Marilyn Nelson

Five daughters, in the slant light on the porch, are bickering. The eldest has come home with new truths she can hardly wait to teach. She lectures them: the younger daughters search the sky, elbow each other's ribs, and groan. Five daughters, in the slant light on the porch and blue-sprigged dresses, like a stand of birch saplings whose leaves are going yellow-brown with new truths. They can hardly wait to teach, themselves, to be called "Ma'am," to march high-heeled across the hanging bridge to town. Five daughters. In the slant light on the porch Pomp lowers his paper for a while, to watch the beauties he's begotten with his Ann: these new truths they can hardly wait to teach. The eldest sniffs, "A lady doesn't scratch." The third snorts back, "Knock, knock: nobody home." The fourth concedes, "Well, maybe not in church. . . " Five daughters in the slant light on the porch.

for St. Mark's Episcopal, Good Friday 1999 In his careful welter of dried leaves and seeds, soil samples, quartz pebbles, notes-to-myself, letters, on Dr. Carver's bedside table next to his pocket watch, folded in Aunt Mariah's Bible: the Bill of Sale. Seven hundred dollars for a thirteen-year-old girl named Mary. He moves it from passage to favorite passage. Fifteen cents for every day she had lived. Three hundred fifty dollars for each son. No charge for two stillborn daughters buried out there with the Carvers' child. This new incandescent light makes his evening's reading unwaveringly easy, if he remembers to wipe his spectacles. He turns to the blossoming story of Abraham's dumbstruck luck, of Isaac's pure trust in his father's wisdom. Seven hundred dollars for all of her future. He shakes his head.

Great Creator, why did you make the peanut? —GWC Arachis Hypogaea may have been smuggled to North America by slaves who hid seeds of survival in their hair. Despite your nakedness, the chains, the stench, if white men did not eat you, you might come to a cruel land where, tended by moonlight and exhaustion, your seed might grow to be your children's manna in the wilderness. Arachis Hypogaea, or goober, an annual preferring warmth and sun, is an attractive plant, resembling clover. It bears flowers of two distinct genders: the staminate, or “male,” yellow, pretty, and the inconspicuous pistillate “female.” When fertilized, the pistillate turns down and corkscrews six inches into the ground. Each corkscrew, called a “peg,” grows one to four peanuts in the soil near the mother plant; each shell two of her shots at infinity. From the laboratory of a slave emerged a varied, balanced diet for the poor, stock foods, ink, paints, cosmetics, medicines ... Promise and purpose, the Ancestors' dream. “The Peanut Man,” we say, and laugh at him.