from Descent [Text Only]

Dear Robert, Dear Redbeard, Dear Specter of the Great White Father, Dear Slaveholder, Dear Confederate Captain Captured at Gettysburg, Dear Dispenser of Land Favors Semen, Procreator of Twenty Children by Three Sisters Simultaneously, Dear Father of the Negro League Pitcher, Dear Farmer Schoolmaster Landlord Hired Hand Grave Paler Log Roller Surveyor and Manure Shoveler, Dear Singer, Dear Churchman and Circus Fan, Dear Reveler at Brigade Reunions, Dear Collector of Sentimental Poems about Loneliness and Redemption, Dear Pointy Eared Like Lucifer and Bearded Beyond Rasputin, Dear Mythical Jim Crow Defier, Hero of my Grandfather’s Childhood, Who Took Him on the “Whites Only” Section of the Streetcar (He Claimed This Really Happened) Proclaiming “These Are My Grandchildren & They’re Sitting With Me!”, Dear Diarist, Dear Widower, Dear Lonesome Hunger, Dear Admirer of Well- Formed Women, Dear Inscrutable in the Tintype Beside Your Favorite Half-Claimed Child, Dear Tallier of Payments Debts Work Days Weather Conditions Neighbors by Name and Race, Dear Borer of Wells,            Dear Master of Omission,

 

 

Heard a whippoorwill holler this morning for the first time this spring. Heard a whippoorwill holler. All hands choking cotton. Heard a holler, a whimper. Heard a will whip her. Will heard a whip. Whip or will. Will heard. Herding hers. Whipping herds. Sowing oats. Whipping whores. Stripping cane or— whelped her willed her a well and a hold. Dank of the dark of the hell of the hold. Choking cotton. Caught in. A yoke and a pull. Stripped and caned for— Heard her holler, caught her, held her hand to the— whipped out your— held her head to the— whipped out the billfold. Heard a whimper this spring. Choked or— heard a holler, a hollowed- out hold, whipped to a wheelbarrow, hell-bent toward a hole, ripped from a wrapped in a gutwrench sugarhold.

 

 

 

 

Q: So how did the women feel about this?

A: Don’t guess they had no say.

 

 

 

Peggy rises out of sleep through the dream called Blue—where all her kinfolk are wading through fields of blue, even her father left in Georgia, her stillborn brother somehow grown, her little niece who stumbled into the fire on Christmas day and died with the vision of her white dress aflame, the aunt or uncle who ran off or was lost forever to the auction block. They are all wearing blue—blue hats, blue shawls, and in the way they sing a song with no words, deep from the gut, there is also blue, and bluely she creeps toward them in her calico blue, and now there is a dance, they are partnering for the quadrille, and the man they called Bo Peep cradles a banjo, strikes a tune, blue, and her petticoat’s starched with hominy water, and Priss’s, too, and every time they stop moving for a second the petticoats pop, and Priss giggles, and in Priss’s eyes are flecks of blue. The log train shakes her into waking, black then dark blue, and she reaches for her kerchief blue, and she is stumbling toward the cradle blue and cooing Shoo
shoo
 to the baby who is hollering now. One Sunday
the preacher prayed, “Lord, let us all go to Heaven where there’ll be no log train.” Who who who and a clankety clank—whose? Black smoke curling into the half blue.

 

 

Bob:

Can I be your lazy eye, your wander- lust, your grave without a headstone, your bleeding gums, your buck teeth and your walk bowlegged at the knee? Can I be your fortune hunter, your glimpse of wild geese, your red russet shoes that poison the feet? Reckon this is the best of my seed. Been stripping cane and blind robbing the bees. Reckon you’ve thought of swimming the creek. Last night they came on horseback, white hoods like phantoms scanning the trees, burning torches, shattering sleep. I dragged the shotgun from the door and stepped squinting onto the porch.

 

 

 

I want to think that when the witness tree leaned into the ledge, it heard her heart stop between one breath and the next.

The day they buried Peggy, all the trees were whispering, the chinkapins and loblolly pines. Did she miscarry, bleed to death while Bob or Plunk saddled the horse, rode miles panting after the doctor in town? Did she recall her mother’s twenty pregnancies and bite her lips her tongue the quilt and finally the bedpost lest her daughters hear her scream and come too close? Did she rage deliriously through the shakes? Bloat from dropsy or hack through a consumptive fit? Or did she take her own life— swallow strychnine or arsenic, hang herself from a beam, clench a shotgun between her teeth?

Peggy sometimes spoke in whispers. Sometimes she did not speak at all but just said “Uh huh,” leaning hard on the last syllable, or “Sho’ did,” with all her weight on the first. Sometimes if Bob looked closely, he would see a thought blow across her face. Once he might have tried to squeeze it out, but a woman is not sugar cane you can run through a mill, its secrets easily expelled.

Peggy:

Today I plucked a whippoorwill from down the bottom of the well. Her neck was broke but still she hollered out her name. “Get. The burst of freedom came in June. Go yon- der way,” I said.

Once when she was sixteen, Peggy finished cooking the hominy and drew pictures with ashes left on the hearth.