but to shed the skin, you get my meaning, the tainted skin of the injuring party.
Just to act, was the glorious thing.
And those so grievously harmed, who do the forgiving, do so, that they not be deformed by the lie, must call on reserves not meant to be tapped except for a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, a sudden death or what disclaimers call Acts-of-the-Almighty such as a twister tearing over the land on which a plain frame house stands, or if, in town, it will be of cinderblock, a yard of raked dirt, a stand of day lilies, their withering heads lopped off.
But in this case, the reserves are needed every day, every hour of every day, because the warp is everywhere, because one is supposed to look at one’s reflection and see an inferior, uncomely, unwantable thing, because those are the terms for living, that is the conditioning. It is in fact, the law.
And a most elaborate system has been built up to ensure that the manchild and the womanchild see a lesser face than the one that is there. It requires the long crooked arm of enforcement, the duplication of services and facilities, with one set being far superior to the other set, which of course does not even aim to duplicate, but underscores the shoddiness of the second set of services and facilities, that they be “deservedly,” emphatically unequal.
So, you will find the answers on page 51; though the answers are etched in bloodied ink on paper that has been torn out by your tormentors and dragged into a crawdad hole. Being a measure of society’s distortion, in truth, the answers could have provided little inspiration for the rest of your life. Rather, their absence provides the inspiration, as a pop bottle flies toward a lightbulb and the Savoys commence stomping in the basement.
It also entails the complicity of the leaders of the faithful who are obliged to advance this doctrine as the Word of the Almighty, some of whom probably are believers in this malevolent reading, while others sign on for efficacy’s sake and others by dint of intimidation.
And it enjoins the participation of merchants and professionals, and law enforcers and the extralegal forces of men known as Whitecappers, Night Riders, Klansmen, and Birchers [the latter termed by its local spokesman to be strictly an educational society dedicated to the defeat of communism]; men who openly congregate at a service station owned by the deputy or a city barbershop or outbuilding of a big farm to conspire and collaborate or call themselves Concerned Citizens and so can assemble in public buildings or even the Legion Hut, the swell green slope of which has been used as a setting for a cross in flames, facing the road, you see where I’m coming from, public and semipublic places from which more than half the population is blatantly barred.
DEAR ABBY,
When Daryl and I were first married, he asked me to IRON his undershorts. His mother always did. At first I didn’t mind because we had no children, but now have two, and I could save a lot of time tossing them in the dryer and folding them, but I tried that once and I never heard the end of it. Daryl says he could “feel” the difference. What would you do?
DEAR TOO MUCH IRONING,
I would iron his underwear. You are wasting more energy complaining and arguing than it takes to iron seven pair of shorts once a week.
Everybody has a problem. What’s yours.
+ + +
When I show the granddaughter of my friend’s babysitter a picture of the swimming pool taken when it was built in 1935, printed in a special promotional edition of the paper to entice [white] people to move to the Jewel of the Delta, her eyes flash/ fill/ clear:
We were not allowed to swim there/We had never seen the dressing rooms/ We had never been near the locker room/ We had never seen the lights on their playing field except from the other side of Division.
+ + +
In Big Tree
People are reading their Bibles in bed
Their laces hang by their walking shoes
People are dreaming money semen
And boll weevils on the creep
Some could be soothed by a mourning dove
Some would be soothed by the Prince of Peace
UNDERTAKER: The night a threat wrapped in a brick came through that window, my mother, a mortician herself, said, Girl, forget calling the sheriff. Get the dustpan.
Some people want to lift you up and some are like a crawdad, they just want to drag you down.
[And there are those among the injured who cannot forgive the harm done because they have borne it since they opened their eyes, since the moment their perfectly good-seeing eyes made contact with the delusional eyes of their fellow citizens and lived to see this ignominy passed on; they cannot because the injury is inherently repugnant and because it feeds on a lie that appears to be alive and marked for service into perpetuity; so that not only must they endure its consequences, but so must their flesh, their blood, their firstborn.]
[Thus, the practice begins before the period of quickening before the crochet needle and catheter can be employed to prevent the quickening.]
[Where was it you wanted to bury this hatchet. Your land or mine.]
+ + +
V’s bush was sweet-betsy. I broke off a twig in her oldest daughter’s yard. Over the coming months, I break it over and over for a quick hit of camphor.
And offshore Camille brought rain that September. The year they put the kids under arrest and put them in the swimming pool.
King called “it” a disease, segregation. [Sounds contagious.]
It’s cradle work is what it is. It begins before the quickening.
When V ended up back in Kentucky after her expulsion from Big Tree, she kept a retired fighting cock. It was her only pleasure, Helmet. No one else could get near him.
Long before this black and white issue, she said she was going to make up a coat of arms and the motto on its heater would read:
I never knew what misery was till I came to Arkansas
Why wake up in this torpor—unless you happen to be from here. Which requires less than volition. It requires only inertia.
Or blood ties, where everyone you ever knew or were kin to lies buried.
Or, the long-lingering olfaction of home, whether from the faint cut of walnuts spoiled in the grass or a sour work shirt on a rotted railing. When the ones who are from here come home in the evening and get out of their car, and rise on tired legs, the barbecued night they smell is theirs—that exact streaked sky, that turned dirt, that crape myrtle, that dog chained to the clothesline.
+ + +
Love then, she was all but dying for, except the love of Catholic men, who did not live to love [from whom it was an article of faith that
