are covered in grass and dew.
New York doesn’t smell like this, she says.
I follow her, the dew cool against my feet
the soft hush of wind through leaves
my mother and I
alone together.
Her coffee is sweetened with condensed milk,
her hair pulled back into a braid,
her dark fingers circling her cup.
If I ask, she will hold it to my lips,
let me taste the bittersweet of it.
It’s dawn and the birds have come alive, chasing
each other from maple to pine and back
to maple again. This is how time passes here.
The maple will be bare-branched come winter,
Mama says. But the pines, they just keep on living.
And the air is what I’ll remember.
Even once we move to New York.
It always smelled like this, my mother says.
Wet grass and pine.
Like memory.
harvest time
When Daddy’s garden is ready
it is filled with words that make me laugh
when I say them—
pole beans and tomatoes, okra and corn
sweet peas and sugar snaps,
lettuce and squash.
Who could have imagined
so much color that the ground disappears
and we are left
walking through an autumn’s worth
of crazy words
that beneath the magic
of my grandmother’s hands
become
side dishes.
grown folks’ stories
Warm autumn night with the crickets crying
the smell of pine coming soft on the wind
and the women
on the porch, quilts across their laps,
Aunt Lucinda, Miss Bell and whatever neighbor
has a breath or two left at the end of the day
for sitting and running our mouths.
That’s when we listen
to the grown folks talking.
Hope, Dell and me sitting quiet on the stairs.
We know one word from us will bring a hush
upon the women, my grandmother’s finger suddenly
pointing toward the house, her soft-spoken
I think it’s time for you kids to go to bed now ushering
us into our room. So we are silent, our backs against
posts and the back of the stairs, Hope’s elbows
on his knees, head down. Now is when we learn
everything
there is to know
about the people down the road and
in the daywork houses,
about the Sisters at the Kingdom Hall
and the faraway relatives we rarely see.
Long after the stories are told, I remember them,
whisper them back to Hope
and Dell late into the night:
She’s the one who left Nicholtown in the daytime
the one Grandmama says wasn’t afraid
of anything. Retelling each story.
Making up what I didn’t understand
or missed when voices dropped too low, I talk
until my sister and brother’s soft breaths tell me
they’ve fallen
asleep.
Then I let the stories live
inside my head, again and again
until the real world fades back
into cricket lullabies
and my own dreams.
tobacco
Summer is over, a kiss
of chill in the southern air. We see the dim orange
of my grandfather’s cigarette, as he makes his way
down the darkening road. Hear his evening greetings
and the coughing that follows them.
Not enough breath left now
to sing so I sing for him, in my head
where only I can hear.
Where will the wedding supper be?
Way down yonder in a hollow tree. Uh hmmm . . .
The old people used to say
a pinch of dirt in the mouth
can tell tobacco’s story:
what crops
are ready for picking
what needs to be left to grow.
What soil is rich enough for planting
and the patches of land that need
a year of rest.
how sometimes the earth makes a promise
it can never keep. Tobacco fields
lay fallow, crops picked clean.
My grandfather coughs again
and the earth waits
for what and who it will get in return.
how to listen #3
Middle of the night
my grandfather is coughing
me upright. Startled.
my mother leaving greenville
It is late autumn now, the smell of wood burning,
the potbellied stove like a warm soft hand
in the center of my grandparents’ living room,
its black pipe
stretching into the ceiling then disappearing.
So many years have passed since we last saw
our father, his absence
like a bubble in my older brother’s life,
that pops again and again
into a whole lot of tiny bubbles
of memory.
You were just a baby, he says to me.
You’re so lucky you don’t remember the fighting
or anything.
It’s like erasers came through her memory, my sister says.
Erase. Erase. Erase.
But now, my mother is leaving again.
This, I will remember.
halfway home #1
New York, my mother says.
Soon, I’ll find us a place there. Come back
and bring you all home.
She wants a place of her own that is not
The Nelsonville House, The Columbus House,
The Greenville House.
Looking for her next place.
Our next place.
Right now, our mother says,
we’re only halfway home.
And I imagine her standing
in the middle of a road, her arms out
fingers pointing North and South.
I want to ask:
Will there always be a road?
Will there always be a bus?
Will we always have to choose
between home
and home?
my mother looks back on greenville
After our dinner and bath,
after our powdered and pajamaed bodies are tucked
three across into bed,
after Winnie the Pooh and kisses on our foreheads
and longer-than-usual hugs,
my mother walks away from the house on Hall Street
out into the growing night,
down a long dusty road
to where the Nicholtown bus
takes her to the Greyhound station
then more dust
then she’s gone.
New York ahead of her,
her family behind, she moves
to the back, her purse in her lap,
the land
pulling her gaze to the window once more.
Before darkness
covers it and for many hours, there are only shadows
and stars
and tears
and hope.
the
last fireflies
We know our days are counted here.
Each evening we wait for the first light
of the last fireflies, catch them in jars
then let them go again. As though we understand
their need for freedom.
As though our silent prayers to stay in Greenville
will be answered if
we do what we know is right.
changes
Now the evenings are quiet with my mother gone
as though the night is listening
to the way we are counting the days. We know
even the feel of our grandmother’s brush
being pulled gently through our hair
will fast become a memory. Those Saturday evenings
at her kitchen table, the smell
of Dixie Peach hair grease,
the sizzle of the straightening comb,
the hiss of the iron
against damp, newly washed ribbons, all of this
may happen again, but in another place.
We sit on our grandparents’ porch,
shivering already against the coming winter,
and talk softly about Greenville summer,
how when we come back,
we’ll do all the stuff we always did,
hear the same stories,
laugh at the same jokes, catch fireflies in the same
mason jars, promise each other
future summers that are as good as the past.
But we know we are lying
coming home will be different now.
This place called Greenville
this neighborhood called Nicholtown
will change some
and so will each of us.
sterling high school, greenville
While my mother is away in New York City,
a fire sweeps through
her old high school
during a senior dance.
Smoke filled the crowded room
and the music
stopped
and the students dancing
stopped
and the DJ told them
to quickly leave the building.
The fire
lasted all night
and when it was over,
my mother’s high school had burned
nearly to the ground.
My mother said it was because
the students had been marching,
and the marching
made some white people in Greenville mad.
After the fire the students weren’t allowed to go to
the all-white high school.
Instead they had to crowd in
beside their younger sisters and brothers
at the lower school.
In the photos from my mother’s high school yearbook—
The Torch, 1959,
my mother is smiling beside her cousin
Dorothy Ann and on her other side,
there is Jesse Jackson,
who maybe was already dreaming of one day
being the first brown man to run
for president.
And not even
the torching of their school
could stop him or the marchers
from changing the world.
faith
After my mother leaves, my grandmother
pulls us further
into the religion she has always known.
We become Jehovah’s Witnesses
like her.
After my mother leaves
there is no one
to say,
The children can choose their own faith
when they’re old enough.
In my house, my grandmother says,
you will do as I do.
After my mother leaves,
we wake in the middle of the night
calling out for her.
Have faith, my grandmother says
pulling us to her in the darkness.
Let the Bible,
my grandmother says,
become your sword and your shield.
But we do not know yet
who we are fighting
and what we are fighting for.
the stories cora tells
In the evening now
Coraandhersisters come over to our porch.
There are three of them
and three of us but Hope
moves away from the girls
sits by himself
out in the yard.
And even though my grandmother tells us
not to play with them,
she doesn’t call us into the house anymore
when she sees them walking down the road. Maybe
her heart moves over a bit
making room for them.
A colorful mushroom grows
beneath the pine tree. Purple and gold and strange
against the pine-needled ground.
When I step on it,
Coraandhersisters scream at me,
You just killed the Devil while he was sleeping!
Sleeping in his own house.
Cora warns me
the Devil will soon be alive again.
She says, He’s going to come for you,
late in the night while you’re sleeping
and the God y’all pray to won’t be there protecting you.
I cry as the sun sets, waiting.
Cry until my grandmother comes out
shoos Coraandhersisters home
holds me tight
tells me they are lying.
That’s just some crazy southern superstition,
my grandmother says.
Those girls must be a little simple not knowing
a mushroom when they see one.
Don’t believe everything you hear, Jackie.
Someday, you’ll come to know
when someone is telling the truth
and when they’re just making up stories.
hall street
In the early evening, just before the best light
for hide-and-seek
takes over the sky,
it’s Bible-study time. We watch
from our places on the front porch, our cold hands
cupped around hot chocolate
half gone and sweetest at the bottom
as the Brother and Sister
from the Kingdom Hall make their way up our road.
Pretty Monday evening, the Brother
from the Kingdom Hall says.
Thank Jehovah, the Sister
from the Kingdom Hall says back.
We are silent, Brother Hope, Sister Dell and me.
None of us want to sit inside when the late autumn
is calling to us
and frogs are finally feeling brave enough
to hop across our yard. We want
anything but this. We want warm biscuits
and tag and jacks on the porch,
our too-long sweater sleeves
getting in the way sometimes.
But we are Jehovah’s Witnesses. Monday night
is Bible-study time.
Somewhere else,
my grandfather is
spending time with his brother Vertie.
Maybe they are playing the harmonica and banjo,
laughing and singing loud. Doing
what’s fun to do on a pretty Monday evening.
Jehovah promises us everlasting life in the New World,
the Brother from the Kingdom Hall says
and Brother Hope, Sister Dell and me are silent
wanting only what’s right outside.
Wanting only this world.
soon
When the phone rings in my grandmother’s kitchen,
we run from wherever we are,
jumping from the front porch swing
climbing out of the mud-filled ditch out back,
running quick from the picked-clean garden—
but
my brother, Hope, is the fastest, picking up the phone,
pressing it hard
against his ear as though my mother’s voice
just that much closer means my mother is
closer to us. We jump around him:
Let me speak! until my grandmother comes
through the screen door
puts down the basket of laundry, cold and dry
from the line
takes the phone from my brother,
shushes us,
shoos us,
promises us
a moment with our mother soon.
how i learn the days of the week
Monday night is Bible study with a Brother and Sister
from the Kingdom Hall.
Tuesday night is Bible study at the Kingdom Hall.
Wednesday night is laundry night—the clothes
blowing clean on the line above
my grandfather’s garden. When no one is looking,
we run through the sheets,
breathe in all the wonderful smells the air
adds to them.
Thursday night is Ministry School. One day,
we will grow up to preach
God’s word, take it out
into the world
and maybe we’ll save some people.
Friday night, we’re free as anything,
Hope and Dell’s bikes skidding along Hall Street,
my knees bumping hard against the handlebars
of my red three-wheeler. One more year maybe
Dell’s bike will be mine.
Saturday we’re up early: The Watchtower and Awake!