Fanny Says Read online

  We had her cremated, and at his feet,

  set her a simple stone.

  I doubt Grandfather’s girlfriend

  knew where her sweetheart’s money

  came from, but if she did,

  what would she buy? The bitch

  in me sees a gaudy chain with her

  name scripted in gold, a pair of acrylic

  heels too tall to tramp her

  around the block. But no. The real

  sorrow—the deeper anger

  harder to swallow—is for him:

  he knew damn well that girl was

  poor and needed cash

  to live, just as Fanny needed it

  to pay her doctor’s bills, maybe

  a few month’s worth

  food and rent.

  13.

  I doubt Grandfather’s girlfriend wanted to go

  to Tupperware parties.

  I don’t ever remember Fanny having enough

  Tupperware to give.

  Sometimes, Bernie would doggy-bag

  her dinner in foil and take it home with her

  across the tracks.

  Say it: Tupperware. Tupperware,

  tupperware, tupperware, tupperware, tupperware,

  tupperware, tupperware, tupperware, tupperware.

  See?

  Most anything,

  enough times, quits

  making sense.

  14.

  Sometimes, I’m afraid I will die

  an old woman blurting out

  nigger from my sour bed.

  It is not like the rational

  fear of rape, no. More

  the compulsive driving

  across that dotted white

  line, a full-on case of senile

  Tourette’s, an unexplained spark

  in the orange can of gasoline

  forgotten in the shed,

  like a bullet

  that’s waited too long

  for a trigger

  that decides, on its own

  just to get up and go.

  15.

  In second grade, I came home with a new word,

  ancestor, rolling in my mouth,

  thought of greengreen Ireland, great-grandfathers

  with shields or kilts, people all the way from a poet’s place

  called Wales.

  I had to know, I begged:

  Fanny, please, can’t you tell me where we from?

  Right quick, she said,

  Child, don’t you worry your pretty little head bout that.

  We weren’t nothing but a bunch of chicken thieves.

  What I thought she meant by this was trash, as in

  white. Always, her joke: Girl, you was born

  trash, and you’ ll die trash. We’d laugh, and she’d say

  it again, Yep, you trash alright. That’s how you were

  born, that’s how you’ ll die.

  Say it: Born trash, die trash. Born trash, die trash.

  Born trash, die trash. Born trash, die trash.

  Born, die, born, die, born, die. White,

  but trash, trash, trash, trash, trash, trash.

  16.

  The summer—

  that last summer—

  Fanny tells me there was a woman,

  a mother

  to her mother

  to her mother,

  to her mother,

  count it—four generations

  back—who was dark

  as a bucket of water,

  an unstirred pool of black

  left out

  for sleepers who thirst

  in the dead of night.

  She didn’t make

  much of it, just mentioned it casual

  as if it were something she told

  me all my life. So there you go,

  Kunta Kinte blood, she said,

  laughing softly

  before turning out

  her light.

  17.

  A slave?

  In our family? Good God, Nickole, you’ d believe

  anything, my aunt says.

  That was morphine talking.

  But I swear Fanny remembered things

  clear, much clearer than before,

  she told way-back stories

  hard as the lichen-green apples

  of Kentucky, hot as the place

  where she and Monroe made their first

  home, an attic apartment

  with a small window to the roof:

  I’ d sleep there with my little top

  and a pair a bloomers, all sexy,

  cause my legs weren’t like they are

  now. And I didn’t take nothing

  but a little blanket and pillow and wasn’t nothing

  above that roof and me but those stars.

  She looked up to show me

  just how she looked up then. I, too, looked

  at that low popcorn ceiling, searching

  for cloud shapes

  in the mop stucco, when she said,

  And then the wind picked up

  over top those trees, it hit me, and it felt

  so good, you wouldn’t believe.

  18.

  Bernie May taught me how to hex

  and how to protect: in a tree right outside

  your front door, tie up bottles with string

  long enough to sway from the bough.

  When the sun comes out, the spirits—

  the ghosts and memories meddling

  from another time—get distracted by all that broken

  light, all that pool-bottom beauty,

  and fly into the trap, dazzled inside.

  Once, I dreamt that dark

  water, took a cool drink

  from the night to find that

  woman, that secret mother,

  arches fallen and arms strong.

  She wrung the necks of chickens

  and beat rugs to a thread, and when her work

  was done, the bit of light

  left over let her

  tie bottles to a tree

  that wasn’t hers.

  19.

  Great-mother, if I ever lose my mind and call you

  nigger would you know it was because I was

  eaten alive with the cancer

  of this history, this fear working my skull up

  through my face?

  Because for you, I would cross over—

  the living haunting the dead.

  Would you let me carry what’s left

  of you across the river?

  Not far, in Indiana, is that good earth

  where at least your bones could be set free, a cemetery

  right across the dividing line, a place where women were not

  purchased, even though they may still be cajoled into selling

  themselves to an old white man once his heart gives out

  and he’s gone limp as his own flag.

  20.

  Forgive me. Now, I can see:

  in one bottle, a tiny black knot,

  not much more than a raisin—a mulatto’s

  umbilicus dried and broken free. In another

  bottle, dumb as a housefly

  and thumping against the glass, is me.

  From the humid, from the stink

  of old tincture, from this scratched and sugared

  cage, I watch. You are bent in your garden,

  on your back a colicky baby the high yellow

  of rape, rounding its tiny mouth ah, ah, ah, ah—

  to you, it’s just milk-tongue all babies make, but to me,

  it’s those first syllables

  needed, this terrible word softened, still bristling but

  between family. Can you hear the hum of me,

  begging, Please, your real name? Would you let me call you

  a mother of mine? What name opens the warm mouth

  of your cabin door?

  Tell me, tell me how
to call

  you, how to conjure the sounds that bring

  you here. It’s me—your long-gone

  grandchild, caught in this heat, in this glittering,

  haint bottle in the wind.

  IV

  You didn’t want to be no wife, Koey. You wanted to go out and see the world, and you were looking for something else. You didn’t have time for a man. You don’t need no husband. You need to be doing what you worked so hard all these years to do. You need to write yourself a book.

  —Frances Lee Cox,

  September 27, 2003

  Fanny Says She Knows How Little Time Is Left

  I loved green apples till I lost my teeth. I still remember them though—I was about six, and I’d climb that tree and fill my bloomers up with apples for everybody to eat and climb back down again. We ate enough of them bright green apples to make ourselves green—got so sick we could barely stand then got up the next day and went back to that tree for more. I know I told that story a hundred times, but I remember that tree and all them apples like it was here now.

  No, I don’t figure I’ll ever taste those things again as long as I live.

  For My Grandmother’s Gallstones, Reconsidered

  I didn’t believe you when you said

  the stones from your body looked

  pulled from a treasure chest,

  that those sad, toxic deposits

  could be anything like jewels.

  No, to me they were tarry knots

  that should have been carried out

  with stool but instead required

  a scalpel to cut from you, a doctor

  who dug and found the unexpected

  tentacles, a blue tumor reaching

  underneath.

  Is despair a sin? I ask the lowly

  gallstone and find its answer

  on the Internet—a photo

  of a small pile cleansed naturally,

  looking just like you said:

  something you wouldn’t believe your eyes

  until you seen it—a black diamond, a stone

  of every color, yella and lilac and aquamarine.

  When I saw that glittering I couldn’t help but

  ask: Why do I always have to see beauty

  to believe? Why do I have to be shown? Despair comes

  to me easy: I didn’t need any convincing about the cancer found,

  but otherwise thought you dosed,

  out of your head; I rolled my eyes,

  pressed my cup to a darker door

  eavesdropping on death’s plans instead.

  It’s like heaven, when I asked you

  what you thought it would be.

  You shrugged like I was downright

  silly, asking something daft, then

  said, Well, it’s beautiful, just like the Bible says.

  Sweet Silver

  1.

  You were in a bakery when you first saw it:

  hair bright as

  abalone,

  a back-lit gray kissed

  with lavender,

  a color that flashed

  like the white underside of leaves

  when strong winds flipped

  their color silver

  before a storm.

  It might not have been a natural tone, but by then, you knew:

  a woman blending in meant

  a woman forgettable, and your edges

  were fading, near forty,

  a mother of six and another

  on the way,

  your smile lost to

  empty root chambers and a set of false teeth,

  your husband gone missing again,

  this time to a game of tennis

  and the instructor’s little white skirt.

  You bought a dozen of this, a dozen of that—

  so many mouths to feed—and before the door chime

  announced that lady’s departure, you asked,

  Excuse me, what color you got on your hair?

  She said, Clairol, Sweet Silver, and

  if anyone can name a color theirs,

  that’s been your color since.

  2.

  This is the trick Lucille Ball could teach:

  as beauty queen, a woman is

  measured, compared to the rest,

  as sex symbol

  she ages, and unless she manages

  a spectacular suicide, she just

  disappears.

  But make yourself into a funny lady,

  pull your skirt up and stomp

  barefoot in grapes, let yourself get knocked

  across the stage by a loaf of bread a mile long,

  and you’re on to something,

  pile your clown red

  high, everybody loves Lucy,

  take a bow.

  3.

  It was an art form, really—a sculpture

  fit for Marie Antoinette,

  not a hive or a bouffant but a

  placement of silver curls

  teased to Jesus

  and set with aerosol.

  Necessary tools included

  rollers, clips, perm rods,

  dense bristle brushes, rat-tail combs,

  setting lotion, and

  a hood dryer

  to bake it into place.

  For the crowning touch,

  a matching Sweet Silver wiglet,

  securely pinned then blended

  like three-inch meringue

  on top.

  4.

  A whore’s bath is what she called it—

  once she got sick, all she could do

  was stand at the sink and splash

  clean.

  Her hair became

  a dandelion puff in the front,

  a shut-in’s mat in the back,

  and after months of illness

  she grew roots two inches long

  in a color none of us had ever seen.

  She became

  limp,

  bruised,

  pale,

  her flesh returning to

  water,

  her hair gone to

  weed.

  My uncle, the one who ran a salon, he said,

  Your grandmama’s just given up, that’s all.

  And how do you like those lowlights in her hair?

  It was a joke—

  I know, I know, I know—

  but I could have

  wrapped the cord of the spray nozzle

  around his neck.

  Instead, I smiled quiet,

  stood behind her

  as she gripped her walker

  hard.

  Her face was bent

  in the kitchen sink,

  she was white-knuckled, she was shaking,

  and eventually, she let me touch

  my fingers to her scalp.

  I’m hurrying, Fanny, I know, you hurt, I know, I said.

  Don’t I know it, Fanny, don’t I know.

  Just one more minute now.

  I have to work these knots out.

  5.

  What I wouldn’t do for a lock of that hair now,

  a bright flash of

  fuck all y’all

  to braid into the ancestral

  wreath.

  Can you see it?

  The intricate twists in shades of

  mouse, dishwater, ash, straw-broom—

  all the church-going,

  mannered tones of

  almost-blonde,

  the hair of the dead resigned to

  the bleak of

  autumn leaves long after

  it’s time to rake and

  snow is on the ground.

  Can you see it? There—

  at the strong base of the tree,

  that bough with seven branches forking from it, that

  carbonated platinum, that stainless Adriatic,

  the Sweet Silver of her

  last remaining threads.

  Trac
e your finger—you might be

  surprised to find the hair

  thinner than it looked on her,

  find it has more oil,

  not enough curl,

  further proof of how

  hard she worked

  to become

  who she was.

  Fanny Says She Met a Stripper Girl in the ER

  There was a woman in a pink bikini in the hospital bed next to me. I knew she was there because she was a hype, hype—you know, like your Aunt Toni does—a panic-like, yes, that’s it—hyperventilate. And she was hyperventilating, and she was built like a brick shithouse—she had them fake tiddies and a waist that wasn’t this big and her ass was like pow! and she tells me that was all the clothes she had—that pink bikini—and it was barely enough to cover her nipples. I think she musta been in the burlesque, Koey, but I didn’t say nothing. And she had two kids, and she musta been about your age, twenty-six, twenty-seven, and her mother was keeping them kids. And her little boy said he was afraid she was gonna die, and she told him to be quiet and stop a buggin her, and I said phewwww. I couldn’t believe a mother could be so bad, could you? Can’t be easy though, what she’s got to do, stepping in those strange cars. And it’s I like told her—Honey, it’s an easy ride up but a long walk down.