One With Others. C.D. Wright
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needle and catheter can be employed to prevent the quickening.]
[Where was it you wanted to bury this hatchet. Your land or mine.]
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V’s bush was sweet-betsy. I broke off a twig in her oldest daughter’s yard. Over the coming months, I break it over and over for a quick hit of camphor.
And offshore Camille brought rain that September. The year they put the kids under arrest and put them in the swimming pool.
King called “it” a disease, segregation. [Sounds contagious.]
It’s cradle work is what it is. It begins before the quickening.
When V ended up back in Kentucky after her expulsion from Big Tree, she kept a retired fighting cock. It was her only pleasure, Helmet. No one else could get near him.
Long before this black and white issue, she said she was going to make up a coat of arms and the motto on its heater would read:
I never knew what misery was till I came to Arkansas
Why wake up in this torpor—unless you happen to be from here. Which requires less than volition. It requires only inertia.
Or blood ties, where everyone you ever knew or were kin to lies buried.
Or, the long-lingering olfaction of home, whether from the faint cut of walnuts spoiled in the grass or a sour work shirt on a rotted railing. When the ones who are from here come home in the evening and get out of their car, and rise on tired legs, the barbecued night they smell is theirs—that exact streaked sky, that turned dirt, that crape myrtle, that dog chained to the clothesline.
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Love then, she was all but dying for, except the love of Catholic men, who did not live to love [from whom it was an article of faith that life is and forever shall be, for suffering].
V liked to say: It makes martyrs of the women and emasculates the men.
If religion, she also liked to say, is the opiate of the masses, fundamentalism is the amphetamine.
[That busted us up.]
The hierarchy, indisputable. The hereafter, actual. Sin, she believed in. That she was born in and bound to do it; she was likewise accepting of being sinned against. Injustice she rejected. Through and through.
Something else—LIE, was not in her vocabulary. The pure inflammatory truth she could take it, and Gentle Reader, she knew how to inflict it.
The night the town erupted, the night they beat the Memphis organizer, the Man Imported from Memphis, the City of Good Abode, the self-named Invader [the tag was picked from a sci-fi show; it stuck, and it sent its message straight to the eighth nerve].
The night they put some of the strangers in jail [in Swahili, stranger is mgeni. It also means “guest.” Hereabouts, it means outside agitator; it means godless communist; it means Invader], a crazed white woman turned her hose on V and the Invaders through the bars, and a mad white mob set her car ablaze [the only car she would ever have];
and a little twig of a white kid went to the Bijou with his father.
The reel had just sputtered into action when the lady left the projection booth and ran down the aisle to the boy and his father. You’ve got to get out of here, this town’s about to blow. And it was rare to go to a movie, rare for his daddy to take him, and he did not want to leave, he wanted to see the show, he wanted to see, but the lady had already stopped the projector and everyone else had cleared out.
It was all black. It was all white. It was black and white. No, it was in living color.
What was playing.
VETERINARIAN: You got me there.
You tend big animals or cats and dogs.
I’m small, I just take care of the small. If a heifer or a mare rolled over on me, that’d be all she wrote. I wouldn’t be able to work anymore. So, I stick to small. My father treated every one of her cats, the Persians, the blue point Siamese. Long before the black and white issue. He knew them all.
Two of their descendants made it to Hell’s Kitchen. They were ill-tempered, overweight, and generally obnoxious.
So, who would you rather live with, V asked, Al Capone or Mahatma Gandhi.
You got me there.
GRADUATE OF THE ALL-NEGRO HIGH SCHOOL: I did not participate [in the uprising]. I was in the band room, practicing. Keeping time. Our mother was very strict.
What was your band called.
Come again.
Your band.
You got me there.
GRADUATE OF THE ALL-WHITE HIGH SCHOOL, first year of Integration-By-Choice: I did not participate. I was in the theater, practicing.
I was a smart kid, and I sort of knew I was going to leave, and that high school was just something you had to go through to get to the rest of your life.
ALL-NEGRO HIGH SCHOOL ANNUAL:
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