The World Is Round: Poems

Mean Nina

21 mean nIna Lying there in state when I arrive is Great-Aunt Nina. Nina of the pear gum trees, of the old old ways, seamstress of flowers so fine, thread laid to silken seed, inside the eyelids of raw cotton. Nina Davenport could sew the wing back on a butterfly, make them rise, cocoon, bloom again. On every arm of every chair in the old home house, her linen butterflies fluttered, her needles pursed a power. Lying there now is mean Aunt Nina, who won’t die. Nina, the general. Sergeant maiden of the farm, distributor of all good backbreaking work within a five-mile radius. Mean Nina, devoted sister of Daisy, the sweet. I lift the sheet to see what lies left of her. What shakes out is one long-as-me crooked trembling bone. She is without clothes from the waist down. The diaper stamped Large Adult. A middle passage insignia. My eyes run headlong into a summer afternoon shower. Still wet, they whisper to her Jesus, “Don’t you keep me here this long.” I cover back up her protruding pelvic bone that was once her Black woman’s saucy hip. I keep my hand on her posting family messages through my fingers all along her body board. 22 They never touch her here. They change her diaper when they please, their latex hands rake her long Indian hair, with what should be saved for mules, archaeological digs. I look inside her table drawer. The soft brush that Mama brought Thanksgiving Day is gone, disappeared with all the other nice things. I turn to stampede the office again, like all the other times before. I want to know how they can steal from a woman who won’t die, but her eyes fall on me like a shaft, “Don’t child, you get to go and I get to stay. You don’t know the half of mean when nothing but your mind can leave the room.” Aunt Nina goes on to tell me there is good news. She insists that I take word of it back to family. “I am no longer the meanest woman in the world.” We smile. She goes on. “The new night nurse, the one called Little Mary, has now won the crown.” Little Mary, who every time I walk in, never looks me in my eye. Every time Mary comes into the room Aunt Nina stops whatever she is saying, and turns her voice into a needle or a knife, searching for the jugular of Little Mary’s ear, and pushes: One day you will be old. You will. I won’t be around to see it but word will come. All day Aunt Nina thinks and stares. Rolled up fetal, unable to go anywhere except in her head. Every day staring down the wall as it grows from dark to light. No corn to shuck. Page to turn. Thread end to lick. She remembers now with worry how mean to everyone she was. “Mean Nina,” Mama and the rest of us would whisper every time 23 our car pulled into her yard, just before walking into her house of linen butterflies and fresh pole beans. That was when Nina Davenport could walk away from you with great purpose. When everybody thought she would just die easy, like the rest of us. Teacher. Farmer. Spinster. She surprised everybody and married a short man once. The land needed a man’s back for a season and all the other hired hands had escaped away one night or another. Eventually, he would flee too. The night before he ran the new pastor had just preached, “Meanness do not wear down,” his hand pummeling the gospel plow—“meanness,” he swore, “lasts longer than plastic.” I grew up scared of Nina Davenport. But that was before, when I believed she would just die regular. Back then I would fly out of her way like a biddy in a barnyard too close to a boot. Now that she is flat on her side, buckshot as a red fox, I stand as close as I can, amazed that something, finally, has laid her meanness down. On the outside Nina Davenport is helpless. But on the inside she is whole. Little Mary hates Aunt Nina. She knows her body is gone but doesn’t know her mind is perfect. Nina Davenport won’t just go...