Lisa Lewis

When We Were Southerners

It’s what they argued about. 

It could happen anywhere, but I remember it in the car
crossing railroad tracks. 

My grandfather, railroad foreman,
lectures on the importance of not stopping there at a red light. 

He glitters like an old tree dropping needles.  This is the family outrage:
the suffering that comes of stupidity. 

Who would do this
look at the car smashed to tin foil, no don’t look
you might see something

There’s no reason for words they think of when they think of the side of town
we stay away from
to come up

except they always can when you’re white
in Virginia in the 1960s. 

I am the reason
there’s something wrong with my grandfather’s version of the word
my grandmother pronounces with an a to close, not an r.

She doesn’t say it’s not racist because nobody says that word in our car.
I’m the one in the car with the reputation for knowing words,
but I’m eight.   

Also, my mother.
Driving, hands hard on the wheel, face hard on her head.

Born there, I don’t know how I got out or how far, not enough.   

Got out of the state, got out
of not knowing what was wrong, there in the car not parked on the tracks,

but sitting there staring
out the window at the flashing lights and the gates dropping down like angry hands,
like birds of prey, like falling trees,

it was all wrong, like barbed wire in their mouths, the side of town
we didn’t visit shining out there like a lighthouse painted bright colors
white people didn’t trust.  Why do they do it?  I asked. 
Nobody said because

who wants to be like us? 

I was the wrong who knew we were wrong. 
If you broke the egg on the sidewalk, you’d have to run. 

The last time I really saw the place I broke a window to get in.   

You have to tell it sometime.  What we had was white and they liked
to talk about it by talking about what they weren’t.  They needed a reminder. 
They wanted to fit into white like paper I learned to write on.

White in the downstairs bathroom, white like a key in a white lock that opened. 

Why talk about it now?  Why can’t I just stop?   

This talk of white, this need
to steal anything that’s not nailed down and stuff it in the white bag, the white box,
the white bank carved from white stone.

There is no taking it back, no cleansing ritual, no change to the old calendars
or the old dictionaries or the old dead, the old old wrong wrong dead. 

And my friend too, who took me to Wilmington to show me
the gravesites of her ancestors.  I didn’t

ask.  I had already chided her for something she said.  My unpleasant
necessary habit.  She had already
conceded she was wrong.  She read the right books, or said she did. 

She wanted to live in Wilmington then, she wanted a job, something to pay the bills,
but it didn’t work out because she still had some lots left from the old place
she inherited.  Last year she died there, on the floor.   

Those grounds never felt safe underfoot. 
It’s what you don’t know, exactly, but you know how it went.

Accusations, closed hands, words, words, and more words. 

How could you possibly pronounce them?  What were the many ways? 

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Lisa Lewis has published eight collections of poetry, most recently Taxonomy of the Missing (WordWorks, 2018) and a chapbook, The Borrowing Days (Emrys, 2021).  Recent work appears or is forthcoming in National Poetry Review, Cream City Review, Puerto del Sol, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, Florida Review, Isele, Diode and elsewhere.  She directs the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as editor of the Cimarron Review.