not this all-day standing around,
not that elevator lurching up, then down.
3. Secular
Workweek’s end
and there’s enough
block-ice in the box
to chill a washtub of colas
and one large melon,
dripping green.
After service, each house opens
heavy doors to street and woods,
one clear shot from front to back—
bullet, breeze, or holler.
A neighbor’s Yoo-hoo reaches her
out back, lolling, pulling in wash,
pillow slips billowing
around her head like clouds.
Up the block,
a brand-new Grafonola,
parlor music, blues parlando—
Big Mama, Ma Rainey, Bessie—
baby shake that thing like a saltshaker.
Lipstick, nylons
and she’s out the door,
tipping past the church house,
Dixie Peach in her hair,
greased forehead shining
like gospel, like gold.
4. Signs, Oakvale, Mississippi, 1941
The first time she leaves home is with a man.
On Highway 49, heading north, she watches
the pine woods roll by, and counts on one hand
dead possum along the road, crows in splotches
of light—she knows to watch the signs for luck.
He has a fine car, she thinks. And money green
enough to buy a dream—more than she could tuck
under the mattress, in a Bible, or fold between
her powdered breasts. He’d promised land to farm
back home, new dresses, a house where she’d be
queen. (Was that gap in his teeth cause for alarm?)
The cards said go. She could roam the Delta, see
things she’d never seen. Outside her window,
nothing but cotton and road signs—stop or slow.
5. Expectant
Nights are hardest, the swelling,
tight and low (a girl), Delta heat,
and that woodsy silence a zephyred hush.
So how to keep busy? Wind the clocks,
measure out time to check the window,
or listen hard for his car on the road.
Small tasks done and undone, a floor
swept clean. She can fill a room
with a loud clear alto, broom-dance
right out the back door, her heavy footsteps
a parade beneath the stars. Honeysuckle
fragrant as perfume, nightlife
a steady insect hum. Still, she longs
for the Quarter—lights, riverboats churning,
the tinkle of ice in a slim bar glass.
Each night a refrain, its plain blue notes
carrying her, slightly swaying, home.
6. Tableau
At breakfast, the scent of lemons,
just picked, yellowing on the sill.
At the table, the man and woman.
Between them, a still life:
shallow bowl, damask plums
in one square of morning light.
The woman sips tea
from a chipped blue cup, turning it,
avoiding the rough white edge.
The man, his thumb pushing deep
toward the pit, peels taut skin
clean from plum flesh.
The woman watches his hands,
the pale fruit darkening
wherever he’s pushed too hard.
She is thinking seed, the hardness
she’ll roll on her tongue,
a beginning. One by one,
the man fills the bowl with globes
that glisten. Translucent, he thinks.
The woman, now, her cup tilting
empty, sees, for the first time,
the hairline crack
that has begun to split the bowl in half.
7. At the Station
The blue light was my blues,
and the red light was my mind.
—Robert Johnson
The man, turning, moves away
he does not say
Come back. She won’t. Each
glowing light dims
the farther it moves from reach,
the train pulling clean
out of the station. The woman sits
facing where she’s been.
She’s chosen her place with care—
each window another eye, another
way of seeing what’s back there:
heavy blossoms in afternoon rain
spilling scent and glistening sex.
Everything dripping green.
Blue shade, leaves swollen like desire.
A man motioning nothing.
No words. His mind on fire.
8. Naola Beauty Academy, New Orleans, 1945
Made hair? The girls here
put a press on your head
last two weeks. No naps.
They learning. See the basins?
This where we wash. Yeah,
it’s hot. July jam.
Stove always on. Keep the combs
hot. Lee and Ida bumping hair
right now. Best two.
Ida got a natural touch.
Don’t burn nobody.
Her own’s a righteous mass.
Lee, now she used to sew.
Her fingers steady
from them tiny needles.
She can fix some bad hair.
Look how she lay them waves.
Light, slight, and polite.
Not a one out of place.
9. Drapery Factory,
Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956
She made the trip daily, though
later she would not remember
how far to tell the grandchildren—
Better that way.
She could keep those miles
a secret, and her black face
and black hands, and the pink bottoms
of her black feet
a minor inconvenience.
She does remember the men
she worked for, and that often
she sat side by side
with white women, all of them
bent over, pushing into the hum
of the machines, their right calves
tensed against the pedals.
Her lips tighten speaking
of quitting time when
the colored women filed out slowly
to have their purses checked,
the insides laid open and exposed
by the boss’s hand.
But then she laughs
when she recalls the soiled Kotex
she saved, stuffed into a bag
in her purse, and Adam’s look
on one white man’s face, his hand
deep in knowledge.
10. His Hands
His hands will never be large enough.
Not for the woman who sees in his face
the father she can’t remember,
or her first husband, the soldier with two wives—
all the men who would only take.
Not large enough to deflect
the sharp edges of her words.
Still he tries to prove himself in work,
his callused hands heaving crates
all day on the docks, his pay twice spent.
He brings home what he can, buckets of crabs
from his morning traps, a few green bananas.
His supper waits in the warming oven,
the kitchen dark, the screens hooked.
He thinks Make the hands gentle
as he raps lightly on the back door.
He has never had a key.
Putting her hands to his, she pulls him in,
sets him by the stove. Slowly, she r
ubs oil
into his cracked palms, drawing out soreness
from the swells, removing splinters, taking
whatever his hands will give.
11. Self-Employment, 1970
Who to be today? So many choices,
all that natural human hair piled high,
curled and flipped—style after style
perched, each on its Styrofoam head.
Maybe an upsweep, or finger waves
with a ponytail. Not a day passes
that she goes unkempt—
Never know who might stop by—
now that she works at home
pacing the cutting table,
or pumping the stiff pedal
of the bought-on-time Singer.
Most days, she dresses for the weather,
relentless sun, white heat. The one tree
nearest her workroom, a mimosa,
its whimsy of pink puffs cut back
for a child’s swing set. And now, grandchildren—
it’s come to this—a frenzy of shouts,
the constant slap of an old screen door.
At least the radio still swings jazz
just above the noise, and
ah yes, the window unit—leaky at best.
Sometimes she just stands still, lets
ice water drip onto upturned wrists.
Up under that wig, her head
sweating, hot as an idea.
Gesture of a Woman in Process
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY
CLIFTON JOHNSON, 1902
In the foreground, two women,
their squinting faces
creased into texture—
a deep relief—the lines
like palms of hands
I could read if I could touch.
Around them, their dailiness:
clotheslines sagged with linens,
a patch of greens and yams,
buckets of peas for shelling.
One woman pauses for the picture.
The other won’t be still.
Even now, her hands circling,
the white blur of her apron
still in motion.
II
from
Bellocq’s Ophelia
Nevertheless, the camera’s rendering of reality
must always hide more than it discloses.
—Susan Sontag
Bellocq’s Ophelia
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH, CIRCA 1912
In Millais’s painting, Ophelia dies faceup,
eyes and mouth open as if caught in the gasp
of her last word or breath, flowers and reeds
growing out of the pond, floating on the surface
around her. The young woman who posed
lay in a bath for hours, shivering,
catching cold, perhaps imagining fish
tangling in her hair or nibbling a dark mole
raised upon her white skin. Ophelia’s final gaze
aims skyward, her palms curling open
as if she’s just said, Take me.
I think of her when I see Bellocq’s photograph—
a woman posed on a wicker divan, her hair
spilling over. Around her, flowers—
on a pillow, on a thick carpet. Even
the ravages of this old photograph
bloom like water lilies across her thigh.
How long did she hold there, this other
Ophelia, nameless inmate of Storyville,
naked, her nipples offered up hard with cold?
The small mound of her belly, the pale hair
of her pubis—these things—her body
there for the taking. But in her face, a dare.
Staring into the camera, she seems to pull
all movement from her slender limbs
and hold it in her heavy-lidded eyes.
Her body limp as dead Ophelia’s,
her lips poised to open, to speak.
Letter Home
NEW ORLEANS, NOVEMBER 1910
Four weeks have passed since I left, and still
I must write to you of no work. I’ve worn down
the soles and walked through the tightness
of my new shoes, calling upon the merchants,
their offices bustling. All the while I kept thinking
my plain English and good writing would secure
for me some modest position. Though I dress each day
in my best, hands covered with the lace gloves
you crocheted—no one needs a girl. How flat
the word sounds, and heavy. My purse thins.
I spend foolishly to make an appearance of quiet
industry, to mask the desperation that tightens
my throat. I sit watching—
though I pretend not to notice—the dark maids
ambling by with their white charges. Do I deceive
anyone? Were they to see my hands, brown
as your dear face, they’d know I’m not quite
what I pretend to be. I walk these streets
a white woman, or so I think, until I catch the eyes
of some stranger upon me, and I must lower mine,
a negress again. There are enough things here
to remind me who I am. Mules lumbering through
the crowded streets send me into reverie, their footfall
the sound of a pointer and chalk hitting the blackboard
at school, only louder. Then there are women, clicking
their tongues in conversation, carrying their loads
on their heads. Their husky voices, the washpots
and irons of the laundresses call to me. Here,
I thought not to do the work I once did, back-bending
and domestic; my schooling a gift—even those half days
at picking time, listening to Miss J—. How
I’d come to know words, the recitations I practiced
to sound like her, lilting, my sentences curling up
or trailing off at the ends. I read my books until
I nearly broke their spines, and in the cotton field,
I repeated whole sections I’d learned by heart,
spelling each word in my head to make a picture
I could see, as well as a weight I could feel
in my mouth. So now, even as I write this
and think of you at home, Goodbye
is the waving map of your palm, is
a stone on my tongue.
Countess P—’s Advice for New Girls
STORYVILLE, 1910
Look, this is a high-class house—polished
mahogany, potted ferns, rugs two inches thick.
The mirrored parlor multiplies everything—
one glass of champagne is twenty. You’ll see
yourself a hundred times. For our customers
you must learn to be watched. Empty
your thoughts—think, if you do, only
of your swelling purse. Hold still as if
you sit for a painting. Catch light
in the hollow of your throat; let shadow dwell
in your navel and beneath the curve
of your breasts. See yourself through his eyes—
your neck stretched long and slender, your back
arched—the awkward poses he might capture
in stone. Let his gaze animate you, then move
as it flatters you most. Wait to be
asked to speak. Think of yourself as molten glass—
expand and quiver beneath the weight of his breath.
Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.
Become what you must. Let him see whatever
he needs. Train yourself not to look back.
Storyville Diary
1. Naming
EN ROUTE, OCTOBER 1910
I cannot now remember the first word
I learned to write—perhaps it was my name,
Oph
elia, in tentative strokes, a banner
slanting across my tablet at school, or inside
the cover of some treasured book. Leaving
my home today, I feel even more the need
for some new words to mark this journey,
like the naming of a child—Queen, Lovely,
Hope—marking even the humblest beginnings
in the shanties. My own name was a chant
over the washboard, a song to guide me
into sleep. Once, my mother pushed me toward
a white man in our front room. Your father,
she whispered. He’s the one that named you, girl.
2. Father
FEBRUARY 1911
There is but little I recall of him—how
I feared his visits, though he would bring gifts:
apples, candy, a toothbrush and powder.
In exchange, I must present fingernails
and ears, open my mouth to show the teeth.
Then I’d recite my lessons, my voice low.
I would stumble over a simple word, say
lay for lie, and he would stop me there. How
I wanted him to like me, think me smart,
a delicate colored girl—not the wild
pickaninny roaming the fields, barefoot.
I search now for his face among the men
I pass in the streets, fear the day a man