Testifying: In Memory of Harriet Waltzer Sheridan

Testifying: In Memory of Harriet Waltzer Sheridan Michael S. Harper a church at the first level is an echo chamber its own creation which we make As in any sanctified church, menagerie is home: birds, exotic plants, books perch on the active mind-when she hosted lunch, always working lunch but not institutional fare, it was to read, lecture, and teach for the students needed an example, and spouses, and a wary kitchen staff at attention, ready to be quizzed. One does many shuffles on the doorstep, up or down, into one's drawing room, an ongoing conversation, how to fetch, recall, retrieve; everywhere there is the Minnesota connection. Dinner begins with Sheridan scotch, which would be malt in the categories of high and low barley, mountain pass, glen; one is always on Sheridan island. With that peculiar edge of maternity, husbanding resources, community work, group entertainment, she is no day at the beach; like her clothes, expensive, unobtrusive, preeminently in charge, © 1994 by Michael S. Harper. Reprinted with permission of Michael S. Harper. Literature and Medicine 13, no. 2 (Fall 1994) 188-189 Michael S. Harper 189 she has text, has written it, hones context, laughs into her mustache, holds back, lofts ahead. One source of great pain are the rituals of race and agony to me too, but to her 'illiterate/ as in bookshelf, which she goes to with military speed. First edition of Invisible Man, which is scuffed with markings of rereading, in hard cover, since publication: what I take this gift to mean: thematics of citizenship, bird imagery for flight, many landingspaces in the seams of the text, which, like water, is rippling, has a flowchart, glass, and the rivets of a rocky beach; always with obligations to feed the young, those who gauge their educations, in the formal sense, as truncated, 'straight, no chaser' hazard pay, changing the gender in dialogue, suffering fools, for she had enemies: who were they? The territory is within us: sustain, maintain, renew, populate, enhance, expand, as in menu, cookware, cuisine, tableware, an accumulation, command decisions, abstract and in praxis, as in efficacies of command. You could take orders from this woman; you would like it. ...