can march with 4,000 men and four brass bands
under the Emancipation League’s auspices.
He builds two blocks from the Creole Fire Station,
which keeps fast horses, racetrack rejects,
because the first fire-truck to arrive on the scene
is the only one whose men get paid.
Fifty-some years later, a merchant marine
offered West Indies by way of Mobile:
crab lumped, layered in fine-chopped onion
& the kiss of Wesson oil,
& the slap of iced water & how God
means for salad to be served, on a saltine.
We chow down in the last all-wood joint on Dauphin.
The secret is in the cider vinegar, how
a hundred jaws of minor angels macerate the haul.
NOSTALGIA
An adult shad has 1,300 bones,
but that’s not why I always order it:
I remember fingers of white flesh, flaky-fried,
or a sac of red roe slapped into a pan
with a pat of butter,
and I think of camping by the James River,
how the sky yawned and hollered.
I once loved a band named Emmet Swimming.
I got lost in a crowd of teenagers
inscribing each other’s yearbooks in blue Bic ink,
working hard for a house with fake wood trim,
singing that it’s a long way down,
wondering how long it’d been since I’d been good.
We were sweat-sweet and dancing.
We paid what we could afford at the door.
Two decades later, I read the band named themselves
for Emmett Till.
The lead singer says the name means
a fourteen-year-old should be swimming in the river,
not dying in it.
They spelled his name wrong and,
once they realized that,
they kept spelling his name wrong.
I’ve got 1,290 pin bones to go.
WE GOT AN A—
We your friends.
We the Virginians.
We the northern Virginians.
We the eleventh grade.
We the choir parties.
We the Madonna sing-alongs.
We the third-period U.S. History.
We the antebellum economies.
We the Sunday, the Doritos and Jolt.
We the directors.
We the script.
We the farmers.
We the farmers’ wives.
You, we decide,
should play the cotton picker.
You who vogues best of any of us.
You stand in the closet
with a Tylenol bottle, teasing
puffs of white from its open mouth.
We your friends.
We the northern Virginians.
We the Virginians.
We the video camera, waiting.
We who swear This Will Be Hilarious.
The door opens. The skit begins.
MONTICELLO PEACHES
Jefferson planted over a thousand trees
in the South Orchard—eighteen varieties of apple,
six apricot, four nectarine,
and thirty-eight types of peach.
Lemon Cling. Heath Cling. Indian Blood Cling.
Vaga Loggia. Breast of Venus,
which Jefferson accounted for as the “teat peach”—
interlopers mistaken as indigenous.
Each cleft globe was a luxury,
yet so abundant they were sliced, chipped,
boiled, brandied, fried, sun-dried,
and extras fed to the hogs.
My first wish is that the labourers
may be well treated,
the Master wrote.
He created a system for tipping.
Once, James Hemings was whipped
three times over before the sun had set
behind Brown’s Mountain.
When Jefferson traveled to Paris
in 1784, he took Sally and her brother—
James, who learned the language,
who trained at pasta and pastry,
paid four dollars per month to serve
as chef de cuisine to the Minister to France.
James, who had to be coaxed to leave
a country where, in 1789,
slavery had been abolished.
I hereby do promise & declare
until he shall have taught such person
as I shall place under him for that purpose
to be a good cook, this previous condition
being performed,
he shall thereupon be made free . . .
“For that purpose”: their brother, Robert.
In 1796, James was freed.
In 1801, James killed himself.
In 1802, Robert debuted macaroni pie
on the menu for Jefferson’s state dinner.
In 1824, a recipe layering pasta, cheese, and butter
appears in The Virginia Housewife: Or, Methodical Cook,
alongside Mrs. Mary Randolph’s marmalade
that specifies a pound of West Indies sugar
to two pounds of peaches—“yellow ones
make the prettiest”—and a hard chop
until flesh gives away to transparent pulp,
chilled to a jelly.
If one was accused of stealing or eating
beyond one’s share
the grill was secured
over the mouth.
This was considered the kind muzzle.
The unkind one settled an iron bit
over the tongue.
The groundskeepers knew we’d come
with our wreath to lay at Jefferson’s grave,
walking Monticello’s grass at misted dawn,
half-drunk and laughing.
We came every year.
There are two types of peaches:
one to which the stone clings,
shredding to wet threads,
and another allowed to lift clean.
“Freestone,” they call those peaches—
that most popular variety, the White Lady.
TOPSY TURVY
A style of doll original to plantation culture
and mass-manufactured well into the twentieth century,
later reworked to feature fairy-tale characters.
Lovable Topsy, charming Eva,
the adaptable pattern:
Little Red Riding Hood
with stitch-mouth, her big eyes,
her gingham apron. Flip her,
reverse her skirts—
one face covered, another bared—
now she’s Grandmother
with perched glasses, mob cap.
Yank and tuck the elastic,
fussing the cap back and down
to cover Grandma’s face,
and where her silvering bun
might be, he waits:
Turn me up / And turn me back,
I once was white / And now am black.
What good is a tale,
I was taught,
without the Big Bad Wolf?
His pointed ears, his fangs,
his expanse of charcoal
and slavering pup-tongue.
Little flip-figure, little relic.
Give him a howl.
In the toy basket one day
& one day & one day & one day
& Where did this come from?
& then the doll was gone.
MY WHITENESSES
Whiteness as my body’s
spent currency:
hair that holds no melanin,
which I pluck out;
an overlong fingernail
that I tear away;
what once blistered,
collapsed flat to my heel.
And what then?
Skin picked, flicked
under my bed—
strands dropped to tile—
the keratin crescents folded,
tucked in couch-crevice.
My performative strip
of self, still
trashing up the place.
Down by Richmond,
how you pronounce a thing
sets stake in the land.
Do you elaborate
a tribe’s Pow-hite?
Or does 300 years
of muscle memory
guide the tongue?
Po’ white Creek.
Po’ white Parkway.
One man uses cracker
as absolution,
as proof of brotherhood,
while another uses cracker
because someone,
three great-grands ago,
cracked a whip.
Virginia, my ghosts
need gathering.
Come to the table
and sit, goddammit. Sit.
BLACK DEATH SPECTACLE
A Golden Shovel
after Gwendolyn Brooks,
“The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till.”
A man asks those viewing Open Casket what comes after
their shock, when from the
safe distance of cocktails the boy’s murder
becomes a matter of palette, of line and stroke, after
someone fumbles their way through the
—drowned? Was he drowned? Wasn’t the Chicago burial
a kind of show, they say, curated by Emmett’s
mother? The painter says, And I, too, am a mother.
Our tools seduce. Ask what the shovel is
burying.
