Here's-- here's a long poem.
Where's the water?
OK.
So a couple of years ago, Elizabeth Alexander
asked me and several other poets to create new poems
for an exhibition of Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series.
And each of us had to choose a panel,
and I chose the only one that had a woman in it.
I would do that, wouldn't I?
And it was panel number 57, and it's a strange--
the caption is very strange for that panel,
I'll put it that way.
I don't write narrative poems very often.
This is a narrative poem.
And when I read it, people came up to me, all kinds of people
came up to me and said, that's my grandmother's story, that's
my aunt's story, that's my sister's
story because a lot of people have been talking
about migration at this conference,
but one of the largest migrations
that took place in this nation was
from the south to the north.
More than three million Black people left the south
and went north between 1917 and 1960.
That's a whole lot of people.
And changed communities from New York, to Chicago, to St. Louis,
to Detroit, to Los Angeles.
We need to remember that there has
been this internal migration as well.
"Lave."
"Where is the lavender, the purple scent
that says the world is fresh and ready to receive
the woman who walks into whatever room she walks into?
What room will she enter?
How will the female worker smell?
Lemon, mint, roses crushed for homemade soup--
soap, no place here for the boiling recipe.
There is no room.
And her extra money, how will she make it?
Who will she do for?
How will she get there?
Will she find her old friends, her lovers?
She is lonely.
The artist says in panel 57 that the female worker," in quotes--
in parentheses, not Negro, not migrant,
is the last group to leave the south.
One woman is her own group?
Was she ready to leave or was she left behind?
Caring for baby, grandfather, brother, sister, cousin,
and elderly aunt?
Was her garden where the family sought nurture?
Were her skills at picking cotton so great,
the bosses did all they could to keep her?
Was there a fourth child, not wished for?
Much about the south is unseen or not shown.
The painter understands the usefulness of obscenity.
Lynching, hunger, the crops failing,
boll weevil, boll weevil.
And so we see the cotton ball, but not
the bleeding hands that pick.
We see the rope dangling, we see the meager rations
of meat and bread, and the table set, no plenty.
Is this the start of a woman's true blues?
The men go ahead, the women stay behind, and everyone is lonely.
In many of the painting's planes,
she is not seen preparing the meals,
cleaning, sewing, packing clothes to last for as long
as they can last in the distant cities of Chicago, Pittsburgh,
Detroit.
She is not seen crying at the preacher's table,
or burying her head into the broad chest of the man who
gets up before sunrise to make it
to the station, ticket in hand.
The men knew the hardships ahead,
others were ignorant enough to believe the stories of plenty,
work food, shelter.
Women put no truck in these white men's promises.
They wanted out of Dixie on a very bad day.
Wanted out of stuck.
She will leave for the north and go to the cities.
She will find the church where the Bible meets the preacher's
holy hollering and the music sounds
as sweet as in the backwoods.
She will find the kind of dresses
she wanted to make from the Butterick patterns
at the notions counter.
The same counter where she finds the yellow ribbons that
tie the braids of the young girl in painting 21, who
arrived early to get on that northbound train.
Is this the start of another woman's blues,
to journey north and find the men mired, to journey north
and find her skills unknown?
To journey north and discover an even greater loneliness?
The female worker gets that ticket
and joins that motion forward, the many shoulders, legs,
hands stretched across the painting's frames,
counting the rails away, away from Dixieland.
Head bound, holding an orange dolly,
the laundress is charged with purgation.
Removing the dust and dirt and stains
of city living, the marks, the many sins, sex, drink,
the opium den, those swirling, oblong colors
rests beneath her gaze as if she has the power
to make this job seem better than picking cotton, or hog
butchering, or taking in washing for the old gentleman who
pinches her breasts for that extra nickel.
Last to arrive north but first to see the way home,
to make a home, put her skillets on the hot plate, shelves
her Mason jars full of peach preserves,
pickles, tastes of home.
Chanel spreads on the lumpy mattresses, the Chicago
Defender on a kitchen table, biscuits rising before sunrise,
greens found in an Italian market.
She stands in this painting, a cruciform of desire,
in her center of beauty, dressed in white, the orange stick
her cudgel, her sword, the laundry her step
on that ladder to the future.
A migrant from the back of the bottom,
or a town just big enough for the railroad to notice,
gone to the city and its bitter possibilities,
so that church is a hearthstone, an eau de cologne, lavender,
roses, vanilla, hints of a necessity."