About Little Charlie Lindbergh, and: Preface
Rent from DeepDyve- About Little Charlie Lindbergh, and: Preface
About Little Charlie Lindbergh
The truth about little Charlie Lindbergh’smurder?A hero’s dark love of eugenics.President Kennedy’s lone killer,or the Tonkin Gulf incident:ghosts that still haunt uspushing fantasy as factor fact as fantasy.
A year before I was born, Mothergave birth to her first daughter,named Margaretand dead within hours.I too am Margaret.She always said she was pregnantwith me eighteen months.
Throughout her long lifeshe repeatedthat other Margaret’s nameand the story of her deathuntil once, toward the end,she turned to me in mock surpriseand askedHow could you think such a thing?You have the wildest imagination! [End Page 109]
A gesture here, comment there,years of disparate cluesslipped between my anxious fingersor lodged themselves in doubt.The twin name unraveled.The mysterious death remained.
Facts erased in a moment,then reinforced:Mother’s fear of illness—the common coldbut also quieter hidden ills,unseen and menacing.
Pressing my brothernot to datethe college sweetheartwhose sister was rumoredto be mentally ill.Fear of the raucous genecompounding a shadowy blight.
I’d point out the mental illnessrife in our family as in many.For Mother,if no one sawit wasn’t there.
Grandfather just a dreamy old man.Grandma’s biting petulance,her lies.Uncle took a drink too manynow and then,but wasn’t an alcoholic.Never giving in to his gay identity.Choice rather than tragedy. [End Page 110]
No wooden ladder remains standingagainst the open second-story windowof a New Jersey mansionin my family history.No grassy knollobscures another script.No fabricated strikeauthorized a warthat would claim two million livesand initiate the right to first attack.
My family secrets were humbler,easier to hide.They shaped individualrather than collective lives.They only made me crazy,didn’t seed posttraumatic stressamong nations.
Preface
Nineteen-thirty-six: I hurried as alwaysbut was late. Eight centuriesor ten thousand years,my small story fixed to my back.Food came weighed and wrapped,shelter engorged, surplus.My own, my own, my ownwas a mantra I could singin any season.I could be who I wasand also anyone else. [End Page 111]
I was late and also much too early.I came to justicebefore its time.Unprepared to receive me,its rough grasp hurt my hand,embedded its promises in my flesh.Juggling genderI was early and also late.Juggling children, service,my explosion of wordson stone, parchment,or floating cyber cloud.
Only poetry and love met mewhere we laughed.After so many false startsthey came in whole and surebefore the finish line.My hand fit the ancient print,a radius of living settledon my shoulders.I am lunar standstill now,calendar of hope.
It is 2013, and I discoverI am perfectly on time.Soon I will disappeartogether with all my kind,and the earthwith its synchronized clockwill wake some green-blue morning,its rhythms safe at last. [End Page 112]
Margaret Randall is a poet, essayist, photographer, and social activist. She lived in Latin America from 1961 to 1984. From 1962 to 1969, she and Mexican poet Sergio Mondragon edited El Corno Emplumado (The Plumed Horn), a bilingual quarterly out of Mexico City. In 1984 Randall returned to the United States only to be ordered deported under the 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act because opinions expressed in several of her books were deemed to be “against the good order and happiness of the United States.” Many writers and others supported her, and she won her case in 1989. Among her most recent titles are the poetry collection The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones and two books of essays, More Than Things and Che on My Mind. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and travels widely to read and lecture.
