Marilyn Nelson

For Ruben Ahoueya Today in America people were bought and sold: five hundred for a "likely Negro wench." If someone at auction is worth her weight in gold, how much would she be worth by pound? By ounce? If I owned an unimaginable quantity of wealth, could I buy an iota of myself? How would I know which part belonged to me? If I owned part, could I set my part free? It must be worth something—maybe a lot— that my great-grandfather, they say, killed a lion. They say he was black, with muscles as hard as iron, that he wore a necklace of the claws of the lion he'd fought. How much do I hear, for his majesty in my blood? I auction myself. And I make the highest bid.

Mariah Watkins, Neosho, Missuri Imagine a child at your door, offering to do your wash, clean your house, cook, to weed your kitchen garden or paint you a bunch of flowers in exchange for a meal. A spindly ten-year-old, alone and a stranger in town, here to go to our school for colored children. His high peep brought tears: sleeping in a barn and all that, nary mama nor kin, but only white folks he left with their blessing, his earthly belongings in a handkerchief tied to a stick. I've brought a houseful of children into this world, concentrating on that needle's eye into eternity. But ain't none of them children mine. Well, of course I moved him on in. He helped me with my washings, brought me roots from the woods that bleached them white folks' sheets brighter than sunshine. He could fill a canning jar with leaves and petals so when you lifted the lid a fine perfume flooded your senses. White bodices and pantalettes danced around George on my line. He was sweet with the neighbor children. Taught the girls to crochet. Showed the boys a seed he said held a worm cupped hands warmed so it wriggled and set the seed to twitching. Gave them skills and wonders. Knelt with me at bedtime. He was the child the good Lord gave and took away before I got more than the twinkle of a glimpse at the man he was going to be. It happened one Saturday afternoon. George was holding a black-eyed Susan, talking about how the seed this flower grew from carried a message from a flower that bloomed a million years ago, and how this flower would send the message on to a flower that was going to bloom in a million more years. Praise Jesus, I'll never forget it. He left to find a teach that knew more than he knew. I give him my Bible. I keep his letters in the bureau, tied with a bow. He always sends a dried flower.

Ostrich and Lark started each morning together at first light, day in and day out. And they parted at nightfall. Every day they nibbled an ongoing meal: a few seeds here, a few seeds there; for Ostrich, the occasional lizard. All day the sun glared out of cloudless blue. Every day, all day, over the cidada’s drone, a drizzle of buzzings fell, and a downpour of birdsong. Hornbill, Bee-eater, Hoopoe, Diederik, Mousebird, Whydah, Canary: from gray-light-come to last-light-gone, the fancy-dressed suitors of the veld warbled their rain-shower jazz. But Ostrich was silent. Lark sang the first song of the day, perched tall, slender, the tawny brown on a termite castle or a low branch of a camel thorn tree. But Ostrich was silent. When Lark sang, he flickered his wings, and his white throat feathers trembled. All day Lark sang, standing still or flitting, his open wings vermillion-spangled. But Ostrich was silent. At dusk Lark sought his hidden nest on the ground. Ostrich sat down under an acacia tree and tucked his head under one of his black-and-white wings. Sometimes he dreamed of flying. Sometimes he dreamed of singing the sky full of stars. Sometimes he dreamed of the green season, drinking caught water, and drinking, and drinking. At first light, Lark called, and together they started their day. One evening, as the great red sun sank toward the tree-spiked horizon and the birds swooped to their nests; as the plant eaters gathered at full alert and the meat eaters woke to prowl; as the gates of night opened to the dark, Ostrich fluttered his billowy wings. He stretched his graceful neck, closed his eyes, and TWOO-WOO-WOOOT Ostrich found his voice, a voice part lion’s roar, part foghorn, part old man trumpeting into his handkerchief. Ostrich was booming! Which is what ostriches do. The veld fell silent. And Ostrich boomed like thunderheads on the horizon. Ostrich boomed like the rainstorm that ends the dusty months of thirst. Ostrich boomed like the promise of jubilant green, like the promise of birth. Ostrich boomed Lark right off his perch! Lark flew up to an Ostrich-high branch and looked at his friend with a big WOW in his eyes. Ostrich had found his voice at last, his own beauty, his big, terrific self.

Which reminds me of another knock-on-wood memory. I was cycling with a male friend, through a small midwestern town. We came to a 4-way stop and stopped, chatting. As we started again, a rusty old pick-up truck, ignoring the stop sign, hurricaned past scant inches from our front wheels. My partner called, “Hey, that was a 4-way stop!” The truck driver, stringy blond hair a long fringe under his brand-name beer cap, looked back and yelled, “You fucking niggers!” And sped off. My friend and I looked at each other and shook our heads. We remounted our bikes and headed out of town. We were pedaling through a clear blue afternoon between two fields of almost-ripened wheat bordered by cornflowers and Queen Anne’s lace when we heard an unmuffled motor, a honk-honking. We stopped, closed ranks, made fists. It was the same truck. It pulled over. A tall, very much in shape young white guy slid out: greasy jeans, homemade finger tattoos, probably a Marine Corps boot-camp footlockerful of martial arts techniques. “What did you say back there!” he shouted. My friend said, “I said it was a 4-way stop. You went through it.” “And what did I say?” the white guy asked. “You said: ‘You fucking niggers.’” The afternoon froze. “Well,” said the white guy, shoving his hands into his pockets and pushing dirt around with the pointed toe of his boot, “I just want to say I’m sorry.” He climbed back into his truck and drove away.

I have no answer to the blank inequity of a four-year-old dying of cancer. I saw her on t.v. and wept with my mouth full of meatloaf. I constantly flash on disasters now; red lights shout Warning.Danger. everywhere I look. I buckle him in, but what if a car with a grille like a sharkbite roared up out of the road? I feed him square meals but what if the fist of his heart should simply fall open? I carried him safely as long as I could, but now he's a runaway on the dangerous highway. Warning.Danger. I've started to pray. But the dangerous highway curves through blue evenings when I hold his yielding hand and snip his miniscule nails with my vicious-looking scissors. I carry him around like an egg in a spoon, and I remember a porcelain fawn, a best friend's trust, my broken faith in myself. It's not my grace that keeps me erect as the sidewalk clatters downhill under my rollerskate wheels. Sometimes I lie awake troubled by this thought: It's not so simple to give a child birth; you also have to give it death, the jealous fairy's christening gift. I've always pictured my own death as a closed door, a black room, a breathless leap from the mountain top with time to throw out my arms, lift my head, and see, in the instant my heart stops, a whole galaxy of blue. I imagined I'd forget, in the cessation of feeling, while the guilt of my lifetime floated away like a nylon nightgown, and that I'd fall into clean, fresh forgiveness. Ah, but the death I've given away is more mine than the one I've kept: from my hand the poisoned apple, from my bow the mistletoe dart. Then I think of Mama, her bountiful breasts. When I was a child, I really swear, Mama's kisses could heal. I remember her promise, and whisper it over my sweet son's sleep: When you float to the bottom, child, like a mote down a sunbeam, you'll see me from a trillion miles away: my eyes looking up to you, my arms outstretched for you like night.

for Daniel “Chappie” James, General USAF and for the 332d Fighter Group Being black in America was the Original Catch, so no one was surprised by 22: The segregated airstrips, separate camps. They did the jobs they’d been trained to do. Black ground crews kept them in the air; black flight surgeons kept them alive; the whole Group removed their headgear when another pilot died. They were known by their names: “Ace” and “Lucky,” “Sky-hawk Johnny,” “Mr. Death.” And by their positions and planes. Red Leader to Yellow Wing-man, do you copy? If you could find a fresh egg you bought it and hid it in your dopp-kit or your boot until you could eat it alone. On the night before a mission you gave a buddy your hiding-places as solemnly as a man dictating his will. There’s a chocolate bar in my Bible; my whiskey bottle is inside my bedroll. In beat-up Flying Tigers that had seen action in Burma, they shot down three German jets. They were the only outfit in the American Air Corps to sink a destroyer with fighter planes. Fighter planes with names like “By Request.” Sometimes the radios didn’t even work. They called themselves “Hell from Heaven.” This Spookwaffe. My father’s old friends. It was always maximum effort: A whole squadron of brother-men raced across the tarmac and mounted their planes. My tent-mate was a guy named Starks. The funny thing about me and Starks was that my air mattress leaked, and Starks’ didn’t. Every time we went up, I gave my mattress to Starks and put his on my cot. One day we were strafing a train. Strafing’s bad news: you have to fly so low and slow you’re a pretty clear target. My other wing-man and I exhausted our ammunition and got out. I recognized Starks by his red tail and his rudder’s trim-tabs. He couldn’t pull up his nose. He dived into the train and bought the farm. I found his chocolate, three eggs, and a full fifth of his hoarded-up whiskey. I used his mattress for the rest of my tour. It still bothers me, sometimes: I was sleeping on his breath.

It was like soul-kissing, the way the words filled my mouth as Mrs. Purdy read from her desk. All the other kids zoned an hour ahead to 3:15, but Mrs. Purdy and I wandered lonely as clouds borne by a breeze off Mount Parnassus. She must have seen the darkest eyes in the room brim: The next day she gave me a poem she’d chosen especially for me to read to the all except for me white class. She smiled when she told me to read it, smiled harder, said oh yes I could. She smiled harder and harder until I stood and opened my mouth to banjo playing darkies, pickaninnies, disses and dats. When I finished my classmates stared at the floor. We walked silent to the buses, awed by the power of words.

It's the ragged source of memory, a tarpaper-shingled bungalow whose floors tilt toward the porch, whose back yard ends abruptly in a weedy ravine. Nothing special: a chain of three bedrooms and a long side porch turned parlor where my great-grandfather, Pomp, smoked every evening over the news, a long sunny kitchen where Annie, his wife, measured cornmeal dreaming through the window across the ravine and up to Shelby Hill where she had borne their spirited, high-yellow brood. In the middle bedroom's hard, high antique double bed the ghost of Aunt Jane, the laundress who bought the house in 1872, though I call with all my voices, does not appear. Nor does Pomp's ghost, with whom one of my cousins believes she once had a long and intimate unspoken midnight talk. He told her, though they'd never met, that he loved her; promised her raw widowhood would heal without leaving a scar. The conveniences in an enclosed corner of the slant-floored back side porch were the first indoor plumbing in town. Aunt Jane put them in, incurring the wrath of the woman who lived in the big house next door. Aunt Jane left the house to Annie, whose mother she had known as a slave on the plantation, so Annie and Pomp could move their children into town, down off Shelby Hill. My grandmother, her brother, and five sisters watched their faces change slowly in the oval mirror on the wall outside the door into teachers' faces, golden with respect. Here Geneva, the randy sister, damned their colleges, daubing her quicksilver breasts with gifts of perfume. As much as love, as much as a visit to the grave of a known ancestor, the homeplace moves me not to silence but to righteous, praise Jesus song: Oh, catfish and turnip greens, hot-water cornbread and grits. Oh, musty, much-underlined Bibles; generations lost to be found, to be found.

Dr. L. H. Pammel Hybridization, cross-breeding, evolution: He takes to new theories like a puppy takes to ice cream. We whisper that our Green-Thumb Boy is the black Mendel, that Darwin would have made good use of Carver's eyes. So clear his gift for observation: the best collector I've ever known. I think we have an entirely new species of Pseudocercospora. And always in his threadbare lapel a flower. Even in January. I've never asked how. We had doubts about giving him a class to teach, but he's done a bang-up job with the greenhouse. His students see the light of genius through the dusky window of his skin. Just yesterday, that new boy, what's-his-name, from Arkansas, tried to raise a ruckus when Carver put his dinner tray down. He cleared his throat, stared, rattled his own tray, scraped his chair legs in a rush to move away. Carver ate on in silence. Then the boys at the table the new boy had moved to cleared their throats, rattled their trays and scraped their chair legs as they got up and moved to Carver's table. Something about the man does that, raises the best in you. I've never asked what. I guess I'll put his name next to mine on that article I'm sending out.

My master/father sent me up from South Carolina to Boston as a nine-year-old. My mother's illiterate silence has been a death. I wonder if she still labors in his fields. His sister, dutiful but cold as snow, gave me a little room in her house, below the stairs with the Irish servants, who hated me for the fatal flaw in my genealogy. For the first time in my life I am at home in this bevy of scholars, my first family. Here, the wallpapers welcome me into every room, and the mirrors see me, not my pedigree. My sisters, Jerusha, Emilia, Elizabeth ... But Mama's unlettered silence is a death.