to make my point
but anybody
who even stops
takes time
to think about it
and still makes
their lips ask why
I’m so proud to be
Mrs. Byron De La Beckwith
ain’t never heard
Tammy Wynnette sing
—and she’s
from Mississippi too.
HUSBANDRY
Myrlie Evers
I fell in love with his desire to take his fear
make Mississippi something stronger out of it.
Put my plans on hold to breathe him up close
help him plant his dreams for a better South.
Wove my spine to his so he could stand
magnolia tall and blossom for all to see.
Birthed him namesakes with enough arms
to carry all of his tomorrows.
He spent every penny of his strength organizing
for a hate-free day and we didn’t waste a single night.
UNWRITTEN RULES FOR YOUNG BLACK BOYS WANTING TO LIVE IN MISSISSIPPI LONG ENOUGH TO BECOME MEN
Rule number one. White is always right.
Number two. Never look a white man in the eye.
Three. Always answer yes Sir or no Ma’am when spoken to by whites.
Four. Always look for, use or request the colored section.
Five. Never speak to, smile at or stare in the direction of a white woman.
Six. Pretend your name really is boy, son, or worse.
Seven. Ignore all white sexual aggression towards your sisters, mothers, or aunts.
Eight. Always suppress your anger, cynicism, and rage or mask it with a wide grin, pretend stupidity, and silence.
Nine. If a white man says it looks like rain, wish out loud for an umbrella no matter how dry it is.
Ten. If you forget any of these rules, fall back on rule number one.
PART III
Look Away, Look Away…
BYRON DE LA BECKWITH DREAMING II
I am driving a new white Cadillac
but instead of gunning it and kicking up red dirt
I’m joy riding Sunday-slow on a country road
of wooly black heads
I slam on the breaks
and suddenly I can hear them breathing,
when I floor the pedal they start to sing
and the faster I drive the louder they howl
my steering wheel and windshield disappear
the leather seats turn to pine
the caddy rolls right into a church
where somebody is beating
the hell out of a tambourine
and it gets louder and louder and louder
until my woman screams
and we both look down
to see she has given birth
to what we first thought
was a mongrel baby
but after I throw it in the Mississippi
I can see it was just covered with blood.
AFTER DINNER IN MONEY, MISSISSIPPI
after Tyehimba Jess
pick up
a tool and beat
any nigger looking at
white eggs
white women
white sugar
or anything white but cotton
wait until after
dark
corn syrup, vanilla
extract
a confession at gun point
salt
open wounds and butter
pour into
a thin crust
the Tallahatchie River
cover
with pecans
up the truth
bake
with a 75-lb
cotton gin fan
let things cool
ready when brown and puffy
WORLD WAR TOO
Myrlie Evers
Medgar, Charles, and men like them
survived Jim Crow Army,
the Blitzkrieg, and Messerschmitts.
They returned home and fought
for a Double Victory
against the axis powers
of poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence.
The battle now was to have some say
in their own lives.
I once was blind, but thank God I
It was because grace and mercy
came along and rescued me.
—MISSISSIPPI MASS CHOIR
BELIEVING IN HYMN
Myrlie Evers
Whenever we needed more confidence
than we woke up with in the morning
God would come in a song
wearing a black woman’s voice
a voice that sounded like that far away
look in Reverend Martin Luther King’s eyes.
When she opened it up, it wrapped its arms
around all our fears, our doubts;
it lifted our hearts and spirits and took up
so much space there was no room to hate back.
Every time she laid down a verse over the roar
of fire hoses, attack dogs, and police batons,
our own voices would join hands, pick it up
and let the chorus carry us as far as we needed to go.
white men would say they were
going out to the quarters to
have their luck changed.
—ANONYMOUS
SOUTHERN BELLS
Willie De La Beckwith
When our grandfathers strutted back
from the slave quarters
still unzipped and whiskey-eyed
and on occasion forgetting
it was a sweet southern belle
they were now wringing
when the mongrel evidence of their sins
crowded the edge of the front porch
or tiptoed around our kitchens
with swollen bellies—thus began
our great tradition
of not knowing and not wanting to know
of never ever asking about
what happened
out there in the dark
but, if you really know a man
you know what he loves
and you know what ignites his lust
whether that be the peal and chime
of a black woman’s body
or the silent one of her man.
… racism is a mental illness
brought on by the fear of white
genetic annihilation.”
—DR. FRANCIS CRESS WELSING
FIGHTING EXTINCTION
Byron De La Beckwith
We do what we do to build a fort around our women
and to protect America from mongrelization.
Allowing the free mixing of colored and white
is worse than too much pepper on a bowl of grits.
Have you not seen what one drop of black
paint will do to a gallon of white?
I ain’t afraid of niggers, but I have nightmares
about the end of whiteness
and waking up one morning, pulling back the sheet
only to find my Willie is Aunt Jemima.
HARRIET TUBMAN AS VILLAIN: A GHOST STORY
Willie De La Beckwith
There was a scary ol’ black woman ghost
that carried a shotgun and snuck into the quarters
at night to steal little picaninnies an’ field hands.
She carried each one of ’em down to the creek
and covered ’em with mud to hide their scent,
then sang a magic song that made ’em all invisible.
They ran away so quickly even the bloodhounds
couldn’t catch ’em. She came back night after night
until she’d stole nearly every nigger in the quarters
and come spring there was hardly anybody to break
the ground and drop the seeds. In the su
mmer
there was almost nobody to chop the cotton
when harvest time come, the poor old farmer and his wife
picked what they’d planted by themselves, worked
every day ’til sundown and even took supper in the fields.
They were both found on Christmas day, bent over
and frozen to a cotton bush, fingers and hands cut up
and still bleeding, after working themselves to death.
LEGAL LYNCHING
The registration of Negro voters
and demonstrations for civil rights
is strictly prohibited.
Violators will be punished
with racial epithets, harassing
phone calls, rocks, and eggs
(thrown from cars and trucks)
and firebombs when necessary.
Repeat offenders run the risk
of being immediately separated
from places of employment
and having mortgages called in.
Organizers of said activities
will be dealt with harshly
outside the highest limits of the law.
AFTER THE FBI SEARCHED THE BAYOU
Myrlie Evers
When they unearthed
each new corpse,
we couldn’t speak for days.
We came back
from that dark place
in tears—not for ourselves,
but for all the mutilated
and charred remains that were not
Goodman, Schwerner, or Chaney.
We could only find solace
looking out over the Mississippi,
watching that dark woman
swallow the sun.
HAIKU FOR EMMETT TILL
Up north, nobody thought
it necessary to teach
Dixie decorum
Did he whistle or
flirt, forget the Negro’s place?
Was it eyeball rape?
The all-white jury
guzzled beer, while his mamma
shed tears on the stand
They looked at his skull
his disfigured face, smiled, and
still voted not guilty
Fourteen is too soon
to visit Mississippi
come home in a box
NO MORE FEAR
Myrlie Evers
Three months before Emmett Till arrived
Reverend George Lee was killed
by a shotgun blast to the face.
It was ruled a traffic accident.
He had been the first to register
to vote in his county.
One week before Emmett Till arrived
Lamar Smith voted in the democratic primary
and was shot at high noon
in front of the county courthouse.
There were no arrests.
Medgar cried when he heard about young Till.
Then he dressed as a sharecropper
helped find witnesses
and smuggled them out of town
for their safety.
When Uncle Mose stood up in court,
pointed right at J. W. Milam, identified him
as the killer, we thought the air would split,
but it didn’t.
Instead a seam opened up in that place
where we kept all our fears.
WHEN DEATH MOVED IN
Myrlie Evers
It attached itself to our lives, first
like an unplanned pregnancy,
then like our fourth child.
We didn’t talk about its disfigured face
or its crooked limbs and spine.
We went about the people’s business
tried to pretend that it wasn’t really there,
though some nights it filled every open space
in the room, often crawling into bed between us,
making it difficult to sleep.
Every new registered voter, successful boycott,
demonstration and prime-time television minute
put fat on its face. Images of Medgar
escorting James Meredith into Ole Miss
were celebrated with new front teeth.
When it crawled to the front door, and spoke
its first cuss words
it sounded like a car backfired twice.
PART IV
Gallant South
BYRON DE LA BECKWITH DREAMING III
I unzip my pants to piss,
and my fingers pull out a long black snake.
Willie reaches over, strokes it,
and smiles. I squeeze my eyes shut,
clear my head, enjoy the weight of it
in my hands, open my right eye to a squint,
line up the crosshairs,
take a deep breath and smile back.
Killing that nigger gave me no
more inner discomfort than
our wives endure when they
give birth to our children.
—BYRON DE LA BECKWITH
AFTER BIRTH
Like them, a man can conceive
an idea, an event, a moment so clearly
he can name it even before it breathes.
We both can carry a thing around inside
for only so long and no matter how small
it starts out, it can swell and get so heavy
our backs hurt and we can’t find comfort
enough to sleep at night. All we can think
about is the relief that waits, at the end.
When it was finally time, it was painless.
It was the most natural thing I’d ever done.
I just closed my eyes and squeezed
then opened them and there he was,
just laying there still covered with blood,
(laughs) but already trying to crawl.
I must admit, like any proud parent
I was afraid at first, afraid he’d live,
afraid he’d die too soon.
Funny how life ’n death
is a whole lot of pushing and pulling,
holding and seeking breath;
a whole world turned upside down
until some body screams.
SORORITY MEETING
Myrlie Evers speaks to Willie
and Thelma De La Beckwith
My faith urges me to love you.
My stomach begs me to not.
All I know is that day
made us sisters, somehow. After long
nervous nights and trials on end
we are bound together
in this unholy sorority of misery.
I think about you every time I run
my hands across the echoes
in the hollows of my sheets.
They seem loudest just before I wake.
I open my eyes every morning
half expecting Medgar to be there,
then I think about you
and your eyes always snatch me back.
Your eyes won’t let me forget.
We are sorority sisters now
with a gut-wrenching country ballad
for a sweetheart song, tired funeral
and courtroom clothes for colors
and secrets we will take to our graves.
I was forced to sleep night after night
after night with a ghost.
You chose to sleep with a killer.
We all pledged our love,
crossed our hearts and swallowed oaths
before being initiated with a bullet.
ONE-THIRD OF 180 GRAMS OF LEAD
Both of them were history, even before one
pulled the trigger, before I rocketed through
the smoking barrel hidden in the honeysuckle
before I tore through a man’s back, shattered
his family, a window, and tore through an inner wall
before I bounced off a refrigerator and a coffeepot
before I landed at my destined point in history
—next to a watermelon. What was cruel was the irony
not the melon, not the man falling in slow motion,
but the man squinting through the crosshairs
reducing the justice system to a small circle, praying
that he not miss, then sending me to deliver a message
as if the woman screaming in the dark
or the children crying at her feet
could ever believe
a bullet was small enough to hate.
ARLINGTON
Myrlie Evers
During the flag ceremony
soldiers folded, creased, tucked,
smoothed, and then folded again
with such precision and care,
I imagined they were wrapping
a body
a red, white, and blue
mummy
which they passed, and saluted
and honored so much so
everybody stopped looking
at the casket
by the time they placed that triangle
of husband in my arms,
they left no doubt
I was holding his future
and what we were burying
was only his past.
CROSS-EXAMINATION
Byron De La Beckwith
What good would it do to own a whole orchard
and not make preserves out of the fruit?
Any fool with money and a passion for guns
is at most, a collector. Only a marksman like me
could truly own a rifle like that or any gun.
Owning a gun is like driving a fast car.
Hell, it’s like raising prize cocks. You gotta keep
’em healthy and mean. You gotta let ’em out
of they cage sometimes and rev the engines
just to see ’em strut. Now, I ain’t saying I did it,
that’s for the state to prove, but you gotta be a fool