All the Songs We Sing, page 8
Between chores, she fiddles with the button,
Hoping they are never separated.
The Long Green was a true community.
Families, here for as far back as they know.
Here, after long hours in the fields or shops,
the enslaved people washed, sewed,
mended, cooked, collected oysters
And raised their own crops and children.
Here was harsh labor but also love.
Here were shackles but more importantly bonds
Sustained by spirits, sayings, superstitions, and songs.
These songs that reverberated in the woods
were lost on young Frederick Douglass,
But he later wrote of the haunting chants:
[R]evealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness …
Were tones loud, long and deep.
[T]hey breathed the prayer and complaint of souls
Boiling over with the bitterest anguish.
Every tone was a testimony against slavery,
And a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.
Was slumber the same refuge as song?
In an old brick building, in the long quarter,
Or in slave houses or huts. All crowded.
Little room or time to sleep.
And no beds, just planks or the bare floor—
As would have been the case in Africa—
And only one coarse blanket per adult.
All laid together, young and old,
Male and female, married and single.
God only knows what they prayed for
Or what they dreamed of at night.
The Question of Doctor Isaac Copper
Carole Boston Weatherford
How did you come to be owned
By the Lloyds? Were you kidnapped
Near the coast of Africa or far from it?
Did your father, the chief, send warriors to find you?
Were you loaded on a slave ship
From the Bight of Biafra—present-day Nigeria?
Was the year 1761 and the vessel
The Alexander that took 145 Africans
And delivered 110 to the port of Annapolis?
Could you have been in your mother’s womb?
Had you made the Middle Passage as a tot
Or were you old enough never to forget
The faces of the dead and dying Africans
Thrown overboard—almost one in four?
During the voyage, were you laid on your back
With other captives in the ship’s belly
Or spooned on your side among many tribes?
Were you Igbo?
What was your given name?
Were you taken first to the West Indies
To be broken in and then held in a barracoon
’Til traders greased you with palm oil for auction?
Did you come to another port,
Oxford perhaps, on a later ship—
The Success Packet, the Africa or the Providence?
Who were your gods then?
And what was your given name?
Or did you come along after slaveholders
Started buying females to produce
Babies who could grow up to work in the fields?
Are Jacob and Matt your brothers?
Were your parents or grandparents
Human cargo on the Dolphin, the Diana,
The Hunter Gally or the Fly?
Were you born here, Isaac?
Is Wye House all you know?
Isaac Copper I
Why I Am Called Doctor or Minister
Carole Boston Weatherford
When you are among the few
Who can remember the Motherland
Or who heard firsthand accounts of it,
You must keep watering those roots.
When you are the only one who knows for sure
That he descends from African royalty,
You must take the lead in teaching others,
Even if prayer is the only education slaves are allowed.
When you are the keeper of stories, cures, and rituals,
You must tell your children their heritage.
You must summon the power of shamans and healers
And the ancient wisdom of the elders.
When you are past labor, you hold
A two-faced carving in one hand and a cane with the other.
You make magic bundles of stones and coins
And poultices from plants in the hothouse.
When you are the only one who knows,
You tell somebody; you show someone.
You remember for those who might forget.
You pass it down.
I Am Black & Comely
L. Lamar Wilson
I am black & comely, Solomon said, except
in King James’ version. There, a but abuts
comely, making black less so, palatable. That beaut’s
mind lured more women into his court than I suspect
that fair(y) James ever cared to see. Expecting
a real mama, whore or not, would feel the cut
of the sword long before its blade was sought,
Solomon saw division a perfect divining rod. Yet
his progeny—with as much sense as he,
& so much of it opaque in our holiest of holy
scripts—dare not question the sleight
of James’ God’s scribes’ pens, the buts blighting
our wizened faces, making half-truths seem far
more palatable. O will we ever know how beautiful we are?
You Da Only Man I Loves, Daddy
Lot’s Daughters
L. Lamar Wilson
The things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so.
—Ira Gershwin
How you gon’ let dem strangers touch me, Daddy?
How you gon’ let dem strangers touch me?
You say only you can touch me, Daddy, ’member?
You say only you can touch me.
You say we can’ let my coat tear up too soon, say
We can’ let it tear up, you say
We can’ let my coat tear up too soon, say
We can’ let it tear up, say
If it do no man will want me, you say
If it do no man will want me, say
If it do no man will want me, you say
If it do no man will want me
Guess it don’ matter now, do it?
Guess it don’ matter now? Funny how
It jus’ don’ matter now? Funny how
It jus’ don’ matter now
Mama done gon’ off & left us, Daddy
Look like Mama done gon’ off & left us, wonder why
Mama done gon’ off & left us, Daddy, wonder why
Mama done gon’ off & left us
You da only man I loves, Daddy, you know
You da only man I loves, sho’ nuff
You da only man I loves, Daddy, you know
You da only man I loves
Now I gon’ have yo’ babies, Daddy
Now I gon’ have yo’ babies, so glad
Now I gon’ have yo’ babies, Daddy, so glad,
Now I gon’ have yo’ babies
Haiku
Gideon Young
the smell of tomato plants
I write to a friend
in New York’s prisons
pale ferns
across the lake
a powerboat surges
early frost
on the long grass
a silent hare
water from the sky
bit by bit
I turn to dust
FICTION
Sophia
(excerpt from Salt in the Sugar Bowl)
Angela Belcher Epps
Sophia’s strong, waitress legs felt thin and weak; it had been two days since she’d had so much as a cracker. She bumped back and forth down the aisle, holding onto backrests of the Coastline Express toward an empty seat. Maybe the bus would have a freak accident with her as the only fatality. Have it known that Sophia Sawyer died on a bus, unexpectedly, thirty-five miles from home. Death was palatable. They could put it in the obituary section, and her people could have a good cry, then put a period on her life and move on. There was nothing palatable about a woman leaving six children behind in Haden, N.C., on a balmy April morning—with no intention of ever looking back.
The flat, black fields of eastern North Carolina gave way to thick swamp foliage, but Sophia would not look. She covered her eyes as she passed the only places she’d ever known in her thirty-nine years. Her long, tan hands squeezed against a headache that felt like a sharpened hatchet hacking away at her skull. She let out an animal moan. Sophia had proven, as clear as wedding crystal, she was not the woman anybody thought she was—including herself.
The only thing she knew about this new self was that she would go to Norington. She could make a living there. Anybody could who didn’t mind work. In Norington, she could live off the profits left by a steady stream of tourists. People who had it easy enough to lie on beach chairs, swim in indoor pools, and ride bikes up and down the strip. With no thought at all, she could hand people towels, change beds, load and unload mountains of soiled and clean linen, serve food and drinks. Any of that worked for her. It was her own life she could no longer stomach.
Just after 2 p.m. the bus arrived, and Sophia grabbed her cylindrical duffel bag from the sidewalk where the driver had slung it. The crowd cleared, and Sophia sat in a plastic chair on the side of the building. A dozen yards away, a man dozed with his chin tucked fowl-like onto his chest. A woman, barefoot with sun-streaked hair, sat on the curb smoking. Sophia sat afraid to move. She now understood how a person could walk into a brick wall and slam her head against it over and over just to escape the pain happening inside it. Sophia walked slowly across the platform toward a worn-out wooden structure with a fading red sign that read THE CONVENIENCE MART. An irritating bell jangled when she opened the door. “Pack of Camels please.” She spoke to the skinny young tattooed woman behind the counter.
The cigarettes were the same no-nonsense brand her grandfather had smoked. Outside she tore open the top, shook one out and lit it, held the smoke in against a cough.
Sophia’s thoughts began to settle for the first time since the storm arrived at her door three days ago.
The storm blasted into her life when a social worker, a very young Miss Dalton, knocked on the front door. Miss Dalton had a baby in one arm and a little boy by the hand. Sophia’s first instinct was to reach for the baby girl because Miss Dalton carried it like a bag of groceries seconds away from slipping to the ground. Sophia glanced down, immediately recognizing the double dimple on the little boy’s chin. In an instant, she recognized them. They were her husband’s children. Sophia’s head began to spin.
Then Miss Dalton spoke. “Excuse me, ma’am, but I was sent to bring these children to your house because their mother is very sick. Is Mr. Sawyer home yet?”
Sophia shook her head and squinted with confusion at the lady.
Miss Dalton explained. “Their mother, Ms. Portia Basnight, has suffered a breakdown. We’re not sure what it is, but the neighbors called it a fit.”
Sophia stared, wanting to slam the door and go back several years and be living at some other address without this husband and this life.
“They took her to the facility in Goldsboro. The neighbors told us Mr. Sawyer is their father and where he works? We called his job and left the message to meet us at his home. Is he home yet?”
Sophia shook her head once more.
Miss Dalton shifted the baby.
Sophia ran her hands through her thick mass of curls. She was still in her uniform—the tight black pants and white three-button rayon shirt for waiting tables from breakfast through late lunch. She wanted a shower. She wanted a cup of coffee. She wanted thirty minutes off her feet before she had to start dinner for her children. Most of all, she wanted this not to be happening at her front door.
“Can I bring them in to wait?” Miss Dalton asked. “My arm feels like it’s breaking.”
Sophia could not speak. She stepped aside so they could come in and left them there. She walked through her house with her breath skipping madly. As she went in and out of the rooms—three bedrooms, each with its dingy bedspread and sagging curtains, Sophia saw nothing but disappointment. A whole twenty years amounted to next to nothing. She needed the blinders she had put on every day to be a human glue gun in this house. In a few short minutes, they were gone, and without them, she saw nothing to hold together. Walls unpainted for the whole time they’d lived in this perfectly square ranch house, too tight for anybody to grow in any direction. The floors creaking under cheap carpet the color of dirt. What the hell color had it been in the first place? Her anger, confusion, and tension crawled into every nerve and cell; any touch of sweetness she felt about her life finally gave way to a brine at the back of her throat and brewing behind her eyes.
Sophia edged to the living room door when she heard Hunter’s key slip into the door. She watched from the doorway. The baby slept in the social worker’s arms, and the boy sat playing with his fingers. Hunter, slick with sweat and oil, stepped into the room. The boy sprang up and ran, screaming, “Daddy!” Hunter reached down and scooped him up. “Hey, boy!” Then, as if remembering his whereabouts, his eyes surveyed the room. Sophia held his gaze for a mere second before going to the back of the house. This wasn’t going to be her business.
That evening not one angry word passed her lips, not a tear dropped. She paid no attention to the two babies. Her smaller children accepted them like surprise pets—examining them, picking them up, rubbing them, probably wondering if they would keep them. Sophia’s and Hunter’s eyes did not meet, and he offered no words of explanation or apology. Nearing bedtime, he’d said, “I’ll sleep out here with them till we figure out what to do.” Sophia nodded, ignored the we.
This was not going to be her business, and she wasn’t going to make it a sad and long-suffering situation to get through. Haden was a small town, no more than 2,500 people. It was not her home, and she did not have a sprawling nest of relatives to make it worth her while to stay in a place she probably should have left years ago. The thoughts continued to come throughout the evening and into the night. She didn’t set the intention to leave. But her mind would not, and refused, to look in the direction of living with this backhanded slap.
Maybe Sophia really should have left years ago—when it dawned on her that her husband really didn’t want her, even though he seemed to try. She had accepted this fact like a little “P.S. I don’t love you” that would have been written at the bottom of a letter. She let it rest at the back of her mind like a cancer seemingly in remission but not declared gone. Hunter was the kind to run with other women, not so openly that Sophia came across anything concrete, but he came and went often in a way that kept his wife from wanting to ask questions. And his name might crop up in a conversation, then suddenly be dismissed because the speaker realized it was headed down a wrong path. Sophia never blamed Hunt for it, and she always believed the problem was hers. It was nothing she ever tried to explain to anyone else because they naturally saw him as the wrongdoer.
But, Sophia blamed herself because her mother had taught her pretense as if it was some wonderful skill without thinking through what happened after all that false advertising. She had met Hunter after high school, when she was cashiering at the A&P. Hunter had been a temporary worker at Hofneister Mill and didn’t know much of anything about Maxton County. He met Sophia at the time her mother, Devora Douglas, was pushing Sophia to take herself up a notch.
Devora cut out pictures from magazines and bought makeup. She paid for her daughter’s Friday evening hairdresser appointments, and she coaxed Sophia to spend entire paychecks on dresses that lifted her average-sized breasts and cinched her nonexistent waist. It was 1964, and while most Maxton County women were still modest in their knee-length shirtwaists, Devora’s magazines were showing dresses way up on the thigh. So it didn’t matter how much of a waist her daughter didn’t have when a dress was that short.
Devora knew how to reel in a lonely man; she had reeled in plenty and married three of them. She nudged Sophia to invite Hunter to dinner, and Devora credited Sophia with the production. Hunter Sawyer was blindsided by the glamorized Sophia among the drab selection in Maxton County. In less than six months they were married at the Hope and Savior Baptist Church, including a feast for seventy-five in the church dining room. Both Sophia and Devora were overwhelmed by the 6'2", good-looking, hard-working Hunter. Sophia remembered her mother pinching her cheek and winking on the receiving line after the wedding. Sophia didn’t wink back.
Sophia was nineteen, and marriage was fine for the first few months because she and Hunter lived with Devora while he finished out his contract. Sophia and Devora hadn’t thought much about what to do once she moved to her own house in Haden and couldn’t match colors, or season a chicken, or hem her dresses, or apply false eyelashes on her own. In no time, Hunter was asking why he kept getting strangled with too much vinegar.
Sophia gave birth to their first child, Boyd, and she had no paycheck coming in. She saw how Hunter looked sideways at her hair sprouting wild and wooly with no beautician to work magic. To make it worse, Devora died from a massive, after-dinner heart attack shortly before the birth of their second child, Eva. The baby weight clung, and there was no Devora coaching about what to eat and not eat, and gone were the short, form-fitting dresses to camouflage her new, maternal shape.
To say Hunter was disappointed didn’t do it justice. His discontent was like a force field between them. There were no more long, sucking kisses. No unexpected grabbing and rubbing. Sophia didn’t have any tricks up her sleeve, and there was no money to create Devora’s mirages. Hunter brought home the little prize on the middle shelf instead of the big, top shelf, glossy one he’d been promised. They couldn’t ever seem to get beyond it, and Sophia silently watched her failures, questioned everything about herself. She hadn’t been smart in school, but something told her she could have been, would have been if things had been different. But different how? Born in another town? Born to another mother who bought books instead of perfume? She didn’t know. But being married, having two babies, and running a house, who had time to think about intelligence?
