In the Language of My Captor
IN THE LANGUAGE OF MY CAPTOR
SHANE McCRAE
Wesleyan University Press
MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT
Wesleyan Poetry
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
© 2017 Shane McCrae
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Quemadura
Typeset in DIN and Scala
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McCrae, Shane, 1975– author.
Title: In the language of my captor / Shane McCrae.
Description: Middletown, Connecticut : Wesleyan University Press, [2017] | Series: Wesleyan poetry
Identifiers: LCCN 2016035696 (print) | LCCN 2016041724 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819577115 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780819577139 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3613.C385747 A6 2017 (print) | LCC PS3613.C385747 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016035696
5 4 3 2 1
Cover photo: Bradley Theodore, Young President 2015.
For my families
You will feed yourself five thousand times. —THYLIAS MOSS
Contents
1
His God
3
Panopticon
5
Privacy
6
What Do You Know About Shame
8
Privacy 2
11
In the Language
13
2
Purgatory: A Memoir / A Son and a Father of Sons
17
3
Banjo Yes Receives a Lifetime Achievement Award
55
Banjo Yes Recalls His First Movies
58
Banjo Yes Talks About His First White Wife
60
Banjo Yes Plucks an Apple from a Tree in a Park
61
Banjo Yes Talks About Motivation
63
Banjo Yes Asks a Journalist
65
4
(hope)(lessness)
69
Sunlight
72
Jim Limber the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Davis Visits His Adoptive Parents After the War
77
Asked About The Banjo Man and Its Sequels Banjo Yes Tells a Journalist Something About Himself
78
Still When I Picture It the Face of God Is a White Man’s Face
82
Acknowledgments
85
1
His God
I am the keeper tells
Me the most popular exhibit
I’m given many opportunities
I like especially to ask the groups
Led by fat white men I am careful to
Never address the fat man but the group
How has it come // To pass
that I’m on this side of the bars
And you’re on that side
And Who stands in your shoes
You or the people you resemble
they don’t give me shoes // I say
Gesturing toward a zoo employee
and I smile
Often the people do not answer me
Often the fat man squints and says It real- // ly makes you think
Something like that or There
but for the grace of God / I tell the keeper they must be
The daughters and the sons of nearer gods
I tell him my gods had to stay behind
To watch my people / He likes it when I talk like that
the truth is I don’t know
The keeper when he’s drunk
Sometimes he says I’m lucky
To have been rescued from my gods
And I should thank the man who bought me
I used to laugh at him but now I grieve
I think // His god is not a god like mine / His god
Is not a mother not a father
not a hunter not a farmer
his / God is a stranger
from no country he has seen
Panopticon
The keeper put me in the cage with the monkeys
Because I asked to be
Put in the cage with the monkeys
Most of the papers say the monkeys
must // Remind me of my family
The liberal papers say the monkeys must
Remind me of my home
The papers don’t ask me
some days // I tuck notes explanations
Into soft monkey shits
and call white children to the bars
I warn the parents / But still they let their children come
And that’s my explanation / I am
their honest mirror
I say Whether you’re here
to see me or to see the monkeys
You’re here to see yourselves
Privacy
I tell the keeper I don’t know
What he or any white man means
When he says privacy
Especially
In the phrase In the privacy
Of one’s own home / I understand
he thinks he means a kind of
Militarized aloneness
If he would listen I would tell him
Privacy is impossible
If one’s community is
Not bound by love
Instead I tell him where I’m from we
Have no such concept
If he thinks I am / Too wise
he won’t speak honestly
And so I make an / Effort to make
my language fit his
Idea of what I am
I find with him and with his guests
Because I’m on display in
A cage with monkeys
I / Must speak and act
carefully to maintain / His privacy
and // If he would listen I would tell him
Where privacy
Must be defended
There is no privacy
I have become an // Expert on the subject
But I have also learned
The keeper will not trust me / To understand
even what he has taught me
What Do You Know About Shame
Late very late long after
The many families and the lone white man
Who stayed long after
The families had gone had gone
Last night the keeper staggered to my cage / Weeping
he said his wife
Was leaving him
And he would never see his son
Again I said I did not understand
Why he would never see his son again
He said he was ashamed
And his // Wife was ashamed
and she was going back to
Her people was his word
and / Taking the child
I said I did not understand
Why he would never see his son again
Again I said there would be no
Ocean between his son and him
No bars
Between / Him and the ocean
if there were an ocean
And I said Surely I am making you
A wealthy man
you can // Afford to travel
can you not
The keeper stepped close to my cage
and snarled / Your women
/ Tramp through the jungle
with their tits out // What do you know about
shame and I shouted You are drunk
Go home and be / Drunk with your family
While you still can
He growled
and struck the bar between us
And stumbled back and fell
How do you know a white man’s really hurt I laughed
He / Stops crying
Privacy 2
I tell the keeper I don’t know
What he or any white man means
When he says privacy
Especially
In the phrase In the privacy
Of one’s own home / I understand
he thinks he means a kind of
Militarized aloneness
If he would listen I would ask him whether
The power / To enforce alone-
ness and aloneness
can exist together
Instead I tell him where I’m from we
Have no such con-
cept if he thinks I am / Too wise
he won’t speak honestly
And so I talk the way the men
He says are men like me
Talk in the books he reads to me
I understand
Those books are not supposed to make me wise
And yet I think perhaps
They show me what he means
By privacy // Perhaps
by privacy he means / This
certainty he has that
The weapons he has made
Will not be used against him
In the Language
I cannot talk about the place I came from
I do not want it to exist
The way I knew it
In the language of my captor
The keeper asks me why I
Refuse him this
I think to anyone who came from / The place I came from
It would be obvious
but // I did not think my people
Superior to other people before
The keeper’s language has infected me
I knew of // Few people
Beyond the people / I knew
before and when I met new people
The first thing I assumed was
they were just like me
Perhaps even relatives
Who had before my birth been lost
In the jungle or on the plain
Or on the other side of the mountain
And so at first I thought the white men / Were ghosts
one spoke my language
And said that he had spoken to my father
I did not fear them
I thought they had been
whitened by the sun / Like bones wandering
I thought I could / Help them
I thought they didn’t
Know they were dead
2
Purgatory: A Memoir / A Son and a Father of Sons
I myself prefer to be left face up
in a ditch and for someone to go to jail
because of what he’s done to me.
— PRISCILLA BECKER
Ajax (within)
Boy! Where is my child?
— SOPHOCLES (TRANSLATED BY JOHN MOORE)
1
Most mornings, on my way to school, I would stop on the bridge over the branch of the creek that separated the school from my house and peer through the railing down at the minnows twisting in the pale current.
Some afternoons, and sometimes on the weekends, I would climb through the thick bushes behind the school—I would push, violently, sometimes knocking whole trees down, sometimes stomping on them, imagining myself hacking through a faraway jungle, and once I brought one of my grandfather’s machetes with me, his only souvenirs from the army, although he hadn’t fought in a war, two machetes and a pair of boots, and hacked so desperately, so gleefully then that I didn’t get anywhere, but stood in one spot, hacking—and through the bamboo trees beyond the bushes, to the village of abandoned and rotting houses in the placeless clearing.
Two houses, both wooden, and both painted brown, although most of the paint had peeled away, stood in the center of the village if one were facing the village, having just emerged from the bamboo forest. To the left of the houses a narrow dirt road led away from the village. To the right of the houses stood a building that looked like a cross between a barn and a warehouse. It, too, was brown, and brown also where the paint had peeled away, exposing the wood underneath.
The village was the emptiest place I had ever seen. But the warehouse and the houses were full. The houses were full of furniture nobody had used in years, and old kitchen appliances, and shoes—I remember several pairs of shoes—and stained jeans. In the first house I walked through, the first couch I saw had been tilted on its back. It lay in a small living room, and next to it was a pair of cracked brown wingtip oxfords, and a few feet in front of it were two empty, beatenup suitcases; otherwise, it was surrounded by old sheets of plywood and fragments of the walls. The houses stood even though they looked as if more material had been torn from the walls than could have been in the walls in the first place.
The houses and the warehouse were separated by about 100 feet of dirt, and patches of broken concrete, and thorny, low bushes, and grass. I call it a village, but there wasn’t more to it than what I’ve just described. I call it a village because it was abandoned—the words seem to go together—and filled with trash and also things I thought people wouldn’t have left behind, things that looked important to me, toys, mostly, some whole and some broken, all filthy, mostly in the warehouse. I remember the ivory-colored stuffed bear I saw near the bottom left corner of the mouth of the warehouse—the first thing I saw in the warehouse, the thing that drew me to the warehouse—best. But toys were scattered all over the floor of the warehouse, and at the back of the warehouse—I only visited the warehouse once, after I had visited the houses several times, and didn’t return to the village for months afterward—I saw a door, like the front door of a house, but deep and far in darkness.
Back then—I was six or seven years old—as now, fear compelled me toward the things I feared, and so I made my way slowly—and I lost my balance a few times, slipping on stuffed animals or dolls or fire trucks or doll parts—to the door, and turned the handle, and pushed. On the other side was a small workroom with a desk—a board about the size of a door, but smaller, laid across two saw horses—a dirty chair with metal legs and brown vinyl padding on the seat and the back, and a few shelves full of paint cans. A dusty toolbox, a small lamp with a flexible neck and a metal, cup-shaped head, and a Phillips screwdriver sat on the desk. The room’s single window was intact, and sunlight fell through it and across the desk, striking the head of the lamp, which glowed. I stared at the glowing lamp, terrified, feeling suddenly near, as children sometimes for imaginary reasons do, death, hoping the lamp was on.
JIM LIMBER THE ADOPTED MULATTO SON OF JEFFERSON DAVIS MET HIS ADOPTIVE MOTHER VARINA DAVIS AT A CROSSROADS
Up north it’s midnight in America
Here in America it’s midnight too
Daddy Jeff says he says it was always two
Americas and he just keeps it law
I don’t know anything about the law
Except I know what’s true and isn’t true
But sometimes I’ll see Negroes running through
A field in the dark and not say what I saw
When white folks ask I tell them I was happy
With momma and she didn’t beat me of-
ten till the war got bad but we was going
North and I didn’t want to go the morning
Momma Varina rescued me she whups me
Different like what she wants from it is love
2
Later, months after or before, when I wake in the sharp grass, and the large, older boy, who a moment, a minute, how long was it ago ha
d been crushing my chest against the brick pillar at the edge of my porch, and every inch of my body except for my chest had felt like it was disappearing, and alongside that feeling, the other feeling, the feeling I had been looking for, the feeling I had asked him to give me, please, after he had offered it, guessing I must want it, the feeling that my body was no longer mine, is now standing above me, and my skin burns where each blade of grass touches it, and I feel the world more particularly than I’ve ever felt it before, and so I hurt in a way I’ve never hurt before, when I wake, the first question I ask, thinking it would be like this, to return to my body, burning, is, “Am I dead?”
And the large, older boy doesn’t answer me. The large, older boy doesn’t help me up. It’s the first time the large, older boy has visited my house during the day, and after he leaves, the large, older boy will never come back—not during the day, and not at night. I lie in the grass, not sure whether I’m supposed to stand. The corners of the large, older boy’s disproportionately large mouth turn down. Then he calls me a faggot and walks away.
I was passed around the neighborhood as a child—never from adult to adult, mostly from child to child, and sometimes from child to teenager to child—not me in my body, but the rumor of me and my body, according to which I took my place in the world more surely than if I stood where the rumor went. I must have met the large, older boy who, the day we met, told me to leave my bedroom window unlocked for him later, on that circuit, but I don’t remember where, or when. He was much bigger than me—a child, also, but old enough and big enough that I couldn’t form a clear idea of his age, and he seemed, as all older, much bigger children seemed, somehow bigger than my father, who was, anyway, my grandfather, the man raising me who was married to the woman raising me. He might have been a teenager.