One With Others: [A Little Book of Her Days] by C. D. Wright Read Free Book Online

past the displays of dry-mounted text and props from the Movement and wend my way to room 306.
Looking through the Plexiglas that separates us from the carefully unkempt furnishing at the Lorraine—cigarette butts in the ashtray and the dinner plate shared with Abernathy.
The stuck clock of history.
An anachronistic-looking child stands next to me, with ringlets like Shirley Temple. Is this where they killed Elvis she asked her mother.
Wrong king child, wrong freaking king.
CRUISING DOWN UNION AVE: Why there’s Nathan Bedford Forrest, confident as ever on the one mount out of nearly thirty that didn’t get shot out from under him.
Those hoofbeats die not
TAPED TO A UTILITY BOX, corner of Highland and Poplar:
I’m tired of hearing what rich people have to say
STOPOVER AT BURKE’S BOOKS:
Graffiti in the bathroom:
What the American public does not know
is what makes the American public. —Anonymous
I slept with Bill Faulkner. —Anonymous
Along the wall lined with the author photos, I pick out Joan Williams. [ She slept with Bill. ]
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FAMILY OF V’S BABYSITTER: Another stifling day in Big Tree. There was a fight on the South Side, a family disturbance that got loud, got ugly. Cops came. There were arrests. Her father went to the jailhouse to find out about his sons. They wouldn’t tell him anything. They wouldn’t let him post bail. He got a call late that night. The sons were going to be released. He went down there. In the a.m. hours they let them go. First they cut the outside lights. A line of pickups were idling in the lot. The men in the trucks, the patriarch knew them all. They were from the farms. He was the flat-fixer for every one of those farms. They said they were going to take them to a fish fry. It was a [N-word] fry. That’s what it was. They beat her father. Beat the crap out of him. The youngest boys ran off. One jumped from the overpass. His knees jammed. Permanently. The brothers scrambled under a vehicle in a carport. The patriarch hid in the sticker bushes. He couldn’t see. He bled until he blacked out.
Maybe the reverend knew they were under his vehicle. Maybe he didn’t. He held his tongue. It was a choreographed release. Don’t you see. The police notified the men on the farms, the Night Riders, gave them time to get together. The flat-fixer knew every one of them. And they knew him.
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VIETNAM VETERAN, RETIRED NURSE: We were in the second wave of arrests. We met at the funeral home and broke into groups of fourteen. That way we were legal. A lot of us still got arrested and transported in horse trailers to the dressing room of the pool. Took three of us in the dogcatcher wagon.
I was eighteen. Graduated and went to Vietnam. Wounded. Purple Heart. Came home and town under curfew.
I picked my mother up from church. My car was surrounded. A woman held a brick. She saw I had a Service .45. I said, Lady, you hit my car...
Hardest part to come back and see signs that said [N-word].
All my kids were military. Oldest son killed by police officer in Memphis. Had a great job, went to church, great family. Now the cop is dead. He was black too.
Jesus saved me from the hatred. It’s the only way.
When life gets you down/keep looking up
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RETIRED WELDING TEACHER: Kept first watch on the porch with the lights off. Wore my fatigues. Holding a rifle. Since Nam, we were armed, too.
That’s when things began to calm down. When both sides were armed. Black people coming back from the Mekong Delta toting M16s, the way we used to walk off the fields with hoes.
There was a shooting at the Tastee-Freez. Things got too dangerous and kind of chilled off.
A teacher has been fired for a derogatory letter, for insubordination in which he told the superintendent the Negro had no voice.
It was a riot, a rampage. An outbreak. A disturbance. The students called it a boycott, a walkout. Gentle Reader, it was an uprising.
During the morning of this date, no one had been given any cause to believe that a riot was