This is so beautifully and sensitively written. As an adoptive mother, I found myself reading your words through my experience of “ choosing.”Your words will resonate with others like me or the “chosen.” Your words are a blessing on something I have known for forty plus years. Thank you. Keep writing.
As I age, I find myself preferring audiobooks, perhaps regressing to the childlike joy of having stories read to me. Jon, I love your writing and your fiction best of all, especially when I can ease back and hear you reading to me.
I recently read Everett’s book, James. I thought it was a perfectly awful book. The novel was generally praised. But it takes balls, I guess, to ventriloquise a master like Mark Twain. I thought he failed miserably in the usual way such things fail, inviting comparison with the greater artist. But I understand what you’re saying. Your piece actually brought Toni Morrison to mind. But we’re white boys from Mississippi, and there’s nothing we can do about that. The matter of race goes to the bone. The sins of our ancestors are visited upon us is the debt we pay. You recall the trouble Styron had to endure with Nat Turner.
Here’s a poem of mine - it’s actually about the earliest memory I have. What I believe to be the failure of the poem is exactly the point I’m making here. I’m sure the same thing bedevils you.
David, this is wondeful. I'm humbled to read your words. This evokes such a sense of wonder and pathos, of time and place, of unfilted love. Thank you for shaing this with me. I'm honored.
I so LOVE it when you read to me! I am an audience of one, and I am mesmerized by your voice. Please finish this book so that I can read it.
Thanks for the encouragement, Pru. I'll keep truding along if you keep listeing.
This is so beautifully and sensitively written. As an adoptive mother, I found myself reading your words through my experience of “ choosing.”Your words will resonate with others like me or the “chosen.” Your words are a blessing on something I have known for forty plus years. Thank you. Keep writing.
Thanks, Karla. I can't tell you what it means to have this validated by you.
As I age, I find myself preferring audiobooks, perhaps regressing to the childlike joy of having stories read to me. Jon, I love your writing and your fiction best of all, especially when I can ease back and hear you reading to me.
Thanks, Kevin. Listening to the playback is shocking. I sound like a very old southern grandpa.
Bringing such rich resonance, making it all the more immersive.
It’s so good to hear from Gran Gran again! I’ve missed her. She’s such a wise old soul. I’m not familiar with swap dog kin, but I like it.
I"ve missed her too! And Polly. I'd love to work her into the story as well. Maybe a flashback.
I sure hope you can finish this. I don’t read much fiction these days, but this seems like it could be an important story.
Thanks, David. I hope I can finish as well. There is such pushback against white men writing Black characters, but it's what I do.
I recently read Everett’s book, James. I thought it was a perfectly awful book. The novel was generally praised. But it takes balls, I guess, to ventriloquise a master like Mark Twain. I thought he failed miserably in the usual way such things fail, inviting comparison with the greater artist. But I understand what you’re saying. Your piece actually brought Toni Morrison to mind. But we’re white boys from Mississippi, and there’s nothing we can do about that. The matter of race goes to the bone. The sins of our ancestors are visited upon us is the debt we pay. You recall the trouble Styron had to endure with Nat Turner.
Here’s a poem of mine - it’s actually about the earliest memory I have. What I believe to be the failure of the poem is exactly the point I’m making here. I’m sure the same thing bedevils you.
Washing the Children
She washed peanuts and children
in the same zinc tub.
Being made, being unmade,
being made up,
all the necessary performances.
The census listed her as family in the old style.
It must have been an unseasonal day,
late October, Natchez,
the house beside St. Catherine's Creek,
where Uncle Joe sifted through the loess
to discover ancient rivers between his toes:
the jawbone of a mammoth,
a trilobite as ample as a dinner plate.
I was six months old. The water was warm.
She held me up like a little coconut.
I was not afraid in her strong, certain hands,
though her eye was black and rheumy.
She would bathe children as given,
dress the generations in their Sunday best,
knees jostling soul to bone,
like threading a needle,
dancing them in her lap, step and cadence,
small bodies moving with her body
in an incommensurate generosity.
(Why would I remember this?
Dream or visitation, how spirits
gather at a gate to beg agency
as if they had somewhere to go.)
She wrapped me up in a towel,
and left me in my mother's arms.
A fire was lighted, evening coming on.
Violet’s chair rocked in the bright light,
runners on the bricks.
She had that corncob pipe
blowing like a riverboat,
not a tooth left in her old head,
bless her heart, but her feet in the fire,
and another white child washed clean
for the moment, by her hand,
of those old, cruel histories.
The white folks seemed dim and cold,
as if they could not even warm themselves,
but must gather in her inexhaustible borrow.
A clever costume the old gods had chosen,
a humble disguise - to humble themselves? -
to charm an old dead woman into a cartoon
of memory, improbable rag on her head.
In dreams she had but to wave her hand,
and the tall stacks and the bound rivers,
would swing open and the old oxbow
bends would knit together again -
Marengo Chute, Spithead and Waterproof -
an unhurried flow, as in the old days,
those black, black eyes
looking beyond me as through
a window, recursive, window
after window after window,
taking me in, taking me with her -
I would go with her -
taking me up to follow her down
to false bottoms, panes of cold, clear water,
hoary and bearded blue logs,
detritus of a weary, unheedful continent.
David, this is wondeful. I'm humbled to read your words. This evokes such a sense of wonder and pathos, of time and place, of unfilted love. Thank you for shaing this with me. I'm honored.