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  • The Builders (Under One Whole Sky of Beating Wing), and: Inventing the Safety Hood, and: Devil's Swamp, and: Wash Woman
  • William Woolfitt (bio)

The Builders (Under One Whole Sky of Beating Wing)

1724

Where the river coils, snarls,        changes aim,    they work the rice fields. Where the swamp-poolsstream back light        and moss weeps low, they pour    the strength of their backs and legs,break their bodies

        to break clay, and raise    high banks to hold the river, dig ditchesthrough raw woods, open the double trunks,        let water sluice.    When the rice is in milk,the May-birds pound the air,        blot the sun—the people lift hoes

    and slings to scatter the birds,shout and knock bones. At moonrise,        some go to the groves, the burns,    the channels. Beneba gives praisein tree shadows, Luba seeks charred places        and prays, Quashee favors    the long tongues of water

that ease the skin.        There are bobolinks—flapping,    shrieking—fewer, this time. Some weary,grow slack, drop their sticks—        but others cry out,    raise their frailsand drum the sky.

Inventing the Safety Hood

1916

Each flower Mary stitches in Garrett's    handkerchiefs—lilac, bluet, self-heal—means come back alive. Come back

    from the Cleveland fair, where he showsfiremen and investors how to survive an inferno,    wearing the hood Mary helped him sew—

a canvas sack with eye-shield, with tubes    hanging to the ground, drawing the airthat's purest, the unspoiled layer [End Page 200]     smoke lays down. Come backfrom buckets of burning tar, army tents    of smoke where Garrett sits, nine minutes,

ten, unharmed—while the spectators    outside choke, even faint as smoke poursfrom the olive seams. Come back

    from his southern tour, his trickof vanishing in plain sight: with a hired    white actor playing the inventor

Garrett Morgan, he passes as a Potawatomi,    his own assistant—lyingso he won't be lynched. Come back

    with the lives he saves when the salt mineexplodes under Erie, the dust clouds    and afterdamp shrouding him

as he eases out a pinned miner,    shoulders a gasping man,frees them, bears their weight.

Devil's Swamp

I come across ponds covered with a greasy film, nothing living in them.

—Florence Robinson

Once, you could eat the persimmons and lotus seeds here.The Choctaws lived in palmetto-thatched cabins, put up

iti humma, vermilion poles topped with fish heads,and danced with turtle shells tied to their ankles—

for sacrifice, or mourning. You could see the windcomb the butterweeds and horsetails. A German,

foundering here, thought the devil had resurrectedthe magnificent cypress and tupelo he'd been felling

for weeks. La Cipreria de Diablo, the Spanish called it.You could hook catfish in the bottomless pools.

Maroons and freedmen farmed the swamp's edges.You could pray here, see everything come alive,

tell your joys to a cracked pot. Before we could vote,this was made an industrial zone, Robinson says.

The KKK didn't let us vote. She teaches her neighborsto gather data, to theorize; she charts the smells,

symptoms, and dump sites. Some guy from Texas cameand said a hole in the ground is a gold mine:

dump chemicals in your hole and get paid. Children swamin those holes, played with tar-balls. We have infertility,

facial keloids, rashes, birth defects. You could linger here,pass through an oak tunnel, the interlocking limbs [End Page 201]

shaggy with moss, if you could take the sour windthat unravels the bleached nests of heronries, tangles

blackberry and jessamine vines, strips magnolias—windthat coats people with the leavings—fine, minute,

unseen—of borrow pits, chemical barges, coke yards,impoundments, landfills, lead smelter, resin maker,

plastic plant, tank-car washer, petroleum processor.You could untie a tupelo raft or just swim out,

float on still waters on a still night. You could gofor long walks, find a pond with salamander eggs.

Wash Woman

Handfuls of mulberries, quittingAlabama, cross over LookoutMountain, his burlap sacks, herwashboards, the moon-eyed cow

they drag along, the pitch of night.Crab apples marblingtheir shanty, wind-shook,frog-ponds, the...

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