Xr361 final01 text

R XAVIEREVIEW 36.1&2, Spring & Fall 2016

XAVIER REVIEW

Xavier Review, a journal of literature and culture, is published twice a year. Š Xavier University of Louisiana.

Ralph Adamo Editor Katheryn Laborde Managing Editor Thomas Bonner, Jr., Violet Bryan, Biljana Obradovic, James Shade, Robin Vander, Mark Whitaker, Nicole Pepinster Greene Contributing Editors Bill Lavender Graphic Design Editors, Xavier University Studies, 1961-1971 Rainulf A. Stelzman, Hamilton P. Avegno, Leon Baisier Editors, Xavier Review Charles Fort, 1980-1982 Thomas Bonner, Jr., 1982-2002 Richard Collins, 2000-2007 Nicole Pepinster Greene, 2007-2011 Managing Editor Robert Skinner, 1989-2010

Unsolicited manuscripts may be submitted in typescript or by email attachment with a brief letter of submission and a self-addressed envelope for reply to the Editors, Xavier Review, Box 89, Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans, LA 70125. Essays should conform to the MLA Handbook for Writers with parenthetical citations and a list of Works Cited.

Manuscripts accepted for publication will be requested as electronic files. Subscriptions are $20 for individuals, $25 for institutions. Editorial inquiries may be addressed to Ralph Adamo at radamo@xula.edu. All other inquiries may be addressed to Katheryn Laborde at klaborde@xula.edu. Xavier Review is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and the Index of American Periodical Verse, as well as other indices.

Current support comes from Xavier University, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Commission for Catholic Missions.

Sources of previous support include the Louisiana Division of the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. http://www.xula.edu/review ISSN 0887-6681

Editor’s Note

One of the obvious pleasures of editing a magazine like this is the

opportunity to see work from all over, by people one has never read or heard of before. This issue is composed mostly of work by writers who fall into that category, like our two story writers, each of whom has given us a story that is deeply unsettling, in completely different ways. As it happens, one — Toni Ann Johnson — has been writing and publishing for years; the other — Denise Cunningham — is publishing for the first time, a special honor for the magazine.

There are exceptions in this issue, writers I know, like my old friend, the scholar-poet Richard Godden who has been at work on the book this excerpt comes from for years now, and who guest-edited an issue of New Orleans Review featuring contemporary British poetry for me in the 1990s. Some, like Mark Statman and Adam Clay, are recently-and-well-met, poets I am happy to count now among my friends. Andy Young is also here, a wonderful writer with whom I share a love of the work of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet.

And thankfully, dependably: my colleagues Tom Bonner, Ronald Dorris, and James Shade whose writing is always among this journal’s strengths.

It was not until I began laying the current issue out that I realized how many longer poems I had accepted, making that phenomenon itself the single most notable common aspect within Xavier Review 36. Whether this fact betrays a bias of mine or a trend in poetry, I couldn’t say. Aside from length, most of these poems do not have a lot in common, except possibly a degree of political consciousness that is not standard in American poetry.

Xavier Review now has an on-line presence where you may find this issue and the immediate past issue, 35.2, which was our special 35th anniversary issue. The journal can be accessed at www.xavierreview.com.

We invite you to read, to enjoy, to respond.

v

Xavier Review 36.1, Spring 2016 Editor’s Note — v Mark Statman Two Poems — 9 Bibhu Padhi Two Poems — 15 Andrea Young Istanbul House of Detention: from Poet’s Prison to Elite Hotel — 18 Richard Godden and Colin Richmond An Encrypted and Annotated Alphabet for Europe’s Jewry — 27 Adam Clay Three Poems — 36 Edward Dupuy New Orleans in Walker Percy’s Works: Place, Placement, Nonplacement, and Misplacement — 39 Simeon Berry from Fingerling Lakes — 49 David Mills Three Poems — 53 Ronald Dorris ‘Til Emmett Speaks: Tiresias Sailing on the Tallahatchie — 56 Sheryl L. Nelms Two Poems — 67 James Miller Robinson The Marionette Tango in San Telmo — 69 Charlene Fix A Bad Sound — 72

E.P. Fisher I Heard in the Midst of Noises — 73 Holly Iglesias Three Poems — 75 Thomas Bonner, Jr. A Review of Spanish Luck, By Robert Skinner — 78 Karen Maceira Profound Simplicity: A Review of Elegy for a Broken Machine,

by Patrick Phillips. — 81 Toni Ann Johnson Up That Hill — 85 Denise Aretha Cunningham One of the Others — 112 Michael McManus Mourner at Dusk — 121 James Daniels Thrashing — 128 July 20 Fireworks in Pittsburgh During Ongoing Conflicts Abroad — 130 James Shade A review of Negroland by Margot Jefferson — 135 Thomas Bonner, Jr. A Review of Witness to Change: From Jim Crow to Political Empowerment. By Sybil Haydel Morial — 139 Ralph Adamo C.D.: A (Too) Brief (Just Getting Started) Memorial — 142 Contributors — 144

Mark Statman

Two Poems a story collection 1. the wasp in the attic means wasps in the attic a nest of them mud daubers or paper my dad used to kill wasps in the shed by leaving open a container of powdered chlorine it’s like nerve gas, he said and in the morning they’d be dead I can’t remember if one or if which of my brothers would go and stare at the no longer so frightening bodies if we ever swept them out I don’t know 2. stories of childhood beginning with death?

9

Xavier Review 36.1

oh man those wasps we are watching a summer day through a screen screened porch, summer house over dry grass in the yard when was the last rain? gnats swarm the wasps dangle through them in flight somewhere wasp-waisted some kind of noir image wasp-waisted women trustworthy to a point of untrustworthy a highball glass highball on ice let me get that for you she says the voice called rich with promise the let the me the get the you oh yes she will until she won’t the story of 10

the wasp-waisted woman a wasted summer afternoon of looking at the dry yard the yellow brown yellow green those clouds too high no rain in them the sun over the mountains unseen from the screened-in porch the screen door leads out to a road here comes the muse! in dry grass, gravel yellow-hazed air 3. those were winter notes she said that though there hadn’t been a question of what they were winter notes of a summer longing that leads to a longed-for winter imagine how much that hurts when in every season is the belief in how better the next and then the year well, suddenly, years 11

Xavier Review 36.1

who knew? as in, do I know now? do I know you? or myself? there’s something I’ve been meaning to write some notes, she said and waved them away a honeyed voice the pages, white flowers off a white flowering tree pink petals, yellow petals can you believe winter’s snow? the heavier flakes floating, slightly spinning her voice inside the snow a newer constellation uncounted stars now patterning into all the words on the page which she puts to her lips her tongue flits over them what is it you remember? you your voice your winter covered in snow and flowers 12

a dream in which I am a black woman and Allen Ginsberg is making love to me which he does with great tenderness as if understanding that neither of us knows what is happening or what to do exactly I tell him I haven’t seen my son in a very long time Allen says, so he’s wandering, a wanderer, your wandering boy, a wander a wonder Allen looks sad he says, I’m worried about the earth I say I am too the future I say I won’t be in the future Not as a woman as a man as a poet Allen shakes his head his hands are everywhere on my skin and he sometimes stops to look at them but you will be, he says you will he hums Night and Day and I hum along as well we do this being sad 13

Xavier Review 36.1

we smile at each other I say, you mean when I’m a ghost? he shakes his head the light on his glasses opaque hiding his eyes there are no ghosts, he says we just keep going even when there is no we, I ask he says your son is a wanderer you are in love you are asleep there is always a we

14

Bibhu Padhi

Two Poems Another Night of Pain It is always the same night.

The same pain that stitches its nimble story by its dark thread into the thin sheets of bone and muscle, nerves and skin; pushing itself into the fingers and lips, wrists, knees, ankles and elbows; shifting inside the night that draws the whole wounded world here again.

It is always the same story, as if there was nothing new, nothing more lucidly patterned than what is given or taken.

It is always the same night, the same going back to the beginning along the same line as the one we took last time. Pain. It urges its own story to this place, night after night, again and again.

15

Xavier Review 36.1

The Shawl You died at the end of winter earlier this year.

It is the year’s end, the end of November.

The cold in Dhenkanal has my tendons and ligaments imprisoned in pain and winter.

When you gave me the shawl four years ago, I thought it was a gift like any other.

But you knew what it meant to you.

I couldn’t even thank you, time being what it is and wouldn’t let me look back or praise what was good and precious.

Dreams that we are, we forget to remember the dreams of others.

But this evening, I wrap your last gift— the shawl—around these frail shoulders and watch The Last Samurai.

16

Stories of win and loss, death and birth, are here and elsewhere.

Keep us warm, as if it were always early March, teach us to be strong, like the sun, fresh like the love we must donate to all those who need us in the dreams of our own absence.

17

Xavier Review 36.1

Andy Young

Istanbul House of Detention: from Poet’s Prison to Elite Hotel

There is an inscription, technically more of a graffito, on a remote

marble column in Istanbul’s Four Seasons Hotel, repeatedly rated one of the top luxury hotels in the world. Sofar Niyazi apparently carved it in 1935 as evidenced by what is etched there: “SOFOR NiYAZi 1935,”a heart leaning just below it. Though crude, it must have taken some time to do. Above, two curves like large parentheses or crescent moons face each other, a star between them. Niyazi, a taxi driver, was an inmate in the Sultan Ahmet Prison, which is now one of the crown jewels of the Canadian hotel chain. Before any of this, the physical location of the prison-now-hotel was the center of Constantine’s great empire, thought to be built over part of the Emperor’s palace which sprawled its elaborate kiosks down the slopes to the Sea of Marmara. The site of the building, used as a prison from 1919 to 1969 and then again in the late 1970s/early 1980s , was smack in the city’s nexus. Here was the Hippodrome, which housed 100,000 spectators, the Milion, or milestone, made of gold and said to symbolize the center of the Roman world.

Other than Niyazi’s testimony — hidden in the shadows as, no doubt, it had to be in order for Niyazi to avoid the prison guards’ gaze — there are not many obvious traces that this was a detention center. But Sultan Ahmet Prison was famous in its day, especially as a temporary detention center for writers and dissidents. According to the hotel’s pamphlet on its history: “The life of the prison came to dominate the neighborhood: to say you were going to Sultanahmet invited the question ‘But what have you done this time?’”

(Four Seasons Hotel) Most guests at the Four Seasons (where the cost of a single room begins at $776 and suites top out upwards of $10,000 per night) probably don’t realize that they are staying in a prison cell which used to hold between six to twelve inmates or that Turkey’s most famous and beloved poet, Nazim Hikmet, 18

paced the courtyard outside in the winter of 1939 and wrote, with perplexing enthusiasm, in “Istanbul House of Detention:” “I love my country:/I’ve swung on its plane trees,/I’ve slept in its prisons./Nothing lifts my spirits like its songs and tobacco” (Hikmet 82).

The poems Hikmet wrote in prison would become his most celebrated.

It was more than a decade after leaving Sultan Ahmet Prison that the likes of Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson and Pablo Neruda rallied to have him released.

As a part of a general amnesty, he was. (Blasing 188) But he was nearly fifty years old then, and had a bad heart. And when he got out, he was constantly under scrutiny and finally given punitive orders to serve in the military despite his health. He ultimately fled the country to avoid a worse fate and later died in exile. He was stripped of his Turkish citizenship in absentia. It was only regained in 2009, forty-six years after his death (Flood).

Hikmet shared his time in Sultan Ahmet Prison with other famous writers such as novelist Yasar Kemal and satirist Aziz Nesin. And some met worse fates than he did—fiction writer Sabahattin Ali, for example, who was duped by a police informer offering to smuggle him out of the country but who led him instead to be shot by border guards (Four Seasons Hotel). Still, Hikmet’s time in the prison was the beginning of a persecution that would determine the course of his life. It was a political vendetta toward a committed communist who championed the common man and was the first to write poetry in colloquial, conversational Turkish, and it dovetailed with the wave of fascism in Europe determined to silence left-wing voices. Hikmet’s arrest was based on a left-leaning military cadet in Ankara possessing his books; Hikmet was charged with incitement to rebellion among the troops. At the time, there was no law against holding or discussing socialist or communist ideas. He was charged under a military law that should not have applied to a civilian, by army officers who had no legal training, and he was forced to defend himself. In his own defense, he said: “I am in a case with no witnesses, no documents, no files of evidence, no crime weapon, no confession, and no informants.” (Blasing 114) When Hikmet was first apprehended, he was shipped to Ankara and put in solitary confinement in a military prison where he would be held for 19

Xavier Review 36.1

two months and allowed no contact with anyone, including lawyers. Later, he would say that he felt on the verge of losing his mind (Blasing 114). His poetry began to change at this time, as his biographer Mutlu Blasing points out, marking the shift from his poem “Letters from a Man in Solitary(114):” No doubt my state can be explained physiologically, psychologically, etc.

Or maybe it’s this barred window,

this earthen jug,

these four walls, which for months have kept me from hearing another human voice (Hikmet 74-75).

After Ankara, and Hikmet’s stay in Sultan Ahmet Prison, he was taken onto the warship Erkin where he was forced into the ship’s closed latrine and then its dark bilge (Blasing 117). Pablo Neruda would later recall a conversation with the poet about his experience there. Hikmet, overwhelmed by the stench and knowing that those in power were hoping to break him, responded, according to Neruda, by singing: “He began to sing, low at first, then louder, then finally at the top of his lungs. He sang all the songs, all the love poems he could remember, all the ballads of the peasants, all the people’s battle hymns. He sang everything he knew. And so he vanquished the filth and his torturers” (Neruda 195-6). As the ship floated on the Sea of Marmara, Hikmet endured, this time, a navy trial, along with several other writers, for books which were legally published and publicly available. As the prosecutor said, “If these people haven’t done anything today, they will tomorrow” (Blasing 117). He received, in this trial, twenty years, for being a “Communist propagandist” and inciting the navy. The two combined sentences were reduced from 35 to 28 years, and he was shipped to Cankiri Prison to carry them out (118). His one hope, revolutionary president Mustafa Kamel Ataturk, who was a fan of his poetry and knew that Hikmet supported his revolution, died soon after his sentencing and would never receive his petition (119). Sultan Ahmet was thus the beginning point for a long and pivotal era 20

of his life which would be circumscribed by prison walls.

Today the courtyard of the Four Seasons is carefully manicured, the watchtower a cheerful yellow blending into the shadowy neoclassical angles

Istanbul Detention House, 1939/ Nazım Hikmet Kültür ve Sanat Vakfı, Istanbul, Turkey (Blasing 107).

housing guest rooms with names like “Palace Bosphorus Room.” Guests are invited to enjoy late night dining where “crisp tablecloths and gleaming silver play against the rhythm of the blue-green waters of the Bosphorus” and are treated to overnight shoe shines (Four Seasons Istanbul). One can easily be dizzied by the immensity of the history surrounding the hotel, and, without knowing where to look, one would never know the building’s history, though one might ponder why its front entrance is on the House of Detention Street or why, around the corner, a street is named the “Day of Celebration,” where fortunate prisoners were released (Four Seasons Hotel).

What would Hikmet, a committed communist, think should he be transported back to the origin of the imprisonment that would define his adult life? If he were to be offered a writers’ residency, say, in one of the “palace courtyard” rooms, would he note the irony of the fact that the prison that inmates once referred to cynically as “the Hilton” (Four Seasons Hotel) is now, in fact, a western hotel chain smack in the middle of the Eastern heart 21

Xavier Review 36.1

of the city? Would he, so committed to the principals of egalitarianism and the value of the common man, object to the decadent amenities of the site overshadowing its historical significance? Would he ponder how the center of empire shifted so seamlessly from a holding place for the dissident to a playground for the rich?

A joint decision made by Turkey’s cabinet and the Culture Ministry in 1991 turned the then-abandoned prison into what it is today, though there have been objections about its construction. Byzantine Art Historian Dr. Asnu Bilban Yalçın claims that no thorough archaeological examination has been conducted on the site, which is of “vital importance” to Istanbul’s history.

“The mysteries of Hagia Sophia are hidden beneath the spot where this hotel stands,” he says (Ziflioğlu “Five Star”).

Oktay Ekinci, a columnist at the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet and a member of the Board for Protection of Cultural and Natural Assets, strongly condemns the hotel’s construction due to concern about demolishing of the Grand Byzantine Palace’s relics. “It is the government that was in power in 1991 that is responsible for this crime. Such a decision has no precedent anywhere in the world. This is a pure crime” (Ziflioğlu “Five Star”).

Aside from the concerns about historical preservation, some question the symbolic message of transforming such a place into such an opulent locale.

As Mutlu Blasing notes in Hikmet’s biography: “Its walls are impressively thick, and the service is exceptional, but it’s hard to tell what Orientalist fantasy draws customers to this hotel, with its low ceilings and claustrophobic corridors and memories . . .” (267n130) The trend of transforming prisons into luxury hotels is not limited to Turkey, but it carries, perhaps, a particular poignancy given the prison’s association with silencing dissidents. Turkey is repeatedly rated as one of the worst in the world for its rate of incarceration of writers and intellectuals. On November 15th, 2013, the International Day of the Imprisoned Writer, the writers’ organization PEN International and the Turkish Writers Union denounced the ongoing persecution of writers, citing the country as holding “almost one tenth of all intellectuals imprisoned for freedom of expression in the world” (Ziflioğlu “Pen”). Particularly with Turkey’s recent uprisings, there is a concern about the abuse of Article 301, 22

a wide-ranging Anti-Terror law which many accuse Erdoğan’s AK Party government of abusing to silence opposition (Günersel).

Would Hikmet, so appreciative of the small beauties of life, somehow admire the tasteful image of the ornate, engraved lock and key which graces the Hotel’s brochure about its history? Would his familiarity with life’s absurdities prompt him to laugh or cringe at Fodor Travel’s description of the hotel as “Unexpected Jailhouse Splendor” or with the joking tone of the Four Season’s brochure which quips: “At reception, new guests didn’t so much flash their credit cards as undergo disinfection”? Or would he share the sentiment of the eighteen-year inmate known as Kani who scratched on its walls: “All the world’s an inn—or that’s the tale,/But Sultanahmet is a stinking jail” (Four Seasons Hotel)?

Though Hikmet is perhaps Turkey’s most beloved writer, he would likely not be invited for such a residency were he alive today as he is still a controversial figure whose poems, according to the Turkish Cultural Foundation, are not taught in schools. Mutlu and Randy Blasing, the translation team most responsible for bringing Hikmet’s poetry to an English speaking audience with their collaborative translations, described at a 2013 Associated Writing Program panel on the poet that Mutlu had never heard of Hikmet, though she grew up in Turkey, until Randy discovered his work in French.

In truth, it is unlikely that he would agree to stay in a place of such ostentation and privilege. Egyptian poet Zein Alabdin Fouad recently recounted how, during Hikmet’s visit to Cairo, he politely declined a visit to the famous Ibn Tulun mosque. Turkey had plenty of mosques, Hikmet said, and preferred to be taken to meet the people in the streets. Hikmet tended to eschew the decadent and delight in the elemental and simple things of the earth. In his poem “Letters from Chankiri Prison,” for example, he praises the “gilded purple eggplants”of market day (88) and, in “9-10 PM Poems,” the poplars which are “undressing on the plain (108).” In the latter poem, he speaks of the “enemies of hope” who will one day be vanquished. “And yes, my love,/ freedom will walk around swinging its arms/in its Sunday best—worker’s overalls!—/yes, freedom in this beautiful country . . ..” (110). It is hard to imagine Hikmet’s vision of personified freedom, with workman’s overalls 23

Xavier Review 36.1

as his best outfit, reclining comfortably by the pool with a frozen cocktail.

In fact, it is hard to imagine anyone, even someone with the good fortune to stay in a place of such luxury, enjoying life as much as the unfortunate Hikmet. Whatever his circumstances, Hikmet seemingly tried to wring from them every drop of life he could manage. While in prison, he worked to educate other prisoners, asking them to memorize Baudelaire and translate short stories, and he encouraged, and later hosted the first exhibition, of painter and fellow inmate Ibrahim Balaban, about whom he would write several poems (Ziflioğlu “Artist”). In one of his most famous poems, “On Living,” Hikmet commands: “I mean, however and wherever we are,/we must live as if we will never die” (133).

Do the guests of the Four Seasons Hotel in Istanbul now enjoy the light the way he did when he walked it as a prison and wrote: “I’m wonderfully happy I came into the world:/I love its earth, light, struggle, bread” (80)? Do they, as they partake of the hotel’s offering of all-day complimentary fresh fruit, relish it as Hikmet once did the strawberries he and fellow inmates received as a gift? Novelist Orhan Kamel recounts in In Jail with Nazim Hikmet, Hikmet’s childlike glee at receiving them: “Nazim clutched the box to his bosom; his face red as the strawberries, his blue eyes sparkling with pleasure.” He decided they should order some icing sugar through the prison guard, and while they waited, they picked off the green caps, all the while “Nazim was reciting odes to the strawberry, heaping praise on the fruit.”

Kamel quotes Hikmet as saying “At least I shan’t be saying I haven’t had my fill of strawberries (142-3).”

“My strength/is that I’m not alone in this big world,” wrote Hikmet while he was in Sultan Ahmet Prison (81). Do the guests who sleep in his decorated old cell block feel the same sense of solidarity and purpose? The same stubborn hope that allowed him to sing from the dank stench of the warship’s bilge or write poems inside the grim confines of his cell? With all of the luxury of their surroundings, do they feel the same faith in the future as Hikmet did when he wrote from that same locale:

24

My love, amid these footsteps and this slaughter I sometimes lost my freedom, bread, and you, but never my faith in the days that will come out of the darkness, screams, and hunger, knocking on our door with hands full of sun (80). *

* This essay was originally published in Rhetoric Today (American University Cairo)

25

Xavier Review 36.1

Works Cited Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Nazim Hikmet: The Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet.

New York: Persea Books, 2013. Print.

Fodor’s Travel. “Four Seasons Istanbul at Sultanahmet Review: 2011 Fodor’s 100 Hotel Award Winner.” Web. 15 March 2014.

Flood, Alison. “Turkish Poet Nazim Hikmet Regains Citizenship.” The Guardian.

7 January 2009. Web. 15 March 2014.

Fouad, Zein Alabdin. Personal Interview. 16 April 2013.

Four Seasons Hotel Istanbul. A History of the Sultanahmet Prison. English text Andrew Finkel and Elizabeth Meath Baker. Print.

Four Seasons Istanbul at the Bosphorus. Website.

Günersel, Tarik. Sampsonia Way: An Online Magazine for Literature, Free Speech and Social Justice. 6 December 2013. Web. 15 March 2014.

Hikmet, Nazim. Poems of Nazim Hikmet. Trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk.

New York: Persea Books, 1994. Print.

Kemal, Orhan. In Jail with Nazim Hikmet. Trans. Bengisu Rona. Istanbul: Everest Publications, 2012. Print.

Neruda, Pablo. Memoirs. Trans. Hardie St. Martin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Print.

Turkish Cultural Foundation. Literature: Nazim Hikmet. Web. 15 March 2014.

Ziflioglu, Vercihan. “Artist Rises from Behind Prison Bars.” Hurriyet Daily News.

21 March 2008. Web. 15 March 2014.

—. “Five Star By-Pass in Heart of Ancient Istanbul. Hurriyet Daily News. 29 January 2008. Web. 15 March 2014.

—. “Pen International and Turkish Publishers Call on Turkey Call on Turkey to Extend Freedom of Expression.” Hurriyet Daily News. 16 Nov 2013. Web. 15 March 2014

26

Richard Godden and Colin Richmond

An Encrypted and Annotated Alphabet for Europe’s Jewry Abraham — Judaism’s non-Jewish founding father, who becomes Jewish and kick-starts a nation into being by self-circumcision.

Genealogy is for cutting: like a rhyme it shines at its edge. * Benjamin (Walter) — German-Jewish ponderer of life and language who stayed in Europe too long, not having been able to make up his own mind to depart the old world for one older still — unlike his life-long friend and correspondent Gershom Scholem. Adorno on the other hand went to the furthest reaches of the new world.

Fruiting in the sub semantics of Europe’s tongues they disseminate. * Camp — Greater Germany’s more than ten thousand camps were for the most part in Europe east of the Oder.

The Reich’s heart is vast, up its arse, and sits and shits on Eastern Europe.

27

Xavier Review 36.1

* David — was a dancer about the ark in which the tablets of the Torah were being transported to their new premises in Jerusalem’s temple. David’s own transportations of delight included Bathsheba for whom he broke a number of the Lord’s Commandments.

His prick danced David round the scratched stones. Rock hard he templed God’s template. * Elijah –who once fed by crows in the desert will return to eat and drink at the Pesach table if a place has been set for him.

Leave a chair empty.

Crows will set a bare table.

Leave a chair empty. * Frei — Arbeit Macht Frei was the ubiquitous slogan of a regime which exacted free labour from those condemned to extermination, if, as in the case of most Jews, it had not exterminated them first, that is, turned them into basalt blocks in gas chambers: a description of what thousands of zyklon-gassed corpses looked like as reported by the sonderkommando whose task it was to empty those chambers at Birkenau.

“ARBEIT MACHT FREI”. Work 28

makes you free. Riddle, ‘What work makes you basalt blocks?’

* Goyim — Was it ‘because’ Christian intellectuals in the Middle Ages and for some centuries thereafter believed Jewish men menstruated and were therefore hermaphrodite-like, that they also believed the wine at mass turned into blood?

“Goyim blood is wine because yid men menstruate bitch thick haemorrhoids.”

* Hasid — At the graves of Hasidic rebbes and zadiks prayers are left written on pieces of paper, which are often held down by the stones that are also left at the tombs of those reckoned to have been holy.

Black trees grow through graves.

Hasidic pens break, seeping stones and stained prayers.

* Immigration — Millions of Jews left Galicia, Volhynia, Ukraine, and Belarus for North America between 1881 and 1914. They traded a culture where there was more to life than the bread for one in which bread was all there was to life. But: who would blame them?

29

Xavier Review 36.1

For Capital’s sake from Belarus, and only Realism to eat.

* Jerusalem — The city of heavenly peace is truly (as those who have been there know) the only place on earth to live and die, above all to die so as to be on the spot when and where the Messiah will come to make time stand still.

Eternity starts here, city at the queue’s head.

Die differently here

* Kike — What’s in a word: insult and injury.

Jew-mark, not a cross but ‘o’ (kickel); the circle made into a stick.

* Luftmensch — were as light as air because they no longer had any weight; were those named as the barely alive, scarcely living, already dead by the other inmates of the camps, who still struggled to be human — to be mensch yet.

Life below life, lived as transparency, without improvisation.

30

* Marx — If it is the case that comics are the most serious of men, are those who never make us laugh to be taken least seriously? If so, give me Groucho and the Brothers not Karl and the Comrades.

If not redemption . . .

Light relief? There must be some . . .

Marx. Which? Moods vary. * Norwich — was where in 1144 the charge against Jews that they murdered adolescent Christian boys at Easter surfaced for the first time in Europe. A rationalising addition to the charge originated a hundred years later, namely that the blood of the victims was necessary for the making of matzos, as most of these ritual murder charges occurred at Easter-Pesach time. The last, however, was in July 1946 and led to the Kielch pogrom in which at least fortytwo Jews (mainly survivors of the camps) were killed.

Bake a cake. Bake a cake, baker’s knife. Catch Jew. Catch Jew. Cut off his life.

* Oswiecim — Although it does not matter whether its tomato or tomahto, potato or potahto, it has to be Auschwitz even though it’s Oswiecim.

They say ‘aus’, we say 31

Xavier Review 36.1

“os”… ausch/os; witz/wiecim . . . let’s call the whole thing off. * Pomnik — is Polish for monument. Poland besides being the country of cemeteries is the land of monuments. Many of the monuments, the Warsaw Ghetto Monument for example, are Heroic. As a reason for Polish monuments, heroic or otherwise, it needs to be remembered that one in five of the people of Poland were killed during the Second World War. Flesh to stone. Stone to pectoral; Polish statues aren’t pigeon chested.

* Question — the Jewish. For Jews the question is: what problem?

For Christians it was: where will we ever find a better Other?

Christ! not a “problem”, nor a “question”: just never another Other.

* Rashi — was a great Jewish scholar whose influence within Judaism was probably far greater than that of his Christian contemporaries within their tradition. He is, however, an unknown name to historians of Medieval Europe.

Aberlard, Heloise (the better read), Berengar 32

Lanfranc, Rashi . . . who?

* Shtetl — The typical market town of the Russian Pale of Settlement was largely Jewish in population, the Pale of Settlement being that region of the Russian Empire where Jews were compelled to live; it comprised central and eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. Jews in this area were not only the traders and craftsmen of market towns, they also leased from the Polish landed class of the region taverns, mills, and timber yards; thus, they were the classic middlemen between landlord and tenant. The compound was made further combustible by the ethnic separation of Polish aristocracy, Jewish businessmen and a peasantry of Ukrainain or Belarussian or Lituanian determination. It might be stressed that eight out of ten Jews were poor or very poor.

Settled in the Pale.

Lessees to the Lord’s scams. His bucket wasn’t kicked.

* Talmud — is the teaching on the Torah, written down over two thousand years and still being added to as the context in which Jewish lives are led continues to change. The more devoutly the Talmud is studied, and the more enthusiastically it is put into everyday operation, the quicker the Messiah will come.

Those who interpret interpreters are latch-keys for the Messiah.

33

Xavier Review 36.1

* U-boats — is what Jews living underground in Berlin were called.

The hair of Jewesses, whose heads were shaved on their arrival in extermination camps and before their gassing, was dispatched to manufacturers in Germany to be made into the lining of submariners’ boots.

Jew-boats in u-boats whispering, cat’s whiskerish, that cropped heads will bloom.

* Vitz — a wisecrack. The first ghetto was created in Venice in 1516.

Whatever happened in the Middle Ages it was Modernity which saw the fatal and unwise-crack (rift or flaw) which ran, though neither directly nor ever unstoppably, from Venice in 1516 to Aushwitz in 1942.

Work the word for “vitz”.

Concentrate: find the wise, cracked from Venice to Ausch . . .

* Worms — The destruction by the first Crusaders of Jewish communities in the Rhineland is a watershed in Jewish history: from toleration to murder at a single bound.

In 1096, Crucifiers, en route, lit Worms 34

with their Kristallnacht.

* X — For Jews, Europe — the Europe they had helped fashion and whose culture was as much theirs as any other Europeans — became a charnel house between 1914 and 1946; not that Jews were the only victims of the Nazis: Gypsies, Homosexuals, Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, Serbs, and Germans too were marked down for extermination and slavery. . . . marks the State, call it Charnel, where Juden is one among many x’ed.

* Yahweh — is the unpronounceable God of the Jews, who is God of the Jews believe it or not, understand it or not, or like it or not.

I am that. I am to the arbitrary point of whether or not.

* Zion — A holy land which is not wholly in the head — alas!

Zion, unfinished and unfinishable sleight of mind over land

35

Xavier Review 36.1

Adam Clay

Three Poems After the Tone In desperation we amaze even ourselves. A document demands the eye, but what else?

Would it be this way if we could step out of the past and into what’s been misremembered, a lie uttered free of malice? Our ancestors had it right and then they had it wrong. It’s true of the way we manage to get along like how under hypnosis, most subjects draw their faces more symmetrical than they appear in real life. You want to be a paragraph, my favorite sentence. You want to be a promise unraveling, a spool of ribbon just before it’s opened.

36

The Last Falcon In the way it circles above the wind that disrupts our speaking, it might as well be the first.

No use in looking up.

Something larger looms like a third rail with its promise. What fact does the last of anything propose?

The moon has always been there for the eye, but its periodic absence must have been void of words when narrative was the only logic and when birds made of stone perched like guardians along every tree within the green valleys of the mind.

37

Xavier Review 36.1

A New History of Sky And gods came to rescue nature from our divinity, bones singing before they break, floating up before finding their way down the long gray hall of dust. Ruin lasts a long time, its path disappearing to a place beyond the eyes, a place best left unseen, lifting both to and away from the heart, a branch of blood desiring less than the sky from under the ground.

Though nature needs no syntax, the mind wants to harness its wildness, organize its flailing into the grip of a single word. To suggest divine suggests a higher order, one without need for coupling or fracture, words like gods twisted into sense, bending high branches while others feather wings with what weightlessness they can stand.

38

Edward Dupuy

New Orleans in Walker Percy’s Works: Place, Placement, Nonplacement, and Misplacement

“I alight at Esplanade in a smell of roasting coffee and creosote and

walk up Royal Street. The lower Quarter is the best part. The ironwork on the balconies sags like rotten lace. Little French cottages hide behind high walls. Through deep sweating carriageways one catches glimpses of courtyards gone to jungle” (MG 14-15). So muses Binx Bolling in Walker Percy’s first, and most well-known, novel, The Moviegoer. While he provides an inviting scene in this passage, Binx also says that he “can’t stand the old world atmosphere of the French Quarter or the genteel charm of the Garden District.” Having lived In the Quarter, he grew tired, he says “of Birmingham businessmen smirking around Bourbon Street . . . and [the] patio connoisseurs on Royal Street.” When he tries to live in the Garden District, on the other hand, he’s either in a “rage, during which [he] develop[s] strong opinions on a variety of subjects and write[s] letters to editors,” or in a “depression during which [he] lie[s] rigid as a stick for hours staring straight up at the plaster medallion in the ceiling of [his] bedroom” (6). So he lives an “uneventful” and “peaceful” life in Gentilly, a suburb near Lake Pontchartrain, away from both the Quarter and the Garden District. Throughout the novel, Binx engages with both, though in his own peculiar, detached, and “in between” way. In this manner he’s like Walker Percy himself, who though he lived in New Orleans for awhile in the mid-1940s, moved to the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain in 1948, first on Military Road North of Covington, and in 1961, just before The Moviegoer’s publication, to Jahnke Avenue, then on the outer edges of Covington. From this “in between” place, he observed New Orleans and the South for the rest of his life.

In Percy’s famous “self-interview,” published originally in the December 1977 issue of Esquire and reprinted in both Conversations with Walker Percy 39

Xavier Review 36.1

(1985) and Signposts in a Strange Land (1991), Percy asks himself, “Do you regard yourself as a southern writer?” His ironic and pugilistic alter ego responds: “That is a strange question, even a little mad. Sometimes I think that the South brings out the latent madness in people . . .Would you ask John Cheever if he regarded himself as a northern writer?” The hapless interviewer persists: “How do you perceive your place in society?” Answer: “I’m not sure what that means.” The interview continues: But what about those unique characteristics of the South? Don’t they tend to make the South a more hospitable place for writers?”

Answer: “Well, I’ve heard about that, the storytelling tradition, sense of identity, tragic dimension, community history and so forth. But I was never quite sure what it meant. . . . People don’t read much in the South and don’t take writers very seriously. . . . I’ve managed to live here for thirty years and am less well-known than the Budweiser distributor. . . . If one lived in a place like France where writers are honored, one might well end up like Sartre, a kind of literary-political pope, a savant, an academician, the very sort of person Sartre made fun of in Nausea. On the other hand, if one is thought an idler and a bum, one is free to do what one pleases. One day a fellow townsman asked me: “What do you do, Doc?” “Well, I write books.” I know that doc, but what do your really do?” “Nothing.” He nodded. He was pleased and I was pleased. (Conversations 158, 161-62)

Despite his protestations about not wanting to be called a “southern writer,” Percy said in another interview (one with someone other than himself) that “without the southern backdrop, Mississippi, Louisiana (New Orleans)— the [Moviegoer] does not work—it doesn’t work at all. Try to imagine Binx Bolling in Butte, Montana. There has to be a contrast between this very saturated culture in the South . . . whether it’s French, Creole, uptown New Orleans, or Protestant. It’s a very dense society or culture which you need for Binx to collide with” (Conversations 301). While The Moviegoer is a very understated book and while it doesn’t follow a traditional novelistic structure, part of its dramatic tension rests in the place—New Orleans and the Gulf South—Percy uses as its backdrop.

Much of Percy’s work centers on the notion of place and placement 40

and their counterparts, nonplacement and misplacement. These categories are developed in his novels as well as his works of nonfiction. Instead of following in the American (or even Southern) tradition of writers, he saw himself following in the line of European existentialist writers such as Camus, Sartre, and Marcel, who write of alienation, isolation, and inauthenticity. A scion of the aristocratic South, Percy knew well the American and Southern lineage of Faulkner, Penn Warren, Welty, and O’Connor, among many others.

These writers help define the “backdrop” he uses in The Moviegoer. The character of Aunt Emily, for example, is based on Percy’s second cousin, William Alexander Percy, a lawyer, planter and poet who is also the author of Lanterns on the Levee, which, among other things serves as an extended paeon to the South the elder Percy sees vanishing. After his father’s suicide when Percy was thirteen and his mother’s death two years later, Walker and his two brothers were adopted by “Uncle Will,” as they called him. Walker Percy dedicated The Moviegoer to him. As noted above, however, Percy uses Uncle Will and his novelistic incarnation, Aunt Emily, as part of the backdrop against which Binx collides. Binx is detached, adrift, on a search for a way of being in the world that the South can no longer provide as it once did for Uncle Will cum Aunt Emily. By having Binx live in Gentilly, Percy places him outside the two “centers” of the city,” in a “nonplace” of suburban America. He writes: “Except for the banana plants in the patios and the curlicues of iron on the Walgreen drugstore one would never guess [Gentilly] was part of New Orleans. Most of the houses are either old-style California bungalows or new-style Daytona cottages. But this is what I like about it” (MG, 6). In the nonplace of Gentilly, Binx presents himself as “a model tenant and model citizen and take[s] pleasure in doing all that is expected of me” (6). As he says: “What satisfaction I take in appearing the first day to get my auto tag and brake sticker. I subscribe to Consumer Reports and as a consequence I own a first-class television set, an all but silent air conditioner and a very long lasting deodorant. My armpits never stink” (7). He is, as Percy develops later in the novel, at times a scientist and at times a consumer—an anyone living anywhere.

But the search has entered his consciousness and “complicated” his 41

Xavier Review 36.1

model suburban existence (10). Binx defines the search as “what anyone would undertake if he weren’t sunk in the everydayness of his own life” (13).

Percy’s use of Heidegger’s category of “everydayness” in this definition indicates the irony with which Binx plays at being the “model citizen.” He recognizes his placement as precarious at best.

The idea of becoming an “anyone living anywhere” becomes most clear when Binx speaks of the difference between the vertical and horizontal searches and the sorts of books he reads. His new secretary, Sharon Kincaid, carries a copy of Peyton Place in her bag and though Binx sees this as a “good omen” in his plans to seduce her, he later says “My Sharon should not read this kind of stuff” (67). He reads Arabia Deserta, and the two hide their secret readings from one another. After offering a sensuous sampling from Arabia Deserta, a section that might be said to capture the “singularities of time and place” (MG, 52), Binx says that there was a time when Arabia Deserta “was the last book on earth I’d have chosen to read.” Recall that Binx had spent a summer doing research with Harry Stern, who he says, “was absolutely unaffected by the singularities of time and place.” He goes on to say that Harry “is no more aware of the mystery which surrounds him than a fish is aware of the water it swims in” (52). Instead of Arabia Deserta, Binx used to read only “’fundamental’ books, that is key books on key subjects” (69). Books such as War and Peace, A Study of History, What is Life?, and The Universe as I See It. As he says, “during those years I stood outside the universe and sought to understand it. I lived in my room as an Anyone living Anywhere. . . . Certainly it didn’t matter to me where I was when I read such a book as The Expanding Universe” (69-70). He goes on to say, The greatest success of this enterprise, which I call my vertical search, came one night when I sat in a hotel room in Birmingham and read a book called The Chemistry of Life. When I finished it, it seemed to me that the main goals of my search were reached or were in principle reachable. . . . The only difficulty was that though the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over . . . obliged to draw one breath and then the next. (70)

The vertical search “displaces” Binx clear out of the world, above it 42

(in orbit, if you will). This is an idea Percy develops much later in Lost in the Cosmos, his satirical, wildly funny, and at the same time, very serious attempt to view the self from a semiotic point of view. I don’t have time to develop Percy’s linguistic philosophy deeply. Let me say only that in Lost in the Cosmos, the vertical search is the attitude of science, a removing of the self from its own particularity in favor of generality. Like Kierkegaard before him, Percy sees the self always as a particularity, and any attempt to encompass the self through science, which de facto depends on looking at particulars in terms of generalities, will fall short. Furthermore, the self is not a thing as a chair might be. In naming a chair with the word, “chair,” Percy says, we give it a place in the world. While the thing and the word are distinct, we “know” the chair in naming it. It has a place through a mutual naming between “you and me.” There is no name for the self, however; the self cannot be encompassed by signs, and thus it is quite literally unspeakable.

Lost, then, the self seeks any manner of ways to avoid its unspeakableness, to place it self as a thing among the other things of the world. Such an enterprise leads to despair. The Moviegoer is dedicated to William Alexander Percy, but its epigraph comes from Kierkegaard: “ . . .the specific character of despair is precisely this; it is unaware of being despair.” And so Binx participates in, while he is also dimly aware of, the despair of his charades.

Since the vertical search leaves the “universe disposed of” (lost), Binx has “undertaken a different kind of search, a horizontal search. . . . What is important is what I shall find when I leave my room and wander the neighborhood.” The horizontal search might be described as the search for the “singularities of time and place.” Binx inchoately recognizes that being an “anyone, anywhere” is a type of malaise or despair, and he seeks to avoid it. “The malaise,” he says, “is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost” (120). Note that the “malaise” (another word for despair) is similar to the vertical search in that one stands outside the world to understand it. The world is disposed of (lost) through “fundamental” books but “there remains you and the world” and you, adrift from the singularities of time and place, are nevertheless 43

Xavier Review 36.1

obliged to find a place in the world—obliged to take one breath and then the next. Placement is the problem.

The place that Percy chose for himself, of course, was Covington, Louisiana, near enough to New Orleans, but not so near that he would be overcome by its strong sense of place. In his 1980 essay “Why I live Where I Live,” Percy explores the issue of his own placement in Covington: The reason I live in Covington, Louisiana, is not because it was listed recently in Money as one of the best places in the United States to retire to. The reason is not that it is a pleasant place but rather it is a pleasant nonplace. . . . Covington occupies a kind of interstice in the South. It falls between places.

Technically speaking, Covington is a nonplace in a certain relation to place (New Orleans), a relation that allows one to avoid the horrors of total placement or total nonplacement or total misplacement. (SP 3)

For Percy total placement would be to live in “Charleston or Mobile where one’s family has lived for two hundred years. . . . Such places are haunted,” he writes. “Ancestors perch on your shoulder while you write.”

For Binx, total placement was living in the Garden District of New Orleans, where his family haunts him. Recall his continual musing over the photo on Aunt Emily’s mantelpiece, searching it continually for clues of his own placement. He concludes that in the picture his father has a “smart-alecky” and “ironical” look about him. Like Binx, he’s out of place with the other Bollings. Total nonplacement for a Southern Writer, Percy writes, “is to live in a nondescript Northern place, like Waterbury, Connecticut, or become writer in residence at Purdue.” Again, Binx in Gentilly is an analogue of nonplacement. Total misplacement “is to live in another place, usually an exotic place, which is so strongly informed by its exoticness that the writer, who has fled his haunted place or his vacant nonplace and who feels somewhat ghostly himself, somehow expects to become informed by the exotic identity of the new place. . . . Hemingway in Paris and Madrid. Sherwood Anderson in New Orleans, . . . Vidal in Italy.” (SP 4)

44

Binx finds the exoticness of the French Quarter a misplacement for him.

When Percy first visited Covington, having driven over from New Orleans, he says: “I took one look around, sniffed the ozone, and exclaimed unlike Brigham Young: ‘This is the nonplace for me!’ It had no country clubs, no subdivisions, no Chamber of Commerce, no hospitals, no psychiatrists (now it has all these). I didn’t know anybody, had no kin here. A stranger in my own country. A perfect place for a writer!” But things changed. As Percy writes: “Covington is now threatened by progress. It has become a little jewel in the Sunbelt and is in serious danger of being written up in Southern Living” (SP 4-7). All this in 1980. After Hurricane Katrina, Covington has become a refuge for many displaced New Orleanians.

In 1968, Percy also had the chance to muse about New Orleans. That year, he published in the September issue of Harper’s, “New Orleans Mon Amour.” In this essay, he focuses not primarily on the exoticness of New Orleans as he does in “Why I Live Where I Live,” but on New Orleans as an interstice of the South: “It has something to do with the South and with a cutting off from the South, with the River and with history. . . . [New Orleans is] cut adrift not only from the South but from the rest of Louisiana, somewhat like Mont-St.-Michel awash at high tide” (SP 11-12). “The city,” he goes on to say is a most peculiar concoction of exotic and American ingredients, a gumbo of stray chunks of the South, of Latin and [Black] oddments, German and Irish morsels all swimming in a fairly standard American soup. What is interesting is that none of the ingredients has overpowered the gumbo, yet each has flavored the others and been flavored. (12)

In 1968, racial tensions were high, of course. It was the year of the Chicago riots at the Democratic National Convention, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The long shadow of the Watts riots in 1965 lingered. The TET Offensive in the Vietnam War, furthermore, caught United States troops and the Johnson administration off guard, and led to an escalation of US troops (composed largely of minorities) being sent 45

Xavier Review 36.1

there to fight for an increasingly unpopular and ill-defined cause. The mood in the country, to say the least, was rancorous and divisive. In “New Orleans Mon Amour” Percy seeks a middle way, a way between—an interstice, one might say—regarding the so-called “race question,” something that anyone writing about New Orleans must address.

And so he makes the bold statement at the outset: If the American city does not go to hell in the next few years, it will not be the likes of Dallas or Gross Pointe, which will work its deliverance. . . . But New Orleans just might. Just as New Orleans hit upon jazz, the only unique American contribution to art, and hit upon it almost by accident and despite itself, it could also hit upon the way out of the hell which has overtaken the American City. (SP 11)

Percy certainly recognized the deep problems of the city: “many of the streets look like the alleys of Warsaw. In one subdivision, feces empty into open ditches. Its garbage collection is whimsical and sporadic. . . .

It has some of the cruelest slums in America” (16). And, furthermore, he acknowledges its complicated history: “New Orleans was the original slave market, a name to frighten Tidewater [Blacks], the place where people were sold like hogs, families dismembered, and males commercially exploited, the females sexually exploited.” And yet it hit upon jazz. (17) Percy counters nearly every serious problem in New Orleans with an “and yet.” A “mediocre” newspaper is offset by an outstanding television station. A Jesuit owned media outlet could do more for social justice, and yet, a Jesuit, Fr. Louis Twomey, has “translated Catholic social principles into meaningful action.” And while other elements of the Catholic church have “been content to yield moral leadership to the federal bench,” and Catholic schools integrate “only when public schools are forced to,” New Orleans was also the place the Catholic Church installed the first [Black] bishop in the United States.

While Percy was no Pollyanna regarding race relations in New Orleans, he can perhaps be forgiven for not probing even more deeply into the African American plight in this essay. His wish to find a cultured middle way between 46

the “hell” of riots and the inauthenticity of Uncle Toms sometimes falls short.

Three prominent black characters appear in The Moviegoer: Mercer, Aunt Emily’s houseman, who, Binx says “is thought to be devoted to us and we to him. But the truth is that Mercer and I are not at all devoted to each other. My main emotion around Mercer is unease that in threading his way between servility and presumption, his foot might slip. I wait on Mercer, not he on me” (22). The second is Cothard, “the last of the chimney sweeps.”

He appears in the background when Aunt Emily is telling Binx off in her no-uncertain-terms-aristocratic-Southern-way. His cry: “R-r-r-ramonez la chiminée du haut en bas!” is a foreshadowing of Binx’s subtle change at the end of the novel. And finally there is the middle-class black whom Binx sees at the church on the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants on Ash Wednesday, the day after Mardi Gras, which in the novel, happens also to be Binx’s 30th birthday—the day he told Aunt Emily he would make a decision about his future. Because the black is “sienna colored and pied,” Binx cannot tell if he received ashes at the church, and thus he wonders if God is or is not present at the corner of Bons Enfant and Esplade. “It is impossible to say,” are the final words of the novel before the Epilogue, and the power of Percy’s first novel derives in large part because he has kept its religious undertones extremely subtle and ambiguous.

Except perhaps for Cothard, the chimney sweep, these blacks in Percy’s fiction are not the sort revealed to the world in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Katrina made a big lie out of New Orleans’ reputation as “The Big Easy.” In the flood waters, the storm paradoxically uncovered what the City had so arduously kept covered for the majority of its history since the Civil Rights movement—that blacks and whites in New Orleans--despite Percy’s “and yets”--have never really been on equal footing. Percy does say in “New Orleans Mon Amour” that the real trouble in these race issues is that “as long as [Blacks] do not lose [their] temper nobody is apt to do anything about [them] and when they do it is too late.” But this attitude—that someone should do something “about them”—does not sit well today, in these “dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A,” as the start of Percy’s third novel, Love in the Ruins, has it. And the degenerated attitude of noblesse oblige of Uncle 47

Xavier Review 36.1

Will and other “Southern Stoics” is part of what Percy writes against in his 1956 essay “Stoicism in the South.” The old Southern Code of honor, which made “place” inhabitable for many, no longer holds, if it ever did. The code which led “to generosity toward [one’s] fellow men and above all to [one’s] inferiors” was always at odds with seeing the individual as individual. The Southern Stoic attended to his “inferiors,” as Percy says, “not because they were made in the image of God and were therefore loveable in themselves, but because to do them an injustice would be to defile the inner fortress which was oneself” (SP 85). In Love in the Ruins black “Bantu Guerillas” have overtaken “Paradise Estates”—a fairly clear metaphor that all is not well with in the so-called paradise of the Sunbelt South.

Percy did not live to witness the killings of Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, or Michael Brown, but I suspect he would have seen in them the long line of cultural decay brought on by our sense of unconscious displacement and lostness in the hellishness of the American city.

One can praise Percy’s attempt to find a middle way for New Orleans in 1968—to take on the race issue at all—and to present the city, with all its foibles, as a possible way out of the “hell” of the American City. His attempt to place it as an interstice in the South, while recognizing also its squalor and de facto segregation, evinces a civil discourse and sense of humor the likes of which would be welcomed in our present age.

—Originally delivered at American Literature Association New Orleans, September 10, 2015

48

Simeon Berry

from Fingerling Lakes Natural Selection Miss Raylene says the samurai meditated on dismemberment That Buddhist monks closed their hands and let their fingernails grow through their palms Suffering apparently a requirement for being professional and effective When I skip class I go to the greenhouse with Stell Watch her twist up a joint and blow her dirtied breath over the phalaenopsis She’s amused This is Like Cannibalism 49

Xavier Review 36.1

Kind of Except weed is low class Orchids are like those toffs in Great Expectations Oi Time to partake of fucking pudding Dickens is this quarter and it’s giving her nightmares She says reading him is like licking wool Nobody can make Miss Raylene annoyed like her Stell always wants to linger on rotting colonial teeth The people who tied census-takers to trees Miss Raylene says education is not pure shock value Stell says it’s only something for the last person to hum as he turns out the light 50

Vacant Miss Raylene’s empty place is lit up like a skull in a classroom Already someone’s advertised their loneliness on the living room wall with a phone number and a drawing of a crippled swan Stell says Miss Raylene either left a note Or didn’t That she threatened the principal with a pair of pinking shears when he called Anne Frank’s diary a crypto-lesbian narrative That a man with hair implants and a scaly leather jacket followed her from Atlantic City We’re going to be taught the rest of Virginia Woolf 51

Xavier Review 36.1

by the beefy wrestling coach with the tic and the stained ties I can see the silhouettes of dust in the floor from her furniture Can smell the spiced wood of her books and scarves Something in me folds Like the wings of a bee shutting down for the winter I have the comfort of Stell’s intoxicated disbelief My acceptance letter to the U And the first sentences Miss Raylene ever said to me I can see that you’re troubled That’s good Hold onto that All the best ones are 52

David Mills

Three Poems Thought Quiet of wasted light on a welder’s interrupted knuckle. Harrowing: this language of flesh; memories. Drowning in memory. How scarlet billows on both nodes of a dream. Before light has made up its mind, hoist it from puddingstone. A tabby gallivants: a ream of my cheek in its mouth. Dangle me between two hotels. Loose moonlight. Pluck dawn from my skin. A straight line’s a complicated odyssey where one can’t drive the driving rain.

53

Xavier Review 36.1

Dream Detective Dream, who ate the pureed sunlight?

Spork from Ork: Nanu Nanu.

Dream, what is the multi-disciplinary, septic-tank theory?

How many pieces of chicken are you currently in a long-term relationship with?

Dream, when does one stand at a 45 degree angle to autumn?

Friends, Homeys, countrymen—lend me your yummy.

Dream, where can a poem chat with the paper it’s printed on?

If you’re not at the table—you’re on the menu.

Dream, why was the host tossed from the “Come-in” club?

Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed.

54

Settle/Down

The wind settles like an upset stomach like a case out of court, a dispute; like some do for less or second best; like an old score, a debt, dust: like some folks in their ways; like the Pilgrims in Plymouth, Mass or the lesson of two evils. Might the wind die down like a fool beckoning a bullet waves laughter? Like something that never lived up to its potential (a Yalie managing a copy shop) like a flame, a storm, excitement; or like the howl and dread likely filling that fool’s head before guncotton did.

55

Xavier Review 36.1

Ronald Dorris

‘Til Emmett Speaks: Tiresias Sailing on the Tallahatchie

Emmett Till in Different States (2015) by Philip C. Kolin is comprised

of 49 poems. The word state in the title, as noun/subject, connotes that the life, understanding, misunderstanding and image of Emmett permeate from state to state, both literally and figuratively. Throughout the text, at interval Emmett is allowed to speak for himself. As his own noun/subject/ state, Emmett embraces his shape of self in congruence with mode of being, condition, nature, and position that resurrects on the written page. At interval, when the script is flipped to highlight the word state in verb transitive employ, the spotlight is readjusted to denote the plight of Emmett as object to mark, indicate and designate what is executed to set, settle, fix, and establish explicit signification of an event in history.

To begin analysis with poem number 49,”The Canonization of Emmett Till,” we could surmise that arrangement of language throughout the text is instrumental in petitioning for canonization for the legacy that is Emmett Till.

We further could surmise that this single poem stands alone, and the previous 48 poems, for the attempt at analysis, comprises three trilogies, each endowed with sixteen movements that may call to mind the sixteen dismembered pieces of Osiris, or the 16 black and white pieces on the respective side of a board in a game of chess. Kolin’s production also inspires one to engage numerology.

The first nine numbers in numerology constitute a cipher, a key that unlocks certain mysteries. Hence the numbers 1 to 9, emblematic of the nine months of pregnancy, begin and end a cipher because the two-digit number that follows, 10=1+0=1, begins a new cipher. It may or may not resonate as a cause for concern why Kolin has not included one more poem to add up to the number 50. The number 5 (adventure), the middle point of the cipher, would position us between the first four secular numbers, and the last four cosmic numbers—as above so below. But we have what we have, 49 poems= 56

4+9=13=4 (foundation) relative to four directions on the planet Earth in which humankind is operative.

If we give consideration to Kolin’s design of text as a trilogy, we note that fourteen poems in each trilogy, respectively is positioned between an alpha (beginning) and omega (ending) poem. We may consider Emmett primarily as subject in trilogy one, as object in trilogy two, and framed by collective memory in trilogy three. Trilogy one rests between “Facts about Me” as alpha poem, and “The Jet Photo” as omega poem. In the first trilogy Emmett is allowed to speak for himself, and the title of the inaugural poem is emphatic given message and title, “Facts about Me.” In the opening line of this poem, in his own voice Emmett announces his birth. “I was born breeched” (7). His telling of the red string tied around his wrist to pull him out of the womb sets the stage for how Kolin’s text frames from life through death Emmett’s fourteen station-of–the-cross-years positioned between an alpha and an omega poem in each trilogy. The color red calls to mind much blood, and the string tied around the infant’s wrist calls to mind a lynch rope, as he is yanked from one world, the darkness of the womb, into the cold daylight.

KolIn’s skillful choice and arrangement of language enables Emmett, in his own voice, to announce in the alpha poem execution of his birth and death in the same breath when he informs, “Mama said breech babies would have/ more danger in their lives” (7).

As the alpha poem unfolds, Emmett makes his way through realm elementary (school) as someone who the teachers think is a good speller, yet honestly he informs us, “but one of my i’s was left out in Mississippi.” Kolin remains in command not only of language, but also movement. Toward the end of the alpha poem, Emmett is fourteen, and his mastery of the elementary realm rewards him with his first trip down South in August to see his relatives, a suggestive rite-of-passage as a precursor to high school when he returns to Chicago. We hear a jubilant Emmett say he cannot wait to visit his folk in Money, Mississippi. From the outset, given Emmett’s delivery of facts about his trek from Illinois to Mississippi, Kolin launches a productive enterprise directed via language and movement to frame the danger lurking ahead. Up front, close, and personal, center stage frames the breech, the missing lower 57

Xavier Review 36.1

case “I,” of the human and socially constructed state, and any speculative money to be made from the impending brutal murder of Emmett on August 28, 1955, eight days after he arrives in Mississippi.

The alpha in the first trilogy trails “From Facts about Me,” to the omega “The Jet Photo,” featuring the battered, monstrous body of Emmett lying in state at his funeral in Chicago as 50,000 people pass by to review his crushed body and soul in an open casket with a sealed glass top. As she stares into the coffin looking at remains which call to mind the Elephant Man and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, reverberating off Emmett’s battered body is the echo of his mother’s cry of anguish, ‘Why’? The audience wants answers.

Given the fourteen station-of-the-cross renditions resting between the alpha and omega poems in the first trilogy, “Emmett’s Wallet” is positioned after the alpha poem. While the transitive verb state of Emmett’s storyline has presented during the past half century that he was walking around with pictures of white women in his wallet, he clarifies by informing that the pictures were already inserted for anyone who bought a dime store wallet. Pictures of movie stars appeared in cellophane slots within wallets purchased from dime stores from 1952-1956.

In the first trilogy, Emmett speaks to us in his own voice four more times. In “R.I.P. Louis Till,” he shares with us the execution of his father in 1945. “My father lies in segregated ground,/a weedy grave cell somewhere/ in northern France, /along with 80 other Negro soldiers hung by the U.S./ Army for “wilful miscounduct,”/ whatever that means. Evidence is never /that important in a Till trial,/where “Bury and forget” turns out to be the verdict” (19). In order for their son never to be forgotten and always identified, Louis leaves with his wife Mamie a signet ring for their son. In the next poem, “My Father’s Ring,” Emmett’s mother takes from the “frayed linen . . .in a nicked up dresser drawer” (20) his father’s signet ring and, says Emmett, “When I reached 14 she placed my father’s ring on my finger/and told me it was mine for the journey” (20).

In Emmett’s voice, the ring ceremony is followed by “Mamie Till’s Warning,” spoken in 16 couplets and sealed at the end with Emmett’s utterance of what could be considered a one-line epitaph, “To devour cries like mine” 58

(22). In the following poem, “Emmett Till on Whistling,” he closes out his speaking voice: “In 1955 my body was interred in history,/after a trial more scandalous than the crime/I was to have committed—whistling” (23). Two of the remaining four poems before the omega poem focus on Mamie Till, and two on Emmett. “Mamie’s Veil on Attending Her Son’s Funeral,” is emblematic of the state of a veil of lies, a veil of secrecy, a veil of destruction, a veil against hope. The Pattern in the veil intertwines Kolin’s entire text.

To see the story unfold, one has to be able to pull back Mamie’s veil. “She wore a true icon of suffering/a mother’s shroud sealing/in her shaded sight/ the mutilated mosaic that was Emmett . . ../Black butterflies dirged across her face /sad comforters keening a son/who will die before her eyes/endlessly in the days ahead” (24).

Mamie does not back down. She travels from Chicago to Mississippi to reclaim the body of her lifeless son. “Mamie Till’s Triolet” informs, “No, the Delta shall not keep my son/Though they tried to hide him in the river’s misery” (25). Kolin highlights Mamie sense of empowerment. By standing her ground for an open casket funeral, she refocuses and repositions the gaze on segregation at the local, national and international level. This move is sealed in the drowning and baptism of collective memory as “The Chicago River Leads a Jazz Funeral for Emmett,” and the first line takes-him -on through, “A Eulogy for Emmett to the Tune of The Old Ship of Zion.”

The alpha poem in the second trilogy is “White Lies about Emmett.” The omega poem is “The Freedom Riders.” In this trilogy, Emmett speaks in two poems, “Tiresias of Tallahatchie County” and “Eisenhower and Me.” What seems like an abrupt change in design and discourse on the part of Kolin as author unfolds as a balanced flipping of the script whereby the lens is shifted away from the state of Emmett as subject to the state of the nation embroiled in controversy and crime pertaining to the Till execution. Six poems in the second trilogy precede the Tiresias poem. Tiresias is the blind prophet in The Bacchae by Euripides. The Bacchae centers on Dionysus, who returns to Thebes to start a new religion, while simultaneously vindicating the honor of his mother, Semele.

After giving birth to her son, Semele was struck with a lightning bolt.

59

Xavier Review 36.1

Thereafter, rumors fly. Was Semele struck by a lightning bolt because as the daughter of a king she has dishonored the throne by being unable or refuses to name the father of her son? Or was she struck because she has blasphemed the god Zeus by declaring he is the father of her son? Dionysus is sent away for his own safety, and returns twenty years later. Tiresias counsels Dionysus how people can and will be torn limb for limb if there is no balance between emotion and intellect in a transplanted environment. Likewise, there had been effort to educate Emmett before his trip to Mississippi.

The alpha poem in the second trilogy opens with the spotlight on Emmett as object. “White lies were as thick as dragonflies/kept on a leash in the Delta until/untied they barked and bit/any black man (or boy) who dared/to show his dead body before the sun went down/Black ghosts knew their place in 1955;” (30). In the six poems that follow, Kolin perceptively assembles a cast who each address the transplantation of Emmett as a consequence of his alleged whispering bacchic frenzy that got him torn limb for limb atop the hills of Mississippi, and then threw him below to be consumed by the Tallahatchie River. Each voice that addresses Emmett as object parallel and reaffirm his active voice as subject whenever he speaks on his own behalf.

“Uncle Moses’s Dream” constitutes a series of ‘what ifs’ had Emmett fled to secure his freedom. Whether in the dream or the awakening state, Uncle Moses is emblematic of the Socratic method whereby accepting that everyone is pregnant with thought, it becomes the role of the questioner as midwife to bring on the process of irritation to engage discourse. Kolin skillfully incorporates this feature into his work in an attempt to expose the truth. More white lies are covered up in “Come Visit Mississippi, 19551964,” and clearly not to vacation in a manner that parallels what Emmett Till experienced when he visited Mississippi. Emmett’s facts about himself already have murdered the post card billboard lie invitation that surfaces in the second trilogy. Kolin is masterful in achieving such angle of consistency in his work, and picks up the subject/object refrain in the next three poems.

Many who have gone before, during and after Till’s execution, resurrect in “Emmett Till’s Brothers Speak” to present a signet account of their limb for limb destruction. “Graveless faces, bodiless corpses/obscured by spades 60

of black mud/these silent limestone ledges/become our tombstone” (34).

Likewise, jurors at the trial drank black mud (Coke), and Emmett’s body was packed in limestone in a pine box and shipped back to Chicago for his funeral and burial. “In Mahalia Sings the Blues,” she proclaims, “I bought him a stone pillow/for his eternal rest” (35). Her contribution to a headstone for identification parallels Louis’ signet ring passed down to his son, and which served as the key item for identification of Emmett’s tortured and swollen body from the Tallahatchie River.

In “What Emmett Would Have Sung,” voices of musicians chime in to inquire: “Emmett, if your voice had survived/the hushed screams that took it away/before your dreams were pummeled/into nightmares by those brothers/with their broken laughter/and shark white teeth,/I wonder what you would have sung” (36). However, like the voices in the previous five poems, they do not leave Emmett to face nameless silence at the bottom of a river.

They keep his memory alive in song. Kolin’s command and arrangement of language in an alpha poem and five station-of-the- cross poems to open the second trilogy show that taking Emmett’s voice away and objectifying his action does not drown him, but instead serves as the geyser that propels him to a new height. It is his perpetrators who drown.

Kolin has cleared a passageway, and in “Tiresias of Tallahatchie County” endows Emmett with the force to speak again, this time to the 18-year-old black boy who stood up in court to testify about what he heard on the night of the torture. “Willie, you are the brave Tiresias of Tallahatchie County/blind to the threats of a lynching rope/or those sneaky bullets aimed at the back/of your head. You told the gunshot truth . . ./Your voice broke the black silence of intimidation./ Your ears opened the world to hear my agony” (37). So the torturing perpetrators get nothing. In the successive “Slop Jars,” despite all of those outhouse buckets strategically placed through Tallahatchie County, and that the killers hoped would be filled with an honorarium for their evil deed, “They never got half of what was promised . . ./Even though five lawyers/agreed to work pro malo/still there was not enough/blood money to keep these sons of hell/in cigars and out of ruin” (38-39).

The bacchic frenzy is not yet over. Before Emmett speaks one more time 61

Xavier Review 36.1

in the second trilogy, “The Jury” have their say: “We made a show of our civic duty/and agreed to wait/a whole hour before coming back into court./ We told fishing stories./But some of us were thirsty,/and it took an extra seven minutes/to get some Cokes, dark as cold mud, delivered”(40). Social explosion constitutes the framing of 20 couplets in the poem “1955,” with a frontline seat for popular culture viewing of the world of Disney brought live into the home on airwaves, even though Emmett could not breathe at the bottom of the Tallahatchie. So in his own muffled voice, in “Eisenhower and Me,” he sends out an S.O.S. “Seems like Ike didn’t like my family./Why did he hang my daddy/in some foreign place: Never sent my Mama one damn dime, though, and she was/ a G.I.’s widow” (43). Despite the many campaign buttons—I like Ike-- floating around in an effort to contribute to getting Ike elected in the 1952 and 1956 presidential election, Emmett issues his own pronouncement at the end of the poem: “I don’t like Ike” (44). Emmett had hoped that because Ike’s wife was named Mamie, he might speak to the Mamie of the son who had been brutally tortured and drowned.

As Mamie Till’s open-casket funeral and Jet magazine coverage place Emmett on the international stage, distraught perpetrators cry out for their fifteen minutes of limelight fame. In “The Judgment of Carolyn Bryant,” Kolin frames her frustration although she had inaugurated the demise of Emmett Till: “The boy’s botched syllables spoke more/than my lifetime of hiding my words, burying them/in the two back rooms of my mind , the past and past present” (45). “Emmett Till’s Sister” calls to mind Antigone, in the namesake play, who defies the state to bury her brother accused of being a traitor for raising an army from the outside to defend Thebes, while the other brother is given a state funeral as a hero for defending Thebes from the inside. King Creon has issued a royal decree that anyone caught in the attempt at burial will be executed. Performing a symbolic funeral by sprinkling dust on her brother, Antigone is spied upon by a sentinel who reports her to the king. In Kolin’s poem the extended family sister persona says: “I search for my brother in/ the streets where/sentinels look around/each corner a hiding place/for my tears. I wear a veil—“(47). His mother at the funeral gazes from behind a veil for a son “who will die before her eyes /endlessly in the days ahead” 62

(24). She could not yet see his resurrection. The sister as extended family, from behind her veil, issues a Lazarus call to Emmett: “Arise, Brother,/and each flower quickens/the aether hopes/the west dapples” (47). “Death on a Bicycle” and “Medgar’s Planting” frame two more murders prior to attempt by assembled mobs stretched along the Mason Dixie line, waiting for their moment to attack “The Freedom Riders,” the subjects of this omega poem of the second trilogy.

In the third trilogy, Kolin arranges language to shape poems to frame the importance of collective memory as the lynchpin of immortality. Emmett’s concern highlighted in this trilogy shows him raising questions and reflecting on what is to be done with him. In the poems in which he speaks, collective memory is the guiding principle. “My Viet Nam” is the alpha poem. “The Legacy” is the omega poem. Emmett announces his own curtain call in the alpha poem: “I served in my own Viet Nam/getting caught on the Delta line;/for a time I was an MIA, too,/until they shipped what was left of me/ home in a government box” (54). Emmett will not give up the good fight; he fights for immortality: “Who could deny that I am a part/of America’s memory program;/my abraded face/turned to bone and shale” (54). In “Had I Lived,” Emmett draws the past and the future into the Everlasting Present.

Had I lived . . ./I would have resurrected the shreds/and shards of bodies in swamps, pits, fields thick with thistles, thorns, and time”(56). Emmett’s focus here on the shreds and shards of bodies call to mind the second-hand washed diapers under which had been placed for safekeeping and to secure his identity on the trek to Mississippi, his father’s signet ring wrapped in frayed linen.

Aware of others to keep his memory alive, “Emmett Till on Dr. Martin Luther King” is an expression of his appreciation for the voice of his favorite preacher he listened to on the radio in Chicago. “We both lived in a season of fall;/our dreams turned to nightmares, . . ./Dr. King carried my memory like a cross, to L.A., Detroit, Memphis, Yazoo City;/I was his “Little Emmett.” He painted/visions of my agonies before crowds and/spoke of my crucifixion in places where/black murders were a whites-only pastime” (57). These words attest to the way in which we could view the fourteen poems positioned among the alpha and omega poems in each trilogy as the fourteen station of the cross.

63

Xavier Review 36.1

“Mamie’s Heirlooms” calls to mind how to conserve one’s energy while working on strategy to generate change: “She saves time’s heirlooms but the years spend/her speeches, many before ghosts,/all these fine young black men with burning/souls marching across history and harm’ (58). Chicago gets on the bandwagon of commemoration when 71st Street is re-named, highlighted in the third trilogy under the banner “Emmett Till Road.” Says the persona, “It used to be just a street/now it is a memory that raps/through five or six zip codes/three dolorosa long...” (59. In “Emmett Weeps over Chicago,” his tears serve as a reflecting pool when his speaking voice announces his entrance through yet another curtain call: “Like Christ over Jerusalem/I weep over Chicago,/My sisters and brothers wait/for eyewitnesses to recover from their memories/So many unwritten lives./ Thank God, I had a mother who wrote” (61).

Highlighting transplanted continuum, “The South Side of Chicago” is the sixth-station-of-the- cross poem under the third trilogy, “a memory festering with/Mississippi Delta/sharecropper shanties” (62). Preoccupation with search for “The Train to Nain” looms large on the horizon when on “the day the news came from/Mississippi, all Mamie could think about/was boarding a train for Nain . . ./But she couldn’t find a train/to Nain from Chicago or/from Mississippi, that sovereign state/of black terror and despair” (63). Kolin has come far enough in his framing so that we see “Emmett’s Second Resurrection” as he speaks on his own behalf. “Free now of those/ voices in the dark,/I am a bronzed Lazarus/performing my own/autopsy, setting right/your upset plot which you once/recorded in my flesh” (64). In “Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin” sixteen lines featuring dismemberment parallel the sixteen pieces of Osiris as Emmett calls out to Trayvon. “You could be my grandson/we both made history/before our teens expired/our photos walled the world . . ./Our bodies became witnesses/to crimes we did not commit” (65).

“Antiphons for Emmett and Trayvon” set discourse on race as a social construct. Emmett raises the question: “What’s the penalty for being/black in white America, /where skin precedes essence?/How does a black mother rescue/a son entrapped in a thousand fictions,/when the body of truth has been severed” (66)? For sixty years collective memory has been “Searching for 64

Emmett Till in the Loop.” Says the persona, “I must find you and hold you back/before the traffic light switches from redneck jealous/and time hunts you further south./I will hire a loudspeaker truck to rescue your/name before the stampede of angry mouths crush you./My words are evaporating in the summer haze” (68).

“A Black Man in Chicago Celebrates Emmett Till’s Birthday” with the following message. “It’s July and I am thinking about/your birthday; today you would be 75,/ a grandfather to the boy you were/when murder baptized your name into history; the child became/the father of the man who never died;/you outlived your hollow assassins” (69).”

“Orpheus of Burr Oak” frames how territory that envelops Emmett’s resting place is desecrated on three occasion. The initial episode evolves when Emmett’s sunken body is fished from the sunken grave of the Tallahatchie River, and then loaded onto a train for the long ride to be interred in Burr Oak Cemetery outside Chicago. Fifty-eight years later, Emmett’s body is ordered exhumed by the FBI for further investigation into his death, and afterward reburial. Involving the third occasion, attendants at Burr Oak Cemetery dig up and cast aside grave content to make room to accommodate more dead bodies. Emmett was spared the final scorn because he had been properly buried after the exhumation. However, his initial coffin was found in a shed, and the family granted assumption to the Smithsonian Institute.

Down to the last stitch, in the omega poem “The Legacy” the persona says to Emmett, “Your nightmare woke the world up about /Dixieland so it could not look away” (71).

We are now left with the overarching poem of Kolin’s text, “The Canonization of Emmett Till (August 28).” The eighth month August, added to the twenty-eighth day, adds up to 8+28=36=9, a complete cipher. Has Kolin’s work come full circle? Design, word choice and message stand on their own merit. Emmett is brought to life as subject, as object and, endowed within the frame of collective memory, is canonized in the hallowed ground of immortality. However, Kolin should be cautious not to take away from his command of production by telling the reader what he wants them to hear.

He should let them hear other voices for themselves. This could have been 65

Xavier Review 36.1

achieved were the preface not included, merely assemblage of a collage of statements from others. Likewise, eleven pages of notes that offer explanation for nearly every poem is not necessary. This amounts to overkill, literally and figuratively. Each poem is its own voice.

Kolin’ choice of language that projects a scenario of action accounts for Emmett being brought to life. Masterfully, not only is Emmett resurrected; he also is canonized relative to continual summation throughout the text, but not in the overarching poem at the end of Emmett Till in Different States. It is apparent that Kolin is striving for poetic closure, having included a tercet comprised of free verse, as opposed to rhyme scheme pattern. Ancestors teach that when recounting the story of a life, the Being has the last word and we should never cheat them of it. In the canonization poem, if the first line of the first stanza is added to the single stand-alone line at the end of the poem, we are left with the declaration, “You lead a life of heroic virtue . . ./But you bled more” (72). The extent to which Emmett’s blood flowed long ago was and remains imprinted in collective memory. His mother saw to that with an open-casket funeral. To continue to see Emmett, we need to see that as he lived he lives. He has the last word. Let us not cheat him of it.

66

Sheryl L. Nelms

Two Poems Don’t Touch the Pea Soup!

I just could not stand it if you did you must leave that saucepan there on the back burner to simmer fat green bubbles doing their slow burp up from the bottom waiting for me to ladle out a little concentration 67

Xavier Review 36.1

Montana Wind it rushes up through dry feather grass pushes the antelope over the ridge drops off a limestone cliff rolls along the slope through the scrub cedar rattles the branches shakes a nesting turtle dove into flight riffles out across the Rosebud River catches in thick thorns of a plum thicket rimming the bank and lays down dying moaning its wau ya pi song

68

James Miller Robinson

The Marionette Tango in San Telmo It is a cold gray August Sunday afternoon when the cobblestone plaza is packed with antique vendors displaying crystal, silverware, silver pesos, watches, clocks and odd things whose use has been forgotten, things that might have been brought from Spain, Italy, England, Germany or France centuries before or more-recently stolen from another neighborhood.

Vendors line the barricaded street selling leather purses, wallets and belts, knitted scarves and children’s sweaters.

There are Peruvians selling wooden flutes, Paraguayans embroidered blouses, Columbians precious stones, Uruguayans cured gourds with silver tubes for mate tea.

Andean quartets fill the air with the distant hint of Asian sparrows.

Multiple accordions breathe melancholy tones.

The buildings side by side were private mansions During the “Golden Age,” but no one knows when that might have been. Now mostly subdivided into shops, principally antique stores stuffed with the pawned and discarded possessions that ebb and flow during repeated cycles of hard times.

Of course, there are Italian restaurants, 69

Xavier Review 36.1

meat grills, wine bars, and tired cafes.

On the sidewalk a puppeteer dressed in charcoal gray suit and fedora hat is pantomiming a song from a record

by Gardel as his hands dance before him holding crosses tied with strings.

The marionette himself is dressed like the man above who controls his every step, bend, reach, and gesture, and seemingly even the sad expression on his painted face.

The song’s lyrics describe a man who has waited all night for his partner to arrive at the wooden box turned on its side and mocked up to mimic a little tango cafÊ and before it a street corner with a lamp post in San Telmo years ago, but the partner never comes and the marionette keeps on drinking from a little black bottle in one of his despondent little hands.

To the music of Gardel he tries to groove into a solitary tango by himself, but by this time he can hardly stand up because his feet keep slipping out from under him. To the laughter of the encircled audience gathered in the street, he sways off balance with flailing arms then topples off the edge of the little stage but grabs hold with both hands, and after assuring his grip, pauses to take another slug from the little black bottle while dangling by just one hand.

70

First one knee, then the other, he tries to throw a leg onto the precipice from which he has fallen but keeps slipping toward the abyss below we can only imagine.

He finally climbs onto the little street corner on all fours as though praying or begging his lost partner to return before, as Gardel sings in the song, he is swallowed alive by his sorrow.

71

Xavier Review 36.1

Charlene Fix

A Bad Sound Late in this end of summer evening in the dark I’m unwinding, the room cool, the bed smooth, the door closed, just silence.

For a moment I’m on top of everything, so much so that I’ve even swept and washed the kitchen floor.

Now I’m reading poems sent me for review, one leg already planted in their world that is lovelier than ours with its dirt roads and gleaners, and its man churning out paintings while suffering and praising, his mind boiling over in a contemporary way.

My other leg is rising to step in too when I hear a bad sound outside, a thump of heaviness hitting something like a paved road that almost doesn’t, then does give a little, the inscrutable colliding with the ineffable, and the latter absorbing the blow, the resulting waves rippling out forever. So I step outside in my nightgown to see what I can see, the sidewalk damp on my bare feet, clouds masking the moon and stars, and the cat adjudicating these mysteries from behind the screen door.

72

E.P. Fisher

I Heard in the Midst of Noises I heard in the midst of noises, In the midst of children’s cries, How the heart is full of secrets, And the head is full of lies; And out of the sea of voices, Out of the earth like an ear, Thoughts underground, like a river; Blood, like a migrating star.

I fear the bitter harvest, My fellow man, my past, Feel gods among my sorrows And beasts upon my path; The sun is dying in the sky, The moon has come to dust, And in the Milky Way the mind Is dipped, the heart is lost.

A holocaust of children Whose hunger goes unheard, Martyred in the millions, Murdered, massacred!

Like raindrops in the desert Our tears do them no good; The shadow of the planet Longs through their latitude.

I know that in a flower lies 73

Xavier Review 36.1

Some violence and some bliss, That love’s half-blind, half-naked eye, Hides teeth behind each kiss, And passions all go up in smoke, Grief grafted leaf to vine: O I have touched the snake that spoke And bruised the grape to wine!

74

Holly Iglesias

Three Poems Suffer the Little Children and Forbid Them Not Miracles are not visited upon the desirous, the bleeding palm, the lapful of roses, the shimmering apparition, these are for the pure of heart, the poor in spirit, for peasants and shepherds, not, it seems, for people like us. But on the last day of school, a statue arrives, bought with the rolls of pennies and jars of dimes saved by the children year after year since the war ended, a golden giant, our Blessed Mother, Mary, the Queen of Peace, descending from heaven onto the roof before our very eyes.

75

Xavier Review 36.1

Substitutions and Equivalents Mother is the superior of our kitchen, her habit an apron. All around the block, block after block, women work in cells of domestic devotion, lipstick in one pocket, rosary in another, shaping their days from ground chuck and Green Stamps and re-soled shoes.

After Mass, the husbands smoke on the church steps, fingering spare change as their wives, in Sunday hats and cotton gloves, speak with Father, who sports a green chasuble for Ordinary Time and a downtown haircut.

76

Remote Control On saintless days, those sad ellipses on the church calendar, we pray to pure space, that place where the future blooms, our mortal souls loosed into a cool blue void, each isolate, the Mystical Body reduced to parts—ear, thumb, thigh—then flung into orbit with the monkeys and cosmonauts. Language freed from schoolbooks—Run and see! Oh, run and see!—pages disintegrating at the speed of light.

77

Xavier Review 36.1

Thomas Bonner, Jr.

A Review of Spanish Luck, By Robert Skinner ( Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2015)

The seventh noir styled detective novel by Robert Skinner, Spanish

Luck, like his previous novels, is set in New Orleans, but in 1944 rather than in the 1930s. Killings occur early and often in his fiction, and this novel is no exception as the first one occurs in the four page prologue. Unlike his other novels, nightclub owner-detective Wesley Farrell has no role, but police Sergeant Israel Daggett of the “city’s Negro Squad” has a continuing role as does Black businessman Marcel Aristede. Skinner, however, introduces new detectives, a pair: Sal Cortes, an ex cop with a brother on the force and Jessica Richards, a crime reporter inspired to get into this unusual line of work for a woman by the killing of her crime-engaged step-father.

The issue at hand is a planned bank robbery being organized by the notorious Fade Taber, who has corrupted a bank officer and engaged a local street criminal Al Martin. A subplot involves Martin’s teenaged son who has left home to join his father in the caper. Today, the United States has troops in conflict across the Middle East and New Orleans continues with near daily murders, mass shootings, and corruption of corporate and public officials. Similarly, Skinner’s 1944 New Orleans rolls on with major and petty crimes while American troops are fighting in Europe and the Pacific. Even though the fictional events occur more than seventy years ago, he maintains immediacy in his narrative.

Strongly influenced by Chester Himes‘s “domestic novels” (as he termed them), Skinner, who has written about Himes and his detective fiction, characteristically explores racial relations in a city known for their intricacies.

His first novel in the series Skin Deep, Blood Red (Kensington Books, 1997) provides a 1936 lens for the novels that followed as Wesley Farrell, Black with a white father, makes discoveries across the color lines. In Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (Poisoned Pen Press, 2000), the mixture of French names amid the 78

social classes and ethnicities reflects the realities of this exotic city near the end of the Mississippi River. And in Skinner’s current novel, he moves into the Hispanic presence in New Orleans with Sal Cortes, his new lead detective.

While coups in Central America and the Cuban revolution have bolstered the Hispanic population in the city during the later twentieth century, Skinner has responded to the Mexicans and Central Americans who have come to help rebuild New Orleans after the 2005 flood following Hurricane Katrina.

As in his previous novels, Spanish Luck has strong characters that defy the usual formulaic plots associated with genre fiction. Sal Cortes with his war wounds and their story has the qualities of a hero, one associated with Joseph Campbell’s concept. His antagonist Fade Taber has classic elements of personal attraction and cold evil. Jessica Richards and most of the characters have roots—stories, almost prequels—that contribute to who they are and what they do. Al Martin reflects a society that is unforgiving of its violators of laws and who is almost forced to resume his criminal life after completing a jail sentence. The Cortes brothers have a difficult relationship because of conflicting romantic interests. A public service announcement for the local NPR station indicated that New Orleanians have their own stories that demand to be heard, and Skinner’s characters, while having universal appeal, also possess particulars associated with people who come from an old city near an edge of the North American continent.

World War II does not overwhelm the story but simply adds reality and a satisfying context. For example, 1930s cars from a Ford to a Packard reflect the shift of manufacturers from automobiles to tanks and aircraft during the war. Skinner has always been effective with his descriptions and uses of cars and guns. This novel is no exception as readers encounter a “33 Chevrolet roadster” on the first page and a few pages later “a nickel plated .32 Hopkins & Allen revolver.” The period music continues as it has in the other novels to reflect the New Orleans setting and the trends of the early forties—Dinah Shore sings ”Mad About Him, Sad Without Him, How Can I Live Without Him Blues.” Like the inns in eighteenth century English novels, bars like the Old Absinthe House and the Fat Man Lounge offer stages for characters and action. Specific alcoholic drinks like Manhattans sit on bar tops. References 79

Xavier Review 36.1

to products of the period like an old Underwood typewriter and Old Gold cigarettes furnish the scenes.

Robert Skinner knows New Orleans through his years here and his careful research in newspapers and maps. When he served as Librarian of Xavier University of Louisiana and Managing Editor of Xavier Review Press, he could see—from his office--Holly Grove and Gert Town, crime affected neighborhoods that appear in his fiction. Spanish Luck, building on his novels set in the 1930s, is a good start on telling the hard stories of a new decade in an old city.

80

Karen Maceira

Profound Simplicity: A Review of Elegy for a Broken Machine, by Patrick Phillips.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

Patrick Phillips accomplishes the most difficult task for a writer of

any genre—revealing the profound through a lens of simplicity. Employing mostly free verse, spare poems, Phillips delivers unvarnished details of human vulnerability. Beginning with the title poem elegizing his father, to the poem “Mercy,” which begins the second section of the book and portrays the speaker as a father to his sons, to the final poem, “Will,” in which he contemplates his own death, Phillips manages to render narrative, figuration, and form in accessible and imaginative but never simplistic ways.

In this, his third, book, the poet continues a focus on family relationships as his major subject. He divides the book of thirty-one poems into three parts.

The first section deals almost exclusively with the death of his father and begins with the title poem, which, as well as any in the collection, displays the poet’s skills. The poem begins with a depiction of the father and son in the garage as the father attempts a repair:

My father was trying to fix something and I sat there just watching,

like I used to,

whenever something went wrong.

The speaker here is “just watching,” but the word “just” is hardly inconsequential given the observer role of this (or any) writer. The poet nudges the narrative into something more than simple past tense with the line “like I used to.” The speaker is now grown and looking back on similar times.

81

Xavier Review 36.1

Anyone familiar with Phillip’s first book will recognize this father as one who often “made a bonfire of his anger” (“The Rules” from Chattahoochee).

So the “something” that “went wrong” did not always involve machinery that could be fixed with a simple tool, but instead the fractious, overbearing nature of the speaker’s father and how that affected the “machine,” if you will, of the family.

The turn of the poem comes in the father’s answer to the son’s question and five lines that follow:

I kept asking where he’d been,

until he put down a wrench

and said Listen:

dying’s just something

that happens sometimes.

Who knows where that kind of dream comes from?

Why some things

vanish, and some

just keep going forever?

This whole scenario is part of a dream; the father has died, his body the “broken machine” that could not be repaired.

Phillips uses, as the most salient feature of form in this poem (and some in earlier work), the repetition of a word at the end of each strophe, a repetition reminiscent of and carrying the intensifying effect of the use of repeated end words in a sestina. This poem repeats “something,” a word that fits so well with the meaning of the different lines that it does not stand out as gratuitous. The vagueness of the word’s own denotation subtly reinforces the vague answer to the son’s question of where we go after death: “I kept asking where he’d been.” Later in the poem, the speaker describes the garage setting as “murky,” and so is the “something” delivered by the silence of the father’s absence.

82

The poem “Once,” also in the first section, contains an unforgettable image. The poem concerns not the speaker’s own father’s death but that of “the father/of my son’s friend.” Merely an acquaintance at his son’s soccer match, this man, whose father had just died, communicates with only facial expression and body language the pain of the passage we all confront when a parent dies. All that is unsaid between them pulses beneath the lines until:

the truth about love, about all of us,

so plain in him

there was nothing left

but to pretend I was not watching out the corner of my eye

when the muddy dog, and the bouncing ball, and the children

chasing after it all seemed to veer and disappear inside him.

Here Phillips captures the unique way a person leaves childhood upon a parent’s death. Emphasized by the consonance of “muddy dog,” the alliteration in the next lines, and the rhyme of “veer” and “disappear,” Phillips uses indelible childhood images both to reveal the children we remain in the context of our parents’ lives and how those children we still are “disappear” at our parents’ passing.

A total of nine poems named elegies, and a few others that are elegies but not titled as such, appear in this book. Besides his father, Phillips elegizes a childhood friend who died from cancer and others who committed suicide. So it is rather with relief to come to the poem that begins the third section entitled “Elegy for Smoking.” The speaker announces, “It’s not the drug I miss . . ..”

83

Xavier Review 36.1

Rather it is the camaraderie of those who congregate outside buildings “like the remnants / of some decimated tribe, / come down out of the hills / to tell their stories.” The ostensible subject of the poem is smoking, but its tone expresses something deeper--nostalgia for a time when one could either be oblivious to or choose to ignore the consequences of one’s own actions.

Though the second and third sections of the book contain some fine poems, overall, the first section contains the finest. Perhaps it is that the subject of his father’s death calls up a more intense, more intimate, more poignant voice. “The Body” is a good example of this; despite the unadorned, vigorous diction characteristic of the whole book, the poem sings. Here are the two middle stanzas:

Soon the undertaker’s sons

will come and lift this

strangest of all strange things:

a palimpsest of what we loved, a nest in the brittle leaves.

The book as a whole, however, is essential for anyone who does not want to miss one of the most skillful of contemporary poets. Patrick Phillips has compelling stories to tell, and he manages to communicate the essential truths of those stories, truths common to all of our lives, in refreshingly plain language and unusually careful form.

84

Toni Ann Johnson

Up That Hill Monroe, New York, 1962

Philip Arrington rounds a curve in his 1959 powder blue Chrysler and

finds himself unable to focus on the road. Walton Lake, a silver dollar in the sun, shimmers to his left. Flanked by lush woods, it’s an impressionist painting brought to life; a dream he’d like to dive into and explore.

For the first time during his fifteen-minute ride from Goshen to Monroe, Phil’s eyes have stopped scouring the road for black drivers. He hoped to see at least one, but with this view it doesn’t matter anymore. If being a lone pioneer is what it costs to enjoy this small-town beauty, he’ll pay.

He turns off the road onto another, passing a convenience store and a sign for Walton Lake Estates. The car chugs up a hill beneath a canopy of maple trees. He inhales country air, refreshing, even with the oppressive heat.

Squinting out the window, he takes the second right, winding up a steep incline past single-story structures with decorative shutters. They seem fairly new, small—about twelve hundred square feet, and they all look alike.

Probably designed by the same architect.

Nearing a pale yellow house with green shutters, Phil notices a lobstercolored man with a crew cut, standing shirtless on the porch, facing the street.

Two red-haired little girls run through a sprinkler in the front yard. He meets the man’s eyes as he passes. Phil nods, smiles. No response. In the side mirror, he watches the man’s eyes follow his car.

Farther up, Phil slows the Chrysler to a stop under an oak tree across from a white house with black shutters. Feels like he’s driven into the mouth of a fire-breathing dragon. All four windows are open and he’s parked in the shade. With a handkerchief he dabs sweat from his forehead and upper lip.

The front porch is light gray. A carpet of grass and neatly trimmed shrubs line either side of the concrete walk leading to the porch.

Up ahead, the block rounds into a cul-de-sac. Two barking German 85

Xavier Review 36.1

Shepherds chained to a pine tree jump at a blond boy riding a bike in circles.

Next door, a pumpkin-shaped old lady in a straw hat prunes rose bushes.

A bird sings. Phil looks up at a red-bellied robin perched on a branch above the car. He imagines that at night there are crickets, fireflies, and an endless view of the stars.

He’s eager for the respite from the Bronx— from the sirens and the trains thundering above White Plains Road, from his ex-wife and his mother.

His Timex says 5:40pm. His chest pounds. Hand trembling, he shoves the coil lighter in, eyes the pack of Benson & Hedges on the seat.

Looking in the rear view mirror, Phil runs a hand down his amber-colored face. He saw his barber on Sunday. The cut is short, kink tamed. He shaved again before leaving work as his wife recommended. “Good grooming helps put white people at ease,” she said.

He lights up and sucks in a few minutes of calm.

When he grabs the suit jacket off the back seat he slips his fingers into the breast pocket to be sure the hundred dollar bills are there. Polished Florsheims hit the blacktop gleaming. Sliding into the jacket he feels sharp as a church lady’s hatpin.

As he strides toward the little white house, a balding, lanky fellow in his late fifties emerges in dungarees and a white undershirt. The screen door bangs shut. The man descends the porch steps squinting at Phil through glasses. His pale feet in leather sandals are hairy and long.

“Dr. Arrington?” The man’s voice is sandpaper on a cinder block. He clears his throat and coughs into a liver-spotted fist.

“Please, call me Phil. Are you Del?” Phil extends a hand.

Del’s mouth hangs open, momentarily mute. “Uh . . . yeah. I’m Delbert Mathews,” he says. Looking at Phil’s hand, he finally shakes it. “My nephew didn’t mention . . . Ooh, boy.” His smile is tobacco stained. “You don’t look like I expected, Doc.” “Oh?” Phil says. “You don’t like my suit, Del? I splurged just for you.

Brooks Brothers. Custom-tailored, too.”

Del chuckles. Crosses his arms. He leans back getting a better look at Phil. “Must be damn hot wearin’ it. That’s all I got to say.” He glances up 86

the street then back at Phil. “Jesus,” he says, shaking his head. “Well, all right. C’mon in.”

Del’s feet flap up the walkway.

In the living room, neatly stacked moving boxes line the walls. Del lights a cigarette and points to a burnt-orange vinyl sofa in front of a window with a view of the cul-de-sac. Phil tugs his slacks at the thighs as he sits. He eyes a painting on the wall behind the adjacent love seat where Del sits. It’s a beautiful woman with long brown hair and doe eyes, wearing a coy smile and no top. Her large nipples are pink. Phil has the good sense to stop staring. He smiles at Del, caught, hand in a forbidden cookie jar.

Del blows smoke through his nose. Winks. “Like that, huh?”

Phil feels sweat on his forehead. “It’s a nice painting.”

“Thanks. I painted it.”

“Oh. That’s impressive. You’ve got talent.” Phil dabs his head with his handkerchief. “My wife Velma and I enjoy art. We were at The Frick just last Saturday.”

“Ree-aa-lly?” Del places a hand on his ruddy cheek. “I love The Frick,” he says. “You like museums?” He slides his glasses back on his nose.

“We collect art, too,” Phil says. “Nothing of great value yet, but in time.”

“No kidding.” Del leans toward the coffee table, flicks his ashes. “Avery tells me you’re a doctor, too?” He leans back, crosses his legs and shakes his foot.

“A PhD, yes,” Phil nods. “I’m chief psychologist at the mental health clinic where he and I work. Been commuting from the Bronx since the job started in April. The driving’s too much, which is why I’m looking to rent closer.”

“Yeah. Avery did tell me that part, Doc.” He smiles sideways. “Where’d you get your PhD?” “Yeshiva University.”

“No kidding,” Del says, his eyes brightening.

“You’re familiar?”

Del nods. “Doug, my housemate, is Jewish. Some buddies of ours went there. Before your time. You part Jewish, Doc?” Phil shakes his head.

87

Xavier Review 36.1

“Too bad,” Del says, stubbing out his cigarette. “You could almost pass.

Me and Doug met in art school. Cooper Union.”

“I know Cooper Union well,” Phil says. “Almost applied for undergrad.

Before psychology, I considered engineering.”

“That right? Generous place.” Del leans back, clasping his hands behind his head. “That full scholarship sure helps when you come from nothing. Bet you can appreciate that.” His salt-n-pepper eyebrows bounce up as his chin drops to his chest. Am I right?

Phil forces a smile. Thank God Velma didn’t come. He can shrug it off when people make assumptions. Velma tells folks right where to shove them.

“So, you’re an artist?” he asks.

“I work for IBM.” Del’s head hangs in mock shame. “Paint when I can.”

He smiles sadly. “Dougie stuck with it. He’s an artist. You’d’a met him today, but he’s at our new digs. Gettin’ things gussied up. We’re outta here tomorrow.”

“I see,” Phil says. “Mind if I look at—” “—Do you?” Del chuckles. “Avery mention Doug?”

“Uh . . . Not that I remember.”

“Oh, I think you’d remember.” Del laughs until he coughs up phlegm.

Phil waits for the hacking to stop. “I like your work. Hope you find more time to paint. May I take a look at the other rooms?”

“Matter of fact, our new house has an art studio. We’ll see.” Del points behind him at the topless lady. “Dougie hates that piece.”

“Huh. A competitive thing between artists?”

“Somethin’ like that.” Del snorts. “Well. You seem like a fine, articulate young man. Got more going for you than most-a these backwoods bumpkins around here. But listen Doc,” he says leaning forward, elbows on his thighs, “you and your Mrs.’d be the only couple like you in the neighborhood.”

“We’re used to it. Velma works for a Wall Street bank. I’m the only one at my job, too. And it was just me at Yeshiva. But I made friends.”

“Of course you did. But these hillbillies are a whole other species from educated Jews and sophisticated city people. I’ve got no problem with it. Ave says you’re cool. You look respectable, and your landlord told me you pay on time. That’s all I care about.”

88

“Thank you.”

“Just, don’t expect the neighbors to welcome you with cakes or invite you to their barbecues.”

A splat of gray-green bird crap on the hood greets Phil at the car. He lights a cigarette. The lease is signed, keys pocketed. He won’t let this small thing rattle him. He has to pee. Del didn’t offer so much as a glass of water; asking to use the toilet didn’t seem wise. He could go behind the car, but there’s probably some neighbor watching out the window.

He holds it, smokes behind the wheel, and forgets to enjoy the lake view as he drives out.

When he climbs the hardwood steps to the top of the two-family house they share on east 230th Street, Velma greets him at the door in a black lace bra and half-slip. He hands her his jacket and brushes passed her into the bathroom.

Velma enters the open doorway behind him. He turns his head to look.

Copper-colored, with a chic bob, high cheekbones and an hourglass-figure, she’s used to lots of compliments. Will she get them when they move?

“How’d it go?”

He turns back to the commode. “Check the pockets.”

She does and finds the house keys. He sees her in the mirror, twirling them aloft while wiggling her hips—a celebration dance.

“My money was green, Vel,” he says.

“Our money.”

“That’s all he cared about.”

“Told you it’d be fine, honey.”

He glances back at her. She smiles; a sexy slash of a smile.

“Hungry?” She’s not asking about dinner. She drops the jacket, then the keys.

“Nah.” He turns back to finish his business. “Late lunch,” he says, teasing.

“What’d I tell you about spoiling your appetite?” She wraps her arms around him.

89

Xavier Review 36.1

He laughs and sighs.

A fan hums in their bedroom window muffling a siren blocks away. Late night news plays on the elderly couple’s television downstairs. Phil lights a cigarette. Sips a glass of watered down scotch on the nightstand.

“The owner’s a homosexual.”

Velma’s cheek is moist against Phil’s chest. Her perspiration smells sweet like the Chanel No. 5 she applies in layers—lotion, dusting powder, and eau de toilette.

“He told you that?”

“Pretty much.”

“Why?” She fingers the curly hairs between his pectorals. “That’s none of our business.”

“Guess he wanted me to know he’s different. Since we’re different. He also said the neighbors are crackers.”

“He said that?”

“Basically.”

She rolls off his chest onto her back. “Well, they didn’t lynch him. How bad can they be?” She kisses Phil’s shoulder, reaches for his cigarette and takes a puff.

Phil sits upright, against the wall. “He called his fella his housemate.

Doubt they held hands on their neighborhood strolls.”

“You’re worried?”

“Just telling you what he said, Vel.” “Well, I’m not worried. I survived Harlem. Country crackers don’t scare me.”

Saturday, Phil and Velma finish boxing their belongings. In the kitchen, Velma wraps dishes with last Sunday’s New York Times. In the front room, Phil sits on the wood floor beside his roll-top desk, packing files. The front door opens. His mother appears on the threshold, her “key for emergencies” in hand.

She and Phil don’t agree on what constitutes an emergency.

90

He stares up at her, stout, in a gingham housedress and white orthopedic shoes, graying hair in a loose bun. She has his amber complexion and the same kinky hair.

“Hello, Mother. May I have that key, please? I need to return it.”

“You’re going through with it, then?”

He gestures to the box he’s packing.

“Terrible idea.” She shakes her head.

“Is that what you walked over here to say?”

“Philip, they’ll run you out of there.”

His mother doesn’t have his New York accent. She’s lived forty years in the Bronx, but she was raised in Bermuda. Her accent isn’t Bermudian either.

The two have cancelled each other out. She has no accent. What she has is an attitude, one he calls “anti-Phil.”

“You said the same thing when I applied to graduate school. You also said I’d never get a job, remember?” He lights a cigarette, continues packing his papers.

“Such a big shot, aren’t you?” She closes the door behind her. “They may not mind you working beside them, but that doesn’t mean they’ll let you live beside them, too.”

Massaging his eyebrows with one hand, Phil speaks with the cigarette clamped in his back teeth. “Thanks for stopping by, Mother. Your confidence in me is always comforting.”

“And your smart mouth is always vexing.”

“You still hold the pain of childbirth against me.”

“Oh, stop with your foolishness. I’m worried. Don’t wanna have to come up there and cut your big shot britches down from a tree.”

He returns his attention to the files. “Go home. And leave that key, please.”

She steps deeper into the room. “Have you thought of Mallory? After leaving her, you really want to expose that sad little girl to danger, too?

Selfish big shot.”

“Hello, Emily.” Velma appears, her face smudged with newsprint.

Phil slides into a corner with his files and box. He watches her stare his mother down. His first wife kissed up to Emily. Velma’s nobody’s sycophant.

91

Xavier Review 36.1

“Look, we’ve got a lotta packing to do today,” she says, patting perspiration from her cheeks with a dishtowel. “I’ve already boxed up the teapot. Dishes, too, so you’ll have to excuse us. There’s nothing to offer you.”

“Tsssssssssk,” Emily sucks her teeth.

Phil closes his eyes. He’s dying for some scotch, but if he leaves this room Velma’s apt to call him a punk.

“I don’t need your tea. Go back to your boxing. I’m having a conversation with my son.”

Phil shudders.

Velma steps toward Emily. She drapes the dishtowel around her neck, tugging it at both ends like a fighter between rounds. “You’re not senile yet, are you, Emily?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You realize you’re in my house, right?”

Emily stands straighter. “Do you realize I was speaking with my son when you interrupted?”

“Stay calm, Velma,” Phil says.

Velma flicks him a look then returns her glare to Emily. “When you’re in my house, you will respect me.”

“I’m leaving,” Emily says.

“It was nice to see you. Bye.” Emily flings her thumb sideways at Velma. “This one can take care of herself, but heaven help you if something happens to Mallory. You hear me?”

She turns and opens the door. “Heaven help you.”

Phil stands. “I need that key.”

Emily walks back to Philip and puts the key into his palm. She takes his face in both hands and kisses his cheek. “Be safe.” She pads back out in her thick-soled shoes, leaving the door open. Her footsteps clunk down the stairs.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Philip says.

Velma’s eyes roll without rolling. Her mouth tightens and turns up at the ends, yet she’s not smiling. It’s a round-the-way expression widely understood as: Negro please. He watches her turn and walk back down the hall. What will white folks in Monroe make of his woman?

92

Later, the phone rings. “Dr. Arrington,” he answers immediately.

The voice says, “This the Arrington that’s trying to move into Walton Lake Estates?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Jack Wilson. Y’know who I am?”

“Should I?” “I sold Del Matthews the house he tried to rent you. That’s not gonna work out.”

“What are you talking about? I have a lease.”

“He misunderstood.”

“Misunderstood what? It’s a binding agreement.”

“Now don’t you raise your voice at me. I’m sure you’ll be better off someplace else.”

“Why’s that?” “ʼCause you’re not welcome here, that’s why.”

Phil’s pulse pounds in his neck. “The house belongs to Del, Mr. Wilson.”

“You listen here, Walton Lake Estates is a family oriented community and we’re gonna keep it that way!”

“I hear you fine, but yelling doesn’t give you legal standing. I put money down. Del is within his rights to rent out his property. And I’m renting it.”

Velma appears. “Who is that?”

Phil waves her away like a fly.

“Oh, you put money down, huh?” Wilson’s voice continues. “Well, if I’s you, I’d pick it back up and find someplace else to live.”

Phil hangs up.

“Who was that, honey?”

Phil rubs his temples with his thumbs. “The guy who invested in the land and put the houses up—the developer.” He reaches for his cigarettes on the floor. Sighs. “I was expecting some people might be unfriendly,” he says.

“But he was hostile. You gonna be all right with that, Vel?” “I am packed, Philip.”

He lights a match. “Maybe my mother’s right.”

93

Xavier Review 36.1

Velma’s eyes meet his, “You think I’ve been helpin’ to pay your school loans so I can live in the Bronx down the street from your fucking mother for the rest of my life? As long as we can afford it, we can move wherever we want to. This is New York State, not the Jim Crow South.”

They ride silently as Phil drives the powder blue Chrysler out of the neighborhood past tidy two-story houses with chain link fences, ladies on the sidewalk in fancy hats, bibles in their white-gloved hands; others in curlers, rolling carts up the hill toward White Plains Road. There are girls with pressed hair in ribbons, young men in suits, and fellas on the corner sipping beer for breakfast.

The car merges onto the Henry Hudson Parkway followed by a U-Hall truck with two guys from the neighborhood ferrying their belongings north.

Phil holds the wheel with one hand, a cigarette with the other. Velma smokes too. On the new Palisades Parkway she stares out the window at freshly planted trees with young leaves.

When they reach the town of Monroe. Vel’s eyes grow huge at the sight of the turn of the century Victorian homes atop grassy hills. They round the curve and Walton Lake appears, dazzling. She cranes her neck, staring back as they pass it. Phil caresses her cheek with his knuckles. How lucky he feels to have found someone moved by the beauty of what moves him, too.

They pull into the driveway. Velma leaps from the car, crosses behind, and stands at the edge of the yard. She beams at the house and its vibrant grass, tidy shrubs, and sparkling gray porch. Glowing, in a white T-shirt and jeans, she looks more like a teenager than a thirty-year-old woman. She turns to see the maple, oak, and birch trees across the street and the way the sun peeks through their canopies. She looks up the block at how it rounds into the cul-de-sac. Then she turns to Phil. He’s standing on the driveway watching her. She rests a manicured hand against the bare “V” of her chest and smiles from a deeper place than he’s seen before. She nods, happy beyond words; it’s a silence so sweet he hopes to remember it forever.

Inside, the first thing they see is the painting. Del has left the topless 94

woman on the wall.

“What the hell is that?” Velma sets down the box of dishes she’s carrying and marches toward it. A note taped on the wall says, “‘For your collection.’”

She turns to Phil. “What fucking collection?”

“Calm down. I can explain.” Frozen, in the middle of the floor, he holds a box of lamps.

“Oh, I am, calm. I’m calmly, telling you: that shit needs to find another home.”

“I didn’t ask for it.”

“Thought you said they were gay.”

The husky movers, both in their twenties, enter carrying the bed frame.

They stand near the door, eyes cast down, knowing better than to interrupt.

“I told Delbert we collected art,” Phil says. “I think it was nice of him.”

One of the movers cringes.

Velma gives Phil eyes that roll without rolling. She takes the topless woman down, turns her around, and leans the canvas against the wall. She picks up the box of dishes and moves into the kitchen.

As Phil directs the movers, Velma finishes unwrapping a set of glasses.

She turns on the faucet to rinse them. Nothing comes out. She tries the hot water handle. None there either.

In the bathroom the yellow tiles sparkle. She tries the faucets. Empty.

She moves to the bedroom threshold. Phil is helping the movers assemble the bed.

“Why isn’t there any water, honey?” Velma asks.

Phil looks up at her. “What?”

“No water.”

He walks to the bathroom. Tries the faucet. Velma watches from the doorway. She folds her arms. “I have to go to work tomorrow,” she says.

“So do I. Don’t worry. The main water valve is probably off. I’ll find it.”

Outside, Phil finds the valve near the hose spigot under a shrub beside the front porch. He moves the valve lever higher and turns on the hose. No water. He moves the lever down. Nothing. He drops his forehead into his hand.

Phil drives down the hill to the convenience store just outside the entrance 95

Xavier Review 36.1

to the development. There’s a phone booth outside.

“Hey Del?” “Yup.” He exhales, as if blowing cigarette smoke. “Delbert Matthews, here.”

A woman in a red sundress with her hair in a bun leaves the store, followed by two waddling toddlers licking pink Italian ices.

“It’s Phil. Arrington. Did you have the water shut off for some reason?”

“Uh. No, Doc. I didn’t.”

The woman frowns at Phil through the booth’s glass. She grabs the arms of the two chubby little boys and hurries through the parking lot past him.

“Well, there’s none running,” Phil says.

“What’s that?”

“We have no water.”

Del is silent for a moment before he says, “Crap.”

After buying several jugs of water in the convenience store, Phil drives back up the hill. He sees the woman with the kids, hiking up in flip-flops. She’s slim, with a suntanned frame, her back and shoulders bare in the sundress. It would be no bother to offer a lift, but he knows better. He waves. The little boys wave back. The woman crinkles her peachy face like something stinks.

An hour later the movers are gone. Velma organizes the flatware drawer while they wait for Del. Phil drinks from one of the water jugs and watches Velma. Her face is sweaty, her lips set in a frown.

He’s about to speak when he gasps instead. A fat brown spider crawls across the yellow countertop toward her.

“Vel,” his voice quavers, “step back, Honey.” He grabs a piece of crumpled newspaper. Swallows. God, that thing is big.

Velma looks at the spider, then at Phil, his hand holding the paper in the air, immobile. She slaps the spider dead with her bare hand.

“Christ!” Phil yells.

“What?” she shrugs. “I went to summer camp. Spiders don’t scare me.”

She takes the crumpled paper from his hand and wipes the goop off of her own. “Now would be a nice time to have some fucking water.”

96

Phil bends over, hands on his knees, and exhales. “We need to put that painting back up.”

Her head whips around.

“Just for now. The man painted it. He gave it to us and I don’t wanna offend him, Vel.” “What about me? It offends me, dammit.”

“I’m sorry.” He moves behind her and massages her shoulders. “I’ll take it down as soon as he leaves, but let’s not argue about this now. Please.”

Velma flips her hands up at the wrists. Fine.

Phil meets Del at the water valve in front of the house. Cigarette dangling from his mouth, Del moves the lever up and down like Phil did earlier. He takes the blue baseball cap off his head and smoothes his thinning hair before putting it back.

“Jack did something shady’s, my guess,” he says. “Threw a tantrum when he heard about you. Ah, brother.” He drags on the cigarette and blows the smoke through his nose. “I’ll call a plumber buddy a mine. Gotta use someone’s phone, though.” He heads toward the cul-de-sac, speaking over his shoulder. “Wanna meet Mrs. Lynch?”

Phil follows. “Is that really her name?”

Mrs. Lynch is the rotund lady he saw pruning roses the day he signed the lease. Standing in her kitchen with its dingy red and white checkered floor and sink full of dishes, Del uses the telephone while Phil compliments her flowers.

He mentions that his mother grows roses, too, in her backyard in the Bronx.

“Well my goodness, don’t you speak nicely for a colored man,” she says, flashing her dentures. White hair hangs bluntly to her shoulders. “And I’ve got friends that suntan darker than you, dear. Your wife nice, like you?”

Phil bites his lip. He smiles and nods. He doesn’t want to be there if Mrs. Lynch ever makes the mistake of telling Velma she’s nice, or well spoken, for a colored woman. Those dentures may end up lodged in her throat.

“Don’t see what’s so bad about you,” she says. “Jack came by talkin’ about some ‘niggers’—oh,” she taps her mouth with two fingers, “ ‘Scuse me, 97

Xavier Review 36.1

dear, that’s his word not mine. Said they’d ruin the neighborhood. But when I think of someone of that persuasion, a nice young man like you doesn’t come to mind at all.”

Phil hates himself for smiling again. She smiles back.

Del finishes with the phone. “Plumber’ll be over in an hour,” he says.

Back at the house, Velma’s changed into a sleeveless orange dress that shows off her small waist and shapely legs. Phil stares as she sets down a tray with bottles of Coke, Saltine crackers, and Laughing Cow Cheese wedges.

She sits beside him on the antique loveseat she inherited. Her natural scent mixed with the Chanel makes him delirious. He takes her hand.

“Thanks so much for the painting Del,” she says.

Del sits, smoking, in the Bentwood rocker she found at a garage sale. He tilts his cap back and looks up, admiring his topless masterpiece.

Velma squeezes Phil’s hand. “It’s lovely,” she continues. “Owning original art is such a privilege. We’re grateful to you.”

“My pleasure,” Del grins. “Glad she’ll finally be appreciated.”

Mario the plumber has the facial symmetry of a movie star, thick black hair, and a beer gut. He walks Del and Phil and to a muddy spot at the edge of the yard where the grass has been dug up. They look down into a trench he’s cleared with his tools.

“Here’s where the water supply pipe’s supposed to be. It connects the house to the water main. Yours ain’t here.”

“Come again?” Del says.

“Someone ripped it out,” Mario says.

“Can you replace it?” Phil asks.

Mario folds his arms above his belly. “I dunno. If it’s vandalism y’oughta report it.”

“Jesus,” Del says. “That son-of-a-bitch. Sorry, Phil.”

That night, after washing with bottled water heated on the stove, they lie supine in bed. Phil turns his head and kisses Velma’s neck.

98

“Y’okay?” he asks.

“I’ll live, honey,” she says. “Your white girl’s in the closet, in case you’re wondering.”

He can tell from her breathing that she’s drifting off. Worried about the water and Jack Wilson, he doesn’t sleep.

Early the next morning, Phil drives out of the development with Velma.

A few other cars head out at the same time. While descending the hill, he sees the driver behind him, in the rear view mirror—a man in glasses and a suit jacket. He pays no attention to Phil and Velma.

They enjoy the lake view as they pass. Phil drops Velma at the station in Monroe where she’ll catch the train into the city.

When he gets to The Orange County Mental Health clinic in Goshen, he sits at his desk as Avery, his colleague, lumbers into his office lugging plastic jugs of water from the A&P. Phil moves a pile of papers and a pencil, clearing a spot. Avery sets the water on the metal desk.

“Six more in my car,” he says.

Avery is 6’4” and solid. He has thick red hair and a full red beard. Aside from his white collared shirt and khakis, he looks more like a linebacker than someone with an MA in psychology from Columbia.

“That’s nice of you, Ave. Thanks.” Elbows on the desk, Phil holds the pencil between his thumbs and forefingers.

“Feel like I’ve gotta do something. My fault you’re dealing with this bullshit.”

“Not your fault people are bigots.”

“Gimme the key to your trunk. I’ll load the water.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to. Listen, Uncle Del talked to Wilson. He confessed to pulling out the pipe, but he’s refusing to put it back.”

Phil’s teeth clench. He snaps the pencil in two. “Okay.” He exhales, collecting himself. “The confession’s good news, though. Thanks.”

“Good news?”

“A statement from Del that Wilson admitted to stealing the pipe is evidence 99

Xavier Review 36.1

he’s violating my civil rights. I can handle that legally.”

“You’re a better man than I am.” Avery’s nostrils flare. “I’d just kick his ass.”

Phil drops the pencil pieces into the trash. “If we were in the Bronx, and he was black, maybe I could. But I’m not trying to end up in jail.”

Phil picks Velma up from the station that evening. She climbs in, kisses him on the lips.

“Guess what? Ben Gilman agreed to be my lawyer,” he tells her.

“Our lawyer.” She settles in and looks out the window as he drives.

“He used to work for the Attorney General of New York State.”

“That’s great, honey,” she says, watching the buildings pass by: a church, the Town Hall, Manufacturers Hanover Bank. “I stink like someone cut the cheese. I’d kill for a bubble bath.”

“He’s getting a court order from a judge mandating that the water be restored.”

Velma looks at him. “How long’ll that take?”

“Could be a few days.”

She sighs, turning back to the window. “Met a nice woman on the train.

Husband’s a minister. She told me some things we can do with Mallory when she’s here. Oh quick, look there.” She points. “See past that pond on the right, the airplane there? That’s a playground. And down the road, she says there’s place to get ice cream custard. She also said there’re a few black people in town.” She turns to Phil. “Including her dentist. Her dentist is black.

Can you believe that? And listen to this, he owns one of those big houses we pass on this road.” Velma’s eyes sparkle. Her hand covers her lips, as if to contain her glee. “If folks around here’ll let a black man stick his hands in their mouth, honey, your chances of building a private practice are even better than I thought. We can do this.”

Phil squeezes her thigh.

As they approach the development, a group of people, five of them, stand at the edge of the convenience store parking lot at the bottom of the 100

hill. Among them, the sunburned man with the crew cut Phil saw standing on his porch the other day.

The man points at Phil’s car and runs toward it shaking a placard above his head that says: “NIGGERS GET OUT.” An egg cracks against the back window as Phil speeds past.

Velma yips and covers her head with her arms. In the rear view mirror, Phil sees the bun-headed woman with the sundress. Today she’s in blue jeans, yelling, “GET OUT! STAY OUT!” There’s another woman and two more men, but Phil drives up the hill too fast to get a good look.

“Christ. You alright?”

“Del was right,” she says. “They are crackers. I’m shootin’ their asses with my BB gun next time.”

“What? No you are not, Velma.”

“Please. These white trash bumpkins think they’re gonna throw shit at me? I will put their motherfuckin’ eyes out.”

Phil gapes at her.

“Watch the road, Honey,” Velma says. “I know y’don’t like it when the Harlem in me comes out, but I’m tellin’ you, somebody hits me with an egg, or any-damn-thing else, that’ll be the last thing they do this side of the grave.”

“Velma. I know you’re upset. But we didn’t move up here to got to war.

Let me deal with it my way.”

“Oh, you’re gonna deal with it?”

“Yes.” “Well, don’t dillydally.”

Phil puts the car in the garage and wipes the egg off the back window with a rag and ammonia. He locks the garage door. He and Velma carry gallons of water, looking over their shoulder as they walk to the front of the house.

The porch and the screen door are spackled with egg.

Velma pops Swanson TV dinners into the oven and then carries a gallon of water into the bathroom. Phil hears her use some to flush the toilet.

101

Xavier Review 36.1

He pours a glass of scotch and sits at the red Formica table outside the kitchen. As thoughts of how much worse things could get arise, he drinks to drown them. Smokes, too. He focuses on what he sees. There’s a mess of packing boxes, but also a mix of antique and contemporary furniture, oil paintings and signed lithographs waiting to be hung, potted plants, oscillating fans, candles on the coffee table, and drapes that frame a view of the trees and the cul-de-sac. Once they’re unpacked this’ll be a nice place.

Velma re-enters wearing her lace slip. She slides into the chair across from him and takes his cigarette.

“Baby, look around,” Phil says. “Except for the water business, eggs, and screaming neighbors, everything’s just like I pictured.”

Velma blows smoke. “You’re not funny, Philip” “This is temporary,” he says. “Within a year we’ll have enough to put down on a house, with an office. I will start my practice. Things’ll be great.”

He takes her hand.

“I need to wash up,” she says.

He watches her wipe her eyes as she walks away.

That night, though Phil can barely keep his eyes open, he waits until dark, pulls Velma out of bed and leads her, barefooted, through the back door onto the cool grass.

“I don’t wanna be outside right now,” she groans.

It’s too dark to see the tiny sliver of lake view between the trees. He tilts her head up. The starry sky is infinite. No city lights to diminish it. No sirens or trains causing distraction. Wide-eyed, Velma softens. She lets the night drape around her like a glittering shawl.

The next day Phil pulls into the blacktopped parking lot outside the Mental Health Clinic. Avery’s waiting in the sun, leaning against his frost blue Corvette with six jugs of water in the open trunk.

“I really appreciate this, Ave,” Phil says, as they load the water into the Chrysler.

“Of course. How’s it going?”

102

Phil puts the last gallon in and slams the trunk. “We’ve got a group of protesters now.”

“What?”

“Protesters. They were there last night and a few were in same spot this morning.”

“What do you mean, protesters?” He scratches his head.

“Protesters, Avery,” Phil says. “They have signs, ‘No Niggers,’ ‘Niggers get out,” and they throw eggs and tomatoes and yell as we drive by.” He points to the dried yolk on the back window.

Avery’s bushy red brows meet. His hazel eyes narrow into slits. “You fucking kidding me? Oh, I’m coming over there.”

“And do what, Ave? Fight? That’s only gonna make them more aggressive.”

Avery’s fist taps his mouth. “ . . .You’ve gotta show them that you’re armed. They’ll back off.”

Phil looks at him. “I’m not armed, Avery.”

Avery folds his arms, tilts his head sideways, and looks at Phil, brows raised.

“Thanks, but no.” Phil shakes his head. “That’s asking for trouble I’m not equipped to deal with.”

“Phil—” “No, Avery! You trying to get me killed?” Phil walks away.

It’s a short day. Tomorrow’s the Fourth of July. The clinic closes early.

Phil leaves at three to meet the phone man at the house.

When he drives into the development, there’s nobody waiting at the foot of the hill. Thankfully, it’s too early.

The first call he makes after the serviceman leaves is to the lawyer.

“The injunction’s been served,” Gillman tells Phil. “And Wilson’s been ordered to pay a penalty for each day you’re without water.”

“Fantastic. Thank you.”

Before he hangs up he sees a white pick-up through the window. It stops opposite the house. The door opens and a short, thick man in gray coveralls 103

Xavier Review 36.1

and a cap hops out. He has a ruddy face and looks to be in his late fifties.

His quick movements seem tense. Muttering to himself, he marches to the bed of the truck, reaches for the lever and bangs it open. He grabs a long, thin pipe with both hands, hurries it to the edge of the yard and slams it to the ground. Phil steps closer to the window as the man stomps back to the truck and grabs a shovel.

Phil heads outside and approaches as the man digs. “Would you like some help?”

Wilson’s brows are bricks of gray over blue eyes.

“Come out here to gloat, you bastard? You won this round, but the fight ain’t over.”

Phil watches him shovel. “I don’t wanna fight. Just trying to live my life.”

Phil walks to the garage. Comes back with a shovel. As he re-approaches, Wilson flinches, his eyes wide.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He holds his shovel chest level.

“I’m going to help.”

“Why?” “’Because I live here. And I’m gonna make sure you don’t put anything in that pipe that’ll poison my family.”

Wilson looks at him. “Just ‘cause I don’t want you here doesn’t mean I’m crazy. Think I carry poison around? I’ll do this myself.”

“Afraid I’m gonna whack you?” Phil smiles.

“Just put the shovel down!”

“How do I know you won’t try to whack me?”

Wilson grunts. Phil steps back and watches him dig.

“About these people you’ve got egging my car and—” “Don’t take it personally.”

Phil gives him a Velma look.

“I got a responsibility to the people that bought these houses,” Wilson says. “They trusted me and I gotta make sure the value of these properties grow. We let people like you get comfortable, then more start coming.”

“People like me? You mean people with two masters degrees, a PhD, and a steady job?”

104

Wilson blinks.

“You don’t have to worry about that,” Phil says, “because people like me are gonna buy their own house within a year and move on. But if you and your friends keep harassing me, I’ll get the NAACP involved.”

“Oh, I’m shakin’ over here,” Wilson snorts. “Go to hell. And take your masters degrees and your PhDs, with you.”

Thank God Velma’s spending the night with her parents. Phil wouldn’t be able to keep her from pelting this prick with BBs. He waits for the pipe to be replaced, the dirt filled in, and for Wilson’s truck to disappear.

After washing egg off the porch, he fills ice trays with newly running water. He hooks up the Magnavox TV in the living room, preparing for Mallory tomorrow. He smokes a few Benson & Hedges. Drinks too much Dewar’s.

He hurls the empty bottle into the trash so hard it shatters.

In the yellow tiled bathroom the showerhead is wider than the one in the Bronx and the water pressure is perfect. First shower in three days. The warm water running down his back feels like heaven.

BOOM! Something falls in the house making the walls shake. What the fuck? Is someone inside?

He shuts the water, his heart thumping in his throat. Completely still, he listens and then steps out of the shower into a robe. He yanks the chrome towel-rack from its socket and holds it like a bat as he peeks into the hallway, looks both ways, and then walks to the living room. No one there. Not in the kitchen either. He sticks his head into the spare bedroom. There on the blue rug is a gray boulder the size of a football, and with it, the entire frame of the window screen.

This is the room his nine-year-old is supposed to sleep in tomorrow night.

Rage swells inside him, pulsing in the center of his body, spreading outward through his limbs, to the top of his head and to the edges of his skin.

It bursts beyond the confines of his body and swirls around him.

He looks out the window, but sees no one.

“AAAHHH,” he yells, and bangs the towel rack against Mallory’s bed 105

Xavier Review 36.1

over and over until he rips a hole into the blanket.

The doorbell rings.

Breathless, Phil rushes to the door and peers out the peephole. There’s a man and a woman, in their thirties, dressed in suits.

“What the hell do you want?” Phil shouts through the closed door.

The auburn-haired woman’s head lurches back as if she’s been smacked.

The man says, “Dr. Arrington?”

“Yes! What is it?”

“Sorry if we’re disturbing you. I’m Minister Dorland of the Methodist Church. My wife told me about the way some people have been treating you, and we wanted to offer our support. You’d be more than welcome to worship with us if you care to.”

Phil catches his breath and braces a hand against the door. He rubs his forehead with the other hand. “Sorry . . . A rock just came through my kid’s window. Did you see anyone out there?”

Dorland looks at his wife, then back at the door. He says, “Sorry to hear that. We didn’t. Is anyone hurt?”

“No. But I can’t entertain visitors right now. Thanks for stopping by.”

Back in Mallory’s room, Phil looks at the screen he’ll have to replace.

He closes and locks the window. Pulls down the shade. What if those people weren’t really from the church? Maybe they threw the rock. And if they didn’t, who did? And what’ll they do next?

Phil puts on dungarees and an Izod shirt and drives into the city the next morning to get Velma before picking up Mallory from his ex-wife’s place in the Bronx. He doesn’t tell Velma about the rock. He tells her, “Avery’s invited us to spend the weekend at his family’s house.”

“Why would we do that? I still have boxes to unpack.”

“We’re staying at Avery’s, Velma!”

She eyes him. “I don’t know who you think you’re yelling at, but when you calm your ass down, you better tell me what the hell’s going on. I’ll take a apology with that, too.”

106

They don’t speak the rest of the way to the Bronx.

On the ride back to Monroe, Velma looks over the seat at her stepdaughter who has bright eyes and curly black hair past her shoulders.

“And I hear the ice cream is really good,” Velma says with a wink.

“Oh! Can we get some now?”

“Yes,” Velma says. “They don’t open ‘til eleven, but there’s a park nearby with swings and a slide and we’ll go there first.”

“Yay! What else do they have in Monroe?”

“There’s a bowling alley.”

Mallory gasps. “I know how to bowl! Can we go there, too?”

“Sure. Maybe tomorrow.”

Phil glares at Velma. She pretends not to notice.

Mallory enjoys slipping down the slide built onto the silver and orange Korean War plane. Neither Phil nor Velma know why it’s there, so they can’t explain it to her. Mallory is okay with that, because it’s fun. They stand a few feet away and keep an eye on her.

“You ready to tell me what’s wrong?” Velma asks.

There’s no one else in park. Still, Phil’s eyes dart around, vigilant for anything, or anyone that might come hurling at them.

“I’m ready for you to stop running your mouth,” he says. “I told you we’re going to Avery’s. You can’t even drive, Velma. Shut up and stop promising her things.”

“I know you’re not your right mind, talking to me like that.” Velma squints at him. “Like your mother always says: heaven help you.”

At The Three Bears custard stand, Phil dutifully pays for three soft-serve cones at the window.

They sit at one of the picnic benches outside. Phil glances at the other families going about their business. No disapproving faces. No one says anything to them.

Mallory chatters in between licks on her chocolate cone. Velma chatters, 107

Xavier Review 36.1

too. He watches them enjoy the experience. When he thinks of driving back into Walton Lake Estates, it nauseates him.

In the back seat, Mallory’s curls fly around her head, breeze blown, as she meets Monroe through the open windows. Velma points out a waterfall, a movie theater, a library, and Mallards on the pond in the center of town.

Children in shorts throw bread pieces into the water and the ducks gobble them up.

“Can we feed the ducks, too?”

“Not now, sweetie,” Phil snaps.

“Okay, Daddy.”

Mallory looks out at the passing houses, green lawns, and trees. They approach Walton Lake. “Ooo. Can I swim there?”

“Not today, Mal. I want you to roll up the back windows,” Phil says, closing his own, as they near the development.

“But it’s hot, Daddy.”

“Roll up the goddamn windows.”

Mallory’s lip quivers. She does as she’s told.

Velma closes hers, too. “Wanna play a game, Mallory? Let’s duck, so no one can see us.” She bends down.

“That’s not a game,” Mallory says. “That’s silly.”

Phil turns onto the street leading to the development. He looks toward the convenience store parking lot. A couple of people mill around smoking, eating. None of the usual protestors. A skinny teenager without a shirt, or shoes, gallops toward them. Phil speeds up. The kid flings his Italian ice at the car and misses.

Phil’s stomach churns.

Mallory looks out the back window as the teenaged boy ends up in the center of the road behind them.

“Why’s that guy yelling at us?” she asks.

Velma sits up.

“Some white people don’t like black people,” Phil says. “But that’s only some people. You know that.”

108

Yeah. I know,” Mallory says, sighing.

When they get to the house, Velma goes into the bedroom to pack. Mallory wants to look around.

“No honey,” Phil says. “You stay here with Daddy. Mallory sits at the red table with him while he smokes.

There’s a very loud POP outside.

Phil drops his cigarette. He lurches out of his chair and pulls Mallory onto the floor with him. “Stay down!”

Mallory laughs and shakes her Keds in the air. Velma runs into the room.

“Get down, Velma.”

Mallory squeals with glee. Velma crouches down.

“Daddy’s so funny.”

“Funny?” Phil is incredulous.

It’s firecrackers, Daddy, not a shootout.”

Velma looks out the window and smoothes her dress. “Yup. Boys up the street.” She looks at Phil, shakes her head.

There’s another loud POP. Mallory stands. “May I see my room now?”

Climbing to his feet, Phil reaches for his cigarette. “Later, baby.”

“Phil, why can’t she—” Phil stops Velma with an icy look. She throws up her hands and walks down the hall.

They hear loud guitar music. Then Bo Diddley singing. Phil looks out to see Avery’s Corvette pass the house, the radio blasting. He rounds the culde-sac then pulls up in front. The music stops.

Phil opens the front door with Mallory on his heels. Avery emerges in overalls, combat boots, and a white undershirt. There’s a tattoo of a pirate on his left bicep.

Mallory huddles close to Phil, grabbing his leg. “Who’s that big man, Daddy?”

Phil chuckles. “This is my friend Dr. Matthews.”

Avery hops onto the porch. “Not a doctor yet,” he says. “You can call 109

Xavier Review 36.1

me Avery.” He shakes Mallory’s hand.

She looks up at him, “You look like Paul Bunyon.”

“He laughs. “So I’ve been told. Phil, can I speak with you by the car for a sec?”

“Mallory, go inside and sit with Vel,” Phil says. “Tell her I’ll be back in twenty minutes and we’ll leave.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m gonna take a walk with Avery.”

Mallory bounces on the balls of her feet. “Oh, I wanna go for a walk.

Can I come, too, Daddy?”

“No. Stay here. Tell Velma what I said.”

Mallory crosses her arms and pouts. Phil opens the door and gently pushes her back inside.

When Avery opens his trunk, Phil sees two rifles. He doesn’t know what kind they are and he doesn’t ask.

“This is what we’ll do,” Avery says. “We’re gonna—” “I know what the hell to do,” Phi shouts. “I’m gonna walk up and down this block and all around the goddamn neighborhood with this gun so these sons of bitches know they better stop fucking with me.”

Avery smiles. “All right, then. Glad to see your balls came outta hiding.”

Phil blinks a couple of times. “Not that I’m planning to actually use it, but is there more to it than aiming and pulling the trigger?”

“That’s basically it,” Avery says, handing him one. He aims his at the oak tree across the street.

Phil mimics the move. Avery lowers the gun and hangs it over his shoulder, strap to the back, barrel up. Phil does the same.

“Ready?”

Phil nods. Strapped, they walk side by side toward the cul-de-sac.

Two barefooted, blond boys in shorts squat in the center of the circle, lighting a firecracker. Seeing Phil and Avery approach, the boys back away, then run inside a house.

Avery does an about-face a few yards from the center and walks back the 110

other way. Phil follows. The firecracker explodes behind them. Phil resists the urge to cover his ears. He moves through the shower of sparks raining down and through the sulfuric smell of smoke.

“You all right?” Avery asks.

Phil nods.

As they head in the direction of the house, he sees his daughter’s curly head in the window. Velma’s head comes into the window, too. Christ.

He doesn’t look at them. He stares straight ahead and marches like a soldier.

“Sorry, man. Shit. What’re you gonna tell them?” Avery asks.

Phil shakes his head. He doesn’t know. He’s not even sure he’ll make it down this hill. Neighbors have begun appearing in windows. A couple step onto their porches.

Avery whispers, “It’s working.”

Phil doesn’t answer. He doesn’t want to talk. What he wants is to wake from this nightmare, this battle born by his audacity to start a life.

Through the trees, Walton Lake glimmers below—nature’s masterpiece.

If he does make it down, he plans to dive into that beauty. He wants it to drown everything that smolders inside him.

111

Xavier Review 36.1

Denise Aretha Cunningham

One of the Others

I invite the capstone—a giddy stint in kindergarten abounding with glitzy

tin lunch boxes, strawberry milk, and crayons. I knew shades of colors back then. I could tie my shoelaces all by myself. But that was a long time ago, before the accident. When I said things like “please” and “thank you” and did not mind being told what to do. When strangers told me how cute I was and did not look away in silence, revulsion wrenching their faces. I understand the pieces now that I have time to perfect the nursery rhymes. Every other afternoon after my chair is wheeled onto the porch, I eat my two cookies and drink a half cup of milk. With a burry blanket draped over my shoulders, I belt singsong verses into the vintage air.

I practice in my mind. But even in my imaginings, the words do not sound right. They jut into each other and clang. My jaws ache at the make-believe collision. My tongue is weighed down with the promise of pointless work.

My eye retreats at the expectation of ridicule. I can hear them guffaw and then smother their crassness. They peek to see whether I understand. Relief combs their brows once their chuckles take leave. I clear my throat. It sounds like catastrophe. They look outside and praise the day. Water. I wave my finger. I give the signal. No one sees. I feel a chill that sears like it did that day. I do not truckle even though the memories force their way through time-twisted barriers baring warnings they always ignore.

“How’re you feeling today?” she asks, expecting no response. Water. I lift my hand, not very far. “Good, you’re doing fine.” She answers nothing.

I lift my finger further. She does not see. And yet I am the one wearing the patch over my absent eye. I settle into the paradox and feel my lips parch.

She turns her focus to the conversation she never really left. With haphazard gestures, she dispenses her agreement. The others return her affectation and then elaborate until they lose meaning. They approach the stale remnants with an excess of favor. One of the others, she asks how I am doing, her head too 112

lifted to recognize the repetition.

I grasp the pencil after minutes of effort even though it is only three inches away. Three inches away. I know distance and time. I scream into sealed lips. I rest from the exertion.

“That’s what I would’ve done. And don’t tell me I wouldn’t. That’s exactly what I would do,” one of the others boasts. She is to blame, frequent bedside visits and sympathetic flair nudged aside. The others act like the tenor of camaraderie drowns out truth. She ripples past accusation much too flimsy to take hold. “We need to switch places, ‘cause clearly you don’t know how to deal with it,” one of the others prattles on while the others laugh charitably.

I let the pencil go. My fingers cramp. Pains take turns hopping crossbars between digits, leaving my thumb bereft from the exercise. The pencil rolls onto the empty tray for a fingerbreadth, then stops. One of the others turns up the volume on the radio and a couple of the others sing along with her. They sound fractured and I squirm at the hypocrisy. My thumb is straight-faced by the time they turn down the volume and resume their ritual of complaints and commiseration.

“I should let you take care of it,” the quiet one says. The others shred her interjection until they skin the carcass clean. Offers to help swarm them.

They appear unbothered by the insincere attention. I try to yawn. I know how it will end. And it never brings comfort. The close lurks a few feet away and proffers listless tentacles which enliven at the next holiday at the next celebration at the next extended hospital stay.

“Let’s all just make a weekend of it. I mean, we have enough time to plan for it. Right?” the one with coarse veins says. The others clamor their agreement knowing it will never leave the room. But they throw out dates and times and locales and hotels as they steal glances at the windows in search of wooden rungs. I see quiet desperation as the quiet one begins to take notes as if this time would be different. One of the others grabs the pen and belts a pop song into it with a grimness that elicits brassy laughter. Grateful for the save, the others curl lips and sling daggers behind the quiet one’s back while she rummages through the dresser in search of a replacement. Those junk drawers hold everything but, and she caves into the corner, a nearly blank 113

Xavier Review 36.1

piece of paper placed on her lap.

One of the others clasps a tabloid from her collapsible handbag atop the dresser. The others take turns decrying the actions of this one and that one and pretend they would love to have their lives despite their clear dysfunction.

The once-estranged one sheds tears for a death in the family of her favorite soap star. My eye shuts down to elude the charade.

I think of roses. They speak of salads. Salad dressing and grapes. Vinegar and oil. My eye descends from its cowled harbor. The athletic one opens the windows. Cool air leapfrogs human blockade. I count to five and stop. They laugh for no reason. Even the once-estranged one who wears black and mourns.

Or is it navy that clings to her neck? I am not quite sure. I hear everything but the tints. The others are too close, their grating displays too visceral.

You’ve done your duty. You may go now, I shout. But the words are trapped in my desires. A bunch of leaves gust between the panes and sink to the wooden floor in deference, daring not to touch the pageanteers. One leaf drifts onto my bed.

“How much? No! I’m not paying that. You see that’s why I don’t go to those places.” The plan for a movie after dinner succumbs, as everyone expected it would. “I have to be careful how I spend. You don’t have kids.

I have three mouths to feed,” one of the others says and glances toward me.

“I’m not even counting her. You know how much I appreciate all of you helping out with her. You know I couldn’t do this without all of you. But we know how to band together when it comes down to it. That’s how we do it.

We pitch in whenever there’s a need. I know I couldn’t keep doing this all of these years if it wasn’t for all of you.” I collar animated applause and staid laugh track but the sounds barely smother the harmony. Encouragement and appreciation jostle while the others pledge more support and pat themselves for their fortitude.

I remember when the others wore plaits and milk moustaches and hoarded cornflower crayons for fun. When one was for all and none was leftover.

Backpacks empty but for a stray coloring book and loose ribbons. Giggles had no aim. Distraction no deterrent. Clapping hands, amusing pastimes, no extinguisher.

114

I try to lift my hand even though I no longer feel my fingers. The pencil is still within reach. Minutes later, I manage to make the signal. No one sees.

“How much?” she asks again.

One of the others changes the discussion to butterflies. The randomness is ignored and they latch onto the topic as if it goes hand in hand with popcorn prices. They talk of caterpillars and childhood fancy. My lips shiver from the cold. The leaf edges up the quilt with backing from gushes of wind. Its rest is uneasy. Even it knows that the bed is a disheartening ditch. When the next wind blows, the leaf does not bother to budge.

They check their watches at one of the others’ request. She is sure that hers cannot be right. They speak in seconds. And urge each other to make a move. They refuse the collective advice while it skids from their very lips.

The dinner reservation can’t be changed. They trump this mantra and remain wedged to the couch and the chair and the ledge. They fling compliments at rubber necks that have repelled far greater artifice. They invite the breeze to stir and blame its lethargy for their deferment. Then the quiet one stands and one of the others crayons the past. No one else budges.

“Who will stay behind this time?” Replies confuse. The leaf leaps and plops. I do not feel the wind. My finger waggles without my effort and refuses to stop. No one sees.

The athletic one asserts her right to help. She has no appetite, she declares. “I’m just like you. I want to do everything I can,” she yells as if being confronted.

One of the others stands and faces her. “You stayed at Christmas.

Remember? And what about Thanksgiving the year before? It’s my turn to stay.” Immediately, the ledge lightens and they traipse toward the door leaving the athletic one couch bound and malcontent. From the hallway, they holler their good-byes and get-well wishes to the one they cannot see. My finger stills.

I hear the horn blow. The athletic one must believe she is like the stubborn one who stopped visiting when one of the others flouted her suggestion for how to wipe up a spill. But the athletic one’s will is weaker than bargain tissue. A few moments more and she dashes toward the door. I hear her faint cries for them to wait.

115

Xavier Review 36.1

Water. I am sure one of the others does not remember that the signal exists. She fumbles with the quilt at the foot of the bed and brushes the leaf to the floor before heading for the couch.

“I have so much to tell you,” she mutters as I turn my mind to sunsets.

The kindred colors meld and soothe as she describes her latest counterfeit dilemma: Ibiza or Rio? The steps parse into spumes. I shout this observation.

I know it will lose its way. And it does. So she carries on and amuses herself with her pretend worries.

One of the others leaves and does not say why. She returns with a halfeaten sandwich and an empty water bottle. I scream with silent fluency.

Between gulps, she talks of beaches, waves, and rouge. I remember that day. Salt air calmed no pain. Heard cries heeded too late to make much more than slim impact. I scale the alphabet. Backward and forward I go to the elementary beat of encouraging melodies sung to soothe and swamp the petty aggravations of the untested. She hears only her fullness. I hear it all.

“Are you hungry?” one of the others asks, without waiting to see my response. “I wonder what they’re having. I’ll check in another fifteen minutes or maybe twenty. Traffic may’ve held them up a little.”

Leaves float on puffed-up air and take impulsive, exaggerated jaunts as more join their frivolous loops. She does not close the windows. The chill rakes my lips as the same leaf lands on my sunken belly. She stares at her watch and questions its truthfulness. She checks her cell phone for support, and then the landline, and proclaims them all two-faced. “I’ll just have to go with my instincts.” She sighs in resignation.

One of the others leaves and returns with an apple and a bunch of grapes on a paper plate and rests them on her lap. “I’m stuffed,” she cries as she tosses a few grapes in her mouth. “I shouldn’t’ve had all that water. Did I tell you about—yeah I did.” My eye yields but feels no rest. Not like the nested leaf in the hollow of my gut, which curls into itself, just so, in a show of solace with its chosen grotto.

She rushes out of the bedroom and into the hallway. When she returns, she shoves the door so vigorously that the brass knob thuds into the wall. My eye flutters beyond my control. I wait.

116

“He’s in town.” One of the others does not bother to explain who he is.

I imagine he is a soldier from a bygone era returned to sweep her away to inhospitable shores from where she will communicate only by letter.

She is halfway done with the apple when she asks, “How much longer?”

I have no idea what she is referring to until she dials her cellphone and talks to the others about traffic and steak. “They send their hellos,” she says.

I wait for the moment my legs will snap back into purpose and I can heave myself down from the loft that bears no boost, for the second I can move more than my expression with just a thought. All is not lost. One of the doctors had said as much during those first days. I wait for his words to lose their caution, to defy the years long vanished.

“Ugh.” She grumbles something I fail to catch. “I hate it when I’m trying to remember something and it’s like right there, but ugh, I just . . .” One of the others stares into space. My eye dims. I sing throughout her scarcity. A song she cannot remember to hear. I smell onions and ketchup. More condiments cover the stale core that died long before it burned. I do not bother to move my lips. I clutch the nugget. She would not notice if I hurled it across the room.

One of the others screams. I know that she remembers. And up she goes ready to apportion perception. It is that time. Just before the attendant arrives and long past relevance. One of the others saunters toward my bedside, the wind lobbing boos as she sets her face in trouble and falters. I say the words along with her while she struggles to make them even.

“I hate to see you like this. It breaks my heart. I don’t want to imagine what you’re going through. I just can’t wrap my mind around it.”

I know she will reach for the box of tissues before she does. Not to dislodge the caking from my face, but to smear lucid eyes into bloodshot sidekicks.

Her eyes resemble that day. She presses me to explain what happened. “What did you do to deserve this?” I try to give the signal now that her attention is rapt. She looks past it, picks up the leaf from my belly, and throws it down to brood.

“You really don’t deserve this,” she sputters. I stop my ears to the echo.

“You just don’t.” One of the others bows her head and I know she is no longer near the thread of thought. The wind goes mum. I wait.

117

Xavier Review 36.1

“If I could . . .” I know she will never finish. She is listening for the doorbell. I know it will chime to her relief and she will pause before her steps and implore the attendant to hurry.

“This place is a mess.” One of the others scolds the attendant as if she had flung the windows wide and left nonessentials on furniture.

“Look at all the raked-up leaves coming in.” The attendant drops her shopping bags and scurries to the windows.

“Don’t close them.” One of the others holds out her hand as if to create order. “It’s so stuffy in here.”

“OK, I’ll just get her cleaned up and fed.”

“Can’t you do that later? I don’t know if I’ll be around much before Thanksgiving. I’ll be on vacay. Ibiza or Rio. Haven’t decided. But I have to by tomorrow. Gotta lock in the price.”

The attendant does not respond. So one of the others dismisses her to the living room and uninterrupted thought. The attendant leaves without seeing the signal. She is usually good at interpreting, but for one of the others.

“I was in the middle of telling you something,” one of the others whispers as if the attendant might be standing with her ear cupped to the door. “But she just made me forget everything. And it was important.

“Sorry about how things—she has the thing turned up so high. I can’t even think with all that noise. It was my . . .” I know one of the others will not finish. She never finishes. She starts over, dragging seeds through wet cement and bidding them to grow.

I feel no pain but numbness. Thirst brings fullness and error becomes standard. I listen to the garbles. And wait. No longer do I urge my thumb to prod its neighbor to do the impossible.

“You know, I think they’ll be here in about half hour.” One of the others draws lacquered nails across brows. “Forty-five tops. He always waits until it gets too dark and then leaves half the stuff he knows they’ll need in the back of his trunk. Those kids better be back before nine,” she says with conviction before strolling over to the couch. One of the others sits on crunchy leaves but does not start at the noise.

I watch the leaf mount the air and reach pillow height. It is the same one.

118

I would recognize its curvature even if it had not descended upon my eye. The wind dies down to secure the foliate perch. I rejoice for the peculiar curtain.

Blinks force adjustment. And I make them slow. To keep the drapery in tow.

“Rio! It’s got to be Rio. I’m not going back on it—Rio.” I see nothing but colors I cannot pinpoint. Looking at something I do not quite perceive. A relief to have no answers to assay the stunted veins. They infer conflicting routes. Veer into standstills. Phrase escape in their vagueness.

I know it will not last. The others will return. The attendant will regain her clout. Some one of the others will jab the leaf from my eye.

“If only you could go with me. We’d have the best time. But I’ll take in the sights. I’ll swim for both of us. And when I get back, I’ll tell you everything.

I’d bring you pictures but I don’t want you to strain your good eye.”

My tongue melds into the roof of my mouth. The leaf steadies. It settles into the nook that holds the same foresight as the gutted one which helps to rid my face of symmetry. I trace roundabout notices too indistinct to compass until they unfurl on an iris. I sing Christmas songs in September.

“I’ll be back before you know it. Not like last time. The days’ll be so much shorter when you have so much to look forward to.” One of the others takes a riotous breath and deflects it into a sigh. “I know how you used to get whenever there was a trip coming up and you’d be up the night before repacking stuff like it’d be your last—I mean—well, you know what I mean.”

The attendant says something that becomes part of the background whine prompting one of the others to not invite her in, but bellow, “I ate already, thanks.”

But the attendant is not satisfied and says louder this time, “I was asking if you wanted me to get some of her laundry done while I’m waiting.”

One of the others hollers, “I can’t get everything done by myself.”

The wind no longer extends itself. The weight of cold crams into rest.

I see all that is out of view and nothing in perspective. My lashes hold the stole upright, shifting only when compelled.

I ask her why she turned away that day. Why her back is always the first to retort in times of fight. She pretends she does not hear. That mangled remains demand no affirmation. That myths deserve no call for their valor. Yet they 119

Xavier Review 36.1

live long and pass as true. And die stubborn deaths centuries old. Simply the promise of answers emit the key to their endless renewal.

“I think they must be done with a couple courses by now.” I hear one of the others approach. “Or maybe they’re still deciding on dessert.” I smell pickles and plumeria. “Now that I think about it, they might take forever deciding on what to get ‘cause you know they’ll end up sharing only one or two. I should call.” I hear footsteps buckle leaves.

“Hey. Are you? I thought you’d still be making up your minds. What did you have? Um hmm. Yeah. She did. Turned up like she’s supposed to.

Laundry. I know. How long? They’re open again? They’re pretty good. Last year I—no! Really? I don’t know what to say to that one. No, they’re still over at his place. You know how he is. Later.

“They’ll be back in about an hour.” I detect a scuffle. “Maybe less since they’re done with dessert and everything. They had pie. Apple and pecan.”

I search the scalloped edges of the leaf for the grudge. No more to inhabit another coop than to justify the breathing of air into deflated pipes. I know she will not answer but I ask why she did not face me. Had I not seen her run, I would be able to breeze through marathons and barbeque zucchinis outside in January. But one of the others always runs. She never bails surface soil.

Had she lunged back when first I walloped her face, she would be blameless.

I would not have had to struggle in pursuit, nor brace myself against the railing—long rotted at its ankles and cankered in its spines—only to moments later plummet five flights. One of the others turns her back every time. That day, she drawled away my peace. I call her to account. She makes no answer.

I smell sunflowers and turpentine. My eye itches from its vigilant drapery.

120

Michael McManus

Mourner at Dusk When I finally make it to the backyard, I am a castaway waiting for the moon.

I will not find it inside the patronizing house where the Labor Day party is an ongoing shipwreck.

How lovely it is out here under the Catalpa tree, where I no longer have to watch my brother-in-law flounder with Captain Morgan as they run aground against the gravity that they choose to ignore.

I light up a joint and the tip glows when I inhale the lives of a thousand philosophers.

A Sage & Citrus Yankee Candle begins to burn inside of me. It’s raining in the NYC subway so the mayor proclaims a holiday.

I wonder if I am strong enough to join the Knight’s Watch and guard the Wall, or appreciate fall in the Adirondacks, the leaves falling like stones from a necklace.

The next time I inhale a lecture by Spinoza on eternity.

It’s boring, and soon I find myself in a movie as the last person left on earth.

Fair winds and an electric blue sky watch over me as I look out over the silent metropolis littered with cell phones and fast food wrappers the millennials left behind.

It feels good to be on vacation from Facebook updates, like the one in which in which my best friend’s wife must tell the 121

Xavier Review 36.1

world about the gluten-free egg rolls she’s eating at Chinese Jim’s restaurant.

Jim has hired me to repair the rust on the human machine.

This isn’t a dream— I’m barefoot, ankle-deep in the endless lawn, a green cosmos that goes on expanding until it reaches the neighbor’s privacy fence.

I will not mow it for another week, maybe more, because when the riding mower sows its rage, I feel guilty, as if I’m committing a genocide— or acting like a barrel-chested Hemingway in Key West, bellied up to the bar at Sloppy Joes, one double-daiquiri away, maybe two, from turning to my cronies, and in the language that never knotted itself on the page, watch them nod in agreement as I brag about courage being the strength to kill something that you love.

The twilight deepens. The God of ganja and emptiness is commanding me to love without weapons.

It’s easier to listen when you aren’t weighed down with anything more than mindfulness, to moments like this— the languid prose that this day is reciting as it dissolves into dusk.

I know. I know. It’s all a subtle cliché, overused, demystified by the nursing home that’s filled up with poets. So, I’ll make it a chopping block that’s covered with severed fingers— 122

something worthy of CNN or a trusted circle of friends.

I myself can never turn away from those pieces of fading light, the orange horizon a handshake away from thank you now goodnight.

My body believes in these evening prayers, the chance to hear cicadas proselytize with buckling tymbals, or count the many ashes from my life that the industrial smokestacks discharge into the atmosphere.

Smile. Sway. Think. I am driftwood in their current.

On the other side of Arkansas Road in old Halsey Cemetery, it’s business as usual. The tombstones are fairy tale stories in a village with putting green lawns.

The parole officers keep to the river road bars because they don’t like being questioned about the dead, which the live oaks watch over liked hooded monks from a silent movie about the inquisition.

I’m that silent film star who is frightened by the strappado, the coal brazier they will use to roast my feet, and the ending where the grog-drunk illiterate executioner, who is insecure until he hides behind his mask, stumbles forward with his torch to the bundles of dried-up furze, where he waits for the command from the pious Bishop, to ignite the pyre that they piled around my chained-up body, so I can go to meet my God as all heretics should— I have no desire to suffer like this.

—So, yes, I confess that there’s no freestanding barter with the infinite.

At death men abnegate their rights for an eternity.

It’s not such a bad gig if you get it on sale.

123

Xavier Review 36.1

Tell that to the Pope who wants me burned alive because I did Jell-O shots with Galileo.

I come and go in principal, bearing dimples that elongate my face when I smile. Austerity has its place, as well, but it will not be found inside the Lexus that’s turning into the cemetery.

It’s a gilded star from another galaxy.

It’s fuselage is longer than the westward expansion, a plutocratic, hermetically sealed symbol for affluent Americana. It should be racing around inside the Large Hadron Collider, smashing protons into the stuff of legends.

The last streamers of sunlight clear coat its quarter panels.

In the trunk the servants wait for orders to come out and perfume the wheels.

On the far side of my next smokey exhale, I’m standing inside a Brooklyn bagel shop, wearing my Pearl Jam T-shirt, the coffee cup warm against my hand as I chat up the barista wearing the pea coat she got in the Navy, where she never went to sea.

I leave her a nice tip, which is not only cash, but also how to read the braille on your lover’s body.

She goes outside and leaves it with the homeless man sitting cross-legged, reading the Bible of Leonard Cohen, the falling snow powdering his hair with the kind of triumph science can’t duplicate. He takes off his shirt and hands it to me. Some of the sidewalk crowd stops to watch as he calls me brother.

124

There’s a red and black Halleluiah tattooed between his shoulders.

It grows smaller as he walks away.

Now that I have learned what the solar system may want to teach me, I pluck the Lexus from the ashtray the homeless man left it in two blocks from the coffee shop.

He is not a thief. He knows that the Hugo Boss and Prada in its backseat is worthless.

There’s no telling it apart from the empty bag of Ramen noodles on the floor of my college flat, thirty years ago.

Ten-thousand years of tombstones are watching it come to a stop the way my grandfather’s body did, his heart the lightning bug that finally stopped glowing.

The car’s dome light comes on. It goes off.

This semaphore signals the end of a history.

In the sky the Gods go on writing hieroglyphics and tending to their apiaries, so that each earth-bound bee will be bearing the apocalypse in their honey.

I wonder if they watch the way she moves, as if stepping into an empty restaurant, opening the menu, finding only one entre that no one cares to eat, or how long it has taken to reach this place— a fresh grave piled with the soiled shrapnel of broken earth the backhoe excavated this morning.

I am watching a movie about the end of time.

In it the moon is an orchard that is beginning to bloom for the final time.

I wish I could see more clearly the way her hair is like falling water.

How it spills down her back like a shawl 125

Xavier Review 36.1

she’s draped over her black dress.

I wonder if her shoulders are windows through which I can see the tanned or freckled skin.

I wonder if she is as stoic as she appears, a species different from our own, the pharaoh’s stoic queen who goes on watching the surgeon opening a chest cavity, prepping it for mummification.

She falls to her knees like a nightgown slipping from a newlywed’s body— soft, almost vaporous, unlike the earth, which is wild and hard, a skin she reaches for the way Van Gough did for his missing ear. She smooths circles with her hands, caress after caress until the body rises, until the body resurrects, until the body, blessed, stands before her like the picture she keeps at home, beside her bed, or in the crypt-like recesses of her purse.

I wonder if angels are truckers hauling their blessings across America, the heavy tools of God, the heavenly jackhammers that crack open our concrete hearts.

I wonder if I should go back inside the house, get drunk, climb Everest in my mind, and kiss the wintry thighs of the first woman I find at the summit.

Then, Luke, my neighbor’s bastard bulldog mix, 126

a black and white cannonball with four legs, wonders over through a rent in the trellis.

I wonder if Luke is working for minimum wage, or seen an adult video, or gotten high and gone skinny dipping through the Milky Way. He ls lifting his one-inch leg.

It’s made of marble.

He nearly loses his balance and topples off the summit.

But then he’s pissing in my flowerbed grinning the way Buddhist Monks do when all the wealthy tourists come to visit.

When Luke is finished, he waddles over so I can scratch his head— which I do, which I will continue to do as long I am master of the ghosts that slip from my lips.

There they go again, beautiful but terrified of the unknown. I wonder if Luke ever thinks about death or dying.

I wonder if he tries to understand the way things are supposed to work in this world, or how endearing he is when he slobbers and drools.

127

Xavier Review 36.1

Jim Daniels

Thrashing I was at the president’s house for a thank-you reception. I was being thanked.

We were all being thanked. Nervous about being thanked. How dressed up should we get to be thanked? I wore my blue blazer, a hand-me-down from my son who outgrew it and me both. My shirt was wrinkled, so I kept the blazer on. Sweat dribbled over my ribs. While the president made remarks, I was first in line at the faux pas buffet. Loading up, oblivious. I could be black-balled for my hunger now. I don’t drink anymore—I used to be first in the bar line. I was amusing at first. Now, I just belch. I tried to slip out, my cheeks stuffed with three desserts, but I ran into dueling harumphers who seemed dismayed at my rapid exit. But I’m leaking, I wanted to say. I muffled something about lovely weather and how ‘bout those Steelers and strode, yes I strode, down the long circular drive and onto the click-clockety sidewalk in my magic shoes of discomfort worn special for the occasion so I could look down and admire them in lieu of making small talk with other thankees. Hankeys for thankees. That would have been my theme if I was given a chance to choose one. I was off, down the now-dark street of houses few and far between with mulched money spread over the lawns. Or so it appeared in lieu of moonlight. I decided on the shortcut through the park, though I knew no particular shortcut only the abstract notion of as-the-birdflies shortcut so I crashed into the woods thinking I should have brought my magic crank flashlight the blind association gave me for my donation to my mother’s blindness. Where was my little cranker? I’d need another flashlight to find it. Why had no one made a path for such an obvious shortcut for lost golf ballers and furtive lovers from the nearby college of which my president was president, and what had I done to deserve his thanks? I had done a soft-shoe in my hard shoes, I had spoken testing testing into the magic microphone. I did bird calls and corny jokes. I took my seat and counted the bodies. It was an honor to be a thankee. The problem with buffet lines is, where do you put 128

your drink while you’re standing with your tiny plate? I slopped salsa on the floor and casually rubbed it into the dark carpet. Why did I begin running through the woods? The leaves had lost their trees and slickened beneath my feet. I ran into a bare black branch and split my lip. I thrashed and stumbled through the raw woods. I sucked the blood so I would not bleed onto my fat tie or my wrinkled shirt or my blue blazer. Would I ever be invited to the President’s Residence again? I was thinking that’d be a good song title for my next album when I suddenly emerged into a clearing of wet golf-course grass where I lay down and felt my heart beating as the cold soaked through my flexible slacks, my kookie khakis. I heard a rustling through the trees. I was so happy there. I bent over to stain my knees.

129

Xavier Review 36.1

July 20 Fireworks in Pittsburgh During Ongoing Conflicts Abroad Two weeks after the Fourth, and they’re still at it.

Rocket-sizzle fizzles from apartment balconies exploding into shredded curses above our street. * My friend Sam moved out when his downstairs neighbor shot a bullet up through the ceiling into his son’s room. * The distance to Baghdad or Kandahar is measured in rowboat coffins while here in the Heartland minor skirmishes electrify tedium. * The list of Frequently Asked Questions has been shot into a crooked orbit and may collide with logic in five thousand years.

The eternal eye of the fuse. * Every explosion broadcasts a blatant lie.

130

I lay in shame-soaked sweat, unable to dream the unimaginable. * If a rocket lands on my roof should I fire back?

Or should I shout up to the balcony, try to talk things over?

Is talking things over a quaint euphemism for failure? * They call them fatigues, but they don’t look tired.

Why not call them targets?

I’d like to read the label on the juice they’re drinking and have it translated into peaceful discourse. * The gentlemen across the street bark after each pow, and terrified dogs below go silent. * 131

Xavier Review 36.1

Demonizing is an inexpensive proposition, initially.

Pretty soon everybody’s admiring each other’s sharp horns. * Shredded estimates of casualties flutter to earth, nearly indistinguishable from the detritus of our streets. * I can’t call the police— they’ll want to meet outside where the armed insurgents can identify me.

I’ve been saying for days that they’ll run out of ammo soon.

Or simply tire of identical explosions.

Or maybe we’ll all just go deaf. * I can’t even spell Baghdad. What’s that H doing there? Don’t you think we need to know how to spell before invading?

Our collective shrug starts to resemble a sexy new dance.

132

* I don’t know anyone who’s died in the distant Over There.

When I objected, my representative sent a polite computerized response thanking me for my input. When I marched, the police said keep moving. * Across the street, packed into tiny apartments, second-string drug dealers sleep on the floor.

They may be signing up soon to see the world with steady pay and the right to kill. * Okay, that’s a little harsh. Maybe they’re just kids playing boom-boom.

That apartment building, a house of cards taller than my house of cards.

Light ‘em if you’ve got ‘em.

My sheets twisted a-tangle in localized fury and generalized despair. * 133

Xavier Review 36.1

July 20. The rest of us in our houses roll over, yank pillows over our ears, breath rising limp into thick night air, ownership impossible, grief abstract, news underlined in invisible blood.

The boom of our hearts— beating, shredding.

134

James Shade

A Review of Negroland by Margot Jefferson (New York: Pantheon. 247 pages; $25.00)

One of my favorite plays of the last quarter century or so is The Heidi

Chronicles, Wendy Wasserstein’s semi-autobiographical dramedy of woman coming of age during the political and cultural crucible of the sixties and seventies. Oddly enough, The Heidi Chronicles kept coming back to me as I read Negroland, the memoir by Pulitzer Prize winning critic Margo Jefferson.

Both works take place over the same time period and both are written from the specific ethnocentric points of view of the respective authors. In Wasserstein’s case, the point of view was that of a middle-class New York based Jew. Jefferson writes from a much more rarefied and far less examined realm: that of the Black elite, the upper-middle-class/wealthy African American in mid-twentieth century Chicago.

There had been little inclination to examine this world, in books or anywhere else until fairly recently, partially because of the suffocating veil of racial discrimination and also partially by intentional internal design.

This segment of Black America has traditionally been hidden from outside scrutiny. Before the civil rights era, the lives of Black people were of little scientific, sociological or literary interest to the white mainstream; the notion that there were deep and profound class and economic divisions would have been met with either incredulity, ridicule or studied indifference. The Black elite (or the Black Bourgeoisie or the Talented tenth) consisted of African Americans who were educated professionals (and were the children and frequently grandchildren of same), who attended the finest schools possible (or the finest schools that the segregation laws of the time would allow), who lived in exclusive, racially homogenous neighborhoods and who were (and are) obsessive about keeping their children dating and marrying within the same socioeconomic pool. As a child of the Black elite, one would have been a member of Jack and Jill, the exclusive national club for Black kids that 135

Xavier Review 36.1

allowed them to meet and socialize with other Black kids of the same social level, a level where Black children were few and far between. As a teenager one would have attended cotillions and debutante balls, replete with all of the exclusivity and exclusion of their white upper crust counterparts. As an adult, one would join social, quasi-professional clubs such as the Links or the Boule.

In Negroland, we don’t just get a snapshot of the Black elite; these people represent a distinct stratum of society with its own history, traditions, standards and social mores. Jefferson also provides us with a valuable cross reference of other works, many long out of print, that give valuable insight into the history and lineages of this group.

The best known book on the Black elite up to this point has been Lawrence Otis Graham’s Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000). Graham, to be sure, did his research; he extensively chronicled the history and heritage of the Black elite, primarily those families of the east coast, and he briefly became a darling of the media elite, appearing television news segments and talk shows. However, there seemed to be a certain self-satisfied smugness in his literary voice. Graham, a corporate attorney by profession, lacked a degree of self-awareness. This complaint isn’t limited to him, as we shall see; the Black elites as a whole, while celebrating their specialness, seemed reluctant to help or be actively involved in any way with the struggles of their fellow, less affluent African Americans. There’s a reason why the slang term “bourgie” remains a pejorative among Blacks to this day.

By contrast, Jefferson is considerably more ambivalent about her privileged upbringing. While grateful for the opportunities it created for her and the sacrifices her parents made, her tone is much less sentimental, much more astringent (this is where the comparison to Wasserstein comes in). At the very beginning of the book, Jefferson writes: Negroland is my name for a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.

Children in Negroland were warned that few negroes enjoyed privilege or plenty and that most whites would glad to see them returned to indigence, deference and subservience . . . most other 136

negroes ought to be emulating us when too many of them (out of envy or ignorance) went on behaving in ways that encouraged racial prejudice.

Too many negroes, it was said, showed off the wrong things: their loud voices, their brash and garish ways; their gift for popular music and dance, for sports rather than the humanities and sciences . . . but most white people were on the lookout for a too bold display of their kind of accomplishments, their privilege and plenty, what they considered their racial traits.

Initially, idea of a Talented Tenth—to use the famous phrase by W.E.B. DuBois—was meant to help all African Americans; they would lead their less prosperous brethren out of poverty and degradation. Jefferson laments that this once noble intent had, by the time was old enough to notice such things, lapsed into self-involvement and apathy.

It is 1957 and Chicago sociologist E. Franklin Frazier has published Black Bourgeois. The title says it all. Despite its longings, the Talented Tenth is still black and for all its class pretensions, it is merely bourgeois. Its members have scant financial or political power, so they delude themselves with compensatory boasts and rivalries. They have abandoned their role as responsible race leaders and exemplars; they disdain the masses and avoid them as much as possible.

By the time the sixties arrived, Jefferson and her peers rejected what they saw as the complacency of her parents’ generation and had, as she put it embraced the mantle of “Black Power, Black Beauty, Black Studies, the Black Man and . . . the Black Woman.”

It was impossible to shake the imprint of the older generation entirely, however. Jefferson notes that actress Audrey Hepburn and former Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall passed away during the same week in 1993. The desire of her parents’ generation to live a glamorous, albeit, café au lait-toned version of genteel white upper class respectability is betrayed by the observation of a friend of hers during that week. She knew she was supposed to feel sad about Marshall’s death and all that represented, of course.

137

Xavier Review 36.1

Still, it was Hepburn’s passing that affected the friend more. After all, why couldn’t she be Black and glamorous and live the jet set lifestyle that Hepburn exemplified? Why does she have to wear an official mask of mourning for Marshall or face the scorn of her less well fed peers? (She makes no mention of Hepburn’s decades of philanthropy as a spokesperson for UNICEF.) Indeed, one of the reasons Negroland resonates is that Jefferson subtly disabuses the reader of the notion the African Americans have to be the living embodiment of America’s moral righteousness all of the time. We don’t want to be nor should we have to assume the pose of Noble Negro everywhere we go. We’ve earned our God given right to enjoy our cotillions, our dinner parties, our summers on Oak Bluffs public beach on Martha’s Vineyard (the official playground for the Black Elite for the better part of a century). We’ve earned the right to be trivial.

138

Thomas Bonner, Jr.

A Review of Witness to Change: From Jim Crow to Political Empowerment, by Sybil Haydel Morial (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 2015. $26.95 [cloth/eBook])

“In the crucible of racism and poverty, we either had to lead or drown”

(xi) writes former Ambassador and Mayor of Atlanta Andrew Young in the foreword to Sybil Morial’s memoir. As life-long friends from the Seventh Ward of New Orleans, both chose the path of leadership in society. Sybil Morial , the daughter of a physician, had a Roman Catholic education, typical of many people in the city, graduating from Xavier University Preparatory High School and attending Xavier University of Louisiana before transferring to Boston University. What distinguished Morial in her youth, education, and young adulthood was her experience as living “the separate but not equal” life of segregation.

Despite societal restrictions, Morial lived a privileged middle class life in a city that has a history of African American entrepreneurs and professionals, a city in which people of color were not always separated by neighborhood, but a city in which people of color had to sit behind “For Colored Patrons Only” signs or their equivalent. Her awareness of injustice came early in her life. Morial describes a difficult rail journey to Boston and a family trip to Detroit, where the hotel refused to honor her father’s reservation. When she married Ernest Nathan “Dutch” Morial, she had already been breaking the ice of segregation by teaching in a Massachusetts school that had a reputation for maintaining a Caucasian faculty. Her marriage brought her into the legal and political world of her husband’s law practice and later public life in New Orleans.

Her adult life in the city had intellectual and activist edges from the beginning as she and friends organized an alternate Great Books Club after 139

Xavier Review 36.1

being denied participation at the New Orleans Public Library. She made attempts to gain admission to Tulane and Loyola universities, but failed because of her race. The aftermath of the Brown case provided opportunities for social change, and Sybil seized them from protesting a segregated medical waiting room to joining the auxiliary of the newly established Urban League.

She was a plaintiff in successfully securing political rights for public school teachers when promoting integration had been declared grounds for dismissal.

Her life politically expanded over the years, especially after her husband’s elections to the state legislature and then the mayoralty of New Orleans. The memoir makes clear that her and her husband’s lives were those of pioneers with all the risks generally associated with those in early America and its expansion westward.

Sybil and artist John Scott created the African-American Pavilion at the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans, drawing its title “I’ve Known Rivers” from Langston Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” While there had been a “Negro” gallery in the 1884 Cotton Centennial Exhibition in New Orleans, the planned and developed pavilion for 1984 eclipsed the first in every way. Sybil sought and received financial support from local and national corporations. This achievement demonstrated her ability to work quietly and firmly across racial, class, and economic divides, ultimately contributing to her being considered as a nominee for mayor, a role she declined, when her son Marc ran successfully for the office. Her and her husband’s family, community, and professional lives strongly influenced their son Marc’s life as well as those of her children Julie, Monique, Jacques, and Cheri.

Throughout the memoir Xavier University has a critical role as does its former President Norman C. Francis, from the University’s housing Freedom Riders during the Civil Rights era to Sybil’s producing the film A House Divided when she led the University’s Center for Extended Learning.

Furthermore, her two years as an undergraduate at Xavier under the influence of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament “reinforced” (her word) the values that her parents had instilled in her and contributed to the courage she would need to face “the scorn and diminishment” outside her home and the campus.

A reading of Sybil Morial’s memoir reminds us of the viability of the 140

American Dreams, which in reality lie in the principled promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as well as the hard work and sacrifice required to make the dreams realities. While she endured “the slings and arrows� of legal and individual discrimination over the years, she avoided the bitterness that comes with those experiences and shaped her life to contribute to the well being of her family and community. Although the title of her memoir is Witness to Change, Sybil has indeed acted as an agent of change.

141

Xavier Review 36.1

Ralph Adamo

C.D.: A (Too) Brief (Just Getting Started) Memorial

Some things, some people, are or seem to be too deep down in there

to write about, maybe the way many soldiers feel about their war, that it is beyond words, that words won’t get it, will only damage what it is or was to them. With the death of my friend Carolyn Wright (and when did she begin signing herself professionally as ‘C.D.’? I don’t even know . . .), I feel that same paradoxical reluctance to say anything. Like others on Facebook (where I am new and continually awkward), I quoted a line or two of her poetry as a way of saying something. My quote was, from her Living: ‘No matter where I call home anymore, feel like a boat under the trees. Living is strange.’

Indeed. That line comes in the midst of a poem about the endlessly quotidian nature of our days.

Her career was extraordinary, both for her own qualities and talents, and for the breadth of success she enjoyed, almost a charmed sequence of creativity and recognition, of love given and received; she created a truly profound circle of goodness and influence that is as powerful now as when she was alive, that shows no sign of ever concluding its outward trajectory.

Carolyn had that kind of power, and even when she was just starting to become serious about writing, you could feel it in her presence, along with a positive energy that left one feeling optimistic.

It was my good fortune to meet her right at the time she was switching from law school, where she had put in an unhappy year, to the MFA program at the University of Arkansas. I can’t recall now who introduced us, but it happened that we were neighbors there in Fayettevlle, and soon became friends as well. I barely recall our time in workshop, better recall a few barnstorming poetry-in-the-schools trips we made. When I think of Carolyn, I hear that Ozark twang that shaped her voice, see her smile ( always a mixture of kindly and wry), feel the strength of her bodily presence, though she was 142

small, tiny by robust contemporary standards (she must have been the littlest person in any of her classes at Brown), a vigorous presence like a tree that withstands seasons of strong winds. When I think of her . . .I remember times of happiness, comradery, exchange, but also that it has been too long since we spent time together, and years since the days when we exchanged handwritten letters in the mail.

Her abrupt passing has had similar effects on many of us: the recognition that life has this damned natural limit that can be reached with stunning suddenness. While it’s no surprise, it always comes as a surprise. What Carolyn left behind — her poetry, all of her writing, editing, teaching — was such a miraculously full and varied body of work that it is possible to be satisfied that she produced not only her share of what may be considered important/essential in contemporary poetry, but considerably more than what we should expect from any one person. Yet, of course, there will always be a kind of wistful question about what else might have come from her hypernatural fertility. There is no question about her influence, though, as we see it marking a great cross-section of the writers who have started out in the last few decades.

Many others have written, at greater length and with greater eloquence, about this remarkable writer, this extraordinary person, Carolyn Wright. I hope someday to do a more thorough job myself. Meanwhile, I return to her work for its luminosity and ability to show me things I did not know, and I would urge anyone reading this poor memorial to do the same.

143

Xavier Review 36.1

Contributors Simeon Berry has been an Associate Editor for Ploughshares, and won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant and a Career Chapter Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters. His first book, Ampersand Revisited, won the 2013 National Poetry Series (Fence Books), and his second book, Monograph, won the 2014 National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press). He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Thomas Bonner, Jr. has recent fiction in New Laurel Review and War, Literature and the Arts, book reviews in Xavier Review and Choice, and notes and commentary on the Kate Chopin International Society website, www. katechopin.org. “Edna, Cyrille Arnavon’s Translation of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening: Publication Dates and History” appeared in American Notes and Queries. He is Professor Emeritus at Xavier University and Editor Emeritus of Xavier Review and its Press.

Adam Clay is the author of Stranger (Milkweed Editions, 2016), A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World (Milkweed Editions, 2012), and The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, Boston Review, Iowa Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. A co-editor of TYPO Magazine, he serves as a Book Review Editor for Kenyon Review and teaches at the University of Illinois Springfield.

Denise Aretha Cunningham was born and raised in St. Ann, Jamaica.

She moved to Brooklyn, New York with her family at the age of thirteen. A graduate of Fordham University with a double major in Business Economics and Finance, she is as comfortable writing financial reports as crafting stories.

Currently, she hones her lifelong love of creative expression from Jacksonville, Florida. “One of the Others” is her first published short story.

Jim Daniels’ next book of poems, Rowing Inland, will be published by Wayne State University Press in 2017. Other recent collections include Apology to the Moon BatCat Press, Birth Marks, BOA Editions, and Eight Mile High, stories, Michigan State University Press. He is also the writer/producer 144

of a number of short films, including The End of Blessings (2015). Born in Detroit, Daniels is the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Ronald Dorris is a lifelong resident of Garyville, a small sugar cane town along the east bank of the Mississippi River, in St. John the Baptist Parish 35 miles west of New Orleans. He is the author of Cane: Jean Toomer’s Swan Song (1997). His creative works have been published in Quarterly West, Western Humanities Review, American Poetry Anthology,The Griot: Journal of African American Studies, Genetic Dancers, Langston Hughes Colloquy, and Network 2000: In the Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. His scholarly works have been published in Africa, the United Kingdom, and the USA. Edard Dupuy is Founding Dean of a new BFA program at the Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, Texas. Before moving to San Antonio he served as Dean of Graduate Studies at Savannah College of Art and Design, as Provost and Academic Vice President at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, MT, and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at Our Lady of Holy Cross College in New Orleans. He is the author of Autobiography in Walker Percy: Repetition, Recovery, and Redemption, published by LSU press in 1996. He earned a Ph.D. and M.A. in English from LSU in Baton Rouge, and a B.A. from Saint Joseph Seminary College. He has published several articles and reviews on southern writers, religion and literature, and autobiographical approaches to fiction.

Richard Godden teaches English at the University of California, Irvine.

His first collection, Breathing Exercises was published by Peterloo Poets in 1986. He writes slowly. A second manuscript, Marks, Bits, Larks, from which the “Alphabet for Europe’s Jewry” is drawn, seeks a publisher.

E.P. Fisher’s work has appeared in several college journals & little magazines. He has published three books & is a Pushcart nominee. He taught school in Uganda in the Peace Corps & worked for 30 years as a play therapist & adventure-based counselor with special needs children.

Charlene Fix teaches English at Columbus College of Art and Design.

She has received poetry fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and has published poems in various literary 145

Xavier Review 36.1

magazines, among them Poetry, Literary Imagination, Hotel Amerika, The Journal, The Manhattan Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rattle, Mudfish, and The Cincinnati Review. Charlene is the author of Flowering Bruno, a dogbesotted collection of poems with illustrations by Susan Josephson (XOXOX Press 2006 and a finalist for the 2007 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry), Mischief (a poetry chapbook, Pudding House Press 2003), Charlene Fix: Greatest Hits (a poetry chapbook, Kattywompus Press 2012), Harpo Marx as Trickster (a critical study of Harpo in the thirteen Marx Brothers’ films, McFarland 2013), and Frankenstein’s Flowers, poems, from CW Books 2014. Charlene co-coordinates Hospital Poets at the Ohio State University Hospitals.

Holly Iglesias teaches at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and is the author of Angles of Approach (White Pine Press), Souvenirs of a Shrunken World (Kore Press), Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry (Quale Press) and two chapbooks, Hands-On Saints and Fruta Bomba. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Edward Albee Foundation. She is currently working on The Sturdy Child of Terror, a poetry collection about a Catholic childhood during the Cold War. Toni Ann Johnson’s essays, articles, and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Los Angeles Times, The Movement, The Emerson Review, Elohi Gadugi Journal, Red Fez, Arlijo, Soundings Review and Hunger Mountain. A novel, Remedy For a Broken Angel was published in 2014 by Nortia Press. Johnson was nominated for a 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. She won a 2015 International Latino Book Award for Most Inspirational Fiction. Plays have been produced

by The New York Stage and Film Company and The Negro Ensemble Company. Johnson is also the screenwriter of the telefilm “Ruby Bridges,” for which she won a 1998 Humanitas Prize and a 1998 Christopher Award.

A native of New Orleans, Karen Maceira holds an MFA from Penn State.

A past Ruth Lilly Poetry Convocation participant, she has poems published in numerous journals such as The Beloit Poetry Journal, Louisiana Literature, The New Orleans Review, Negative Capability, and The Christian Science Monitor. Her reviews have appeared in The Harvard Review, and her essays 146

in the Hollins Critic and the Journal of College Writing. Currently teaching English in a suburb of New Orleans, she has completed her latest manuscript entitled Poems from the Ninth Ward and Beyond.

After living in Louisiana for 29 years, Michael P. McManus returned to his native Pennsylvania where he lives in Millheim. He has published poems and short stories in numerous journals including Chicago Quarterly Review, Louisiana Literature, Prism International, Rattle, Malpais Review, Contrary Magazine, The Great American Literary Magazine, and Per Contra, among others. He has been awarded a Fellowship from the Louisiana Division of the Arts as well as the Virginia Award and Ocean’s Prize for poetry. He attended Penn State and the University of Louisiana at Monroe. He has poetry forthcoming in The Moth and a short story forthcoming in the Munyori Literary Journal.

David Mills is the author of two books of poetry The Dream Detective (a small-press besteller) and The Sudden Country (a book-prize finalist). His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Jubilat, Fence, The Ringing Ear and The Pedestal Magazine, to name a few. He has received fellowships from Breadloaf and ArtsLink. And has an MA in creative writing from New York University and is the current Holden Fellow in the Warren Wilson MFA program.

Sheryl L. Nelms is from Marysville, Kansas. She graduated from South Dakota State University. She has had over 5,000 articles, stories and poems published, including fourteen individual collections of her poems*. She is the fiction/nonfiction editor of The Pen Woman Magazine, the National League of American Pen Women publication, a contributing editor for Time Of Singing, A Magazine Of Christian Poetry and a three time Pushcart Prize nominee. For longer credits listing see Sheryl L. Nelms at www.pw.org/directory/featured James Owens and Jessie Morgan-Owens collaborate as Morgan & Owens to produce photographs that capture the everyday moments of people and the places they hold dear. They began this collaboration in 1997 while attending Loyola University New Orleans and working together at a café during Mardi Gras on St. Charles Ave. Jessie and James moved to New York City in 2000, where they earned advanced degrees in visual culture and literature at New York University. They aspire to adventure and to explore the wider 147

Xavier Review 36.1

world in its context. Since 2004, Morgan & Owens has shot internationally for Travel+Leisure, Conde Nast Traveller, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Food & Wine, Afar, Budget Travel, Coastal Living, and Town & Country. They returned to New Orleans in 2014. The cover image, “Rousseau 2014,” could once be seen through their home office window, but this view is now obscured by new construction. This familiar and yet foreign landscape of New Orleans is an example of what James calls in our new everyday life here, “Next Orleans.”

Bibhu Padhi has published ten books of poems. His poems have appeared in magazines throughout the English-speaking world, such as Contemporary Review,, Encounter, Outposts,The Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Stand, The Rialto, Wasafiri, Chelsea, Confrontation, The New Criterion, Poetry (Chicago), Rosebud, Southwest Review, TriQuarterly, The Antigonish Review, Queen’s Quarterly, The Toronto Review, The Illustrated Weekly of India, Quest and Indian Literature. They have also been included in anthologies and textbooks, two of the more recent of which are 60 Indian Poets (New Delhi: Penguin) and The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (New Delhi: HarperCollins). He has also written a book on D. H. Lawrence, and (with his wife, Minakshi Padhi) a reference book on Indian Philosophy and Religion.

Colin Richmond taught at Keele University (UK), until he retired as an Emeritus Professor of History in 1997. He has written poetry since he was 17. Perhaps best known for his three volume study of the fifteenth century Paston Letters, he is also the creator of a fictional saint (Saint Penket [see his, The Penket Papers]).

James Miller Robinson has had poems and short prose in a number of literary magazines and journals including Texas Review, Rio Grande Review, Southern Humanities Review, George Washington Review, and Kansas Quarterly. He has two chapbooks—The Caterpillars at Saint Bernard (Mule on a Ferris Wheel Press, 2014) and Boca del Rio in the Afternoon (Finishing Line Press, 2015). He works as a legal interpreter/translator registered with the Alabama Administrative Office of Courts.

James Shade is author of the play First Friday and co- wrote the script 148

for the independent film NOLA, directed by Harold Sylvester. He has written for The Times Picayune, The Louisiana Weekly, The New Orleans Tribune and has been a member of the English department faculty of Xavier University of Louisiana for 13 years.

Mark Statman’s recent books include Tourist at a Miracle (Hanging Loose, 2010), and two recent poetry collections from Lavender Ink, A Map of the Winds (2013) and That Train Again (2015). Other books include Black Tulips: The Selected Poems of José María Hinojosa (University of New Orleans Press, 2012), the first English language translation of the significant poet of Spain’s Generation of 1927, a translation, with Pablo Medina, of Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York (Grove 2008), as well as Listener in the Snow: The Practice and Teaching of Poetry(Teachers & Writers, 2000) and, co-edited with Christian McEwen, The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing (Teachers & Writers, 2000). An Associate Professor in Literary Studies, Mark Statman has taught at Eugene Lang College since 1985, with classes ranging from the regular poetry sequence, literature, and literary translation to classes in media studies and creative pedagogy, with a focus on arts in education Andy Young is a poet and essayist. Her poetry collection All Night It Is Morning was published in 2014 by Diálogos Press. She teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and is a writer for Heinemann Publishing . Her work has appeared in places such as Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, New World Writing, and One.

149

New Releases from

XAVIER REVIEW Percival Everett: Writing Other/Wise Edited by Keith B. Mitchell and Robin G. Vander 978-1-883275-24-2 • 2014 • $30.00 Percival Everett: Writing Other/Wise (2014) presents eight original critical essays analyzing the fiction and poetry of contemporary American writer, Percival Everett, and includes a special section highlighting Everett’s visual art.

What Went Missing and What Got Found Stories by Fatima Shaik 978-1-883275-25-9 • 2015 • $16.00 What Went Missing and What Got Found is a collection of magical short stories about the inner lives of outsiders: religious zealots, day-dreaming musicians, unlikely heroes and others who inhabit an Afro-Creole neighborhood in New Orleans. Among them are a mute woman who believes that the photographs of starving children in the newspaper are speaking to her, a loading-dock worker who sits in a cemetery and ponders the meaning of life, and a man who finds the perfect match only to be accused of her murder. An elderly couple clings together as the floodwaters rise, and a lone fireman fights off a pack of wild dogs before the book concludes with a young woman who returns home and discovers messages in the storm’s debris that illuminate her past and future.

The Shy Mirror Poems by Gordon Robert Sabatier 978-1-883275-24-2 • 2016 • $16.00 “There is no singular delight in coming into the world of Gordon Robert Sabatier who is both a natural poet and a learned one too. . . . Here is a poet who does what all art asks us to do: to blur the lines between what is human and not human, the lines between pain and ecstasy, between being fully immersed in the physical and the spiritual in the moment of the poem. Here is a poet who uses formalisms we use to harness the fierce and wild. We hear and see the attention to line and syllable in the ways that master technicians pay attention to line and measure and sound and image. But there is more.”

—Darrell Bourque, author of Megan’s Guitar and Other Poems from Acadie

XAVIER REVIEW http://www.xula.edu/review