To My Mother, In Heaven
- Dorthera Hedrick Barrax March 26, 1916—March 31, 1991 —for Barbara Baines
I’m glad they did believe it Whom I have never found Since the mighty Autumn afternoon I left them in the ground.
We didn’t know we were part of history, moving with the Black Migration from rural South to urban North where the jobs were, during the War. Dad had gone before us, and I told my friends, as best I understood, that he worked for “Westernhouse” in Pittsburgh. We left Attalla in 1944 to join him there, and you never saw, never played your piano again.
You had baked cakes every Christmas and lined them up—three layers of chocolate, lemon, coconut, caramel— on top of the high, dull-black upright, the only place that kept them out of reach of Harold and me.
I’ll never know how well you played The music I remember—Moonlight Sonata,Song of India, At Twilight— but it must be from the radio that I’ve heard The Warsaw Concerto all these years. The lurid sheet music for The Burningof Rome was always there on the piano, orange-yellow flames leaping [End Page 303] around the buildings of the Imperial Forum; melodramatic as a Max Steiner film score, you practice and practice it all through my childhood.
It was crated and shipped to Pittsburgh for storage, until we had room, a house, space enough for you to have it back. We never did. Until the divorce ten years later, we moved six times to rented rooms, and only once a whole house to ourselves, just long enough to make you ache to have it back before we were on someone else’s second floor again. I don’t know how long it was after the house on Stranahan Street you gave up, stopped paying the storage.
We bought our piano for the girls after your last visit to Raleigh in 1980. I was able to teach myself to play because you’d paid for years of violin lessons. I memorized Moonlight Sonata for the next time you came.
I have a friend here who has a Yamaha, what you would call a baby grand, an ebony mirror, that would take your breath away. I showed her the picture of you at 32. She said you looked like a movie star. We are both shy and self-conscious about our playing, but feel comfortable with each other. We play Chopin, mostly, the Preludes and Nocturnes for you and her father. You may know him now, a new friend named Joshua.
If heaven is where you believed it was, lean out, look down, listen to us play for you. If it’s where I think it must be, we’ll make room for the two of you here on the bench beside us.
Gerald Barrax was Professor of English, Poet-in-Residence, and Editor of Obsidian at North Carolina State University at Raleigh. He is author of four volumes of poems, Another Kind of Rain, An Audience of One, The Deaths of Animals and Lesser Gods, and Leaning Against the Sun. In July, 1997, From a Person Sitting in Darkness: Selected and New Poems, his fifth volume, was published by the Louisiana State University Press. He has recently retired to West Chester, Pennsylvania.
