Southern Legitimacy Statement: I swear on a stack of Bibles I’m from the south. To be specific, I’m a Tarheel born and a Tarheel bred and when I die I’ll be a Tarheel dead. I can still twirl my baton from high school. Staples in our house were yeast rolls, watermelon pickles, country ham with red-eye gravy and chess pie. When my mother asked if we wanted creamed sweet corn or corn on the cob and we said both, she fixed both. I’ve been published in lots of journals and anthologies — Tar River, Broad River, Pembroke, Kakalak, Southern Poetry, Southern Women’s, NC Literary Review and way back when, Dead Mule. I’ve got two collections: The Gravity of Color and Wild Plums (but it’s not about plums). Here’s the hard truth. I grew up a clueless WHITE girl in the south, been trying to account for that ever since. Some of these poems reflect my metamorphosis!
Fish Camp, Indian River, 1956
I’m the one you see with the bony legs
and new frizzy perm, the one scuffling
with my brother outside our shabby cabin
while our parents cast fishing lines
into the greasy river,
me hopping to balance on one foot
while trying to pull a sandspur
out of the other, good heel coming down hard
on more stickers, falling on my knees, knees
that’ll be stuck and scabbed the whole vacation
here where conch shell
ashtrays clutter the porch and mosquitoes
gnaw holes in our screens, while my friends
have gone to a Holiday Inn
or maybe even the Waldorf Astoria
in New York City and I’m the one
in a hole hot as hell, the one whose skin
will tan dark this summer
so back home everyone will say,
“Wow, you sure are black,” and
I’ll smile because it’s a good thing, and
it won’t be until much later that I’ll find out
what I was that summer was not black at all,
but very very white, in fact so white
I might one day opt out of such a dreary place
reeking of fish bait, waitress in the diner
sopping hotcakes with cane syrup,
thick and bitter as the river, might choose
if I wanted, to stay at a motel with a fancy
swimming pool, even join some highfalutin
country club, where I’d know
that deserved or not, I could get in.
