Jelly Bucket: “After Birth”
The Louisville Review: “Heavy Wait,” “White Knights”
95 Notes Literary Magazine: “Anatomy of Hate”
Obsidian: “Husbandry”
Reverie: “After Dinner in Money, Mississippi”
Weave Magazine: “Swamp Thing,” “Harriet Tubman as Villain”
A special thanks to the following for lending their eyes and hearts to early drafts of these poems and especially to those who gifted their brilliant questions, suggestions, and edits toward the final manuscript: Lewis White, Lee Newton, Ama Codjoe, Adam Banks, Debra Kinley, Tammy Ramsey, Jim Minick, CX Dillhunt, Drew Dillhunt, Taunya Phillips, and Michelle Hite. A special thanks to Randall Horton for his interest and support and to Minrose Gwin for including Turn Me Loose among the important literature celebrating and commemorating Evers’s legacy in her much-needed work, Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement.
Introduction
Much of Mississippi’s and the South’s past is characterized by increased resistance to white supremacy in the face of overt and subtle racism that resulted in a multitude of crimes. These include crimes against the body, crimes against property, the collusion of public and private institutions in preventing access and opportunity to all people, and conspiracies of silence that continue today. This collection of poems seeks to interrupt that silence and shine a light on the important legacy of a civil rights icon all too often omitted from summaries of the era, by giving voice to a particular chapter in this history from multiple and often divergent points of view.
On June 12, 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi, Medgar Evers, the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Mississippi, was shot in the back by Byron De La Beck-with in his own driveway and died soon after being transported to a nearby hospital by neighbors. This was the first in a series of high profile assassinations that would cast a shadow on civil rights activities in America in the early 1960s.
The primary speakers in this narrative are Byron De La Beck-with, Medgar Evers’s assassin; Beckwith’s wives, Mary Louise (Willie) and Thelma De La Beckwith; Medgar Evers’s brother, Charles; Evers’s widow, Myrlie Evers; and a sixth voice that works like a Greek chorus. Medgar Evers’s voice is silent beyond lifting his final words, “… turn me loose,” for the title, but his presence, like a ghost, speaks loudly throughout the poems.
I believe acknowledging and working to fully understand history can create opportunities to better understand racism. I offer these imagined poems in hope that art can help complete the important work we continue to struggle with—the access to economic and social justice that Medgar Evers and so many others died for, and ultimately the healing and reconciliation still needed in America.
PART I
Dixie Suite
WHAT KILLS ME
Myrlie Evers
When people talk about the movement
as if it started in ’64, it erases every
body who vanished on the way home
from work or school and is still listed
as missing. It erases the pile of recovered
bodies—some burnt, shot, dismembered,
some beaten just beyond recognition.
It mutes every unsung voice in Mississippi
that dared to speak up—fully understanding
the consequences. When people talk
about the movement as if it started in ’64,
it erases his entire life’s work.
It means he lived and died for nothing.
And that’s worse than killing him again.
AMBIGUITY OVER THE CONFEDERATE FLAG
In the old south
we would sit on the veranda
life was full of work
from sunup to sundown
look out over the horizon at
nothing but fields of cotton
the young
who happily played behind
children
tried to pick their own weight
while their mothers
sang rapturous spirituals
by age 13 filled 500 lb sacks
and lived the blues
those were good ol’ days
not having to use the whip
was more civilized
for plantation owners
sharecropping and extending debt
was almost more profitable
than slavery
ROTTEN FRUIT
Byron De La Beckwith
I.
I fish for pleasure and to relax.
It’s the best way
to sort out details of a plan
that needs flawless execution.
Every useful thing I know
I learned sitting in the bottom
of a boat across from my granddaddy
in one of Mississippi’s finest
fishing holes. How to
pick out the best spot. How to
get there early. How to lay
low, be patient and wait.
II.
Watching your cork disappear
in the water, bob back up and run
is as thrilling as sneaking your hand
up under a pretty girl’s skirt.
They all put up a lil’ fight, at first
but sooner or later a lucky man
will get his hands on a cat;
a patient man, inside a big wide mouth.
There’s something about the thought
of a wet body, flapping about
and gasping for breath
that gives me chills, even now.
Sometimes we’d just sit and smoke,
swim in some ice cold beers,
enjoy the sound of no women around
or shoot at ghosts if fish weren’t biting.
Sometimes we’d get drunk and argue
for hours about who would win
in a fair fight between his nigger, jack,
and that nigger, joe louis.
IV.
He rode me hard for bragging
about catching the big one,
but I know he bragged even harder
about teaching me how to fish.
Niggers are proof that
Indians fucked buffalo.
—ANONYMOUS
HUMOR ME
Byron De La Beckwith
I was raised with the word nigger
in my mouth. In this part of the south
it is considered our silver spoon.
It practically lived in every good joke
I heard growing up in Mississippi.
The only other good ones were about sex.
But I’ve seen bad jokes about niggers and sex
kick all the power of whiskey right off
the front porch, turn it into something so mean,
somebody would have to get smacked around
to stir that power back up again. Sometimes
it was a dog too friendly for drunks.
Sometimes it was a girlfriend or a wife
who wandered grinning into our man-talk
and snickered at all the wrong parts.
If there weren’t no women or dogs around,
us men would pile into a truck and ride off towards
the coon side of town, looking for something funny.
You can never turn that word
around and make it cool….
It’s not a word of love.
—CHUCK D
THE N-WORD
Charles Evers
Hearing that word launched
from the back of any throat
brings back the smell
of German shepherd breath
of fresh gasoline
and sulfur air
of fear—both ours and theirs.
I hear nine brave children
walking a gauntlet of hate in Little Rock
and four innocent little girls
lifted up to heaven too soon.
Instead of a rebel yell
I hear a rifle bark.
Instead of a whiskey-soaked yee haw
I hear a window break
and children sobbing for a father
face down in a pool of blood.
I hear all my faith collapse
on the wings of a woman’s scream.
I can’t hear anything less
and absolutely nothing funny.
Pastoral scene of the gallant south …
—ABEL MEEROPOL,
“Strange Fruit,” sung by
Billie Holiday
SOUTHERN SPORTS
Byron De La Beckwith
Sometimes it starts with a bonfire
or begins with taunting and spitting
quickly graduating to cursing
and punching and kicking
some body as hard as you can
for the sheer joy of causing them pain
as entertainment for the crowd now
celebrating the crack or pop of broken bodies
showering outstanding individual
violence with applause and cheers.
All you need is some body wearing
the color you’ve been taught to hate
some body threatening to take
what’s rightfully yours
and a little girl with her thighs exposed
held high in the air and screaming.
… there was a sign saying
“Welcome Home De lay” and
when I got in the outskirts of
Greenwood, there was another
one. It brought tears to my eyes.
BYRON DE LA BECKWITH DREAMING I
Mamma’s holding a baby
with perfect blue eyes
she drops it when a tea kettle
screams
she reaches for me
but I start to float away
there is a sound like a loud
hand clap and suddenly
I’m floating face up
in a thick warm soup
the air smells like our bathroom
when Willie’s on the rag
I drink down all the soup and a crowd
gathers around me singing “Dixie”
I’D WISH I WAS IN DIXIE TOO
If your family’s wealth depended on those
you enslaved and the cotton they spun into gold;
if your intellectual superiority depended on
hundreds of years of denying literacy to others
while your color confirmed your right to do so;
if the thought of being responsible for your own
hoeing, planting, chopping, picking, smithing,
raking, mucking, shoeing, milking, smoking,
canning, baking, hauling, cooking, serving,
sweeping, washing, ironing, fixing, nursing,
mending, dusting, and cleaning makes you tired;
then I understand why you love that song so much.
PART II
Southern Dreams
FIRE PROOF
Willie De La Beckwith
He would come home
from evening rallies and secret meetings
so in love with me
I could never see nothing wrong
with what he did with his hands.
I just pretended I didn’t know
what gunpowder smelled like
or why he kept his rifles so clean.
If he walked through that door
and said, “Willie, burn these clothes,”
I’d pile them on the coals and stare
at the fire. I’d listen to the music
twix the crackle and calm as we danced.
And while the ashes gathered ’round
their own kind in the bottom of the grate
I’d watch the embers glow like our bedroom did.
Now, I ain’t saying he was right or wrong.
He often confused hatred with desire.
But if you ain’t never set a man on fire,
felt him explode inside you then die in your arms,
honey, you got no idea what I’m talking about.
It was a touch. It was a look …
It was music playing.
—MYRLIE EVERS
LISTENING TO MUSIC
The right song slow dancing through the air
at the end of a long day full of kids
and no husband, could not only set the tone,
but put the sound of yesterday back in the air.
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles crooned
all the sweet words that his eyes whispered
across the doorframe when he finally came home,
but more often than not, it was Sam Cooke
and Ray Charles or Bobby Blue Bland taking turns
in my ears, reminding me how much I loved that man
no matter how mad or lonely I might have felt.
The right song was like a Kodak Brownie of us cuddling
or an atlas mapping out all our rough spots
and the ways around them. After sweet talking him out
of his suit and tie, after he unloaded the day’s burdens,
we melted together in the dark, beneath the covers
and the crackle of the radio. The sound of my guys
singing backup and Medgar’s jack hammer heart
finally slowing to match our leaky faucet, as he fell asleep
in my arms, completing the soundtrack for a perfect night.
LIFE APES ART APES LIFE: BYRON DE LA BECKWITH REFLECTS ON BIRTH OF A NATION
I was told that the president of these United States
said that film was truth written in lightning
25,000 proud hooded knights marched
through Atlanta just to celebrate the opening.
What an electric moment it must have been
sitting in a whites only theater
being right there in the balcony, beside Booth
when that pretty little bullet kissed Lincoln on the head
laughing out loud at clown nigger politicians
pretending to run meetings and pass laws
wiping their asses on the Constitution
pissing on the South and calling it reconstruction
How hard it must have been to sit on your hands
and not shoot at the moving pictures when the actors
made up like coons chased after white women.
I can almost hear the crowd whoop and shout
when the heroes thundered into town at the end,
white robes, hoods and guns gleaming in the sun
dispensing an Old Testament justice on the screen
as clear as Revelations for Christian men like me.
WHITE OF WAY
after A. Van Jordan
Byron De La Beckwith
[White] Power, noun
1 belief in the fact that all white people have the God given and constitutionally guaranteed right to exercise, encourage, promote, celebrate and defend the privilege of being born superior to other races.
[White] Pride, noun
1 a feeling of deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from the knowledge that all members of other races possess behaviors or abilities that distinguish them as inferior with the obvious exception of athletes, musicians, and comedians like Amos and Andy who make white folks laugh so hard they damn near piss themselves. The same goes for the tap dancing nigger butler on the Shirley Temple Show, and that nigger Uncle Ben on the rice box. They’re all always shuffling and bent over with big ol’ dickless grins on their faces. They’re the only niggers a white man could ever trust with his daughters.
[White] Privilege, see Colonialism, Apartheid, and Manifest Destiny.
Synonyms: Patriot, Religious Right, Conservative Christian, Staunch Segregationist, proud American, active Klansman, card carrying member of the Citizens Council, Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, Re
deemers; commonly confused with racist, xenophobe, or bigot.
MUSIC, NIGGERS & JEWS
Byron De La Beckwith
Long before George Jones and others
had folks all over the country hungry
for a weekly plate of Hee Haw
and the Grand Ole Opry, TV pretended
regular, hardworking, blue collar,
proud-to-be-white folks, didn’t exist.
Johnny Cash went on Carson in ’64
and damn near set the stage on fire.
His songs was real music—not none
of that monkey shine they tried to sell
with white faces on the cover.
But as good as Johnny was and is,
American Bandstand, Rock ’n Roll,
and them long-haired sissies from England
made living rooms full of our young
almost apologize for being born white.
Dick Clark is no better than a nigger to me
and the Jews that control television is even less.
SWAMP THING
Willie De La Beckwith
My ears were field with cotton.
My throat had been lynched shut.
I was chained to something as big
and long and dark as Mississippi herself.
Magnolia trees were bleeding. The floor
was turning to marsh beneath my feet.
I called out for help, but only laughter
and spit came out of my whip.
When I felt the cold metal hounds
biting my ankles, I sat up in bed,
screaming and chasing my breath,
only to find my husband
grinning and tickling my feet.
STAND BY YOUR MAN
Willie De La Beckwith
Like any smart woman
I’ve stormed out
even divorced him once