[APPLAUSE]
That was really moving.
Thank you.
And thank you, this is a fabulous place, just fabulous.
We can't hear.
Oh, no.
Can you hear me now?
Yeah.
All right, I'll have to stay close to this thing,
which I find a little scary, but--
[LAUGHTER]
--eat it if I have to.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm going to read just from One with Others
the most recent longer collection that I have
--or It's not really a collection.
It's a thing.
[LAUGHTER]
It's a thing of its own.
And I think I'd like to dedicate this reading to Mary Cuddihy.
This is One with Others, A Little Book of Her Days.
I have a little play sheet here.
I'll make a few awkward cuts for the sake of time and fluidity.
And it was originally intended to be
a memoir, a memoir-ish tribute to my friend,
Peggy Vidito, who was a white woman in the Arkansas Delta
who got involved in some civil rights actions.
And that cost her dearly, but it cost other people
even more dearly.
And she was very proud of her participation.
And I loved her.
She was my goombah.
So it started out that way.
And I'm going to foreground her in this reading.
But it has to do with several rather prominent--
well, not prominent by the record of civil rights
instances, but in this particular town,
there were several things that happened
that once I started going to the town, I had to record.
One was that the Black students went to the white high school
and stood on the edge of the grounds
and sang like a tree planted by the water,
and they were arrested en masse.
It was a small town, so, of course,
there weren't enough police cars and there wasn't enough room
in the jails for them.
So I'm just going to give this information because I'm not
going to read it to you.
Otherwise, it's going to be the village explainer.
[LAUGHTER]
So they were arrested en masse, and they
knew not to transport them in the school buses.
They knew they would really be violating federal law then.
So they transported them in sealed trucks.
And then they didn't know where to transport them to.
So they drove them around for hours.
And some of the kids that thought
it was just part of what they were doing and some of them
were traumatized.
Sealed trucks, I mean, it's rather ominous, and also,
not knowing where they were going.
So then they put them in a drained swimming pool,
which of course was the public pool, which
of course was for whites only.
And they put them there for several days
until several Black farmers who own their own property
put their land up for--
what is the word for it--
bond so that they could release the kids.
So it was one of the incidents.
There were several others that were sort of along those lines
that were unthinkable.
But most of this is really going to be about Vidito.
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.
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 red buds in bloom,
sky a discolored chenille spread,
weather generally: fair.
The marchers step off from the jailhouse at Bragg's Spur.
8:17 AM, more police then reporters, more reporters
then police.
The self-described minister of the invaders, 31 and 5 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 Styles.
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 10 or 12 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 credo 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 and definitely 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 were Catholic, another error bred in the bone.
If he looked at her and she looked at him in nine months,
she was back at the lying- in.
My best guess, she woke up in a rage eight days a week.
[LAUGHTER]
Her friends, the musician, the poet, the actor, Gert.
She taught me how to live.
Now she has taught me how to die.
And I, she was my goombah, my Rafiki.
It was the honor of my life to know her, honor of my life.
Ellis, a crowd will gather and not know it
walks the very street where on a thing
once walked that seemed a burning cloud.
Yates, she knew inside out, inside out.
A man known as Skeeter his whole life, oh yeah, I remember her.
She celebrated all her kids' birthdays on the same day.
[LAUGHTER]
I talked to a number of people in person on the phone.
Mostly, the phone, when I could get anyone to talk to me,
I made so many calls.
Can we talk later because I'm trying to cook for my family?
He's not here now.
He's fishing.
I've got to go to the hospital to see my brother.
He's about to pass.
I've got to go to Memphis.
I've got to work the night shift.
Out of the big pen I worked there since the plant shut.
Can we talk later?
I'm on neighborhood watch.
And the kids are walking out.
There's no food here.
I'm left holding the baby.
You'll have to speak to the hand.
That was my rest day.
He's fishing.
I'm working at the polls.
I'm on poll watch.
I've got to go to Little Rock for my checkup.
My pressure's gone up.
Since he got laid off, he's always fishing.
When he can't go he's home, watching the fishing channel.
[LAUGHTER]
So how is the fishing?
Oh, well, you know, it's lots worse elsewhere.