One With Others. C.D. Wright
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the jaw of the champ, born
seventeen miles west, in Sand Slough,
when he took that phantom punch
the year in which this particular round
of troubles began.
Today, Gentle Reader,
the sermon once again: “Segregation
After Death.” Showers in the a.m.
The threat they say is moving from the east.
The sheriff’s club says Not now. Not
nokindofhow. Not never. The children’s
minds say Never waver. Air
fanned by a flock of hands in the old
funeral home where the meetings
were called [because Mrs. Oliver
owned it free and clear], and
that selfsame air, sanctified
and doomed, rent with racism, and
it percolates up from the soil itself,
which in these parts is richer than Elvis,
and up on the Ridge is called loess
[pronounced “luss”], off-color, windblown stuff.
This is where Hemingway penned some
of A Farewell to Arms, on the Ridge
[when he was married to Pauline]. Where
the mayor of Memphis moved after
his ill-starred term. After they slew
the dreamer and began to slay
the dream. Once an undulant kingdom
of Elberta and Early Wheeler peaches.
Hot air chopping
through clods of earth with
each stroke of the tenant
boy’s hoe [Dyess Colony] back
when the boy hadn’t an iota
of becoming the Man in Black.
Al Green hailed from here;
Sonny Liston, 12th of 13 kids,
[some say 24th of 25]
born 17 miles west,
in Sand Slough. Head hardened
on hickory sticks. [And Scott Bond,
born a slave, became a millionaire.
Bought a drove of farms
around Big Tree. Planted potatoes.
When the price came back up,
planted cotton. Bought gravel. Felled
his own timber. A buy-and-sell individual.
When you look close at his picture, you
can’t tell if he was white
or black. You can just tell he was a trim,
cross-eyed fellow.] And the Silver Fox,
he started out in Colt.
Mostly up-and-down kind of men.
[Except for Mr. Bond, he went in one
direction when it came around
to making money.]
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GRADUATE OF THE ALL-NEGRO SCHOOL: Our teacher would tell us, Turn to page 51. That page wouldn’t be there.
GRADUATE OF THE ALL-WHITE SCHOOL, first year of Integration-By-Choice: Spent a year in classes by myself. They had spotters on the trampoline. I knew they would not spot me. You timed your trips to the restroom.
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She woke up in a housebound rage, my friend V. Changed diapers. Played poker. Drank bourbon. Played duplicate bridge. Made casseroles, grape salad, macaroni and cheese. Played cards with the priest. Made an argument for school uniforms, but the parents were concerned the children would be indistinguishable. She was thinking: affordable, uniforms. You can distinguish them, she argued, by their shoes. It was a mind on fire, a body confined.
And on the other side of Division, a whole other population in year-round lockdown.
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live[d] to bear children to a dunce.
[Yeats she knew well enough to wield as a weapon. It would pop out when she was put out. Over the ironing board. Over cards. Some years the Big Tree Catholic foursome would all be pregnant at once, playing bridge, their cards propped up on distended stomachs. Laughing their bourbon-logged heads off.]
She had a brain like the Reading Room in the old British Museum. She could have donned fingerless gloves and written Das Kapital while hexagons of snowflakes tumbled by the windowpanes. She could have made it up whole cloth. She could have sewn the cotton out of her own life. While the Thames froze over.
She loved: Words. Cats. Long-playing records. Laughter. Men.
Alcohol. Cigarettes. The supernatural. It makes for a carnal list. Pointless to rank. Five in diapers at once—a stench, she claimed, she never got used to.
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AMONG HER EFFECTS, a bourboned-up letter:
Dear Callie,
This grandmother of yours is an intoxicant and you are not. It makes me proud that you study calculus.
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Anyway, there is one thing that happened that I want you to know about. One Arkansas summer, the summer of 1967? The boys came running in the house and said they saw an accident and we all ran down the road and there was this old man walking around in a daze and I asked if I could help him. There was a car in the ditch and Rudy and Will, I think, said no one was in it. The man said his name, which I forget, and asked me to call Mrs. Hand [an aristocrat with an elevator in her house] and ask her to send help.
I did. She took the message, thanked me and hung up.
About a month later, her son, a prominent town attorney, called me up and asked me to be a witness, and I told him that I hadn’t seen anything. And he said, Come to court anyway. So I went.
The prosecutor, the D.A., was a man named Hunter Crumb. So I’m sitting in the witness chair, telling what happened and I referred to the dazed man, and I quote myself:
And that gentleman, I’m sorry, I have forgotten his name, came up to me and asked me to call Mrs. Hand.
Okay, I do not exaggerate, the D.A. got red in the face and said, “Did you call that [N-word] a gentleman?” and went on at length yelling at me. Face on fire, yelling. I looked at the judge. I looked at Mr. Hand, but they would not look at me. Finally I was allowed to step down. I was shocked.
The second thing I want you to know is that in mid-June of 1969, Sweet Willie Wine [aka, the Man Imported from Memphis or the Prime Minister or the Invader] and Mrs. Oliver called on Hunter Crumb, to present the proper permits for the boycott and ten minutes after they left that man’s office Hunter Crumb dropped dead of a heart attack. I don’t have the news accounts of that, but it happened, and it was like electricity in Big Tree.
After that, I would have followed Sweet Willie Wine into hell.
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It gradually turns from clear to coffee;
the