LITMIR.BIZ

      186 West Main St.

      Spartanburg, SC 29306

      1.864.577.9349

       for Donald, Jennifer, Monique, Jasmine, and Julian

       for Birmingham

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

Sam Cooke Sings to Me when I Am Afraid

(I’m Blue) The Gong Gong Song, or, America the Beautiful

Eating Red Dirt in Greensboro, Alabama

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Addie, Carole, Cynthia, Denise

Teaching J To read

Sammy Davis Jr. Sings to Mike Brown, Jr.

      Rammer Jammer

      Sonnet for Sopping

      Mock Election

      Prayer

      In The Beginning, There Was A Sound

      The men come for Emmett and Tamir and Michael and Eric and John and Trayvon and…

      De Soto, Discoverer

      De Soto Leaves a Negro

      God Speaks to Alabama

      Salat Behind Al’s Mediterranean and American Food

      Birmingham Fire and Rescue

      Robert Chambliss Lays the Bombs

      The first time I heard about slavery

      Viewing a KKK Uniform at the Civil Rights Institute

      What the Glass Eye Saw

      slaves for sale

      Elegy

      How To Make Your Daughters Culturally Aware and Racially Content During Christmastime

      Poem for Revolution

      What It Means To Say Sally Hemings

      spin•ster

      Alabama Recipe Box: Cornbread, 1862

      List of Famous Alabama Slaves

      Ingredient list: black girl

      The Ballad of Pearl Bailey

      Corn Silk Barbie

      Gregory Hines comes in a Vision

      Birmingham Fire and Rescue Haiku, 1963

      Symphony of God—A Hymn to Our Jesus

      The History Books Have Forgotten Horace King

      On Martin Luther King Day, A Noose Is Hung On A Tree In Blount County

      Virgin Mary, Re-Imagined

      Happiness

      Gospel of the Grits

      Coming of Age

      Sojurner Truth Speaks to Her Daughter, 1843

      Riddled In the Heart of Dixie

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      NOTES

       SAM COOKE SINGS TO ME WHEN I AM AFRAID

      Sam Cooke plays on the cassette deck in our Nissan Sentra. I am strapped like a parachuter in my booster seat. It is Saturday night. We are travelling from grandma’s house in Bessemer, having waited until the night’s third episode of “Walker, Texas Ranger” to leave for home. I am scared because I am not touching my mother. Sam Cooke is crooning about a party or a lost love or a change coming, and I’m afraid to die. Tonight, Alabama doesn’t feel like home—it is too dark to see and the alleys beckon our little car to them. Dad knows all the shortcuts because he’s a fireman, and I wish so hard for the interstate with lights and its fast, homeward promise. I wish for our little home and all my toys, even the ones that scare me at night. I wish for morning, when I will eat collard greens and cornbread with Mom. I wish for playtime with Monique and our blue couch that is a jungle, that is Pride Rock, that is a spaceship. Sam Cooke is painfully singing. He’s screaming. I can barely breathe behind all these straps—I am straightjacketed and trying to understand the hurt in Sam Cooke’s voice, and why does grandma never get up from her easy chair? Why does she look out at us like we are this night—like we are something she will never quite touch? Even when she laughs, why does she still look sad? Why have we not made it home yet? If I close my eyes and reach for sleep, can I make us teleport home? Sam Cooke, give me the answers instead of your steely wail.

       (I’M BLUE) THE GONG GONG SONG, OR, AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

      Ike Turner sailed the ocean blue in nineteen hundred sixty-two.

      Brown baby boy with a guitar for a ship—the treble clef shining black as a sail. Ike, make like a sailor and break the waves of water, waves of sound.

      On the horizon, amber waves of Anna Mae. The plump promise of fruit in her dark Tennessee body. Nutbush woman, wild with the blues, Ike dreams of you feverishly. That big, wailing mouth. Those legs—shotguns waiting to be loaded up with bullet beats. Ike imagines the way they would feel in his hands, the click of a calf, the smooth, ample ankle. Anna Mae is much softer than she looks from far away. Easier to press a thumb, a fist, into.

      What good is an explorer if he doesn’t keep his discoveries down? Ike Turner gave you a name, America. It alliterated and it sold them records, baby. Tina Turner, baby. He found you, baby. He made you live.

      When he speaks, you will listen:

      “I brought you in this world and I can take you out. Bit by glistening bit. You would have gotten hit with something, anyway—smallpox would have made it over the ocean without me. I built your immunity, baby. Thank me for your scars. Doesn’t matter what you call me, I made you sing. From my mouth comes gold.

      Tell me you can hear a jukebox playing ‘Proud Mary’ without something buckling in your highbrow hips. Tell me something doesn’t stir you to gyrate to ‘The Gong Gong Song.’

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