Nashville
is hot chicken on sopping white bread with green pickle
chips—sour to balance prismatic, flame-colored spice
for white people. Or, rather, white people now curate hot
chicken for $16 and two farm-to-table sides, or maybe
they’ve hungered fried heat and grease from black food
and milk—but didn’t want to drive to Jefferson Street or
don’t know about the history of Jefferson Street or Hell’s
Half Acre, north of downtown. Where freed slaves lived
on the fringe of Union camps, built their own new country.
Where its golden age brought the Silver Streak, a ballroom
bringing Basie, Ellington, and Fitzgerald. First-run movies
at the Ritz and no one had to climb to the balcony. 1968,
they built the interstate. I-40 bisected the black community
like a tourniquet of concrete. There were no highway exits.
120 businesses closed. Ambulance siren driving over
the house that called 911, diminishing howl in the distance,
black bodies going straight to the morgue. At the downtown
library, a continuous loop flashes sncc videos with black
and white kids training for spit and circular cigarette burns
as the video toggles from coaching to counters covered
in pillars of salt and pie and soda—magma of the movement.
On 1-65, there is a two-tone Confederate statue I flick off
daily on my morning commute. Walking down Second Avenue,
past neon honky-tonks playing bro-country and Cash
and herds of squealing pink bachelorette parties—someone
yelled Nigger-lover at my husband. Again. Walking down
Second Avenue, I thought I heard someone yelling at the back
of my husband. I turned around to find the voice and saw
myself as someone who didn’t give a damn. Again. I turned
around to find that it was I who lived inside the lovely word
made flesh by white mouths masticating mashed sweet potatoes
from my mother’s mother’s mother—Freelove was her name,
a slave from Warrior, North Carolina, with twelve children
with names like Pansy, Viola, Oscar, Stella, and Toy—my
grandmother. There is always a word I’m chasing inside and
outside of my body, a word inside another word, scanning
the O.E.D. for soot-covered roots: 1577, 1584, 1608 . . . Tracing my
finger along the boomerang shape of the Niger River for my blood.
1856, 1866, 1889 . . . Who said it? A hyphen—crackles and bites,
burns the body to a spray of white wisps, like when the hot comb,
with its metal teeth, cut close to petroleum jelly edging the scalp—
sizzling. Southern Babel, smoking the hive of epithets hung fat
above bustling crowds like black-and-white lynching photographs,
mute faces, red finger pointing up at my dead, some smiling,
some with hats and ties—all business, as one needlelike lady
is looking at the camera, as if looking through the camera, at me,
in the way I am looking at my lover now—halcyon and constant.
Once my mother-in-law said Watch your back, and I knew exactly
what she meant. Again. I turned around to find I am the breath
of Apollo panting at the back of Daphne’s wild hair, chasing words
like arrows inside the knotted meat between my shoulder blades—
four violent syllables stabbing my skin, enamored with pain.
I am kissing all the trees—searching the mob, mumbling to myself:
Who said it?
Who said it?
Who said it?
Soil Horizon
…the ghost of history lies down beside me,
rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.
–Natasha Trethewey
My husband’s mother wanted to take the family portrait
at Carnton Plantation. I was the only person she called to ask
if it was okay. She said we could redeem the land with our picture—
my brown skin acrostic to the row of their white. She said can’t we
just let the past be the past. I was silent, my cell phone glowing
warm against my cheek. I was driving, red light—then go. She said
it’s practically in my backyard and that her boys played on buckled
fields of green graves growing up—there are so many fun places to shoot!
Oh and that big magnolia is in bloom—fragrant milky petals and waxy
greens by the red brick house, and the large front porch with rocking chairs
tipping back and forth above the purpled stains of Confederate blood. I
said it was fine as long as we weren’t by the slave cabins, and she laughed
and I laughed, which is to say—I wasn’t joking at all. She kept saying:
redeem, as if to say, we’ll make it acceptable: restore and atone, buy it
back, pay it off, we’ll redeem it, she said again. Emancipate. Liberate.
Her voice swelling, like she was singing, and as if we really could.
How do we stand on the dead and smile? I carry so many black souls
in my skin, sometimes I swear it vibrates, like a tuning fork when struck.
~
A staff officer wrote, “the wounded, in hundreds, were brought to [the house]
during the battle, and all the night after. And when the noble old house could
hold no more, the yard was appropriated until the wounded and dead filled that….”
~
The plantation was named after cairns, prophetic stones marking a mass
grave still speaking. How the body leaves its mark on wood—plum dark
and greasy from the shot stippled and amputated. My tongue was cut off
when she asked me again, are you sure it’s okay? I was waiting at the red
light, my cell phone burned from the hot battery in my hand. Even the dark
layers of dirt must testify—how the Battle of Franklin turned the farmstead
to a field hospital, thousands of casualties during the war for states rights
the brochure said, and now it’s sold out for summer weddings with mint
juleps in sweating silver cups, cannon bursts from weekend reenactments,
and photo shoots for graduation, pregnant couples, and my new family.
~
It’s raining, the photographer is snapping and directing us toward the daffodils
in the garden, the shutter opening and closing like a tiny guillotine—clicking.
I’m staring at the black eye clutching my smile. Light drizzle turning my pressed
hair slowly back to curls, the water percolating—weathering its way down
to the bright green topsoil, fertile with the past: organic and holy wet as Dixie
myth—mixing with iron, clay, aluminum, and revision—romancing the dirt
and undead, churning the silt in the subsoil, steeping further down—deep, deep
in the dark pocket of earth, to the parent material, layers of large unbroken rocks,
down to the antebellum base, the bedrock of Southern amnesia. Can’t we just let
the past be the past, she said. Her voice swelling, like she was singing,
and as if we really could.
~
In the portrait, my husband is holding my hand, his hand that dug for bullets as a boy.