Bless Your Heart: Southern Border Style
I come from Country
High and Low.
From Scotland to South Carolina to Texas,
In ships of searchers, uncertain,
And regents sowing dominion
Espoused by King James.
I come from violence and conquest.
From smallpox and privilege.
From cold, dark cellars and roadside terror.
From tiny log cabins and Others’ trails
Of tears.
From the coastal marshes and the edge of the forest
that smelled like tobacco, and sulfur and screams.
I remember the hand pump by the railroad tracks,
From which cold refreshment came
And the riding crop in the kitchen
Of my ancestral home.
My family name on the exchange,
Pappy’s foot on the scale,
Where kids and cotton once sold
For more than their weight.
Cutting switches,
For my grandmother to use on me,
In the tradition of whipping,
For stripes and for shame.
Tilling fields of arrowheads,
Br’er Rabbit and lies,
An “inheritance” strange as molasses and
Sugar cane and rum.
The taste of moonshine,
The trill of the owl,
The rattle in the timber,
And the musk of the men
who dared not make eye contact
with a golden-haired girl.
Even then, I knew,
It was not well with my soul.
The hand-hewn pew
At the church in Indiantown.
The heavy hypocrisy.
The poison of the plantation,
Ether,
Distilled, everywhere.
The family who came here in chains,
Buried, across the road.
Bloodlines blended,
Still separated.
Held captive, on a landscape
Colored by horror.
Somehow
Tenderness came,
from Sugar and Benny and Mae.
Residents of the public housing project,
where children stopped playing,
Stood still, when I walked by,
To visit my mother’s ‘mammy’
Who read bedtime stories of
Little Black Sambo to me.
“Why weren’t we suffocated
In our cribs?”
Was the question that elicited
Rebuke that burned like a fiery brand or a
Flaming cross.
Anesthetized by Williamsburg air and age
My mother’s Liberal retort:
“No one and no thing can withstand your scrutiny!”
as if I was the cruel one.
Still segregating.
Stripping.
The wonder from my unbounded soul.