What's It All About?

The Creation of the Poems

This project really began to take shape one night, after three months of not having written a single poem, when my cat jumped precariously from one piece of furniture to another.

He had jumped between my grandmother's sewing machine and her dresser, both of which I had acquired the previous week from my mother. She did not have room for them in her house, as she had first thought, after my grandmother was moved from her own apartment to an assisted living home.

The cat proceeded to sniff the dresser very carefully, like he could smell the old scents of pets my grandmother once had. Ghost scents of dead pets. I started to write about her furniture, the cat smelling her furniture, her old pets, a dog and cat both named Sugarfoot, and her quirks. She has many quirks, which are part of the reason she's in assisted living now. One of her quirks has led to my talent: she makes lists. She is a profuse writer, if only that her writing consists of hundreds of ledgers, brown paper bags, calenders, all full of lists and notes, all integral to her survival, she's sure.

About a year ago, my mother, who now has power of attorney for my grandmother, found a brown paper bag on grandma's kitchen table with a very peculiar list: Wake up. Eat Breakfast. Read Newspaper. Go To Bathroom. Get Dressed. As if she had to write it all down to remember. I wonder. And she saves things you'd never want to know about, some involving bodily functions, of which she has quite the obsession.

Even for the peculiarities, I love her because I know I am going to be exactly like her when I age. I've been able to see the selfishness and stubbornness that we both share since I was a child. The lack of tolerance for pain since I was a teen. The love of writing and reading, even if it's trivial, since I was a young adult.

And now that I have her furniture, I feel even more a part of her, so I had to write about her. When I saw the cat jump I thought of all the feelings I had about her moving to the assisted living home, and all the facts I knew about her life coming together in two separate, but totally intertwined poems. Essentially they are the same poem, written two different ways.

I came up with the title of Ritual because I thought of what it is about my grandmother's lists that makes her more emotionally stable in her own mind. They keep her straight, make sure she doesn't veer off target for the day. Her reminders to wake up and eat must be written down or she thinks she'll forget. Her rituals.

Moving List was originally entitled Rules of Order  and comes from two linked ideas. I was thinking of items of my grandmother's that I remember vividly from her apartment. When she moved out I got most of her books, and in the boxes of them, my father found one entitled Robert's Rules of Order. He asked me if I knew what it was and I didn't. (I was embarrassed because, as a writer and English major, I feel that I should know every book that was every published. Odd.)

He explained that it was the book detailing how every meeting should be run, with the motions and seconds, and all the other rules of operation in their specific orders. I thought, how just like my grandmother with her lists. Also, my grandmother's second husband (and who seemed to be her strongest love) was named Robert. He was my mother's father. (Also, my mother's name is Libby, so I have a personal intertextuality working with the mason jar image in The Lynching.)

I thought my grandmother had read all of these books, but I kept seeing the name Walter Walker or Hyram Walker in the inside covers. I asked my mother and she told me the story: her father and mother had just bought a house in Asheville, N.C., and they had several bookshelves that were empty. So he went to a garage sale and bought whatever books he could. Mom says she doubts if he ever read any of them. Grandma might have. The only clue that anyone in our family has ever read them is the crayon marks my mother and aunt made on the pages when they were learning to write.

 

I saw the cat jump and wrote the poems Ritual and Moving List. The same night my African-American history professor (in both senses) asked the class if white kids who had seen a lynching would have been more or less racist. I thought immediately of my grandmother. She's the right age to have seen one (she will be 90 in January of 1999).

The next day I was reading about a lynching that almost happened in the same town my grandmother grew up in--Monroe, North Carolina. I knew she had left Monroe years before this incident, but it made me want to be able to answer my professor's question even more. By then, she had lived all over the place with three different husbands (one a no-account, scared off by her five brothers, one dead of lung cancer, one now dead of emphysema), and at one point she had lived in Washington, D.C. A few more paragraphs into the book I read another account of a lynching of the Wales' family. They lived in Gordonsville, VA, and I wondered if my grandmother, while living in D.C., had ever heard of this lynching, or any lynching while she lived in the South.

I decided I needed to write a poem about the Wales' family, and one item in particular made me want to do it more than anything. The book said how common it was for viewers of the lynchings, which were very public and party-like affairs, to dig through the remains of the lynched persons looking for singed body parts or clothing. They would take them home to display in a canning jar on their mantle. I had just seen a photograph of a gaudy, plastic creche my grandmother used to have on her mantle every year at Christmas, and I made a connection.

While my grandmother is a passive racist in many ways, I hoped that she could never have played a part in any lynching; but, it's possible that she could have. Lynchings were considered normal behavior in nearly every part of the country. It was one of the very few aspects of life in this nation where white men, women, and children could congregate on equal terms until well into the 20th century (thanks to Dr. Norrece Jones for pointing this out to me!). There still is no lynching law on the books, so I figured it was highly possible that, even if she didn't see a lynching herself, her father, mother, or brothers did, and might have participated in one.

The Lynching posed the biggest problem for me in its writing. I came to the point where I needed to show the difference in "place" of blacks and whites in history. As a poet, words are our tools, and the one word that is still used by whites to "put blacks in their place" is the word nigger. I hate to write it; I never even think of this word unless someone says it (and almost always in an academic context). But I knew it was the word that carried the most weight emotionally for setting the difference between blacks and whites of the time in history I'm trying to present. I am still trying to justify my use of the word, and I may, inevitably, change it to something that works better. I hope I find something that works better. (NOTE: Since the original version was written, I have changed the poem to reflect a more subtle difference between the "place" of blacks and whites in the early part of this century and have, thankfully, omitted the word. I kept this paragraph as a record of my struggle to choose.)