Black Echoes

There is so much to be said about Camille T. Dungy’s “Suck on the Marrow,” I’ll have to begin by reminding myself, the assignment was to read more than her.  It’s just the feat that her book accomplishes in telling these narratives as a full (and by necessity incomplete) story through poetry is so beautifully wrought.  It both inspires and intimidates me as a writer.

What’s made clear through her skilled and supremely wrought prose is poetry as the finest vehicle for this work, this testimony, this distant witness for the slave narratives she hears singing in her own blood.

            It is her blood and ancestors she hears that allow her to channel these stories alongside the enormous research evidenced in the Primer.  There are things that her characters speak without calling themselves their color that are the clear bells rung in America’s cultural heritage built by Black bodies.  I can hear that through her work, I can’t experience that calling though as someone not Black.  Thankfully, there were some points I could relate to as a body and that is through food.

The poem “Abstinence” (p.39) was terrifying.  While the white lady who runs the place Shad lives on feeds the hands fowl and gives them days off around Christmas, one man not only doesn’t eat from the feast but only eats potatoes and drippings.  This man teaches himself a kind of freedom from want and furthers the distance from his body’s natural urges for food, comfort, shelter and health by cutting himself daily leaving feelings on the floor.  Did Dungy conjur that image?  Is it something she knows as only a Black body in America could know, could be sharing with each other?

I know people who hunt, including my stepfather.  I’ve eaten deer.  I’ve never heard of such a fine strategy to escape hounds as to disguise the dress one’s planning to wear to during an escape under the scent of a deer carcass rotting; to rub the shoes with its putrid fluids, throwing the dogs further off the scent.  Genius!  I made a big assumption but I feel as if this is strategy only someone Black could know, could have heard through a family story, read in a book not on the shelves I grew up with.

Nicky Finney echoes such affinity for this inside information that’s running through the color line.  The first time I read “Left” I couldn’t do anything except marvel at her precision, at her arrival at what that scene on top of that roof meant.  She brought me in to the relationship between the girl with the pom pom legs and her daughter and her grandmother and the United States’ attitude toward all of the people who are “dark but not broken.”

What Finney does with one letter, what understanding and compassion she throws out to the sister on the roof who couldn’t finish the sign, a sign that makes even more sense as multiple pleas for help, is something only someone who understands why the helicopter continues to pass for four days and three nights.  Finney knows that missing e is all the reason a white pilot needs to do a fly on by.  She’s lived long enough in her skin to call out the misspelling of the white president who doesn’t insist on sending water or even help, or the extra e on a potato.  He’s white.  Up to that point, all the presidents have been.  Whatever they do is alright.  It’s always alright.