Boundless, the wheat stretches beyond
the frame, as if toward a distant field—
the white canvas where sky and cotton
meet, where another veteran toils,
his hands the color of dark soil.
III
O magnet-South! O glistening perfumed South! my South!
O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and evil! O all dear to me!
—Walt Whitman
Pastoral
In the dream, I am with the Fugitive
Poets. We’re gathered for a photograph.
Behind us, the skyline of Atlanta
hidden by the photographer’s backdrop—
a lush pasture, green, full of soft-eyed cows
lowing, a chant that sounds like no, no. Yes,
I say to the glass of bourbon I’m offered.
We’re lining up now—Robert Penn Warren,
his voice just audible above the drone
of bulldozers, telling us where to stand.
Say “race,” the photographer croons. I’m in
blackface again when the flash freezes us.
My father’s white, I tell them, and rural.
You don’t hate the South? they ask. You don’t hate it?
Miscegenation
In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.
They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong—mis in Mississippi.
A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same
as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.
Faulkner’s Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name
for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.
My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name.
I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.
When I turned 33 my father said, It’s your Jesus year—you’re the same
age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.
I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name—
though I’m not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.
My Mother Dreams Another Country
Already the words are changing. She is changing
from colored to negro, black still years ahead.
This is 1966—she is married to a white man—
and there are more names for what grows inside her.
It is enough to worry about words like mongrel
and the infertility of mules and mulattoes
while flipping through a book of baby names.
She has come home to wait out the long months,
her room unchanged since she’s been gone:
dolls winking down from every shelf—all of them
white. Every day she is flanked by the rituals of superstition,
and there is a name she will learn for this too:
maternal impression—the shape, like an unknown
country, marking the back of the newborn’s thigh.
For now, women tell her to clear her head, to steady her hands
or she’ll gray a lock of the child’s hair wherever
she worries her own, imprint somewhere the outline
of a thing she craves too much. They tell her
to stanch her cravings by eating dirt. All spring
she has sat on her hands, her fingers numb. For a while
each day, she can’t feel anything she touches: the arbor
out back—the landscape’s green tangle; the molehill
of her own swelling. Here—outside the city limits—
cars speed by, clouds of red dust in their wake.
She breathes it in—Mississippi—then drifts toward sleep,
thinking of someplace she’s never been. Late,
Mississippi is a dark backdrop bearing down
on the windows of her room. On the TV in the corner,
the station signs off, broadcasting its nightly salutation:
the waving Stars and Stripes, our national anthem.
Southern History
Before the war, they were happy, he said,
quoting our textbook. (This was senior-year
history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed,
and better off under a master’s care.
I watched the words blur on the page. No one
raised a hand, disagreed. Not even me.
It was late; we still had Reconstruction
to cover before the test, and—luckily—
three hours of watching Gone with the Wind.
History, the teacher said, of the old South—
a true account of how things were back then.
On screen a slave stood big as life: big mouth,
bucked eyes, our textbook’s grinning proof—a lie
Blond
Certainly it was possible—somewhere
in my parents’ genes the recessive traits
that might have given me a different look:
not attached earlobes or my father’s green eyes,
but another hair color—gentleman-preferred,
have-more-fun blond. And with my skin color,
like a good tan—an even mix of my parents’—
I could have passed for white.
When on Christmas day I woke to find
a blond wig, a pink sequined tutu,
and a blond ballerina doll, nearly tall as me,
I didn’t know to ask, nor that it mattered,
if there’d been a brown version. This was years before
my grandmother nestled the dark baby
into our crèche, years before I’d understand it
as primer for a Mississippi childhood.
Instead, I pranced around our living room
in a whirl of possibility, my parents looking on
at their suddenly strange child. In the photograph
my mother took, my father—almost
out of the frame—looks on as Joseph must have
at the miraculous birth: I’m in the foreground—
my blond wig a shining halo, a newborn likeness
to the child that chance, the long odds,
might have brought.
Southern Gothic
I have lain down into 1970, into the bed
my parents will share for only a few more years.
Early evening, they have not yet turned from each other
in sleep, their bodies curved—parentheses
framing the separate lives they’ll wake to. Dreaming,
I am again the child with too many questions—
the endless why and why and why
my mother cannot answer, her mouth closed, a gesture
toward her future: cold lips stitched shut.
The lines in my young father’s face deepen
toward an expression of grief. I have come home
from the schoolyard with the words that shadow us
in this small Southern town—peckerwood and nigger
lover, half-breed and zebra—words that take shape
outside us. We’re huddled on the tiny island of bed, quiet
in the language of blood: the house, unsteady
on its cinderblock haunches, sinking deeper
into the muck of ancestry. Oil lamps flicker
around us—our shadows, dark glyphs on the wall,
bigger and stranger than we are.
Incident
We tell the story every year—
how we peered from the windows, shades drawn—
though nothing really happened,
the charred grass now green again.
We peered from the windows, shades drawn,
at the cross t
russed like a Christmas tree,
the charred grass still green. Then
we darkened our rooms, lit the hurricane lamps.
At the cross trussed like a Christmas tree,
a few men gathered, white as angels in their gowns.
We darkened our rooms and lit hurricane lamps,
the wicks trembling in their fonts of oil.
It seemed the angels had gathered, white men in their gowns.
When they were done, they left quietly. No one came.
The wicks trembled all night in their fonts of oil;
by morning the flames had all dimmed.
When they were done, the men left quietly. No one came.
Nothing really happened.
By morning all the flames had dimmed.
We tell the story every year.
Providence
What’s left is footage: the hours before
Camille , 1969—hurricane
parties, palm trees leaning
in the wind,
fronds blown back,
a woman’s hair. Then after:
the vacant lots,
boats washed ashore, a swamp
where graves had been. I recall
how we huddled all night in our small house,
moving between rooms,
emptying pots filled with rain.
The next day, our house—
on its cinderblocks—seemed to float
in the flooded yard: no foundation
beneath us, nothing I could see
tying us to the land.
In the water, our reflection
trembled,
disappeared
when I bent to touch it.
Monument
Today the ants are busy
beside my front steps, weaving
in and out of the hill they’re building.
I watch them emerge and—
like everything I’ve forgotten—disappear
into the subterranean—a world
made by displacement. In the cemetery
last June, I circled, lost—
weeds and grass grown up all around—
the landscape blurred and waving.
At my mother’s grave, ants streamed in
and out like arteries, a tiny hill rising
above her untended plot. Bit by bit,
red dirt piled up, spread
like a rash on the grass; I watched a long time
the ants’ determined work,
how they brought up soil
of which she will be part,
and piled it before me. Believe me when I say
I’ve tried not to begrudge them
their industry, this reminder of what
I haven’t done. Even now,
the mound is a blister on my heart,
a red and humming swarm.
Elegy for the Native Guards
Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea . . .
—Allen Tate
We leave Gulfport at noon; gulls overhead
trailing the boat—streamers, noisy fanfare—
all the way to Ship Island. What we see
first is the fort, its roof of grass, a lee—
half reminder of the men who served there—
a weathered monument to some of the dead.
Inside we follow the ranger, hurried
though we are to get to the beach. He tells
of graves lost in the Gulf, the island split
in half when Hurricane Camille hit,
shows us casemates, cannons, the store that sells
souvenirs, tokens of history long buried.
The Daughters of the Confederacy
has placed a plaque here, at the fort’s entrance—
each Confederate soldier’s name raised hard
in bronze; no names carved for the Native Guards—
2nd Regiment, Union men, black phalanx.
What is monument to their legacy?
All the grave markers, all the crude headstones—
water-lost. Now fish dart among their bones,
and we listen for what the waves intone.
Only the fort remains, near forty feet high,
round, unfinished, half open to the sky,
the elements—wind, rain—God’s deliberate eye.
South
Homo sapiens is the only species to suffer psychological exile.
—E. O. Wilson
I returned to a stand of pines,
bone-thin phalanx
flanking the roadside, tangle
of understory—a dialectic of dark
and light—and magnolias blossoming
like afterthought: each flower
a surrender, white flags draped
among the branches. I returned
to land’s end, the swath of coast
clear cut and buried in sand:
mangrove, live oak, gulfweed
razed and replaced by thin palms—
palmettos—symbols of victory
or defiance, over and over
marking this vanquished land. I returned
to a field of cotton, hallowed ground—
as slave legend goes—each boll
holding the ghosts of generations:
those who measured their days
by the heft of sacks and lengths
of rows, whose sweat flecked the cotton plants
still sewn into our clothes.
I returned to a country battlefield
where colored troops fought and died—
Port Hudson where their bodies swelled
and blackened beneath the sun—unburied
until earth’s green sheet pulled over them,
unmarked by any headstones.
Where the roads, buildings, and monuments
are named to honor the Confederacy,
where that old flag still hangs, I return
to Mississippi, state that made a crime
of me—mulatto, half-breed—native
in my native land, this place they’ll bury me.
IV
from
Congregation
Invocation, 1926
How they rose early, a list of chores
pulling them toward the kitchen
in dim light—work that must be done
before the rest of their work be done.
How they walked for miles, down
the Gulf and Ship Island Line, toward
the beach, through the quarters, beyond
shotgun shacks, and into the city limits
where white children stood guard—sentries
on a section of rail—muscling them off
the tracks. How they walked on anyway,
until they waded into water, neck-deep,
though they could not swim—a baptism—
something akin to faith, the daily catch
keeping them afloat. How they tied the lines,
walked back and forth to find each cluster,
each glorious net of crabs. Across sand, the road
hot beneath their feet, then door to back door
they went, my grandmother and her siblings,
knocking, offering their catch, cleaned first
on the back steps, gutted—a display of yellow
bright as sunshine raining down on the grass.
When my grandmother prepared crabs for me
I saw the girl she once was, her nimble hands,
food on the table in all those alien houses
along the beach. On our table: crabs, a mound
of rice steaming in a bowl, gumbo manna—
the line between us and them, between the whites
on one side of the tracks, us on the other, sure
as the crab lines she set, the work of her hands,
that which sustains us. Lord, bless those hands,
the harvesters. Bless the travelers who gather
our food, and those who grow it, clean it, cook it,
who bring it to our tables. Bless the laborers
whose faces we do not see—like the girl
my grandmother was, walking the rails home:
bless us that we remember.
Congregation
Believe the report of the Lord /
Face the things that confront you.
—marquee (front / back),
Greater Mt. Rest Baptist Church,
Gulfport, Mississippi, May 2009
1. Witness
Here is North Gulfport—
its liquor stores and car washes,
trailers and shotgun shacks
propped at the road’s edge;
its brick houses hunkered
against the weather, anchored
to neat, clipped yards;
its streets named for states
and Presidents—each corner
a crossroads of memory,
marked with a white obelisk;
its phalanx of church houses—
a congregation of bunkers
and masonry brick, chorus
of marquees: God is not
the author of fear; Without faith
we is victims; Sooner or later
everybody comes by here.
2. Watcher
AFTER KATRINA, 2005