I'm A Steady Rollin' Man: Duet With Robert Johnson

In early 1995, a 19 year-old white native of Guthrie, Kentucky--ironically, the birthplace of Robert Penn Warren, the sole member of the Vanderbilt Fugitives to recant some of the group's early racist writings--was fatally shot just over the Tennessee border by a fellow Guthrie native, a young African-American man who had given chase to the victim's pick-up truck after being angered by the large Confederate flag flying from its bed. The vehicle's tinted windows obscured the identity of both young men, who, according to several sources, had been neighborhood friends as children.

Almost in Kentucky, the state that gave
My country 'tis of thee two armored foes
Named Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis, who rolled

Both night and day to let their people go,
         The Fugitives, in meters grave,
        Exalted a post-bellum woe

For yeoman farms plowed red by Yankee wheels.
I'm the man that rolls when icicles hang
On the tree, you hitched rides here to sing, and moaned

So even dead Confederates knew your slang
        And called for an encore. Their flag
        Still flies from pick-up trucks adorned

With gun racks and, on chilly autumn nights,
Antlered, rope-trussed deer. Some drivers lagged
At one country funeral to lift beer cans

To their hard workin', steady rollin' friend
        And--maybe--the Ku Klux Klan,
        Which never bought the farm or scorned

Their own, in town called Rednecks and White Trash
Since long before freckled front porches sagged
And girls bought their first radios. You can't

Give your sweet woman ev'thing she wants at one time
        And men know this, especially those
        Whose bullets plowed Kentucky dark,

Who heard no classmate sing from that crashed truck,
Nor his young wife's duet. O Dixie's flag
Still croons Nigger, still sings the Klan reborn

In last century's flamed youth; and there's no rhyme
        For gelding knives, nor Emmett Till,
        Who traveled downhome for a summer

From Chicago and bragged he had white girlfriends
By the score: She gets ramblin' in her brain, other men
On her mind. More rope. A gin wheel. Don't look away

From fugitives, you and the shot white boy
        Just might agree. And his black friends,
        Now jailed, like you sing They and We.

Diann Blakely is author of three collections of poems, the most recent being Cities of Flesh and the Dead, the 1999 winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America. She is a poetry editor of the Antioch Review and co-editor of Each Fugitive Moment: Essays, Elegies, and Memoirs on Lynda Hull. Her poems have appeared in a number of periodicals, including Crab Orchard Review, The Oxford American, and Parnassus. A native of Alabama, she now lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

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