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Emmett Till1
I hear a whistling
Through the water
Little Emmett
Won’t be still.
He keeps floating
Round the darkness,
Edging through
The silent chill.
Tell me, please,
That bedtime story
Of the fairy
River Boy
Who swims forever,
Deep in treasures,
Necklaced in
A coral toy.
1963
1963
1 In 1955, Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago, was lynched in Mississippi for allegedly making improper advances toward a white woman.
[The Norton Introduction to Literature, Fourth Edition (1986), page 745, handles the factual background by this footnote.]](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/system/resource/3/3/0/33063606-d5de-4747-a896-c5c314852b44/attachment/2a454279405e8f9e1690a0df368691de.jpg)
![109
[*This poem, worked on in France, Poland, and Holland, developed from my poetry reading in Toulouse after which a colleague, Annice Mouyen (her later name, reported to me the 1st-stanza comments of some young man in the audience.*]
After the Poetry Reading, Black
His friend, the red hair and tight jeans,
took back her pen, left me THIS piece of cake:
“He’s disappointed”--meant this due half down the aisle,
himself so blond surveying,
counting those who cared--
added what she meant, sweeping off the crumbs
with “You’re not Black enough, he said.”
But do they EVER say, I thought,
just what they mean?--and didn’t even see
her fine retreat,
but went behind The Veil…
Back there with Truth, and Prosser, Turner,
[*Sojourner Truth, Gabriel Prosser (slave rebel), Nat Turner (slave rebel), Frederick Douglass, a truly great man.*]
whipped out my pocket Trans-s-lator
model Double-Oh-Daddy-oh-Douglass,
pushed chromobuttons “Blond” and “Reddish,”
laid it ‘longside the echoes in the aisle
till cake came back in Trans-s-lator slices
hard and sure as this?
“He’s disappointed:
wanted to frolic in the backyard of your mind,
smell weeds, rip up the tender shoots, peel back the shade,](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/system/resource/0/4/4/04441135-b1b5-461e-a5c4-9f00d97124d4/attachment/06d02c7db6d0d1c247a4c787890e2568.jpg)
![113
till I politely shook it, groping elsewhere in my mind
through new poems Black enough
(the shock that twitched his face said so)
to leave a scar.
“He’s disappointed,” I thought.
And I knew
what I meant.
1976-77
1978
113
Racism in France
[*Invited to dine by Christian et Jeannine Renaud, Friend friends, I heard the wife say, after my comments on American racism, the opening line here. By no means naïve, they could not fully grasp my attitude; and this poem cannot fully express it. The only details that came from their 5th arrondissement apartment are the 1st line, the cherry pie, the daughter, and the TV to which she escaped.*]
“But there’s racism in France too.”
She said it almost tenderly,
lifting the dessert,
the glazed cherries gleaming on the pie,
it’s maiden slice for me, the guest.
I nodded, noncommittal, at the second piece,
their blondish daughter reaching for it,
[*Marie Helene Renaud, now married.*]
Quick, like almost nine years old,
her father’s eye a brake that could not hold;
her mother’s hand a lesson lost:
in serving him, it’s careful demonstration
was outmaneuvered in the in the nearest room
by Jacqueline’s favorite TV program,
[*I changed Marie-Helene’s name.*]
“Once Upon a Time,” her anarchy kept low.](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/system/resource/0/5/4/05481b18-dbfe-4ac8-93aa-3b6043cccf30/attachment/0c0289c13f80b7f4f1b233f0155cb5ea.jpg)
