American Happiness. Jacqueline Trimble

and translated Julius Caesar’s battles. “Don’t say Massatwosettes like the governor,” she would say, “Say, Massachusetts,” emphasizing the chew in the middle. “Do not imitate these little white children you go to school with and those awful twangs. You must speak well.” She liked curse words, but only in private and among very close friends. And whoever received the largesse of her choice words knew that he or she been cussed. She reminded me that though she was a widow woman raising a child on her own, we could never be poor because we were educated and had come from a long line of educated and refined people who had never bowed to anyone and never would. When a professor used me as an example, suggesting my grandfather surely had been a sharecropper, she said, “You tell him your grandfather was a teacher and a storeowner. He and your grandmother recited poetry to their children. They owned their own land, had a painted house, and the first car of anyone, black or white, in the community.”

      In the fall of 1968, I went to Edward T. Davis Elementary. My mother made sure of it. My father had died earlier that year, and my mother, who was actually my stepmother, was determined to raise me as she thought my father would have wanted. That meant I was going to get the best education she could find. I was going to be well-rounded. I would take ballet and piano and belong to social clubs to learn decorum. And though I was more of a tomboy than a princess, I was going to be a lady. Most of all, I was going to know that I was as smart, as worthy, and as good as any other human in this world or the next, despite any messages I would get from some in Montgomery, Alabama.

      So, I became the only black child in Davis Elementary that year. I joined the Brownies, and my mother joined the PTA. Whatever minor skirmishes or major wars ensued behind my being at that school, I never heard of them. In those days, children minded children’s business and adults minded their own. Neither inquired about the doings of the other. What I do know is that fall my mother volunteered to read palms at the fall festival. Dressed in a long flowing skirt and a peasant blouse, she played the part of fortune teller. Children and adults alike entered her small booth to have Mama gaze into her magic eight ball and tell their future. I went dressed as a ghost. There I was. The only little black child in the whole school wandering the halls of the festival in a sheet with a pointed pillow case hat in which my mother had cut two little eyeholes. It was years before I understood why my mother laughed and laughed and took so many pictures of me in my white sheet that night. Even then she was teaching me the power and pleasure of ironic juxtaposition—a lesson that continues to inform my sense of humor as well as my poetry.

      Closure

      EVERYBODY IN AMERICA HATE THE SOUTH

      That land filled to the rafters

      with ghosts of lynched boys and attics full

      of souvenirs—dried ears, fingers, genitalia

      like prunes—the sweet Magnolia memory

      of Miss Scarlett calling for Mammy who

      has now grown some dreadlocks and owns

      the chicken restaurant on the boulevard.

      America ought to say

      thank you, Miss South, thank you for being like

      Jesus and taking on the sins of the whole country

      or being our crazy Aunt Hazel who runs naked

      through a house full of company shouting

      all the foolish things we think but can’t say

      so we can walk around all post-racial

      and watch Gone With the Wind over and over

      swooning from the romance.

      CLOSURE

      The summer my father planted grapevines,

      we lived with our mouths in expectant hollows,

      imagined rich fruit cool against our tongues.

      We moved among the rows and whispered praises

      to flat young leaves spreading out like fans.

      And when the land sank in and drew the vines,

      the tendrils like wilted curls, we kicked the dirt—

      our flimsy hope shifting like air—and pulled

      the disappointment around us as shawls.

      But my father took his liquor to the vineyard

      and drank a toast to his undoing. He took his sacrament

      in faith until his soul was renewed. That night,

      he plowed up the whole north field, straight through

      the place we buried things, the weak pups, the runts.

      The bones turned up with earth, rising from the dead,

      as if they wished to touch again

      the thin life unraveled with each breath.

      My father cried, as always when he drank,

      and knelt among the scattered bones. The leaves

      of the pear tree descended like spirits. The fruit,

      not yet ripe, bobbed like unlit lanterns.

      He watched his breath unravel,

      fly from him like dander. He might have caught it

      had he not been clutching at his heart. The strong fingers

      indented the muscle until he kissed the ground

      in one last prayer. He could not take back

      the work, the used up beats of his life.

      He could not even keep the blood

      that ran across his lip. Much later,

      I read about a girl who saw her father

      kill himself and then could not forgive

      the amaryllis on the table, the giving up,

      and oh, like that, the life wasted from him.

      And if I could plow through earth

      and touch my father, call back his spirit

      and his flesh, I would tell him this,

      then press my thumbs against his air

      and kill him at my leisure.

      SECOND SIGHT

      I

      Let the spirits gather here

      in my mother’s eye. Let some

      moonstruck apparition walk her

      into the eternal. Three days

      the dogs will bark at our door.

      And the old women sing,

      their voices smooth as ruby

      elixir, their tobacco skins soft

      as clay. Let her sickness depart.

      Let morphine days vaporize

      like breath in winter. Let the preacher

      say the end. Tell him pour the wine,

      the blood. Let her earthly dreams

      be finished. Come, gather

      beneath the swollen moon and touch

      this life, fragile and resilient as skin.

      II

      My mother swears

      that death walked in her room

      last night, smiled at her and shook

      her foot. But I bear witness

      only