I had a lot of preconceived ideas
about what racism was going to be--
how it would manifest itself-- when I went to Baton Rouge.
And fortunately I was wrong, but it was there.
It was just more subtle than I expected.
At the end of the three years I went to
up to northern Louisiana to do a residency
and spent the day with a friend driving
around Winnsboro, Louisiana.
And this story comes from that.
The friend owns the largest defunct worm farm
in North America, which you'll all
be happy to hear he's turned into a writers' colony.
You too.
"Music for the Dark Earth: Fiddling for Worms."
"Some days he'd rubbed two pegs together
until they made a greasy hum like rain.
The sound of moles gnawing the dirt squaring,
the song soils sing before a quake,
and the brown bodies would hang above the ground in a kind
of confusion or ecstasy.
They were dry.
The farmers showed me the way worms
made love in concrete coffin shaped beds on mattresses
of moss and peat, slipping under the rubber
collars of each other, joyous, shy, nervous, taking turns.
Androgynous worms, their pale lava
rising like dew on black earth, he
told me about the sweet spot in the warm dirt
where he found the wild ones, night crawlers a foot long.
How he'd worked day and night, the plastic sky
dripping on his neck, and preached on Sundays.
16 years old, reeking of worm sweat.
He drove around his slow Louisiana Baptist town
the square garlanded with green metallic bows and red noels
though it was October.
There was one movie house, The Bijou,
of course, first floor expensive, gummy,
for whites only.
Blacks sat in the rafters for a quarter.
Filmy bayous surrounded the blank brown cotton fields
and flooded with white heron.
Once a Black man walked by a white girl and she ran.
He never said hello.
The citizens dragged him from prison
and burned the man alive.
That's an old story.
This one's new.
A Black boy sat in that same prison five years innocent too,
and when the town freed him he headed for a Victorian house
he'd watched each night like television.
The illuminated window of an 80-year-old couple.
He knifed them both, raped the woman, as felons are legend to.
If you tend worms your whole life, dig in their beds,
stir the eggs, sort the dark segmented bodies,
you'll lose the pattern of your own flesh.
The whorls of your fingers will vanish.
A worm can eat anything.
Two by four, dog, human, I know this world said the farmer.
I've listened to worms my whole life.
Stirring in slime.
I know where we come from, and despite all our slick designs,
I know where we return.
This town's passed more than once
through the slippery tunnels of worms."