Botanical Fanaticism

My ancestors weren’t hippies, cotton precluded fascination with flowers. I don’t remember communes, I remember ghettos. The riots were real, not products of hallucinogens. Free love had been at Redbones since black unemployment and credit saturation. The white women my mother cleaned for didn’t notice she had changed. I guess it was a small event, a resurrected African jumping out the gap in her front teeth. I guess it looked like a cockroach; that’s what she was supposed to have, not dignity. My mother just couldn’t get excited about the Beatles, those mops she swilled in ammonia everyday on their heads. Besides, she didn’t work like a dog but like a woman; they aren’t the same. The hair was growing long for the same reasons Pinocchio’s nose did. I can think only of a lesbian draping crepe paper chains over my head to make a black Rapunzel possible; that’s how a white woman tried to lift my burdens. At the time I didn’t reject her for being lesbian or white but for both burdens. That was when I didn’t want Ivory soap to be what cleaned me, made me presentable to society. All the suds I’d seen were white, they still are but who cares? I’m more interested in how soap dwindles in my hand, under the faucet. I’m old enough to remember blocks of ice, old enough or poor enough. I remember chipping away at it, broken glass all over the floor. Later in the riots, the broken glass of looting tattled how desperate people were to keep cool. There are roses now in my mother’s yard. Sometimes she cuts them, sets them in Pepsi bottles throughout her rooms. She is, I admit, being sentimental. Looting her heart. My father who planted them is gone. That mop in the corner is his cane growing roots.