"Shack with Vines"
- “Shack with vines”
Who lives in this motley house? Some old woman left back of the bottom of the county.
She’s crazy, no, she’s poor. She makes her taste of something as bitter as the broad leaves
choking the last of life from her house.
Where is her family? Who was she as a young girl? What did she do?
Go to church each Sunday. Pull the yellow streamers during the Maypole dance. Learn the first four chapters of Genesis by the age of nine
Or was there not a family? Did she nurse the folk of the county? Is this the conjure woman, so talked about?
Or is the resident of this dying house, male? Shotgun at his bedside, ready to blast aside the wicked.
This is his sanctuary, this little house. Away from the highway, Far outside of town.
Far from the many temptations of the flesh, about which he reads repeatedly in weak daylight. [End Page 839]
Or are there orphaned children sleeping beneath blankets, coats, whatever warmth was left behind? They remember electricity, hot showers, macaroni and cheese.
Scavengers in the town, their tee shirts, jeans, and itchy, unwashed sweaters contour skinny backs. There they are outside the fast food place
sifting through the leftovers, tossed aside like an acidulent anecdote.
The shack collapsed.
Patricia Spears Jones is author of a play, Mother, and two volumes of poems, Mythologizing Always and The Weather That Kills. Her work has also been published in such periodicals as The American Voice, The Kenyon Review, The Black Scholar, Hanging Loose, and Journal of Southern Culture. She teaches a poetry seminar at Sarah Lawrence College.
Footnotes
© Patricia Spears Jones, October 1996; “Shack With Vines” is the title of a painting by African-American artist Beverly Buchanan.
