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    One With Others: [a little book of her days]
    One With Others: [a little book of her days]
    One With Others: [a little book of her days]
    Ebook125 pages1 hour

    One With Others: [a little book of her days]

    By C.D. Wright

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    About this ebook

  • an electrifying, idiosyncratic addition to the ever-growing library of Civil Rights Movement books
  • C.D. Wright is using the tools and techniques of poetry to write a "people's history" of an ugly racist event in her beloved Arkansas
  • The hero of this book is a woman named "V," who became a life-long mentor to C.D. Wright
  • C.D. Wright examines racist events in her native Arkansas and creates a layered, nuanced, and riveting tribute to a cantakerous and heroic white woman with the courage to become "one with others," and then be driven to the state line and told to leave by troopers
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateDec 11, 2012
    ISBN9781619320161
    One With Others: [a little book of her days]

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    • 5/5
      Predates the Help (#1 read in local books stores in 2011) & is so much better (truer, more authentic, whatever you want to call it)than that bestseller. No stereotyped white frat boys or stereotyped debutantes as easy villains. Nor stereotyped philandering black husbands for that matter. But rather, one white woman, as well as many black civil rights activists, with plenty of warts & flaws and some very admirable virtues & appealing idiosyncrasies. This book just brought so much to mind, past and present. History & the very personal life both.
    • 5/5
      The setting for this outstanding poetry collection, which won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, is Forrest City, Arkansas, a small Delta town with nearly equal numbers of black and white residents, who lived in separate and very unequal conditions in 1969. Schools remained segregated, despite the passage of the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision 15 years earlier, and although black residents were not formally excluded from white-owned establishments and neighborhoods, they knew that they were putting their lives at risk if they dared to anger any white person in town.In March of that year, a school teacher at an all-black school in Forrest City was fired due to his participation in the town's fledgling civil rights movement, which included encouraging his students to engage in peaceful protests. The students, who were tired of attending classes in a decrepit building and having to use torn textbooks discarded by students at the all-white school, responded by nearly destroying the hated building and its contents. The local police, headed by a virulently racist sheriff, beat and arrested the youths, herded them into an empty swimming pool, and threatened to kill them en masse before they were eventually released. Tension mounted in the broiling summer of 1969, as members of the John Birch Society stirred up extreme racial hatred amongst the town's white residents; most blacks cowed publicly, while a smaller number engaged in limited protests, and community leaders sought to organize a substantial protest movement. Help was requested from a group in nearby Memphis known as the Invaders, which became prominent in the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike that led to Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination on April 4. The Invaders were led by Lance "Sweet Willie Wine" Watson, a former hustler turned community activist and self appointed Messiah, and the group was portrayed as a group of dangerous, violent militants by the white media in Memphis. The group set off on a four day march from West Memphis, Arkansas to Little Rock, Arkansas, which included a stop in Forrest City. Local white officials there learned about the march, and a group of whites awaited their arrival.C.D. Wright, who grew up in Arkansas and was a young woman in 1969, describes the events that took place in Forrest City that year, mainly through the eyes of her friend and mentor 'V', a white resident of the town who crossed over and supported the marchers, but also through interviews with other residents and information obtained from newspaper clippings. Wright expertly weaves these stories into a unique poetic narrative that brings the story to light and compellingly portrays the town's oppressive atmosphere and its black and white residents, none better than V:She woke up in a housebound rage, my friend V. Changed diapers. Played poker. Drank bourbon. Played duplicate bridge, made casseroles, grape salad, macaroni and cheese. Played cards with the priest. Made an argument for school uniforms, but the parents were concerned the children would be indistinguishable. She was thinking: affordable, uniforms. You can distinguish them, she argued, by their shoes. It was a mind on fire, a body confined.And, on the other side of Division, a whole other population in year-round lockdown. A girl that knew all Dante once Live{d} to bear children to a dunce.{Yeats she knew well enough to wield as a weapon. It would pop out when she was put out. Over the ironing board. Over cards. Some years the Big Tree Catholic foursome would all be pregnant at once, playing bridge, their cards propped up on distended stomachs. Laughing their bourbon-logged heads off.}She had a brain like the Reading Room in the old British Museum. She could have donned fingerless gloves and written Das Kapital while hexagons of snowflakes tumbled by the windowpanes. She could have made it up whole cloth. She could have sewn the cotton out of her own life. While the Thames froze over.She loved: Words. Cats. Long-playing records. Laughter. Men.Alcohol. Cigarettes. The supernatural. It makes for a carnal list. Pointless to rank. Five in diapers at once—a stench, she claimed, she never got used to.One with Others is easily one of the best poetry collections I've ever read, one whose terrifying beauty deserves to be widely appreciated and savored.

    Book preview

    One With Others - C.D. Wright

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    Note to the Reader

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    I want people of twenty seven languages walking back and forth saying to one another hello brother how’s the fishing and when they reach their destination I don’t want them to forget if it was bad

    —The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, Frank Stanford

    There are people in small rooms all over the world, in impersonal cubicles in large offices, in malls, in ghettos, and behind fenced mansions—who thrive on a little chaos, enjoy the occasional taste of 220 volts, live for the beauty of the flaw in the grain.

    —It Came from Memphis, Robert Gordon

    No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

    —How It Feels to Be Colored Me, Zora Neale Hurston

    Herein lie buried many things.

    —The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois

    Contents

    Title Page

    Note to Reader

    One With Others

    About the Author

    Books by C.D. Wright

    Links

    Acknowledgments

    Copyright

    Special Thanks

    Some names were changed or omitted in light of the interpretive nature of this account. Others because they still live there. People may have been rendered as semblances and composites of one another. And others, spoken into being. Memories have been tapped, and newspapers consulted. Books referenced. Times fused and towns overlaid. This is not a work of history. It is a report full of holes, a little commemorative edition, and it aspires to the borrowed-tuxedo lining of fiction. In the end, it is a welter of associations.

    Up and down the towns in the Delta, people were stirring. Cotton was right about shoe top. Day lilies hung from their withering necks. Temperatures started out in the 90s with no promise of a good soaking. School was almost out. The farm bells slowly rang for freedom. The King lay moldering in the ground over a year. The scent of liberation stayed on, but it was hard to bring the trophy home. Hard to know what came next; one thing, and one thing only was known, no one wanted to go home dragging their tow sack; no one wanted to go home empty-handed.

    Over at the all-Negro junior high, a popular teacher has been fired for insubordination for a derogatory letter he wrote the superintendent saying the Negro has no voice. No voice at all. It was the start of another cacophonous summer.

    It smells like home. She said, dying. And I, What’s that you smell, V. And V, dying: The faint cut of walnuts in the grass. My husband’s work shirt on the railing. The pulled-barbecued evening. The turned dirt. Even in this pitch I can see the vapor-lit pole, the crape myrtle not in shadow. My sweet-betsy. That exact streaked sky. The mongrel dog being pelted with rain. Mine eyes pelted. All fear. Overcome. At last. No scent. That’s what she said. Dying in the one-room apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.

    MR. EASTER, AN OUTLIER [with FISH 4 SALE]: It’s probably a rat snake. Had a couple in the old storm cellar. My son-in-law accidentally caught it on fire and it killed ever one of my snakes.

    + + +

    I came in by the old road from Memphis, the old military road. Across the iron bridge. No one in the field. Not a living soul.

    I drove around with the windows down. The redbuds in bloom. Sky, a discolored chenille spread. Weather, generally fair.

    The marchers step off from the jailhouse at Bragg’s Spur, 8:17 a.m. More police than reporters. More reporters than police.

    The self-described Prime Minister of the Invaders, 31, and five others have begun their trek. SWEET WILLIE WINE’S WALK AGAINST FEAR is on the move.

    V: We had the water and the shoes in my car. There was a black man named Stiles. [He was a midget.] He kept that water good and cold [for the marchers].

    The threat they say is coming from the east [of the six Negroes walking to Little Rock and the white woman driving a station wagon].

    It was something you came through that.

    V: It was invigorating. It was the most alive I ever felt in my life.

    FBI followed me for a long time. Stringers for the Gazette and the Appeal trailed me for a year. Once every ten or twelve years, I will get a caller. I used all of my life. I told my friend Gert, you’ve got your life until you use it.

    I park in a spot of shade and walk around.

    Downtown half shut down.

    Cotton gin still going, not strong, but going.

    Tracks working, neglected, but working.

    The infamous overpass brought down.

    September 15,2004, Hell’s Kitchen, her life surrendered to her body. September 15 the day Padre Hidalgo uttered the famous Grito that kicked off the Mexican Revolution. She would have liked that, going off the air on a day marking a great struggle for independence.

    The river rises from a mountain of granite.

    The river receives the water of the little river.

    The house where my friend once lived, indefinitely empty.

    Walnuts turning dark in the grass. Papers collected on the porch.

    If I put my face to the glass, I can make out the ghost

    of her ironing board, bottle of bourbon on the end.

    + + +

    HER FORMER HUSBAND: I’d come home from work and she would be in a rage and I just couldn’t understand it.

    They were a poor match. He says so to this day. She said so then. They barely tolerated one another. But they

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