A poem begins with a lump in your throat. Robert Frost
Atlanta, Georgia, October 1958
I loved this dressy-dress
as I spun round and round
in the dressing-room mirror
of Rich’s Department Store –
swirling the skirt, checking it out,
front, back, side-to-side,
yellow chiffon, scooped neck,
puffed sleeves, starched crinolines
two-toned crisscrossed green sash.
On the store telephone my mother called
my father, an attorney in his office
a few blocks away, to come see the dress
and pay for it. He refused.
It is too expensive for a sixteen-year-old girl.
Mother and I took the escalators
to the Rich’s fifth-floor executive offices
where Mimi, my grandfather,
pulled from his gold money clip
fifty dollars in new bills
— he always had crisp money—
and handed it to my mother.
***
The first time I wore the yellow dress
was for my installation as president
of The Temple Youth Group during
its fall membership party in the synagogue social hall—
a plain boxy room we’d decorated
with ribbons of colored crepe paper,
a banner reading “Let’s Break All Membership Records”
and black construction paper 45 RPM records,
names of current hits printed across them—
“All You Have to Do Is Dream,”
“Catch a Falling Star,” “The Purple People Eater.”
I felt pretty—really, really pretty.
***
Five hours after the Youth Group party ended,
while I lay asleep in my bedroom twenty miles away—
the yellow dress across a chair,
a trail of stockings and dyed-to-match
yellow shoes on the floor—
the synagogue of The Hebrew Benevolent Congregation
(known for generations in Atlanta simply as “The Temple” )
was bombed–
a gaping hole blasted
in the north side of the building
where just hours before we’d been dancing
to Elvis Presley, Perry Como,
and the Kingston Trio.
Long-time custodian Robert Benton,
arriving to open the building for Sunday School,
was the first to see
walls of religious school classrooms
and offices blown out,
stained-glass windows shattered,
dust and shards of elaborate
plaster friezes representing
the twelve tribes of Israel
scattered across the sanctuary pews and floor,
and construction paper 45 RPM records
strewn among broken brick and concrete.
***
Five men with histories of racist
and anti-Semitic associations
were arrested and indicted within a few days –
George Bright, Kenneth Griffin, Luther Corley,
brothers Robert and Richard Bolling—
indicted for setting off fifty sticks of dynamite
in the recessed side entry of The Temple—
dynamite supplied by J. B. Stoner,
founder and chairman of the National States Rights Party
who had conveniently left town before the bombing.
George Bright, a thirty-four-year-old cotton mill engineer,
the probable mastermind, was first to be tried –
represented by, among others, James R. Venable,
Imperial Wizard of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Bright’s first trial ended in a hung jury;
his second in an acquittal.
Discouraged prosecutors dropped charges
against the other men indicted
for bombing
the synagogue that my great-grandparents
had helped found in 1867,
the synagogue whose Rabbi, David Marx,
had married my grandparents,
the synagogue where my mother had been confirmed,
the congregation whose Rabbi, Jacob Rothschild,
was active in the Civil Rights Movement,
the congregation where I had just become
president of The Temple Youth Group.
***
Twenty years and dozens of loved dresses later,
I come across the yellow dress
on a wire hanger in a chifforobe
in my childhood room in my mother’s house.
I throw it across my arm, take it home,
hang it in the guest room closet.
Looking for extra pillows in the closet
one morning, I pull out the yellow dress,
hold it up against my body,
twirl round and round in front of the mirror.
I can feel the sideways sway of “slow dancing,”
the hand of a teenage boy at my waist.
I can hear the Platters singing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”
Miss Lizzie’s Kitchen
Turnip greens, green beans, green tomatoes
in the garden just outside Miss Lizzie’s screen door,
Mason jars of yellow-orange peaches,
dense purple-red beets, bread and butter pickles;
Slow-cooked chicken dripping from the bone –
she had raised the chicken, wrung its neck,
watched it flap and flop all over the yard,
blood soaking the ground.
Her father took her out of school at ten,
put her to work in the Georgia fields,
Girls don’t need to learn to read.
Sweet acrid collards, creamed corn,
Big Boy and Beefsteak tomatoes.
Once the law allowed, Miss Lizzie
never missed voting. In Sunday-best,
hair freed from the rag she tied around it
during the week and braided into a crown,
she rode to the polls with my mother
who wore gathered skirts and tailored blouses,
a soft bun at the nape of her neck,
a little rouge her only make-up.
Ages identical, skin colors and stations distinct,
these women named one another “Sister,”
shared five decades of secrets,
I’m gonna take what I know to the grave,
so jus’ don’t ask.
But at eighty-five she told me of the day
she stood between my mother’s parents
until they made peace – no other details;
told me of anger, still, with her father
for cutting short her education,
I could have been something!
Chestnuts freed from porcupine burrs,
sweet potato pies cooling on the windowsill.
Warmth flooded Miss Lizzie’s winter kitchen,
tiny beads of sweat lined her summer brow,
one-eighth Cherokee. We were forbidden
to mention her Indian heritage;
she’d been taught Indian blood is dirty.
We wondered if that one-eighth accounted
for her acute hearing, her dead-eye shot
with a .22 Remington rifle,
her care of others, black and white equally.
Every so often she’d come by our house,
Can I borrow a little change?
always for someone else – for bail, for brakes,
a funeral, a back alley abortion or to repair one.
We knew better than to ask,
or to mention her husband,
succumbed to syphilis before I was born.
Black-eyed peas shelled in a white enameled pot,
butter rounds crosshatched with a knife handle,
a black iron skillet of steaming corn bread.
A Brief Autobiography
Mrs. Davis, the Dunwoody Elementary School
principal, worried my brothers and I
would go to hell. We didn’t believe in Jesus.
Maybe that’s why I didn’t get to be Maid Marian
in sixth grade and kiss Robin Hood, aka Philip Lawson,
or why, when I saw the Ku Klux Klan
crossing Mount Vernon Road at the Sandy Springs
water tower, wearing white robes with pointy hoods
and flaps hiding their faces, I believed they would
take me and my family away, or why,
when I was president of the Temple Youth Group,
our synagogue was bombed. Maybe that’s why I had
difficulty getting pregnant, had two miscarriages and,
twelve hours after learning I was pregnant for the fifth time,
my mother’s heart stopped in the middle
of hip replacement surgery and she survived
thirteen years, unable to walk or feed or bathe herself,
or to read – she a Smith College Phi Beta Kappa.
But surely not believing in Jesus wasn’t why,
after twenty-seven years of marriage,
my husband’s heart valve collapsed
and he died in the St. Joseph’s cardiac care unit,
sixty-five with hardly a gray hair.
Circles in the Sky
What did I know of war –
a girl of eight or ten on a dairy farm bordered
by a winding river with an Indian name I couldn’t spell,
green terraced pastures cascading from red clay hills.
Children wore dog tags embossed
with their name, address, and date of birth –
grey metal rectangles, rounded at the corners,
a small “v” notched at one end to keep teeth apart
if you were dead. Mine hung around my neck
on a chain of tiny balls like pull chains on lights.
I knew savings bond booklets, twenty-five cent stamps
pasted into squares until the total
was $18.75 and would mature into $25.00,
I knew air raid drills, duck and cover under
school desks, line up along hall walls crouching
with arms on top of our heads, as if our
thin arms and small hands could protect us.
I knew fighter pilots from the Chamblee Naval Air Station
tracing the river because the topography resembled Korea,
somewhere so distant we children
could not imagine. They’d swoop up, dive down,
cut their engines and glide. We’d hold our breath
until the engines restarted and the planes turned skyward.
I knew Uncle Joel, a hero in the Pacific ravaged
by war and dysentery, weighing ninety-seven pounds –
called “Colonel” as he practiced law,
gave me a dollar for each year of my age
on birthdays. His brother, Uncle George,
also a Colonel, never mentioned military rank –
his back brace a sufficient reminder
of his jeep rolling at the Battle of the Bulge.
We could feel it when we hugged him. Neither
had children, no cousins with whom to play
or reconstruct this history.
I knew my grandparents hosting veterans
and locally stationed military for barbeque
and beer suppers, whole pigs cooked all night
in an earthen pit by Negro veterans returned
from World War II to plow and plant alfalfa
and corn, bail hay and blow silage. One had been
a driver in the Red Ball Express – mostly Negro soldiers
considered unfit for combat, convoying nearly
six thousand vehicles more than
eighty days and nights to supply Allied forces
at the European front. These Negro veterans
were not invited to sit at the table,
ate standing by the hot open pit –
but I was innocent of race and history.
What did I know of war
watching silver specks leave contrail circles
in the blue sky, certain those circles
were the size of bombs, that they marked
the place from which bombs would drop –
barefoot child on summer days
picking cornflowers beside the ditch.
My Mother’s Hands
When did this happen?
My hands have become my mother’s hands.
I see her when I pass storefront windows,
pause to look at size zero mannequins
with flawless hands wearing clothes
I can neither fit in nor likely afford.
Reflections in the plate glass are surely not me –
that woman’s shoulders are slightly curved,
her thumbs tangled with arthritis,
her palms a map of lines and intersections,
blue veins and tendons slip sideways
as her fingers move over the computer keyboard.
My mother’s hands flew across the keys
of her black manual Underwood typewriter
as she wrote poetry and political protest.
I’d stand beside her left shoulder
mesmerized by the speed of her fingers,
keys jumping out and hitting the ribbon –
magically leaving letters on the paper.
She’d let me pull the carriage back
after the bell dinged at the end of a line.
I see my mother’s hands guiding mine
as I learned to bridle a horse;
once in the saddle she wove the reins
through my fingers and thumbs.
My mother played Schumann’s
Scenes from Childhood every night,
taught me Chopsticks and Hannon Exercises,
my small hands with chewed nails
beside her neatly clipped and filed ones;
I see her hands adjusting the angle of her hats –
straw ones, felt ones, wide brim, cloche,
soft cotton ones at the beach,
a few feathers and bits of sparkle when attending
the Metropolitan Opera in Atlanta each spring.
I spent a summer in France sewing hats
on a treadle Singer sewing machine
for the Fetes et Jeux du Berry,
learned to synchronize my hands and feet
fashioning elegant ladies bonnets,
red cardinal hats, military caps.
When my children were young
I made them elaborate jester costumes,
hats with tentacles and bells.
My mother sewed on lost buttons.
I see my mother’s hands after she was divorced,
took off her gold wedding band
with a sheaf of wheat engraved into it.
She filled her fingers with new rings –
amethyst, coral, topaz, turquoise.
After my husband died I wore both
of our wedding rings, side-by-side
for more than a year – I gave my husband’s ring
to my older daughter at her college graduation,
gave my handmade gold ring to my other daughter,
a talisman to make her safe.
People stared at my naked left hand, or so it felt.
My children bought me a thin gold ring
with tiny diamonds between horizontal bars;
I wear it every day
on the middle finger of my left hand.
I see my mother’s hands cradling
my first two children as newborns,
their tiny fingers grasping hers.
I see her hands, stoke-like disabled
after her heart stopped during surgery,
unable to hold my third child.
I trace my hand in a family journal,
trace the hand of my first grandchild
inside of mine and date it.
I will trace the hands of all my grandchildren
and I will teach them Chopsticks
on my mother’s Steinway piano –
but first they must wash their hands
with Ivory soap and warm water
as she always made me do
before touching the black and white keys.
