Nikky Finney

I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, there’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and accept the Negro [pronounced Nigra] into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches. —Strom Thurmond, South Carolina Senator and Presidential Candidate for the States’ Rights Party, 1948 I said, “I’m gonna fight Thurmond from the mountain to the sea.” —Modjeska Monteith Simkins, Civil Rights Matriarch, South Carolina, 1948 The youngest has been married off. He is as tall as Abraham Lincoln. Here, on his wedding day, he flaunts the high spinning laugh of a newly freed slave. I stand above him, just off the second-floor landing, watching the celebration unfold. Uncle-cousins, bosom buddies, convertible cars of nosy paramours, strolling churlish penny- pinchers pour onto the mansion estate. Below, Strom Thurmond is dancing with my mother. The favorite son of South Carolina has already danced with the giddy bride and the giddy bride’s mother. More women await: Easter dressy, drenched in caramel, double exposed, triple cinched, lined up, leggy, ready. I refuse to leave the porch. If I walk down I imagine he will extend his hand, assume I am next in his happy darky line, #427 on his dance card. His history and mine, burnt cork and blackboard chalk, concentric, pancaked, one face, two histories, slow dragging, doing the nasty. My father knows all this. Daddy’s Black Chief Justice legs straddle the boilerplate carapace of the CSS H. L. Hunley, lost Confederate submarine, soon to be found just off the coast of Charleston. He keeps it fully submerged by applying the weight of every treatise he has ever written against the death penalty of South Carolina. Chanting “Briggs v. Elliott,” he keeps the ironside door of the submarine shut. No hands. His eyes are a Black father’s beacon, search- lights blazing for the married-off sons, and on the unmarried, whale-eyed nose-in-book daughter, born unmoored, quiet, yellow, strategically placed under hospital lights to fully bake. The one with the most to lose. There will be no trouble. Still, he chain- smokes. A burning stick of mint & Indian leaf seesaws between his lips. He wants me to remember that trouble is a fire that runs like a staircase up then down. Even on a beautiful day in June. I remember the new research just out: What the Negro gave America Chapter 9,206: Enslaved Africans gifted porches to North America. Once off the boats they were told, then made, to build themselves a place—to live. They build the house that will keep them alive. Rather than be the bloody human floret on yet another southern tree, they imagine higher ground. They build landings with floor enough to see the trouble coming. Their arced imaginations nail the necessary out into the floral air. On the backs and fronts of twentypenny houses, a watching place is made for the ones who will come tipping with torch & hog tie through the quiet woods, hoping to hang them as decoration in the porcupine hair of longleaf. The architecture of Black people is sui generis. This is architecture dreamed by the enslaved: Their design will be stolen. Their wits will outlast gold. My eyes seek historical rest from the kiss- kiss theater below; Strom Thurmond’s it’s-never-too-late-to-forgive-me chivaree. I search the tops of yellow pine while my fingers reach, catch, pinch my father’s determined-to-rise smoke. Long before AC African people did the math: how to cool down the hot air of South Carolina? If I could descend, without being trotted out by some roughrider driven by his submarine dreams, this is what I’d take my time and scribble into the three-tiered, white créme wedding cake: Filibuster. States’ Rights. The Grand Inquisition of the great Thurgood Marshall. This wedding reception would not have been possible without the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (opposed by you-know-who). The Dixiecrat senator has not worn his sandy seersucker fedora to the vows. The top of Strom Thurmond’s bald head reveals a birthmark tattooed in contrapposto pose:Segregation Forever. All my life he has been the face of hatred; the blue eyes of the Confederate flag, the pasty bald of white men pulling wooly heads up into the dark skirts of trees, the sharp, slobbering, amber teeth of German shepherds, still clenched inside the tissue-thin, (still marching), band-leader legs of Black schoolteachers, the single- minded pupae growing between the legs of white boys crossing the tracks, ready to force Black girls into fifth-grade positions, Palmetto state-sanctioned sex 101. I didn’t want to dance with him. My young cousin arrives at my elbow. Her beautiful lips the color of soft-skin mangoes. She pulls, teasing the stitches of my satin bridesmaid gown, “You better go on down there and dance with Strom— while he still has something left.” I don’t tell her it is unsouthern for her to call him by his first name, as if they are familiar. I don’t tell her: To bear witness to marriage is to believe that everything moving through the sweet wedding air can be confidently,left— to Love. I stand on the landing high above the beginnings of Love, holding a plastic champagne flute, drinking in the warm June air of South Carolina. I hear my youngest brother’s top hat joy. Looking down I find him, deep in the giddy crowd, modern, integrated, interpretive. For ten seconds I consider dancing with Strom. His Confederate hands touch every shoulder, finger, back that I love. I listen to the sound of Black laughter shimmying. All worry floats beyond the gurgling submarine bubbles, the white railing, every drop of champagne air. I close my eyes and Uncle Freddie appears out of a baby’s breath of fog. (The dead are never porch bound.) He moves with ease where I cannot. He walks out on the rice-thrown air, heaving a lightning bolt instead of a wave. Suddenly, there is a table set, complete with 1963 dining room stars, they twinkle twinkle up & behind him. Thelonious, Martin, Malcolm, Nina, Dakota, all mouths Negro wide & open have come to sing me down. His tattered almanac sleeps curled like a wintering slug in his back pocket. His dark Dogon eyes jet to the scene below, then zoom past me until they are lost in the waning sugilite sky. Turning in the shadows of the wheat fields, he whispers a truth plucked from the foreword tucked in his back pocket: Veritas: Black people will forgive you quicker than you can say Orangeburg Massacre. History does not keep books on the handiwork of slaves. But the enslaved who built this Big House, long before I arrived for this big wedding, knew the power of a porch. This native necessity of nailing down a place, for the cooling off of air, in order to lift the friendly, the kindly, the so politely, the in-love-ly, jubilant, into the arms of the grand peculiar, for the greater good of the public spectacular: us giving us away.

(for E) I stop my hand midair. If I touch her there everything about me will be true. The New World discovered without pick or ax. I will be what Brenda Jones was stoned for in 1969. I saw it as a girl but didn’t know I was taking in myself. My hand remembers, treading the watery room, just behind the rose-veiled eyes of memory. Alone in the yard tucked beneath the hood of her car, lucky clover all about her feet, green tea-sweet necklace for her mud-pie crusty work boots. She fends off their spit & words with silent two-handed twists & turns of her socket wrench. A hurl of sticks & stones and only me to whisper for her, from sidewalk far, break my bones. A grown woman in grease-pocket overalls inside her own sexy transmission despite the crowding of hurled red hots. Beneath the hood of her candy-apple Camaro: souped, shiny, low to the ground. The stars over the Atlantic are dangling salt crystals. The room at the Seashell Inn is $20 a night; special winter off-season rate. No one else here but us and the night clerk, five floors below, alone with his cherished stack of Spiderman. My lips are red snails in a primal search for every constellation hiding in the sky of your body. My hand waits for permission, for my life to agree to be changed, forever. Can Captain Night Clerk hear my fingers tambourining you there on the moon? Won’t he soon climb the stairs and bam! on the hood of this car? You are a woman with film reels for eyes. Years of long talking have brought us to the land of the body. Our skin is one endless prayer bead of brown. If my hand ever lands, I will fly past dreaming Australian Aborigines. The old claw hammer and monkey wrench that flew at Brenda Jones will fly across the yard of ocean at me. A grease rag will be thrust into my painter’s pants against my will. I will never be able to wash or peel any of this away. Before the night is over someone I do not know will want the keys to my ’55 silver Thunderbird. He will chase me down the street. A gaggle of spooked hens will fly up in my grandmother’s yard, never to lay another egg, just as I am jump- ed, kneed, pulled finally to the high ground of sweet clover.

We were a Colored Clan of Kinfolk Who threw soil      not salt Over our shoulders Who tendered close the bible Who grew and passed around the almanac at night So we would know What to plant at first light Black soil and sweet brown sorghum From the every morning biscuits Mama Susan fixed Dripping and mixing Up under our fingernails A secret salve Just like any other Living simple And keeping to our proud selves Quite aware of night riders Quite aware of men with Politicious smiles Cologned with kerosene and match Aware of just whose feet Walked across our tin roofs at night We were such light sleepers Such long distance believers We were a family pregnant Whose water had broke And for once there was ham money ’Bacca money So we thought to do better by ourselves To begin our next row We would go and get him Because he was medically degreed in baby bringing Because he was young and white and handsome And because of that Had been neighbor to more knowledge Than us way back behind The country’s proud but inferior lines And because he came with his papers in his pocket So convincing      so soon After his ivy graduation Asking us hadn’t we heard Telling us times had changed And the midwife wasn’t safe anymore Even though we had all been caught By tried and true Black Grannies Who lay ax blade sharp side up And water pan underneath the bed To cut the pain To cool the fever We were a Pregnant Clan of Kinfolk Caught with water running down our legs Old family say they remember Going to fetch him Telling him that it was time That he should come now But he didn’t show right away Not right away But came when he wanted The next day After his breakfast But what more Could we colored country folk ever want Even if we had to watch the road all night for him Even if we had to not let her push too hard When he finally came He had his papers on him Something with one of those pretty shiny seals Old family say they can remember Somethin’ just wasn’t right But we opened the screen for him anyway Trusting And tendering close what the Good Book Had told us all our lives to do Then we made him a path Where he put his hand up      then inside My grandmother’s womb Her precious private pleasing place Somewhere he probably didn’t want to touch Then he pulled my daddy through Somebody he probably didn’t care to reach for And from the first he pulled him wrong And wrong Shattered his collarbone And snapped his soft baby foot in half And smashed the cartilage in his infant hand Wringing Their own sun baked arms Old timey family Remember him well Say they knew somethin’ wasn’t right As he came through the door A day later His breakfast digested now Somethin’ just wasn’t right How he had two waters on him One sweet      one sour-mash One trying to throw snow quilt over the other As he un-carefully As drunkenly He with his papers on him still Stood there turning a brown baby into blue Un-magically And right before our eyes Hope and Pray Hope and Pray Then he packed his bag and      left With all of his official training And gathered up gold stars      left The Virginia land of Cumberland County He left and forgot He left and didn’t remember The afterbirth inside Carlene Godwin Finney To clabber Gangrene Close down Her place Her precious private pleasing place To fill the house to the rafters Up past the dimpled tin roof With a rotting smell That stayed for nine days That mortgaged a room In our memories And did not die with her We were a Brown and Pregnant Family And he would’ve remembered his schoolin’ And left his bottle Recollected his manners And brought his right mind Had another klan called him to their bedside He would’ve come right away He would’ve never had liquor on his breath If the color of my daddy’s broken limbs Had matched the color of his own but We were a Colored Clan of Kinfolk We should’ve met him at the door Should’ve told him lean first into the rusty screen Made him open up his mouth and blow Breathe out right there Into all of our brown and lined up faces In wait of his worthiness Then just for good measure Should’ve made him blow once again Into Papa Josh’s truth telling jar Just to be sure Should’ve let Mama Sally Then Aunt Nanny Then lastly Aunt Mary Give him the final once over And hold his sterile hands Down to the firelight to check Just like she checked our own every night Before supper Before we were allowed to sit At her very particular table We could’ve let Aunt Ira clutch him by his chin Enter and leave through her eyes Just like how she came and went through us Everyday at her leisure She would’ve took care to notice As she traveled all up and through him Any shaking      any sweating And caught his incapable belligerent incompetence In time Oh Jesus We should’ve let Grandpop Robert Have him from the first Should’ve let him pick him up By the back of his pants And swirl him around Just like he picked us up And swirled us around Anytime he caught us lying or lazy Or being less than what we were We should’ve let Grandpop Loose on him from the start And he would’ve held him up High eye to the sun And looked straight through him Just like he held us up And then we would have known first Like he always knew first And brought to us The very map of his heart Then we would have known Just what his intentions were With our Carlene Before we knew his name Or cared about his many degrees Before he dared reach up      then inside Our family’s brown globe While we stood there Some of us throwing good black soil With one hand Some of us tending close The Good Book with the other Believing and trusting We were doing better By this one Standing there Waterfalls running Screaming whitewater rapids Down our pants legs Down our pantaloons To our many selves All the while Praying hard That maybe we were wrong (please make us wrong) One hundred proof Smelled the same as Isopropyl