Backwater Blues
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Backwater Blues
Then trouble's taking place in the lowlands at night.
—Bessie Smith
My students stare at me and half-expect that I might bring young Emmett backand change his story to one that doesn't end with his tortured, teenage bodydragging the Tallahatchie's rocky river bottom.
No one could be that cruel, the girl in the back of the class whispers,though just last night, she heard the man in 14G cursing his wife.Her high-pitched screams. The sirens. The policemen's feet strikingeach step like the hammers inside a piano's growling belly.
I tell my pupils: Listen for the Blues trumpeter turning his bellinto a woman's wide open throat, hear him making a picture of hermired up to her black-stockinged ankles in red clay muck.
The kids tilt their headsand listen as mouthfuls of misery head straight throughthe trumpet's brass tubing and spill into the honey-thick air. Bessie tells them:When it thunder and lightnin' and the wind begin to blow,When it thunder and lightnin' and the wind begin to blow, there's thousands of people ain't got no place to go. [End Page 391]
Cheryl Whitehead, who lives in North Carolina, teaches music in the Guilford County Schools. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, CALYX, International Poetry Review, African Voices, Kuumba, HLLQ, Sinister Wisdom, and other periodicals. For her poetry she has received the Writers Fund Award for Emerging Poets and an Astraea Foundation award. In 2009, she was a finalist in the New Letters Literary Award competition for poetry. She is studying for the MFA in the Sewanee School of Letters in Sewanee, TN.
