Revolutionary Petunias
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