Heat Wave: Liberty, Missouri

HEAT WAVE: LIBERTY, MISSOURI / Carolyne Wright I can't wait to see that evening sun go down. In this first-floor hotbox, no Billie or Bessie or Big Mama Thornton to remind me where we've been: New Orleans, easy city where a white woman's dark-skinned lover could steal away through the grillework and disappear into the Creole wards while the nay-sayers shrugged and went on pruning the brown leaves from their family trees. City where we walked home from the Quarters past the multi-colored stalls of the fruit and flower market, cries of the Cajun vendors; where we made love under the ceiling fan as mid-summer rainstorms swept the yards and lightning touched down around us like incoming fire. Here, derailed from my big-city expectations, I'm on my own. Whatever I choose to make of it. Every suitcase I unpack a concession. A border state's chance to ask the hard questions. Dogs in the front yards bark at my accent and my bedroomcolored skin, the red dress I wear Thursdays that says I don't give a damn. Through jalousies the neighborhood watches—I'm part of all that's wrong with America. 44 · The Missouri Review Only the radio gives the facts. Twenty years to the day from Selma. Twenty years from the hoses, dogs, the demonstrators lying in rows in the squad cars' shadows. Two blocks from the Kappa Alpha house with the Confederate flag still hanging between white columns. Every night, someone stands under my window smoking Camels. I lower the bedframe from its closet, sleep in a room with screens unlocked and a fan that drowns out the footfalls of intruders. Every morning, I get right up against day's burning wall, the I Have a Dream speech fading from air above the marchers. What else could we have said even if I believed my life here? If I dreamed the crossed sticks on the lawn, waiting for evening to burst into spontaneous flame? One signature in the wrong place and this old world of have-to's got me good, twenty years from the Freedom Riders and Rosa Parks' I'm tired. We know which side this town took. My parents are proud of how far from you I've come, justifying my silence in the looped shadow that falls down between us. They don't see how I stand before the bedroom mirror, touching my nipples to the glass. Carolyne Wright THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 45 ...