here, you can’t look right or left or up or down
without seeing brown people.
Colored Town. Brown Town. Even a few mean words
to say where we live.
My grandmother tells us
it’s the way of the South. Colored folks used to stay
where they were told that they belonged. But
times are changing.
And people are itching to go where they want.
This evening, though,
I am happy to belong
to Nicholtown.
daywork
There is daywork for colored women.
In the mornings their dark bodies
fill the crosstown buses,
taking them away
from Nicholtown
to the other side
of Greenville
where the white people live.
Our grandmother tells us this
as she sets a small hat with a topaz pin on her head,
pulls white gloves
over her soft brown hands.
Two days a week, she joins the women,
taking on this second job now
that there are four more mouths to feed
and the money
she gets from part-time teaching isn’t enough
anymore. I’m not ashamed, she says,
cleaning is what I know. I’m not ashamed,
if it feeds my children.
When she returns in the evening, her hands
are ashen from washing other people’s clothes,
Most often by hand,
her ankles swollen from standing all day
making beds and sweeping floors,
shaking dust from curtains,
picking up after other people’s children, cooking,
the list
goes on and on.
Don’t any of you ever do daywork, she warns us.
I’m doing it now so you don’t have to.
And maybe all across Nicholtown, other children
are hearing this, too.
Get the Epsom salts, she says, leaning back
into the soft brown chair, her eyes closing.
When she isn’t in it, Hope, Dell and I squeeze in
side by side by side and still, there is space left
for one more.
We fill a dishpan with warm water, pour
the salts in, swirl it around and carefully
carry it to her feet. We fight to see who will get
to rub the swelling from my grandmother’s ankles,
the smile back onto her face,
the stories back into the too-quiet room.
You could have eaten off the floor by the time
I left this one house today,
my grandmother begins, letting out a heavy sigh. But
let me tell you,
when I first got there, you would have thought
the Devil himself had come through . . .
lullaby
At night, every living thing competes
for a chance to be heard.
The crickets
and frogs call out.
Sometimes, there’s the soft
who-whoo of an owl lost
amid the pines.
Even the dogs won’t rest until
they’ve howled
at the moon.
But the crickets always win, long after
the frogs stop croaking
and the owl has found its way home.
Long after the dogs have lain down
losing the battle against sleep,
the crickets keep going
as though they know their song
is our lullaby.
bible times
My grandmother keeps her Bible on a shelf
beside her bed. When the day is over,
she reads quietly to herself, and in the morning
she’ll tell us the stories,
how Noah listened
to God’s word
pulled two of each animal inside his ark, waited
for the rains to come and floated safely
as the sinners drowned.
It’s morning now and we have floated safely
through the Nicholtown night,
our evening prayers
Jehovah, please give us another day,
now answered.
Biscuits warm and buttered stop halfway
to our mouths. How much rain did it take
to destroy the sinners? What lies did they tell
to die such a death? How loud was the rain
when it came? How did Noah know
that the cobra wouldn’t bite, the bull
wouldn’t charge, the bee wouldn’t sting?
Our questions come fast but we want
the stories more than we want the answers
so when my grandmother says,
Hush, so I can tell it!
We do.
Jacob’s dream of a ladder to heaven, and Jesus
with the children surrounding him. Moses
on the mountain, fire burning words into stone.
Even Salome intrigues us, her wish for a man’s head
on a platter—who could want this and live
to tell the story of that wanting?
Autumn is coming.
Outside, there’s the sound of wind
through the pine trees.
But inside there are stories, there are biscuits
and grits and eggs, the fire in the potbellied stove
already filling the house with warmth.
Still we shiver at the thought of evil Salome,
chew our biscuits slowly.
We are safe here—miles and years away
from Bible Times.
the reader
When we can’t find my sister, we know
she is under the kitchen table, a book in her hand,
a glass of milk and a small bowl of peanuts beside her.
We know we can call Odella’s name out loud,
slap the table hard with our hands,
dance around it singing
“She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain”
so many times the song makes us sick
and the circling makes us dizzy
and still
my sister will do nothing more
than slowly turn the page.
the beginning
I cannot write a word yet but at three,
I now know the letter J
love the way it curves into a hook
that I carefully top with a straight hat
the way my sister has taught me to do. Love
the sound of the letter and the promise
that one day this will be connected to a full name,
my own
that I will be able to write
by myself.
Without my sister’s hand over mine,
making it do what I cannot yet do.
How amazing these words are that slowly come to me.
How wonderfully on and on they go.
Will the words end, I ask
whenever I remember to.
Nope, my sister says, all of five years old now,
and promising me
infinity.
hope
The South doesn’t agree
with my brother.
The heat sandpapers his skin.
Don’t scratch, my grandmother warns. But he does
and the skin grows raw beneath his fingers.
The pollen leaves him puffy eyed, his small breaths
come quick, have too much sound around them.
He moves slow, sickly now where once
he was strong.
And when his body isn’t betraying him, Ohio does.
The memories waking him in the night, the view
from my father’s shoulders, the wonder
of the Nelsonville house, the air
so easy to breathe . . .
You can keep your South, my father had said.
Now Hope stays mostly quiet
unless asked to speak, his head bent
inside the superhero comic books my grandfather
brings home on Fridays. Hope searches for himself
inside their pages. Leaves them
dog-eared by Monday morning.
The South
his mortal enemy.
The South,
his Kryptonite.
the almost friends
There’s the boy from up the road
with the hole in his heart. Some afternoons
he comes to sit in our yard and listen
to our stories. Our aunt Kay, we tell him,
lives in New York City and maybe we will, too,
someday. And yes it’s true, once
we lived in Ohio, that’s why
we speak the way we do.
We don’t ask about the hole
in his heart. Our grandmother warns us
we know better than that.
There is Cora and her sisters, across the road.
One word in my grandmother’s mouth—You stay away
from Coraandhersisters, their mother
left the family, ran off
with their church pastor.
Coraandhersisters
sometimes
sit watching us.
We watch them back not asking
what it feels like not to have a mother because
our grandmother warns us
we know better than that.
There are three brothers who live down the road
we know this only because
our grandmother tells us. They live
inside their dark house
all summer, coming out
long after we’ve bathed and slipped into
our summer pajamas, books curled into
our arms.
These are our almost friends, the people
we think about when we’re tired of playing
with each other.
But our grandmother says,
Three is plenty. Three is a team.
Find something to do together.
And so over and over again,
we do. Even though we want to ask her,
Why can’t we play with them? we don’t.
We know better than that.
the right way to speak
The first time my brother says ain’t my mother
pulls a branch from the willow tree growing down
the hill at the edge
of our backyard.
As she slips her closed hand over it,
removing the leaves,
my brother begins to cry
because the branch is a switch now
no longer beautifully weeping at the bottom of the hill.
It whirs as my mother whips it
through the air and down
against my brother’s legs.
You will never, my mother says,
say ain’t in this house.
You will never
say ain’t anywhere.
Each switching is a warning to us
our words are to remain
crisp and clear.
We are never to say huh?
ain’t or y’all
git or gonna.
Never ma’am—just yes, with eyes
meeting eyes enough
to show respect.
Don’t ever ma’am anyone!
The word too painful
a memory for my mother
of not-so-long-ago
southern subservient days . . .
The list of what not to say
goes on and on .
. .
You are from the North, our mother says.
You know the right way to speak.
As the switch raises dark welts on my brother’s legs
Dell and I look on
afraid to open our mouths. Fearing the South
will slip out or
into them.
the candy lady
On Fridays, our grandfather takes us
to the candy lady’s house,
even though our grandmother worries he’s going
to be the cause of our teeth rotting
right out of our heads.
But my grandfather just laughs,
makes us open our mouths
to show the strong Irby teeth we’ve inherited
from his side of the family.
The three of us stand there, our mouths open wide,
strong white teeth inside,
and my grandmother has to nod, has to say,
They’re lucky before sending us on our way.
The candy lady’s small living room is filled
with shelves and shelves of chocolate bars
and gumdrops, Good & Plenty and Jujubes,
Moon Pies and Necco Wafers,
lollipops and long red licorice strings.
So much candy that it’s hard to choose
until our grandfather says,
Get what you want but I’m getting myself some ice cream.
Then the candy lady, who is gray-haired
and never smiles, disappears
into another room and returns a few minutes later
with a wafer cone, pale yellow
lemon-chiffon ice cream dripping from it.
Outside, even this late in the afternoon,
the sun is beating down
and the idea of lemon-chiffon ice cream cooling us,
even for a few minutes,
makes us all start saying at once—Me, too, Daddy.
Me, too, Daddy. Me, too.
The walk home from the candy lady’s house
is a quiet one
except for the sound of melting ice cream
being slurped up
fast, before it slides past our wrists,
on down our arms and onto
the hot, dry road.