POETRY

at the mississippi civil rights museum

By Ann Fisher-Wirth     Auburn Witness Poetry Prize 2019 Honorable Mention
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        a golden shovel for Lucille Clifton: “miss rosie”

1.
 
i am reading the names of the lynched when
the guard asks how i’m doing and i
start to cry. in one photo, crowds watch
a body burn, you
wouldn’t believe their glee as the man is wrapped
in flame. a father in the picture lifts his boy up
on his shoulders. to the mob it is like
a holy war, they’re doin god’s will, gettin garbage
off the streets... now i am sitting
in one of the tiny film cubicles surrounded
by images from freedom summer, by  
blown-up headlines about the missing men. it is 1964, the
bodies have been found, there’s the smell
of death, legs poking from the mud. and deliquescing flesh of
two other boys found in the river during the search, too
long dead to identify. old
grief and guilt like a knobby rotten potato.
 
how the past peels
open when i see the photos or
hear the ringing freedom songs. when
the guard says kindly if you want to talk, i
can’t talk, just flap my hand around and cry… later i watch
a teacher with her students. in this museum, she says, you
will see what black people, and sometimes white, fought for here in
mississippi. the right to work, to learn, to vote. your
freedoms don’t come cheap, she says, for in the old
days, the white man’s
word was law. but how could we walk in the shoes
of the man who was lynched for “bringing suit,” with
the man who was lynched for “hogging the road,” with the
woman and her little
sons and daughter whose husband/father died because he wouldn’t toe
the line? like mighty trees, cut
down. like holy flames, snuffed out.
i tell myself, no more sitting.
let me walk among those who fought and those still fighting, still waiting.
 
2.
 
i think of your courage, lucille. for
in 1982, before that dignified white audience, you told how your  
great-grandmother, the first lucille, was on your mind
the night you came to read at virginia. not lynched in virginia like
all the others, you told us, but legally hanged because they respected her. next
you said, shot her owner, her baby’s white father, from his horse. my week’s
little concerns drained away, my papers to grade, the grocery
list, the cluttered house, and i saw the crossroads, i
saw dust and pines and broomsedge, heard the clattering hooves, heard him say
for god’s sake lucille don’t. or maybe nothing at all. later, when
you came to my house for the reception, silent and shy i
sat on the steps, a scared new hire among all the senior professors, eager just to watch
you as they shook your hand, as you balanced your plate. saying goodbye, you
touched my cheek and told me, your eyes are so radiant. i will remember you.
 
3.
 
in the photos, jeering crowds surround protesters wet
with sweat and coke and catsup poured on their heads, their brown
and white faces grim at lunch counters. any pocket or bag
could hide a gun. i was the protesters’ age but was not there, the summer of
burning churches. my mother was a
protective, cautious woman
who went to church, taught school, who
forbade me to come on the buses for freedom summer, who used
to say she’d die if i married “a negro.” what is it like to
be a guard here, to comfort white women who weep, to be
surrounded every day by the history of your people’s suffering, the fire, the noose, the
prison whip called black annie that made scar-lace out of even the bestlooking
back? not your grandma, not your mother, not your own sweet gal
was safe in mississippi. or in
arkansas, alabama, texas, louisiana, the carolinas, georgia.
what’s it like to be a guard? to know that for stealing five pounds of ham they used
to give a black man ten years at parchman, then to
rent him out for convict labor until he’d starve, until he’d be
broken? yet in the darkest corners of parchman, the freedom riders sang and called
on each other’s courage, on the conscience and heart of the
nation. and you, lucille, paying homage to your own lost Georgia
Rose…
what was it like to be you? i
think of you with love. i stand
in this museum knowing that you lifted me up
and that you guide me still, through
what i have done and what i have failed to do. your
kindness, and the guard’s, in the midst of so much cruelty, such destruction…
thinking of these, how can i
not take courage, how can i not stand
up?


ANN FISHER-WIRTH’s sixth book of poems is The Bones of Winter Birds (Terrapin Books, 2019). Her fifth book of poems, Mississippi, is a poetry/photography collaboration with the photographer Maude Schuyler Clay (Wings Press, 2018). With Laura-Gray Street, Ann coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity 2013, new edition 2020). She is a senior fellow of The Black Earth Institute, and has had residencies at The Mesa Refuge; Djerassi; Hedgebrook; and CAMAC, France. Ann was the 2017 Anne Spencer Poet in Residence at Randolph College, received a senior Fulbright to Fribourg, Switzerland, and was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her work has received various other awards, including two Mississippi Arts Commission grants and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize, as well as fifteen Pushcart nominations and a special mention. She teaches and directs the Environmental Studies program at the University of Mississippi, and she teaches yoga in Oxford, MS.


VOLUME 52.3