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Roger Bonair-Agard USA
All-America(n)
We’re in a dirt yard. In a corner, chitterlings
boiling in an old can - my woman, Temper
(real name – true story) thought it was time
to bring me down South to meet the extended fam.
We engaged – cubic zirconium ring – Crown Heights apartment.
South which is still
myth to my ears – still water
hoses and work songs, still sinister just beyond
sight, in the trees – back of some unnameable woods.
North Carolina. We drive eight hours from Brownsville
Brooklyn, NYC – taking our time cuz it’s still
1988 and crack is still king and we’re five
black people in a second-hand Cadillac riding
the I-95. But now we in the yard and Big Mama
in the house making mashed potatoes and fried
chicken with the other women. We men (I’m 20) drive
off into Manson (real name – true story) - town
with no streetlights - town even the residents of Durham
5
miles away can’t locate – we hit the piggly wiggly and
get us
each our own personal flasks of Mad Dog 20/20
brown-bagged and brought back to the yard.
John, Temper’s brother, little older than me, say
he don’t wanna hear his wife say shit to him except –
and he mimic moans sexual ecstasy and calls his own
name – we laid out laughing right next to the outhouse
all the tobacco leaf smell thick, thick in my nostril
from the field next door where we walked to go
see the Indian burial ground, to which they
attributed the poor fortunes of Manson, NC.
And John finally turns to me and says
Rog
but… where you from tho?
And I explain,
Trinidad & Tobago, pair of islands all the way
south in the Caribbean, and John say
what part
of America is that? So
I continue explaining
sovereignty, using words like
independence
and island-nation, and saying
six miles
off the coast of Venezuela.
But John
is confused, shakes his head impatient
like I ain’t hear his question right – says
again – yeah, but what
part of America
is that, landing
on the that, the t-h hard
as the d in the dirt yard – my own triangular
slave trade stop, to him, indistinguishable
from his own, so now I channel my people,
teachers all of them, think to myself - brother
is a visual learner - so I break off the lowest
hanging dry branch, from the tree whose roots
run under the outhouse and I get down in the dirt
to draw homie a map. I draw the fat spread shape
of America, its northern border like a shallow wok
its craggy outpost of Atlantic shore. I show him the vague
mass that is Canada, and roughly point out the East
coast to him – New York, where we just came from
DC, which we just drove through –
Virginia just North
of here, I tell him,
the Carolinas where we are I say.
John is half-nodding looking on with a frown,
sipping his Mad Dog 20/20. I get to the hanging
peninsula of Florida – and I fancy myself Jesus
now like in the story of the adulteress brought to him
by the Pharisees, where he’s drawing on the ground the whole
time – I’m like that, messianic in my lessons
I
show him Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico – all countries
I’m sure he’s heard of before, and I’m almost
in love with my cartographic genius now, filling
in the Bahamas, Martinique, St. Kitts, St. Lucia,
Barbados, Grenada and finally with a calligrapher’s
flourish, I fill in Trinidad which I haven’t seen since I left
the year before, and I’m thinking of beaches, and Marcia
to whom I made love at night at one of those
shores on my birthday, three months before I left,
who as I was drawing was still mourning us, mourning,
when I met John’s sister at the Underground bar and lounge
in Union square New York City. I fill in the vague
silhouette of South America, next to the home I have
no idea when I’ll see again, and I say
and here, John
here is Trinidad.
Inside, Big Mama is telling stories about sharecropping,
her uncle who could dance his behind off, and
white
people back in the day
the other men, bored have moved off – talking
about their trailer home extensions, car engines,
crops, guns, women. It’s almost quiet when I look
back up at John, who is slightly agitated now – squints
at my artwork, right hand dangling at his side, thumb
and forefinger gently choking the flask’s throat,
he points dismissively at the end of the drawing says
yeah Rog – but what part of America is that – America
finally full of fields, and white people, and basketball
and highways in his mouth – America of chitterlings
and blues landing in John’s beautiful song
of a voice – what part of ‘murrica…
And at the exact same time, we each bring a flask
to our mouths, gulp hard – I look into the trees
not yet ready for what’s to come from there.
© Copyright, 2013,
Roger Bonair-Agard. |
