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Callaloo 27.2 (2004) 404-405


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prisoner #489235, parchman farm, mississippi, september 3, 1934

Tyehimba Jess

My Dearest Della

averything is good fine down here
How is it over there?
i did not get a leter
from last month again
but i no you is busy with the baby
an a year is one long time. so you
rite me when you can.

time don't way no lesser tho.
we got to hunch it up at sunrise cause
when thay says go you got to go
an then you keep on till the sun hidin
an then maby som mor
after that. but do not worry
Baby it will be allrit. four mor
years an then i be home. in time.

last week thay brung in these
travlin mens. a old White man
an his driver was a jailbird niger
like us calld Ledbelly.
seem like wen that driver singed
it was all of us in one mouth.
we got real qiet then.

they had a box that spred your voys
on a black platter and serve it up
hot an hissin in your face.
i singed them that pea pickin song
we used to sing in the garden
and wen i singed it was like [End Page 404]

i culd smell the dirt we used to own.
i wish you culd here it Della.
we culd sing togather again.

well got to go now.
you take care of yoursef and
please kiss our son for me.
i am thinking of you allways.

your Husband
Jack.

Tyehimba Jess won the 2001 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Awards and an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship in Poetry for 2000-2001. His work has appeared in Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex, Ploughshares, Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, 580 Split, and elsewhere.


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