Toi Derricotte

That time my grandmother dragged me through the perfume aisles at Saks, she held me up by my arm, hissing, “Stand up,” through clenched teeth, her eyes bright as a dog’s cornered in the light. She said it over and over, as if she were Jesus, and I were dead. She had been solid as a tree, a fur around her neck, a light-skinned matron whose car was parked, who walked on swirling marble and passed through brass openings—in 1945. There was not even a black elevator operator at Saks. The saleswoman had brought velvet leggings to lace me in, and cooed, as if in the service of all grandmothers. My grandmother had smiled, but not hungrily, not like my mother who hated them, but wanted to please, and they had smiled back, as if they were wearing wooden collars. When my legs gave out, my grandmother dragged me up and held me like God holds saints by the roots of the hair. I begged her to believe I couldn’t help it. Stumbling, her face white with sweat, she pushed me through the crowd, rushing away from those eyes that saw through her clothes, under her skin, all the way down to the transparent genes confessing.

he came in his seedy brown jacket smelling of paint.   all thumbs, a man stumbling over his own muscles, unable to hold some part of himself and rock it, gently.   she gave up, seeing him come in the door, wanting to show him her flat belly just an hour before, looking at her own corpse in the mirror.   she lay there reduced, neither virgin nor mother. it had been decided.   the winter was too cold in the garage. they would live with her mother.   the old bedroom was already prepared, cleaned, the door opened.   the solitary twin bed remained; he would sleep on the porch. she looked at him and tried to feel her way into the body of a woman, a thing which has to be taken care of, held safely in his arms. she lay there, trying to hold on to what she had, knowing she had to let it go.

Every town with black Catholics has a St. Peter Claver’s. My first was nursery school. Miss Maturin made us fold our towels in a regulation square and nap on army cots. No mother questioned; no child sassed. In blue pleated skirts, pants, and white shirts, we stood in line to use the open toilets and conserved light by walking in darkness. Unsmiling, mostly light-skinned, we were the children of the middle class, preparing to take our parents’ places in a world that would demand we fold our hands and wait. They said it was good for us, the bowl of soup, its pasty whiteness; I learned to swallow and distrust my senses. On holy cards St. Peter’s face is olive-toned, his hair near kinky; I thought he was one of us who pass between the rich and poor, the light and dark. Now I read he was “a Spanish Jesuit priest who labored for the salvation of the African Negroes and the abolition of the slave trade.” I was tricked again, robbed of my patron, and left with a debt to another white man.

A certain doubleness, by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. — Henry David Thoreau i I didn’t choose the word — it came pouring out of my throat like the water inside a drowned man. I didn’t even push on my stomach. I just lay there, dead (like he told me) & “I” came out. (I’m sorry, Father. “I” wasn’t my fault.) ii (How did “I” feel?) Felt almost alive when I’d get in, like the Trojan horse. I’d sit on the bench (I didn’t look out of the eyeholes so I wouldn’t see the carnage). iii (Is “I” speaking another language?) I said, “I” is dangerous. But at the time I couldn’t tell which one of us was speaking. iv (Why “I”?) “I” was the closest I could get to the one I loved (who I believe was smothered in her playpen). Perhaps she gave birth to “I” before she died. v I deny “I,” & the closer I get, the more “I” keeps receding. vi I found “I” in the bulrushes raised by a dirtiness beyond imagination. I loved “I” like a stinky bed. While I hid in a sentence with a bunch of other words. vii (What is “I”?) A transmission through space? A dismemberment of the spirit? More like opening the chest & throwing the heart out with the gizzards. viii (Translation) Years later “I” came back wanting to be known. Like the unspeakable name of God, I tried my 2 letters, leaving the “O” for breath, like in the Bible, missing. ix I am not the “I” in my poems. “I” is the net I try to pull me in with. x I try to talk with “I,” but “I” doesn’t trust me. “I” says I am slippery by nature. xi I made “I” do what I wasn’t supposed to do, what I didn’t want to do — defend me, stand as an example, stand in for what I was hiding. I treated “I” as if “I” wasn’t human. xii They say that what I write belongs to me, that it is my true experience. They think it validates my endurance. But why pretend? “I” is a kind of terminal survival. xiii I didn’t promise “I” anything & in that way “I” is the one I was most true to.

A professor invites me to his “Black Lit” class; they’re reading Larson’s Passing. One of the black students says, “Sometimes light-skinned blacks think they can fool other blacks, but I can always tell,” looking right through me. After I tell them I am black, I ask the class, “Was I passing when I was just sitting here, before I told you?” A white woman shakes her head desperately, as if I had deliberately deceived her. She keeps examining my face, then turning away as if she hopes I’ll disappear. Why presume “passing” is based on what I leave out and not what she fills in? In one scene in the book, in a restaurant, she’s “passing,” though no one checked her at the door— “Hey, you black?” My father, who looked white, told me this story: every year when he’d go to get his driver’s license, the man at the window filling out the form would ask, “White or black?” pencil poised, without looking up. My father wouldn’t pass, but he might use silence to trap a devil. When he didn’t speak, the man would look up at my father’s face. “What did he write?” my father quizzed me.

nun meets me at the station,    first month with carol and dick reynolds.set the table.clean the kitchen.vacuum. thank god she didn't ask me to take care of the children. i dry  dishes in the afternoon.   watch her can apples from the backyard, put them in the cellar dark to save for winter. why is everything so quiet?   why does the man come home from school everyday at 3:30 and read the paper?   why a different casserole on the table every night and everyone eats one portion and one portion only?  why is there always enough, but never too much. . .

I. Tonight, I look, thunderstruck at the gold head of my grandchild. Almost asleep, he buries his feet between my thighs; his little straw eyes close in the near dark. I smell the warmth of his raw slightly foul breath, the new death waiting to rot inside him. Our breaths equalize our heartbeats; every muscle of the chest uncoils, the arm bones loosen in the nest of nerves. I think of the peace of walking through the house, pointing to the name of this, the name of that, an educator of a new man. Mother. Grandmother. Wise Snake-woman who will show the way; Spider-woman whose black tentacles hold him precious. Or will tear off his head, her teeth over the little husband, the small fist clotted in trust at her breast. This morning, looking at the face of his father, I remembered how, an infant, his face was too dark, nose too broad, mouth too wide. I did not look in that mirror and see the face that could save me from my own darkness. Did he, looking in my eye, see what I turned from: my own dark grandmother bending over gladioli in the field, her shaking black hand defenseless at the shining cock of flower? I wanted that face to die, to be reborn in the face of a white child. I wanted the soul to stay the same, for I loved to death, to damnation and God-death, the soul that broke out of me. I crowed: My Son! My Beautiful! But when I peeked in the basket, I saw the face of a black man. Did I bend over his nose and straighten it with my fingers like a vine growing the wrong way? Did he feel my hand in malice? Generations we prayed and fucked for this light child, the shining god of the second coming; we bow down in shame and carry the children of the past in our wallets, begging forgiveness. II. A picture in a book, a lynching. The bland faces of men who watch a Christ go up in flames, smiling, as if he were a hooked fish, a felled antelope, some wild thing tied to boards and burned. His charring body gives off light—a halo burns out of him. His face scorched featureless; the hair matted to the scalp like feathers. One man stands with his hand on his hip, another with his arm slung over the shoulder of a friend, as if this moment were large enough to hold affection. III. How can we wake from a dream we are born into, that shines around us, the terrible bright air? Having awakened, having seen our own bloody hands, how can we ask forgiveness, bring before our children the real monster of their nightmares? The worst is true. Everything you did not want to know.

I love the way the black ants use their dead. They carry them off like warriors on their steel backs. They spend hours struggling, lifting, dragging (it is not grisly as it would be for us, to carry them back to be eaten), so that every part will be of service. I think of my husband at his father’s grave— the grass had closed over the headstone, and the name had disappeared. He took out his pocket knife and cut the grass away, he swept it with his handkerchief to make it clear. “Is this the way we’ll be forgotten?” And he bent down over the grave and wept.

my dad's going to give me a self back. i've made an altar called The Altar for Healing the Father & Child, & asked him what i could do for him so he would do nice for me. he said i should stop saying bad things about him &, since i've said just about everything bad i can think of &, since . . . well, no, i change my mind, i can't promise him that. but even healing is negotiable, so, if he's in heaven (or trying to get in), it wouldn't hurt to be in touch. the first thing i want is to be able to enjoy the little things again—for example, to stop peeling down the list of things i have to do & enjoy this poem, enjoy how, last night, scouring the cupboards, i found a can of sardines that must be five years old &, since i was home after a long trip &, since it was 1 a.m. & i hadn't eaten dinner &, since there was no other protein in the house, i cranked it open & remembered that my dad loved sardines—right before bed—with onions & mustard. i can't get into my dad's old heart, but i remember that look on his face when he would load mustard on a saltine cracker, lay a little fish on top, & tip it with a juicy slice of onion. then he'd look up from his soiled fingers with one eyebrow raised, a rakish grin that said—all for me!—as if he was getting away with murder.

In the backyard of our house on Norwood, there were five hundred steel cages lined up, each with a wooden box roofed with tar paper; inside, two stories, with straw for a bed. Sometimes the minks would pace back and forth wildly, looking for a way out; or else they’d hide in their wooden houses, even when we’d put the offering of raw horse meat on their trays, as if they knew they were beautiful and wanted to deprive us. In spring the placid kits drank with glazed eyes. Sometimes the mothers would go mad and snap their necks. My uncle would lift the roof like a god who might lift our roof, look down on us and take us out to safety. Sometimes one would escape. He would go down on his hands and knees, aiming a flashlight like a bullet of light, hoping to catch the orange gold of its eyes. He wore huge boots, gloves so thick their little teeth couldn’t bite through. “They’re wild,” he’d say. “Never trust them.” Each afternoon when I put the scoop of raw meat rich with eggs and vitamins on their trays, I’d call to each a greeting. Their small thin faces would follow as if slightly curious. In fall they went out in a van, returning sorted, matched, their skins hanging down on huge metal hangers, pinned by their mouths. My uncle would take them out when company came and drape them over his arm—the sweetest cargo. He’d blow down the pelts softly and the hairs would part for his breath and show the shining underlife which, like the shining of the soul, gives us each character and beauty.