Afaa Michael Weaver

Everything that was young went quickly, the way his eyes met mine as soon as we woke together in a room outside Nanjing, feeling as if all the things that were falling would fall and make their thunder, leave us with the challenge of being happy, all the things that felt given when gifts were not just surprises, but what we knew, what we hoped to take with us to heaven, unbound by faults and sins, not deceived the way we were when the end came to what we knew of China, landing me here. I am a wish in the skies spun out from celestial space to be poor, to be covered with black skin, a felt quilt of a map with only one way to China — through pain as big as hogs squealing at killing time on black farms in Alabama — the noise of death, the shrill needle that turns clouds over to rip the air above the cities where people are young and all that is given is never taken away.

It is the twilight blue Chevrolet, four doors with no power but the engine, whitewall tires, no padding on the dashboard, the car I drive on dates, park on dark lanes to ask for a kiss, now my hand goes along the fender, wiping every spot, the suds in the bucket, my father standing at the gate, poor and proud, tall and stout, a wise man, a man troubled by a son gone missing in the head, drag racing his only car at night, traveling with hoodlums to leave the books for street life, naming mentors the men who pack guns and knives, a son gone missing from all the biblical truth, ten talents, prophecies, burning bushes, dirty cars washed on Saturday morning. He tells me not to miss a spot, to open the hood when I'm done so he can check the oil, the vital thing like blood, blood of kinship, blood spilled in the streets of Baltimore, blood oozing from the soul of a son walking prodigal paths leading to gutters. Years later I tell him the stories of what his brother-in-law did to me, and he wipes a tear from the corner of his eye, wraps it in a white handkerchief for church, walks up the stairs with the aluminum crutch to scream at the feet of black Jesus and in these brittle years of his old age we grow deeper, talk way after midnight, peeping over the rail of his hospital bed as we wash the twilight blue Chevrolet.

It was as hot as what stars must feel like so far away, certainly there, inside me. I took it in my hands, put it where it should be in the wet softness where my heart sits. Ugly things came to threaten me, to say I had lost the last lock holding me to truth. That was not true, because old truths were now lies, I saw families as human. I found the goodness in what is not perfect, and a new perfection in what is not good. This happened in a new home twelve time zones away, as the world collapsed. in a clitter clatter like a busy kitchen, the universe forming now inside all of me.

The rain comes late, draws the afternoon into darkness, no light where there should be light, no way to be but drenched until it curves down over your lips. The taste of every living thing is in the raindrop the way all things open their eyes inside a single bloom in the garden that is now hushed in a robe. Whatever you feel about it, whether you live for it or pray for the rains to die, the water joins with all of us, tendon, bone, artery, vein, saliva, everything that melts and goes hard, escapes as air. The water brings a reunion for a moment with what we know each time we breathe ourselves here or are forced to breathe. If I write without color it is to obey the gray way rain brings the past to us. The ten thousand are one giant palace with a room for remembering, where you must stand alone, touch and believe while it seems you are touching nothing and have gone all mad in this life, this gift. We are sitting on a rock in the thick falling of water, purple lilies are growing in the sun's ocean shadow, sheep with golden wool are flying in the trees, a patient monkey is bandaging a wounded blade of grass, the garden is a mesa, seeds are mountain caves, the moon has gone infinite, made two of its own selves for each of our palms. Now we have faces.

I see myself in the shadows of a leaf compressed to the green blades growing to a point like the shards of miles of mirrors falling and cracking to perfect gardens. I never inspect the withered assumption of my face’s petty dialogue in raindrops, the deceptive spreading of the words oozing from the skin to the edges of water etched on the ground by gravity and wishing. Passing for the seriousness of my eye, platitudes of my white collar or the perfect posture of my lips, it skirts from the leaves of the plant hiding me and sits stoic like stone in my pupil, mute and unassuming, like Rashi. To gather myself I will swim naked in the wind, bending my blind elbows in circles, stopping now to dance like the cherubic gold on the ark, and gather myself from the particles of this excitement another structure, one closely resembling the beginning.

It was cousin Alvin who stole the liquor, slipped down Aunt Mabie's steps on the ice, fresh from jail for some small crime. Alvin liked to make us laugh while he took the liquor or other things we did not see, in Aunt Mabie's with her floors polished, wood she polished on her hands and knees until they were truth itself and slippery enough to trick you, Aunt Mabie who loved her Calvert Extra and loved the bright inside of family, the way we come connected in webs, born in clusters of promises, dotted with spots that mark our place in the karma of good times, good times in the long ribbon of being colored I learned when colored had just given way to Negro and Negro was leaving us because blackness chased it out of the house, made it slip on the ice, fall down and spill N-e-g-r-o all over the sidewalk until we were proud in a new avenue of pride, as thick as the scrapple on Saturday morning with King syrup, in the good times, between the strikes and layoffs at the mills when work was too slack, and Pop sat around pretending not to worry, not to let the stream of sweat he wiped from his head be anything except the natural way of things, keeping his habits, the paper in his chair by the window, the radio with the Orioles, with Earl Weaver the screamer and Frank Robinson the gentle black man, keeping his habits, Mama keeping hers, the WSID gospel in the mornings, dusting the encyclopedias she got from the A&P, collecting the secrets of neighbors, holding marriages together, putting golden silence on children who took the wrong turns, broke the laws of getting up and getting down on your knees. These brittle things we call memories rise up, like the aroma of scrapple, beauty and ugliness, life's mix where the hard and painful things from folk who know no boundaries live beside the bright eyes that look into each other, searching their pupils for paths to prayer.

My bones tied up with his bones at night, him falling asleep in my arm after wrasslin me, calling it love in some kind of low whisper no dog would believe. I know his every smell, every way the littlest corner of him be stinkin underneath me, on top of me, while our children snore in the corner, then he creep out the way he creep in, before the cock crow at the sun. In daylight he act like we strangers, on the edge of the field, his little tan children of mine turning brown, playing more than working cause they his children, Missy look over at me while I look over at her, both of us got some kind of papers on this same man that say he own both of us, the man who owes us even we he die cause the Bible say you gotta look after the widow. But when he die it will be cause Missy and me locked eyes many days and hated him like one wronged woman made out of two, him standing up there on the porch studyin everything— his eyes lit up like he the Lord of all creation. hush now, night wind on my skin, hush now bird lost in trees, hush now, hungry moon

for Hsing Hui A thing as delicious as turning the last sound I heard into a word it cannot be or calling your hidden wish out into the broad space of the public to make you touch me instead of asking that I go naked, a thing as delicious as any of that would not be as safe as a dumb silence. I am resting my back with a cushion against the chair, sitting inside the ache when I soaked myself in a balm the way women went to the river and held things down until they were as wet as Jesus hanging in the rain, his pain the invocation of roars destroying the temple. The things I know are not the things you wish to know, or they are and I cannot give them to you until I see what you think of contracts, of what binds the mornings to unkind sunlight, what takes a hawk and lets it know there are things less grand than flying, things that crave.

It is Monday, I am twelve years old, summer still feel like summer to me... Ernest Green My elementary school principal was white I only had one white teacher, she was named after the juice the astronauts took into space, Tang, I got some Tang at home...did you hear about the little girls who got killed while we was in Sunday School yesterday? Elizabeth Eckford I live in Baltimore and so do you, your people the raw and stinky crew, my daddy a big shot on the Avenue your daddy can't buy a pair of shoes... Jefferson Thomas One little girl was named Addie Mae, just liek my aunt from South Carolina, and when I come home from church everybody was cryin about the news from Alabama...I know Alabama Alabama was on the math test today— If you going 65 miles an hour leaving Richmond near where my cousin live and you drive for twelve hours straight will get you to Alabama? hell no, cause Alabama in hell ... Terrance Roberts The bus is hot, the white neighborhood full of angry faces just two miles from where we live, angry faces I see at night when I look out the window and wonder why I have to sit next to white children to be smart...I was smart all the time, my mama told me so when I did things the right way, extra things, good things, smart is knowin when somethin's missing... Carlotta Walls LaNier I like Malcom X because he looks like me when I am so mad I can't stand myself, when my cousins take my model car shelf down, break up my cats and then dare me to fight, when I have to walk from the white school home through the white neighborhood when I miss the bus or when I get a beatin for what my friend did and he get a beatin, too, but mine hurt more because he did it, not me, so I like Malcom X. He so mean, Mr. Green, he so mean...you got to be mean in Chicago... Minnijean Brown When I was fourteen a boy kissed me when we were walking to the movies, he sneaked me, and I tried not to smile because kissing is a sin and all the while I was so full of hallelujah on the inside, on the way to the movies we go to now because somebody made a way somehow, standing in lines with protest signs, dogs barking all around, so I make sure I sound educated when Henry sneaks to kiss me on the way to the movies...we have all kinds of movies in Philadelphia... Gloria Ray Karlmark New York is faster than yesterday, been here and gone before you remember it ain't here no more, we go downtown in the middle of tomorrow when it still be today, New York is faster than yesterday, I got a quarter for your ten dollar bill, give it to me I'll pay your cleaners bill because New York is faster than yesterday, and a high school diploma is all a genius like me will ever need in a city where a thrill is more to me if you will believe me...and believe me you will... Thelma Mothershed What a word will do, my momma used to say at night when her work was done, rearing back in that chair of hers with the stuffin fallin out of the arms, what a word will do when you know what words are for, she would say, layin her head back, closing her eyes and settling down inside some dream. She never told us her dreams when we asked her, she just said we would know when the moon turned over three times and ghosts rose up out of the sea. Mama was half out of this world, in California we all the way in it... Melba Patillo Beals Little Rock Nine, Shaking the line Between white no And black oh yes, I'll walk all over What is mine, thanks To Little Rock Nine.

1978-1979 for Vincent Woodard It is not just my problem. It belongs to us all. I have been cajoled into coming to the emergency room where everything scares me. Black folk shoot and cut each other until they end here where guards have guns. I refuse to be taken upstairs and locked away. I was trying to think of a poem. It got me to this place. With my mother, I stand against the wall, guards on either side. They have guns, and this is my mother. It is now everybody’s problem. A bird is singing in my hair, more important than Thorazine. My head is a tree stretching its leaves to burn in the sun. They say if I make a treaty to take the medicine, I can leave with my family since my family is crazy. I look at the guns on the hips of the guards and know I must be as still and quiet as death or this will turn into psychosis as sick as nightmares. I am angry that they would have me here with my mother, angry at white doctors. I am in a whale in the ocean. Who can swim out to me? Who can cast a line? If I take out the first guard by breaking his neck, I can protect my mother, but it is more important that we are all now underwater, inside a whale who laughs. Later the therapist they say likes me keeps talking about the appointment. She is doing something subliminal with the word “come,” repeating, repeating. She leans to me when she says it. It bothers me that such people think crazy people are stupid, but it is more important that my head is a tree with a bird singing in it inside a whale in the ocean. The most important thing of all is that this whale that ate us likes to laugh a lot. He has the blues.