Signals: Poems

Roots: An Essay on Race

61 Roots: An Essay on Race It isn’t bravery that’s required to watch a television ................. Say No to this only way they want to know Black people Nikky Finney,“Pluck” I am trying to say something about an ignorant white kid, somewhere in the South in the seventies. His dad is a farmer, raises rice and soybeans. They have many farmhands, black and white. His uncle yells, “Niggers in the back,” when they load up the trucks in the fields to head home. He sees Hiram Dean clench his teeth, squeeze himself into the front cab. His mom teaches him not to use the n-word. What does he know of black people? 62 His first black teacher—Ms.Armitage, fourth grade science—tells him she played baseball with his uncles in lower Cowlake—the black and white kids together on summer afternoons. K 63 I am trying to say something about an ignorant but good-hearted white boy in rural Arkansas. His class is one of the first integrated at Newport High—new port on theWhite River, the trains for grain changing the map, upriver, Jacksonport abandoned to its courthouse, its gazebo, its fancy riverboat docked for tours, stories of fresh-water pearls pulled from the muck. With dad and brother, he catches catfish in the muddy Cache.They fish the stocked pond, throw back the trash fish, the gar on the line— take a bucket of perch to Elsie and Kissie, who live at the end of a dirt road at the edge of the Epps farm, on Coon Island— is that name still listed on the maps? K 64 I am trying to say something about being a naïve white boy, who attends an all-white kindergarten, an all-white elementary (except for Mary Charcia Birdsong, who rides his bus)— until they move from Beedeville to Coon Island, landing in the better school district. What does he know of black people, other than farmhands and Elsie and Kissie, and Roots onTV. His parents, who protect him from television—no Happy Days, no All in the Family, no Dark Shadows—let him watch the week of Roots with his little brother, though they miss part of Sunday andWednesday nights, church nights. I am trying to say something about being a white boy who leaves his white church to hurry home to watch Roots, where he learns of slavery and miscegenation, stories brutal but sentimental. He is ignorant, he is so entranced that when his father’s Labrador retriever, Sheba Shadow, gives birth to her first pups, he thinks to name them for names memorized from the miniseries—considersToby and Kizzy, Chicken George, Kunte Kinte. K 65 How can he tell this story now? Such names in the American Kennel Club registry would look racist—maybe not Black Jack, Ebony Mandy, or Storm, butToby Reynolds, Kunte Kinte’s new name. He knows his distant relatives, the Gradys, don’t let their black field hand eat at their table— though they take him with them to the hill cabin to cook their meals on the grill outside. He sees his mother set a place for Nigger Roy. Years later, he will rent a home fromTalbert, who calls his elder black employee “the boy.” Years later, he will march in honor of MLK. But at that moment, there on the floor of the mudroom, where Shadow has given birth to seven shining black pups, what names does he name, claimingToby for his own? K 66 I am trying to say something about being that very boy, ignorant, good-hearted, and poor, in love with the lineage and language of Roots. He knows the rumor—that the grave at the back of the family cemetery is that of a black man who passed for white.The leaning stone is weathered smooth, falling against the barbed wire fence.Years later, home from college, he and his father will visit the home of Elsie and Kissie—deserted, their children long gone. Mulberries will claim the yard, honeysuckle and trumpet vine the western porch.They will wander the warm rooms—an abandoned chair, jars on a sill.They will hear the growing hum of bees inside the walls, and they will leave quickly, stung—Jesus still pale and praying, on the faded flue-plate hanging on the...