A Wild Surmise

Torn Open

132 Torn Open I Martin Luther King a long time dead. Watts and South Central still without malls which mushroom everywhere else, without supermarkets, but plenty of three mile trips on public transportation to get groceries What are we doing about it, anyway? Just filming the fantastic array of sprawled limbs in the nightscapes of drive-bys, just covering the revival of Klan picnics where white-hooded babies are held aloft, just calling in talk-shows, disembodied voices smoking through cellular phones. II I react like a white girl sometimes and don’t cop to my longing to touch the darkest dark, unloved for what of it is African. I don’t claim the full length of a passing glance between racial strangers, but close my door shut before I, too, am seen. 133 III More than a generation ago on TV I saw the Mississippi sun shatter on the river. I stared at the schoolboy faces of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman in the newspapers before their bodies were discovered, dug up like roots from a backwoods earthen dam. I didn’t take the physical to go South with SNCC and register voters or sit at lunch room counters with black women and men. I thought I would die on that freedom train, the good girl would die or I would speak undo-able things for the rest of my days. 134 IV It happened anyway in another part of life’s business. Good girl died kissing a woman, rose from her bed the next day and went out into the altered landscape shaken down, flooded by the river of “Who I Am,” what-to-keep panned out from what-to-lose. That lover drew the big picture on the wall. She had a color chart, too, and my fingers followed the wheel where she spun me, drew a dark line around the body to throw it into stark relief. V In this city, only earthquakes bring out the too simple humanity we crave. Only what shakes us from our beds, schisms one side of the street from the other and takes a building to its knees brings us to our senses and to each other. Daily we live the unnatural disaster over race, and the pulse of it is spiked as a seismic printout in the 8 point range. 135 The heart tries again to rally to the old songs and the marching in the streets, but years of neglect have been rumbling, compressing into a spasm which rends the ground of being open, revealing its unforgiving maw. Then we stand, mouths agape, looking up and down our streets for what is not yet fallen to fall, and what is not yet open to break into flame. ...