Revolutionary Petunias Read online

  Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems

  Alice Walker

  Humbly for George Jackson, who could “still smile sometimes.…” Whose eyes warmed to life until the end; whose face was determined, unconquered, and sweet.

  And for my heroes, heroines, and friends of early SNCC whose courage and beauty burned me forever.

  And for the Mississippi Delta legend of Bob Moses.

  And for Winson Hudson and Fannie Lou Hamer whose strength and compassion I cherish.

  And for my friend, Charles Merrill, the artist, who paints skies.

  And for Mel, the Trouper’s father, who daily fights and daily loves, from a great heart.

  Contents

  In These Dissenting Times … Surrounding Ground and Autobiography

  In These Dissenting Times

  I The Old Men Used to Sing

  II Winking at a Funeral

  III Women

  IV Three Dollars Cash

  V You Had to Go to Funerals

  VI Uncles

  VII They Take a Little Nip

  VIII Sunday School, Circa 1950

  Burial I-VI

  For My Sister Molly Who in the Fifties

  Eagle Rock

  Baptism

  J, My Good Friend (another foolish innocent)

  View from Rosehill Cemetery: Vicksburg

  Revolutionary Petunias …the Living Through

  Revolutionary Petunias

  Expect Nothing

  Be Nodody’s Darling

  Reassurance

  Nothing Is Right

  Crucifixions

  Black Mail

  Lonely Particular

  Perfection

  The Girl Who Died #1

  Ending

  Lost My Voice? Of Course / for Beanie

  The Girl Who Died #2 / for d.p.

  The Old Warrior Terror

  Judge Every One with Perfect Calm

  The QPP

  He Said Come

  Mysteries…the Living Beyond

  Mysteries

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  Gift

  Clutter-Up People

  Thief

  Will

  Rage

  Storm

  What the Finger Writes

  Forbidden Things

  No Fixed Place

  New Face

  The Nature of This Flower Is to Bloom

  While Love Is Unfashionable

  Beyond What

  The Nature of This Flower Is to Bloom

  A Biography of Alice Walker

  These poems are about Revolutionaries and Lovers; and about the loss of compassion, trust, and the ability to expand in love that marks the end of hopeful strategy. Whether in love or revolution. They are also about (and for) those few embattled souls who remain painfully committed to beauty and to love even while facing the firing squad.

  —Alice Walker

  In These Dissenting Times

  To acknowledge our ancestors means

  we are aware that we did not make

  ourselves, that the line stretches

  all the way back, perhaps, to God; or

  to Gods. We remember them because it

  is an easy thing to forget: that we

  are not the first to suffer, rebel,

  fight, love and die. The grace with

  which we embrace life, in spite of

  the pain, the sorrows, is always a

  measure of what has gone before.

  —Alice Walker, “Fundamental Difference”

  IN THESE DISSENTING TIMES

  I shall write of the old men I knew

  And the young men

  I loved

  And of the gold toothed women

  Mighty of arm

  Who dragged us all

  To church.

  I

  THE OLD MEN USED TO SING

  The old men used to sing

  And lifted a brother

  Carefully

  Out the door

  I used to think they

  Were born

  Knowing how to

  Gently swing

  A casket

  They shuffled softly

  Eyes dry

  More awkward

  With the flowers

  Than with the widow

  After they’d put the

  Body in

  And stood around waiting

  In their

  Brown suits.

  II

  WINKING AT A FUNERAL

  Those were the days

  Of winking at a

  Funeral

  Romance blossomed

  In the pews

  Love signaled

  Through the

  Hymns

  What did we know?

  Who smelled the flowers

  Slowly fading

  Knew the arsonist

  Of the church?

  III

  WOMEN

  They were women then

  My mama’s generation

  Husky of voice—Stout of

  Step

  With fists as well as

  Hands

  How they battered down

  Doors

  And ironed

  Starched white

  Shirts

  How they led

  Armies

  Headragged Generals

  Across mined

  Fields

  Booby-trapped

  Ditches

  To discover books

  Desks

  A place for us

  How they knew what we

  Must know

  Without knowing a page

  Of it

  Themselves.

  IV

  THREE DOLLARS CASH

  Three dollars cash

  For a pair of catalog shoes

  Was what the midwife charged

  My mama

  For bringing me.

  “We wasn’t so country then,” says Mom,

  “You being the last one—

  And we couldn’t, like

  We done

  When she brought your

  Brother,

  Send her out to the

  Pen

  And let her pick

  Out

  A pig.”

  V

  YOU HAD TO GO

  TO FUNERALS

  You had to go to funerals

  Even if you didn’t know the

  People

  Your Mama always did

  Usually your Pa.

  In new patent leather shoes

  It wasn’t so bad

  And if it rained

  The graves dropped open

  And if the sun was shining

  You could take some of the

  Flowers home

  In your pocket

  book. At six and seven

  The face in the gray box

  Is always your daddy’s

  Old schoolmate

  Mowed down before his

  Time.

  You don’t even ask

  After a while

  What makes them lie so

  Awfully straight

  And still. If there’s a picture of

  Jesus underneath

  The coffin lid

  You might, during a boring sermon,

  Without shouting or anything,

  Wonder who painted it;

  And how he would like

  All eternity to stare

  It down.

  VI

  UNCLES

  They had broken teeth

  And billy club scars

  But we didn’t notice

  Or mind

  The
y were uncles.

  It was their job

  To come home every summer

  From the North

  And tell my father

  He wasn’t no man

  And make my mother

  Cry and long

  For Denver, Jersey City,

  Philadelphia.

  They were uncles.

  Who noticed how

  Much

  They drank

  And acted womanish

  With they do-rags

  We were nieces.

  And they were almost

  Always good

  For a nickel

  Sometimes

  a dime.

  VII

  THEY TAKE A LITTLE NIP

  They take a little nip

  Now and then

  Do the old folks

  Now they’ve moved to

  Town

  You’ll sometimes

  See them sitting

  Side by side

  On the porch

  Straightly

  As in church

  Or working diligently

  Their small

  City stand of

  Greens

  Serenely pulling

  Stalks and branches

  Up

  Leaving all

  The weeds.

  VIII

  SUNDAY SCHOOL, CIRCA 1950

  “Who made you?” was always

  The question

  The answer was always

  “God.”

  Well, there we stood

  Three feet high

  Heads bowed

  Leaning into

  Bosoms.

  Now

  I no longer recall

  The Catechism

  Or brood on the Genesis

  Of life

  No.

  I ponder the exchange

  Itself

  And salvage mostly

  The leaning.

  Burial

  I

  They have fenced in the dirt road

  that once led to Wards Chapel

  A.M.E. church,

  and cows graze

  among the stones that

  mark my family’s graves.

  The massive oak is gone

  from out the church yard,

  but the giant space is left

  unfilled;

  despite the two-lane blacktop

  that slides across

  the old, unalterable

  roots.

  II

  Today I bring my own child here;

  to this place where my father’s

  grandmother rests undisturbed

  beneath the Georgia sun,

  above her the neatstepping hooves

  of cattle.

  Here the graves soon grow back into the land.

  Have been known to sink. To drop open without

  warning. To cover themselves with wild ivy,

  blackberries. Bittersweet and sage.

  No one knows why. No one asks.

  When Burning Off Day comes, as it does

  some years,

  the graves are haphazardly cleared and snakes

  hacked to death and burned sizzling

  in the brush. … The odor of smoke, oak

  leaves, honeysuckle.

  Forgetful of geographic resolutions as birds,

  the farflung young fly South to bury

  the old dead.

  III

  The old women move quietly up

  and touch Sis Rachel’s face.

  “Tell Jesus I’m coming,” they say.

  “Tell Him I ain’t goin’ to be

  long.”

  My grandfather turns his creaking head

  away from the lavender box.

  He does not cry. But looks afraid.

  For years he called her “Woman”;

  shortened over the decades to

  “ ’Oman.”

  On the cut stone for “ ’Oman’s” grave

  he did not notice

  they had misspelled her name.

  (The stone reads Racher Walker—not “Rachel”—Loving Wife, Devoted Mother.)

  IV

  As a young woman, who had known her? Tripping

  eagerly, “loving wife,” to my grandfather’s

  bed. Not pretty, but serviceable. A hard

  worker, with rough, moist hands. Her own two

  babies dead before she came.

  Came to seven children.

  To aprons and sweat.

  Came to quiltmaking.

  Came to canning and vegetable gardens

  big as fields.

  Came to fields to plow.

  Cotton to chop.

  Potatoes to dig.

  Came to multiple measles, chickenpox,

  and croup.

  Came to water from springs.

  Came to leaning houses one story high.

  Came to rivalries. Saturday night battles.

  Came to straightened hair, Noxzema, and

  feet washing at the Hardshell Baptist church.

  Came to zinnias around the woodpile.

  Came to grandchildren not of her blood

  whom she taught to dip snuff without

  sneezing.

  ____________

  Came to death blank, forgetful of it all.

  When he called her “ ’Oman” she no longer

  listened. Or heard, or knew, or felt.

  V

  It is not until I see my first grade teacher

  review her body that I cry.

  Not for the dead, but for the gray in my

  first grade teacher’s hair. For memories

  of before I was born, when teacher and

  grandmother loved each other; and later

  above the ducks made of soap and the orange-

  legged chicks Miss Reynolds drew over

  my own small hand

  on paper with wide blue lines.

  VI

  Not for the dead, but for memories. None of

  them sad. But seen from the angle of her

  death.

  For My Sister Molly Who in the Fifties

  Once made a fairy rooster from

  Mashed potatoes

  Whose eyes I forget

  But green onions were his tail

  And his two legs were carrot sticks

  A tomato slice his crown.

  Who came home on vacation

  When the sun was hot

  and cooked

  and cleaned

  And minded least of all

  The children’s questions

  A million or more

  Pouring in on her

  Who had been to school

  And knew (and told us too) that certain

  Words were no longer good

  And taught me not to say us for we

  No matter what “Sonny said” up the

  road.

  FOR MY SISTER MOLLY WHO IN THE FIFTIES

  Knew Hamlet well and read into the night

  And coached me in my songs of Africa

  A continent I never knew

  But learned to love

  Because “they” she said could carry

  A tune

  And spoke in accents never heard

  In Eatonton.

  Who read from Prose and Poetry

  And loved to read “Sam McGee from Tennessee”

  On nights the fire was burning low

  And Christmas wrapped in angel hair

  And I for one prayed for snow.

  WHO IN THE FIFTIES

  Knew all the written things that made

  Us laugh and stories by

  The hour Waking up the story buds

  Like fruit. Who walked among the flowers

  And brought them inside the house

  And smelled as good as they

  And looked as bright.

  Who made dresses, braided

  Hair. Moved chairs about />
  Hung things from walls

  Ordered baths

  Frowned on wasp bites

  And seemed to know the endings

  Of all the tales

  I had forgot.

  WHO OFF INTO THE UNIVERSITY

  Went exploring To London and

  To Rotterdam

  Prague and to Liberia

  Bringing back the news to us

  Who knew none of it

  But followed

  crops and weather

  funerals and

  Methodist Homecoming;

  easter speeches,

  groaning church.

  WHO FOUND ANOTHER WORLD

  Another life With gentlefolk

  Far less trusting

  And moved and moved and changed

  Her name

  And sounded precise

  When she spoke And frowned away

  Our sloppishness.

  WHO SAW US SILENT

  Cursed with fear A love burning

  Inexpressible

  And sent me money not for me

  But for “College.”

  Who saw me grow through letters

  The words misspelled But not

  The longing Stretching

  Growth

  The tied and twisting

  Tongue

  Feet no longer bare

  Skin no longer burnt against

  The cotton.

  WHO BECAME SOMEONE OVERHEAD

  A light A thousand watts

  Bright and also blinding

  And saw my brothers cloddish

  And me destined to be

  Wayward

  My mother remote My father

  A wearisome farmer

  With heartbreaking

  Nails.

  I OR MY SISTER MOLLY WHO IN THE FIFTIES

  Found much

  Unbearable

  Who walked where few had

  Understood And sensed our

  Groping after light

  And saw some extinguished

  And no doubt mourned.

  FOR MY SISTER MOLLY WHO IN THE FIFTIES

  Left us.

  Eagle Rock

  In the town where I was born

  There is a mound

  Some eight feet high

  That from the ground

  Seems piled up stones

  In Georgia

  Insignificant.

  But from above

  The lookout tower

  Floor

  An eagle widespread

  In solid gravel

  Stone

  Takes shape

  Below;

  The Cherokees raised it

  Long ago

  Before westward journeys

  In the snow

  Before the

  National Policy slew

  Long before Columbus knew.

  I used to stop and

  Linger there