Southern Fictions: Coda

After I'd completed my "Southern Fictions" sonnet sequence back in the late 90's, I wrote what I considered a coda.   It grew out of the memory of my grandmother telling me when, as a young girl, I asked her whether I was Democrat or Republican.  I think we might  have been watching the t.v. they had just bought, and a news program was on.  I knew nothing of the two parties then.   By now I know too much.  And after watching the SC Republican primary's race-baiting and seeing how successful it was, I know that little has changed.  I never attached this coda to the sonnets, but after Gingrich's win, thanks, let's face it, to his race-baiting, I feel like sharing it.   This is the first time I've shown it to anyone but my husband.

Democrat or Republican, 

I asked in childhood, can 

you tell me which I  am ?  

A Democrat, she slammed

the word down hard.  And don’t

you ever dare forget it. 

And I haven’t.  I regret to mention

 that the most of my relations

have.  Blame civil rights.

Afraid to do the right

thing, they turned right

and lost the moral high

ground.  Elected bigots

and  were proud of it.

CONTINUING TO EXCAVATE OUR SOUTHERN PAST

On Martin Luther King day, I remember a poem I began on a drive several years ago from Selma to Montgomery.  It first appeared in Crab Orchard Review's special issue on Southern writing.

How do we keep the memory of those times alive?   Maybe by re-examining and excavating our own memories and sharing them?  Even though they may be powder-kegs, frighteningly explosive if we come too close to them.

This poem will be in my new collection, Descent, due from LSU Press in early fall of 2012.  

What I See Now

I see yucca and winter stubble along

their route, now and then markers 

noting the sites where they camped,

singing hymns, keeping watch as the Ancient

Ones do in the Bibles they carried.

I take note of hay bales like those 

I grew up seeing everywhere,

Billy’s Tire Center crumbling to nothing

beside a small graveyard with plastic blooms

bled now to white from the weather.

Montgomery waits straight ahead,

looking these days  like everywhere else.

Wal-Mart.  Home Depot. 

Driving through downtown,

we tick off the fast-food chains.

Why not MacDonald’s?  We order

our coffee to go.  Senior

discount.  The girl at the register

rings it up, looking no older than

seventeen, her story holding

not much left of what happened

here

forty years ago.

Blue eyes,

I notice.  Stark

purple eye shadow. 

*

My best friend at Finishing School,

as we  called it while lifting

our lily-white pinkies

and pursing our lips for effect,

came from Selma, 

a beauty queen born late

to parents who asked that their only child

not room with anyone whose shade

of iris bloomed darker than blue.   

Smoking cigarettes, bold in the parking lot,

we watched a regiment of frat men

in Rebel duds raising  the Bonnie Blue Flag

while their girlfriends stood swaying

in hoop skirts: a squadron of cheerleaders

urging them onward, their brave drunks, 

defenders of white Southern womanhood.

Meanwhile her mother was driving

across the state line with a black woman

kept in the back seat to mind

many layers of pink lace and satin,

arriving in time for the ball-gown

to be lifted out  and ironed ever so carefully 

down in the basement where 

those not invited to Mayday

Ball, rapt as an ashram

of wannabe’s, inhaled

our Salem's right down

to the filter and exhaled

our smoke rings,

observing them hang 

in the singed air like ghosts 

before fading away. 

*

Spanish moss hung, 

my friend later told me,

from phony live oaks round the dance floor

while black waiters served phony champagne

(no alcohol  within a 50 mile radius lest

we  be banished, forevermore losing

our chance to be “finished”

like fine crystal ready to be rung

by just the right finger.).

My friend’s gown came back

splashed with whiskey, a stain 

that could never be washed from its pink

satin bodice. My friend did not come back

the next year.  She transferred to Birmingham

Southern.  I wonder what she saw

with those bonnie eyes when the 16th Street

Baptist Church blew, and the little girls pulled

from the rubble lay finished

beyond comprehension, 

their role in this story I see now

as being a stubble field 

close to the edge

of an altered state

line I’m still

trying to cross

with an old

roadmap wrinkled

as yesterday’s

pink satin

inside my skull.

                                       

OLD LETTERS FOR THE NEW YEAR

  

Here's a Language Matters Column from several years back.  It still speaks to me, and I hope to you, as well.

NEW YEAR'S EVE SUNSET

   

Happy New Year!

Old Letters for the New Year 

By Kathryn Stripling Byer 

Lately, my brother and I have been exploring the contents of the attic in the house where we 

grew up. We greeted this new year without my father’s presence, and perhaps that is why we 

have felt so drawn to what remains of our ancestors whose books, letters, journals, and articles of 

clothing rest in the attic like relics. 

We found century-old letters from our great-grandparents and one letter from a great-great- 

grandfather writing from County Clare, Ireland, in 1869, telling his son Will how proud he 

would always be of him. We found another from his daughter, Nell, speaking of our great- 

grandfather’s childhood and early manhood, written to his wife, my great-grandmother Ella 

Valentine Fry, after her husband’s death. My great-grandmother was quite a letter-writer herself, 

educated well enough to become a teacher at age 16 in the Lead City, South Dakota schools, the 

first female so “nominated” to that post. My brother and I unfolded each of these letters as if 

they were the most precious items in the house. Each one was written with care, the handwriting 

graceful, the language itself literate in both style and grammar. These letters obviously mattered 

a great deal to both the authors and the recipients. Now, more than a century later, they speak to 

us in ways we’ve only begun to appreciate. 

Who among us writes letters like this anymore, I wondered, as I read the words that flowed from 

those long-ago pens, the ink fading, but the language still vibrant? Whose handwriting could 

match theirs? Not mine. I type my letters, my handwriting increasingly unreadable and hurried. 

Or, like more and more of us, I email my correspondence. With the click of a mouse, I send my 

messages. I do not labor with a dip pen to put into durable words my love for a child gone to the 

new world to become a miner in South Dakota. My messages are nothing like the letters we 

found by a sister writing across the Atlantic about her dead brother’s love of tools and 

engineering. Like so many of us, I am in a hurry. My correspondence is fleeting, disposable. 

Most of it will be deleted. 

In his poem “Please Write: Don’t Phone,” Robert Watson, my former teacher in the UNC-G 

writing program, exhorts, “Let us write instead: surely our fingers spread out / With pen on paper 

touch more of the mind’s flesh.” He explains, “I can touch the paper you touch,” and “I can read 

you day after day.” His last lines continue to haunt me: “I hold the envelope that you addressed 

in my hand. / I hold the skin that covers you.” 

In this new year of email and instant-messaging, few seem to have time to sit down and put their 

lives onto paper that can be unfolded again and again, or placed in a drawer for safe-keeping. 

The flesh of my family’s past resides in those yellowing sheets of paper we found in the attic. I 

carry their words into the new year, resolved to write more letters in long-hand, letting the words 

rise slowly to the surface and take shape on the empty page like a gift to be cherished. 

FRY FAMILY GRAVESTONE, CORBALLY CHURCHYARD, IRELAND