Rice: Poems

In South Carolina: Where Black Schoolmarms Sleep

47 In South Carolina: Where Black Schoolmarms Sleep All around the Palmetto State ten years before the 2,000th we are still ruining the neighborhood still depreciating the community Mary McLeod Bethune’s school-teaching daughters saved and bought wood then nails then land just where they wanted and hired Josh Neal to build them a place (where schoolteachers might sleep) a place around other places where schoolteachers might borrow sugar and hand soft linen out to wind A place where Mrs. Bethune’s portrait might sweeten up the wall might look out the window herself stare across the street on her own and see them there watching from behind their drawn curtains 48 She would notice them first the very next morning staking up the For Sale sign instead of shaking off their welcome mats instead of coming over with a vat of welcome lemonade All around the neighborhood is selling all around the belief the land the water the air tainted now never to be reclaimed never pure enough again We can do that you know just by walking by and smiling our pretty milk shake brown faces (we have tainted so many places in our time) Places occupied by schoolteachers with savings accounts (not the dreaded black plague) by bus drivers and carpenters with bookshelves and hope chests and hand-whittled carvings (not some colored meningitis) by Campbell Soup workers with freezers full of ham fried corn and butter bean (not the chocolate leprosy) Take to the air if you must but we fly there too 49 our brown ghosts know all there is to know of flight and travel in even more tainted ways than we ...