One With Others: [A Little Book of Her Days] by C. D. Wright

she says talk to this woman, you talk.
Teachers’ kids stuck together. We were the only ones with a telephone, a TV , a record player.
Blew the front of our house off the day before my father’s funeral.
I see someone from that school now and think, I wonder if your father is still alive and if he is still wearing his little Klan outfit on Saturday night.
All of us who went to the white school have a story. Houlie went to Liberia. My husband never went back in the building.
HER MOTHER: I accept nothing less than respect. You hear me.
I haven’t seen the lightning bugs yet but I do enjoy them. And by day I enjoy the butterflies. I sit on my step; they flutter around me. And I think, well maybe somebody is paying me a visit.
A teacher sent a note home saying she couldn’t understand my oldest daughter. I told her I curse better than you speak. My daughter is not going to flunk English because you cannot speak it. No less than respect, you get what I’m saying.
The department store hired a couple of light-skinned blacks to work in the back [Saturdays only].
I remember her. Bought an Emerson from her husband for the Big Shootout.
Parents came down with food for the kids when we found out where they were. Police threw the burgers over the fence.
The former legislator said he fished with a man who told him the school wouldn’t be there when he came to teach in the fall, first year of Choice.
They march along here, the military road
The road they walk built by humpers
Those were the Irish
They pass Blackfish Lake
Ditch #1 about where they crossed
Gerstaecker slept here bundled up in a buffalo’s skin
But first the Choctaw Removal; then came the Creek with ponies;
Then Chickasaw; then Cherokee, maybe Sequoyah among them his syllabary nearly finished
Now stood another anonymous racist calling them names
His rod extended/ his line hung up in his own ignominy
THE MAN IMPORTED FROM MEMPHIS: When you get change you keep pushing and you get more. The hardest thing is to get the ball rolling.
We are marching to get this fear out of your hearts. You must remember the white man puts his pants on the same way you do, one leg at a time.
Since I have been involved with the Movement I have not committed any so-called crime.
The Movement is the best thing I’ve ever been involved in. It channeled my energy into constructive efforts.
My aunt raised me. She worked as a domestic for the family of Judge Bailey Brown.
If white people can ride down their highways with guns, I can walk down the highway unarmed.
Old enough to hunt, hunted.
When people have anticipated something and they have been let down, you must find some way to let them use up this excess energy. [That, Gentle Reader, is the accursed share.]
My walk will help do this for the people of Arkansas. Not a question of violence or nonviolence. Survival is the point. We are going to survive one way or the other. Sweet Willie Wine, V, and the Invaders are
Walking we are just walking
Dead doe on the median
Whoever rides into the scene changes it
Pass a hickory dying on the inside
A black car that has not moved for years
Forever forward/ backwards never
+ + +
IN HELL’S KITCHEN: Her apartment is smaller by half than the shotgun shacks that used to stubble the fields outside of Big Tree. Stained from decades of nonstop smoking. The world according to V was full of smoke and void of mirrors.
She was not an eccentric. She was an original. She was congenitally incapable of conforming. She was resolutely resistant.
Her low-hanging fears no match for her contumacy
Grappling hooks in the mud leaf out in the mind
She was my goombah.
Cats, Catholicism, alcohol, and men. She served them all.
Children—she failed her own. Of that she was acutely aware. It was the grief of her existence.
If I could summon her L’wha now. If this were her book of days. If she were still able to sit back on her double-joints and read my cards: “Sometimes you feel rather alone in the world; times of stress and