trading places
When Maria’s mother makes
arroz con habichuelas y tostones,
we trade dinners. If it’s a school night,
I’ll run to Maria’s house, a plate of my mother’s
baked chicken with Kraft mac and cheese,
sometimes box corn bread,
sometimes canned string beans,
warm in my hands, ready for the first taste
of Maria’s mother’s garlicky rice and beans,
crushed green bananas
fried and salted and warm . . .
Maria will be waiting, her own plate covered in foil.
Sometimes
we sit side by side on her stoop, our traded plates
in our laps.
What are you guys eating? the neighborhood kids ask
but we never answer, too busy shoveling the food we love
into our mouths.
Your mother makes the best chicken, Maria says. The best
corn bread. The best everything!
Yeah, I say.
I guess my grandma taught her something after all.
writing #1
It’s easier to make up stories
than it is to write them down. When I speak,
the words come pouring out of me. The story
wakes up and walks all over the room. Sits in a chair,
crosses one leg over the other, says,
Let me introduce myself. Then just starts going on and on.
But as I bend over my composition notebook,
only my name
comes quickly. Each letter, neatly printed
between the pale blue lines. Then white
space and air and me wondering, How do I
spell introduce? Trying again and again
until there is nothing but pink
bits of eraser and a hole now
where a story should be.
late autumn
Ms. Moskowitz calls us one by one and says,
Come up to the board and write your name.
When it’s my turn, I walk down the aisle from
my seat in the back, write Jacqueline Woodson—
the way I’ve done a hundred times, turn back
toward my seat, proud as anything
of my name in white letters on the dusty blackboard.
But Ms. Moskowitz stops me, says,
In cursive too, please. But the q in Jacqueline is too hard
so I write Jackie Woodson for the first time. Struggle
only a little bit with the k.
Is that what you want us to call you?
I want to say, No, my name is Jacqueline
but I am scared of that cursive q, know
I may never be able to connect it to c and u
so I nod even though
I am lying.
the other woodson
Even though so many people think my sister and I
are twins,
I am the other Woodson, following behind her each year
into the same classroom she had the year before. Each
teacher smiles when they call my name. Woodson, they
say. You must be Odella’s sister. Then they nod
slowly, over and over again, call me Odella. Say,
I’m sorry! You look so much like her and she is SO brilliant!
then wait for my brilliance to light up
the classroom. Wait for my arm to fly into
the air with every answer. Wait for my pencil
to move quickly through the too-easy math problems
on the mimeographed sheet. Wait for me to stand
before class, easily reading words even high school
students stumble over. And they keep waiting.
And waiting
and waiting
and waiting
until one day, they walk into the classroom,
almost call me Odel—then stop
remember that I am the other Woodson
and begin searching for brilliance
at another desk.
writing #2
On the radio, Sly and the Family Stone are singing
“Family Affair,” the song turned up because it’s
my mother’s favorite, the one she plays again and again.
You can’t leave ’cause your heart is there, Sly sings.
But you can’t stay ’cause you been somewhere else.
The song makes me think of Greenville and Brooklyn
the two worlds my heart lives in now. I am writing
the lyrics down, trying to catch each word before it’s gone
then reading them back, out loud to my mother. This
is how I’m learning. Words come slow to me
on the page until
I memorize them, reading the same books over
lyrics to songs from records and TV commercials,
the words
settling into my brain, into my memory.
Not everyone learns
to read this way—memory taking over when the rest
of the brain stops working,
but I do.
Sly is singing the words
over and over as though
he is trying
to convince me that this whole world
is just a bunch of families
like ours
going about their own family affairs.
Stop daydreaming, my mother says.
So I go back to writing down words
that are songs and stories and whole new worlds
tucking themselves into
my memory.
birch tree poem
Before my teacher reads the poem,
she has to explain.
A birch, she says, is a kind of tree
then magically she pulls a picture
from her desk drawer and the tree is suddenly
real to us.
“When I see birches bend to left and right . . .” she begins
“Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think”—
and when she reads, her voice drops down so low
and beautiful
some of us put our heads on our desks to keep
the happy tears from flowing
—“some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do.”
And even though we’ve never seen an ice storm
we’ve seen a birch tree, so we can imagine
everything we need to imagine
forever and ever
infinity
amen.
how to listen #6
When I sit beneath
the shade of my block’s oak tree
the world disappears.
reading
I am not my sister.
Words from the books curl around each other
make little sense
until
I read them again
and again, the story
settling into memory. Too slow
the teacher says.
Read faster.
Too babyish, the teacher says.
Read older.
But I don’t want to read faster or older or
any way else that might
make the story disappear too quickly from where
it’s settling
inside my brain,
slowly becoming
a part of me.
A story I will remember
long after I’ve read i
t for the second, third,
tenth, hundredth time.
stevie and me
Every Monday, my mother takes us
to the library around the corner. We are allowed
to take out seven books each. On those days,
no one complains
that all I want are picture books.
Those days, no one tells me to read faster
to read harder books
to read like Dell.
No one is there to say, Not that book,
when I stop in front of the small paperback
with a brown boy on the cover.
Stevie.
I read:
One day my momma told me,
“You know you’re gonna have
a little friend come stay with you.”
And I said, “Who is it?”
If someone had been fussing with me
to read like my sister, I might have missed
the picture book filled with brown people, more
brown people than I’d ever seen
in a book before.
The little boy’s name was Steven but
his mother kept calling him Stevie.
My name is Robert but my momma don’t
call me Robertie.
If someone had taken
that book out of my hand
said, You’re too old for this
maybe
I’d never have believed
that someone who looked like me
could be in the pages of the book
that someone who looked like me
had a story.
when i tell my family
When I tell my family
I want to be a writer, they smile and say,
We see you in the backyard with your writing.
They say,
We hear you making up all those stories.
And,
We used to write poems.
And,
It’s a good hobby, we see how quiet it keeps you.
They say,
But maybe you should be a teacher,
a lawyer,
do hair . . .
I’ll think about it, I say.
And maybe all of us know
this is just another one of my
stories.
daddy gunnar
Saturday morning and Daddy Gunnar’s voice
is on the other end of the phone.
We all grab for it.
Let me speak to him!
My turn!
No mine!
Until Mama makes us stand in line.
He coughs hard, takes deep breaths.
When he speaks, it’s almost low as a whisper.
How are my New York grandbabies, he wants to know.
We’re good, I say, holding tight to the phone
but my sister is already grabbing for it,
Hope and even Roman, all of us
hungry for the sound
of his faraway voice.
Y’all know how much I love you?
Infinity and back again, I say
the way I’ve said it a million times.
And then, Daddy says to me, Go on and add
a little bit more to that.
hope onstage
Until the curtain comes up and he’s standing there,
ten years old and alone in the center of the P.S. 106 stage,
no one knew
my big brother could sing. He is dressed
as a shepherd, his voice
soft and low, more sure than any sound I’ve ever heard
come out of him. My quiet big brother
who only speaks
when asked, has little to say to any of us, except
when he’s talking about science or comic books, now
has a voice that is circling the air,
landing clear and sweet around us:
“Tingalayo, come little donkey come.
Tingalayo, come little donkey come.
My donkey walks, my donkey talks
my donkey eats with a knife and fork.
Oh Tingalayo, come little donkey come.”
Hope can sing . . . my sister says in wonder
as my mother
and the rest of the audience start to clap.
Maybe, I am thinking, there is something hidden
like this, in all of us. A small gift from the universe
waiting to be discovered.
My big brother raises his arms, calling his donkey home.
He is smiling as he sings, the music getting louder
behind him.
“Tingalayo . . .”
And in the darkened auditorium, the light
is only on Hope
and it’s hard to believe he has such a magic
singing voice
and even harder to believe his donkey
is going to come running.
daddy this time
Greenville is different this summer,
Roman is well and out back, swinging hard. Somewhere
between last summer and now, our daddy
cemented the swing set down.
Roman doesn’t know the shaky days—just this moment,
his dark blue Keds pointing toward the sky,
his laughter and screams, like wind
through the screen door.
Now my grandmother shushes him,
Daddy resting in the bedroom, the covers pulled up
to his chin,
his thin body so much smaller than I remember it.
Just a little tired, Daddy says to me, when I tiptoe
in with chicken soup,
sit on the edge of the bed and try to get him
to take small sips.
He struggles into sitting, lets me feed him
small mouthfuls but only a few
are enough. Too tired to eat anymore.
Then he closes his eyes.
Outside, Roman laughs again and the swing set
whines with the weight of him.
Maybe Hope is there, pushing him
into the air. Or maybe it’s Dell.
The three of them would rather be outside.
His room smells, my sister says.
But I don’t smell anything except the lotion
I rub into my grandfather’s hands.
When the others aren’t around, he whispers,
You’re my favorite,
smiles and winks at me. You’re going to be fine,
you know that.
Then he coughs hard and closes his eyes, his breath
struggling to get
into and out of his body.
Most days, I am in here with my grandfather,
holding his hand
while he sleeps
fluffing pillows and telling him stories
about my friends back home.
When he asks, I speak to him in Spanish,
the language that rolls off my tongue
like I was born knowing it.
Sometimes, my grandfather says,
Sing me something pretty.
And when I sing to him, I’m not
just left of the key or right of the tune
He says I sing beautifully.
He says I am perfect.
what everybody knows now
Even though the laws have changed
my grandmother still takes us
to the back of the bus when we go downtown
in the rain. It’s easier, my grandmother says,
than having white folks look at me like I’m dirt.
But we aren’t dirt. We are people
paying the same fare as other people.
When I say this to my grandmother,
she nods, says, Easier to stay where you belong.
I look around and see the ones
who walk straight to the back. See
the ones who take a seat up front, daring
anyone to make them move. And know
this is who I want to be. Not scared
like that. Brave
like that.
Still, my grandmother takes my hand downtown
pulls me right past the restaurants that have to let us sit
wherever we want now. No need in making trouble,
she says. You all go back to New York City but
I have to live here.
We walk straight past Woolworth’s
without even looking in the windows
because the one time my grandmother went inside
they made her wait and wait. Acted like
I wasn’t even there. It’s hard not to see the moment—
my grandmother in her Sunday clothes, a hat
with a flower pinned to it
neatly on her head, her patent-leather purse,
perfectly clasped
between her gloved hands—waiting quietly
long past her turn.
end of summer
Too fast the summer leaves us, we kiss
our grandparents good-bye and my uncle Robert
is there waiting
to take us home again.
When we hug our grandfather, his body
is all bones and skin. But he is up now,
sitting at the window, a blanket covering
his thin shoulders.
Soon, I’ll get back to that garden, he says.
But most days, all I want to do
is lay down and rest.
We wave again from the taxi that pulls out
slow down the drive—watch our grandmother,
still waving,
grow small behind us and our grandfather,
in the window,
fade from sight.