south carolina at war
Because we have a right, my grandfather tells us—
we are sitting at his feet and the story tonight is
why people are marching all over the South—
to walk and sit and dream wherever we want.
First they brought us here.
Then we worked for free. Then it was 1863,
and we were supposed to be free but we weren’t.
And that’s why people are so mad.
And it’s true, we can’t turn on the radio
without hearing about the marching.
We can’t go to downtown Greenville without
seeing the teenagers walking into stores, sitting
where brown people still aren’t allowed to sit
and getting carried out, their bodies limp,
their faces calm.
This is the way brown people have to fight,
my grandfather says.
You can’t just put your fist up. You have to insist
on something
gently. Walk toward a thing
slowly.
But be ready to die,
my grandfather says,
for what is right.
Be ready to die, my grandfather says,
for everything you believe in.
And none of us can imagine death
but we try to imagine it anyway.
Even my mother joins the fight.
When she thinks our grandmother
isn’t watching she sneaks out
to meet the cousins downtown, but just as
she’s stepping through the door,
her good dress and gloves on, my grandmother says,
Now don’t go getting arrested.
And Mama sounds like a little girl when she says,
I won’t.
More than a hundred years, my grandfather says,
and we’re still fighting for the free life
we’re supposed to be living.
So there’s a war going on in South Carolina
and even as we play
and plant and preach and sleep, we are a part of it.
Because you’re colored, my grandfather says.
And just as good and bright and beautiful and free
as anybody.
And nobody colored in the South is stopping,
my grandfather says,
until everybody knows what’s true.
the training
When my mother’s older cousin
and best friend, Dorothy,
comes with her children, they run off
saying they can’t understand
the way Hope, Dell and I speak.
Y’all go too fast, they say.
And the words get all pushed together.
They say they don’t feel like playing
with us little kids. So they leave us
to walk the streets of Nicholtown when we can’t
leave the porch.
We watch them go, hear
Cousin Dorothy say, Don’t you knuckleheads
get into trouble out there.
Then we stay close to Cousin Dorothy, make believe
we’re not listening when she knows we are.
Laughing when she laughs, shaking our own heads
when she shakes
hers. You know how you have to get those trainings,
she says, and our mother nods. They
won’t let you sit at the counters
without them. Have to know what to do
when those people come at you.
She has a small space between her teeth
like my mother’s space, and Hope’s and Dell’s, too.
She is tall and dark-skinned,
beautiful and broad shouldered.
She wears gloves and dark-colored dresses made for her
by a seamstress in Charleston.
The trainings take place in the basements of churches
and the back rooms of stores,
on long car trips and anywhere else where people can
gather. They learn
how to change the South without violence,
how to not be moved
by the evil actions of others, how to walk slowly but
with deliberate steps.
How to sit at counters and be cursed at
without cursing back, have food and drinks poured
Even the teenagers
get trained to sit tall, not cry, swallow back fear.
But Lord, Cousin Dorothy says. Everybody has a line.
When I’m walking
up to that lunch counter and taking my seat,
I pray to God, don’t let
anybody spit on me. I can be Sweet Dorothy
seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day
as long as nobody crosses that line. Because if they do,
this nonviolent movement
is over!
the blanket
The first time my mother goes to New York City
it is only for a long-weekend visit,
her kiss on our cheeks
as much a promise as the excitement in her eyes.
I’ll bring something back for each of you.
It’s Friday night and the weekend ahead
is already calling us
to the candy lady’s house,
my hand in Daddy’s.
He doesn’t know how to say no,
my grandmother complains.
But neither does she,
dresses and socks and ribbons,
our hair pressed and curled.
She calls my sister and me her baby girls,
smiles proudly when the women say how pretty we are.
So the first time my mother goes to New York City
we don’t know to be sad, the weight
of our grandparents’ love like a blanket
with us beneath it,
safe and warm.
miss bell and the marchers
They look like regular people
visiting our neighbor Miss Bell,
foil-covered dishes held out in front of them
as they arrive
some in pairs,
some alone,
some just little kids
holding their mothers’ hands.
If you didn’t know, you’d think it was just
an evening gathering. Maybe church people
heading into Miss Bell’s house to talk
about God. But when Miss Bell pulls her blinds
closed, the people fill their dinner plates with food,
their glasses with sweet tea and gather
to talk about marching.
And even though Miss Bell works for a white lady
who said I will fire you in a minute if I ever see you
on that line!
Miss Bell knows that marching isn’t the only thing
she can do,
knows that people fighting need full bellies to think
and safe places to gather.
She knows the white lady isn’t the only one
who’s watching, listening, waiting,
to end this fight. So she keeps the marchers’
glasses filled, adds more corn bread
and potato salad to their plates,
stands in the kitchen ready to slice
lemon pound cake into generous pieces.
And in the morning, just before she pulls
her uniform from the closet, she prays,
God, please give me and those people mar
ching
another day.
Amen.
how to listen #2
In the stores downtown
we’re always followed around
just because we’re brown.
hair night
Saturday night smells of biscuits and burning hair.
Supper done and my grandmother has transformed
the kitchen into a beauty shop. Laid across the table
is the hot comb, Dixie Peach hair grease,
horsehair brush, parting stick
and one girl at a time.
Jackie first, my sister says,
our freshly washed hair damp
and spiraling over toweled shoulders
and pale cotton nightgowns.
She opens her book to the marked page,
curls up in a chair pulled close
to the wood-burning stove, bowl of peanuts in her lap.
The words
in her books are so small, I have to squint
to see the letters. Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates.
The House at Pooh Corner. Swiss Family Robinson.
Thick books
dog-eared from the handing down from neighbor
to neighbor. My sister handles them gently,
marks the pages with torn brown pieces
of paper bag, wipes her hands before going
beyond the hardbound covers.
Read to me, I say, my eyes and scalp already stinging
from the tug of the brush through my hair.
And while my grandmother sets the hot comb
on the flame, heats it just enough to pull
my tight curls straighter, my sister’s voice
wafts over the kitchen,
past the smell of hair and oil and flame, settles
like a hand on my shoulder and holds me there.
I want silver skates like Hans’s, a place
on a desert island. I have never seen the ocean
but this, too, I can imagine—blue water pouring
over red dirt.
As my sister reads, the pictures begin forming
as though someone has turned on a television,
lowered the sound,
pulled it up close.
Grainy black-and-white pictures come slowly at me
Deep. Infinite. Remembered
On a bright December morning long ago . . .
My sister’s clear soft voice opens up the world to me.
I lean in
so hungry for it.
Hold still now, my grandmother warns.
So I sit on my hands to keep my mind
off my hurting head, and my whole body still.
But the rest of me is already leaving,
the rest of me is already gone.
family names
There’s James, Joseph, Andrew, Geneva, Annie Mae,
William, Lucinda, David, Talmudge,
my grandmother says. All together,
my mama gave birth to thirteen children.
Our heads spin at the thought of that many brothers
and sisters. Three died as babies, she says,
but only a little of the spinning stops.
There’s Levonia, Montague, Iellus, Hallique,
Valie Mae, Virdie and Elora on my daddy’s side.
We can’t help but laugh each time our daddy
tells us the names of his brothers and sisters.
His own name,
Gunnar, sends us laughing all over again.
Gave their kids names
that no master could ever take away.
What about Bob or Joe? Hope wants to know.
What about
John or Michael? Or something real normal, like Hope?
Hope is not normal, my sister says. Not for a boy. I think
your name is a mistake. Maybe they meant
to name you Virdie.
I’m the great Hope of the family, my brother says.
Just like Grandpa Hope.
Just like Hope the Dope, my sister says back.
Keep up the arguing, my grandfather says,
I’ll take you both down to city hall.
People be happy to call you Talmudge and Valie Mae.
american dream
Even when my girls were little, we’d go down there,
my grandmother tells us. And people’d be marching.
The marching didn’t just start yesterday.
Police with those dogs, scared everybody
near to death. Just once
I let my girls march.
My grandmother leans back in her brown chair,
her feet still in the Epsom salts water,
her fingers tapping out
some silent tune. She closes her eyes.
I let them and I prayed.
What’s the thing, I ask her, that would make people
want to live together?
People have to want it, that’s all.
We get quiet—maybe all of us are thinking about
the ones who want it. And the ones who don’t.
We all have the same dream, my grandmother says.
To live equal in a country that’s supposed to be
the land of the free.
She lets out a long breath,
deep remembering.
When your mother was little
she wanted a dog. But I said no.
Quick as you can blink, I told her,
a dog will turn on you.
So my mother brought kittens home,
soft and purring inside of empty boxes
mewing and mewing until my grandmother
fell in love. And let her keep them.
My grandmother tells us all this
as we sit at her feet, each story like a photograph
we can look right into, see our mother there
marchers and dogs and kittens all blending
and us now
there in each moment
beside her.
the fabric store
Some Fridays, we walk to downtown Greenville where
there are some clothing stores, some restaurants,
a motel and the five-and-dime store but
my grandmother won’t take us
into any of those places anymore.
Even the five-and-dime, which isn’t segregated now
but where a woman is paid, my grandmother says,
to follow colored people around in case they try to
steal something. We don’t go into the restaurants
because they always seat us near the kitchen.
When we go downtown,
we go to the fabric store, where the white woman
knows my grandmother
from back in Anderson, asks,
How’s Gunnar doing and your girls in New York?
She rolls fabric out for my grandmother
to rub between her fingers.
They discuss drape and nap and where to cinch
the waist on a skirt for a child.
At the fabric store, we are not Colored
or Negro. We are not thieves or shameful
or something to be hidden away.
At the fabric store, we’re just people.
ghosts
In downtown Greenville,
they painted over the WHITE ONLY signs,
except on the bathroom doors,
they didn’t use a lot of paint
so you can still see the words, right there
like a ghost standing in front
still keeping you out.
the leavers
We watch men leave Greenville
in their one good suit, shoes
spit shined.
We watch women leave in Sunday clothes,
hatted and lipsticked and white gloved.
We watch them catch buses in the evening,
the black shadows of their backs
the last we see of them.
Others fill their cars with bags.
Whole families disappearing into the night.
People waving good-bye.
They say the City is a place where diamonds
speckle the sidewalk. Money
falls from the sky.
They say a colored person can do well going there.
All you need is the fare out of Greenville.
All you need is to know somebody on the other side,
waiting to cross you over.
Like the River Jordan
and then you’re in Paradise.
the beginning of the leaving
When my mother returns from New York
she has a new plan—all of us are going
to move there. We don’t know
anyplace else but Greenville now—New York
is only the pictures she shows us
in magazines and the two she has in her pocketbook
of our aunt Kay. In one, there are two other people
standing with her.
Bernie and Peaches, our mother tells us.
We all used to be friends
here in Nicholtown.
That’s all the young kids used to talk about,
our grandmother tells us,
going to New York City.
My mother smiles at us and says,
We’ll be going to New York City.
I just have to figure some things out first, that’s all.
I don’t know what I’d do without you all up under me,
my grandmother says and there’s a sadness
in her voice.
Don’t know what I’d do, she says again.
Even sadder this time.
as a child, i smelled the air
Mama takes her coffee out to the front porch
sips it slow. Two steps down and her feet