Woman with Crow

for Mamie Till-Mobley

Perhaps it was nothing more

than the suddenness

of a single black American crow

lifting from the branch

that had me thinking of you.

There in the pale wash of November sky

the bird winged North,

its blue-black splay of wings opening

like some long sought hope

and I wondered about us:

two mothers separated by fifty years.

I imagined an afternoon together with you.

A day, nothing too special,

certainly not that August

when Emmett’s bloated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River,

a tortured and slain child—

nor late September

when that jury of white men

delayed the verdict sixty minutes by sipping soda pop

before carrying out certain Mississippi justice.

Not these, perhaps a different day

when memory might soften slightly

(if such days do come)

when we might sit,

two women in comfortable silence

interrupted by talk, tea.

I would have been nervous.

My clammy, too-white skin

bearing first an apology

for all that has come before

and comes with me

knowing too well the inadequacy of words—

sounding so slight

against this history of such relentless wrongs.

Perhaps you would have helped me to know

how we might begin to get said

what Williams knew must be said.

Sometime that afternoon

I might have mentioned how my mother

told me Emmett’s story,

the one I never heard repeated in school.

Seated at our kitchen table

with late afternoon tea, my mother claimed

history was rewritten on your loved child’s loss

when you said, “Open it up.

Let the people see

what they did to my boy.”

I knew those men

who mowed lawns on weekends

their shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow

and their women, so taken with their whiteness,

were a savage plague unrelenting.

America, thirty years gone by—

How could I know then

from the privileged whiteness

of home that tonight I would stroke

the sweet, unmarred cheek

of my own adopted boy

so slight

so innocent in his sleep, in his waking

knowing it would be only dumb luck

not his mother’s guiding hand,

not his father’s watchful eye

that keeps this child of color

safe.

Rising. South Dakota. July 2010.