Your Verdict: A Judge’s Reckoning with Law and Loss: a Memoir of Race, Law, Family, and Poetry

SNEAK PREVIEW from Your Verdict:  A Judge’s Reckoning with Law and Loss

A journalist once asked me how I’ve managed to overcome so much in my life.  The question stunned me.  It had never occurred to me that I had overcome anything.  I was just living my life.  What she was referring to, of course, was that, compared with many judges, my life has been unconventional.  A working class background.  Interracial marriage.  Welfare mother, Feminist. Community activist. Bi-sexuality. Poetry.  What bothers me about the question is the idea of overcoming something, as if I had to conquer my own life, when this life I’ve been making has also been making me.  I am a part of so many of the extraordinary, ordinary events and people in court.  People like myself, who try to face life and need a little help doing so.

                        This memoir is about all that, and some of the controversial cases where I presided as a county judge, as well as a lifelong power struggle between my mother and me.  We would sink into a sea of racism and rebuke, each of us trying to save herself while watching the other who could not swim.  It was always a question of who abandoned whom.

                        I write to those of you who have appeared in cases where I was the judge.   I give you in this book some of the fragments of my life, as you gave me yours, including, the distortions created by time and ego, by fear and desire.  I have discovered from years of listening to testimony that life stories sound much truer when broken into smaller pieces.  The fragments hang there in the air, near each other, waiting patiently for another piece to fall into place.  I have deliberately included pieces from my life to demonstrate the connections between my work and my life. A life and Life itself.  Impartiality does not mean forgetting who you are, and it can include keeping an open boundary between you as a judge and you as a person with a moveable frontier between you and others in the legal system.  Here I accept risks of being misunderstood, of being criticized professionally, or ridiculed publicly, or delivering a weapon to those who would hurt me.  

                        Please be patient with the process of moving in and out of the stories in this book.  I have laid out pieces of my whole life next to each other and braided them with stories from controversial court cases mixed with their historical era and social issues.  Relax and let me tell it my way.  This what I would tell myself when I’d become impatient with witnesses who wouldn’t tell their stories in the order I preferred.  Sometimes patience allows something in the process of telling a story the way one wants to tell a story, that affects its texture and its credibility.  What I want to open up is not a tabloid expose, but something more profound—the expression of the connections between us that I have tried to find deeply within myself in cases, where I could.  I want to show you a more complete inner look at judicial process than mere legal analysis or linear narration can offer.  For me, being a judge has been a little like falling in love, then having to face the hard work of building, maintaining and finally losing a relationship.  It is the closest thing a Catholic girl can come to becoming something like a priest.  I believe that the influx of women into law has the potential to transform the law itself, to add some flexibility and alignment to the law’s hard muscles.  Now that it is all at a distance, I am happy to shift to a softer, more open, more forgiving world along the edge of the law. 

                        I sit in the witness chair to speak to you.  It seems as though I’ve known you.  You’ve let me know so much and trusted me with decisions about your life, assuming me to be wise, even when I was not.  I both pleased and angered you.  From the bench I have expected witnesses to “drink at the icy fountain and tell the truth,” as the poet W. S. Merwin put it, and here I have asked the same of myself. 

                        You made a difference in my life, so that when I see courage now, I recognize it because I saw it in you.  When the politics of the court, or the community’s opinions were heavy or confusing, I would retreat to the repetition of our public conversation where all of that turmoil seemed so irrelevant.  You’d tell me parts of your life.  Your fears, your pain.  Your intentions.  I could see much of the rest, written as it was on your body and in your eyes.  I would feel grounded then, in that chair, on that platform, in that courtroom, under that robe.  I would feel myself again and dream that whatever can happen to you can happen to me.

The Home Visit

Flash Fiction: "The Home Visit" published by The Ravens Perch

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What you feel here is how it happened there. The grown son was in the garage tinkering with a car. He pretended not to notice me. The father was at the door to let me inside. He was not smiling. It was hot and a fan stood in the corner whirring. The child sat on the floor beneath the fan and seemed to be enjoying the breeze. We sat down. He offered me water. Or a Coke? He asked. I gave him the introductory information about how I was a child advocate appointed by the court and he nodded. We both knew he knew why I was there. The child came closer to listen. She had a soft plastic toy in her hand, something too young for her. I asked to see where she sleeps. There were boys’ voices I could hear in the back of the house. He gestured with his entire arm toward the side of the house and remained seated. I took the little girl’s hand and she led the way. The boys were shouting louder now, in a way that let me know they knew I was there. One tossed a frisbee from the top bunk of a bed through the doorway and into the hall. It almost hit me. The taller one jumped down and seemed to hiss, and the shorter one hid behind the door. Then the showing off ruckus began again and for a moment I was enraptured by their capture of my attention. Then the girl tugged on my hand, and I peeked in the boys’ room which was clean, orderly even, as boys continued shouting, playful but aggressive too, only pretending I was not there. I felt afraid to enter their room and instead followed the tugging child to a small room across the hall. It had a little bed, a doll, a bear. The boys’ noise increased and it was hard to hear the girl. She was trying to say something but was whispering. I leaned closer and she looked away. “Take me with you”, she pleaded with her little voice. “Take me home.”

https://theravensperch.com/the-home-visit-by-jacqueline-st-joan/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-home-visit-by-jacqueline-st-joan

Mississippi Goddam

"Mississippi Goddam" was published in Valley Voices, a literary review of the HBCU, Mississippi Valley State University, in its special issue “A Sense of Place,” Spring 2022.

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In Spring 1927, when Sol Bryson was seventeen, the sky opened up, thunder cracked and the rains poured all the water from heaven into the Ohio River, the Allegheny, the Wabash, the Tennessee, all the tributaries that emptied into the Mississippi as it ran narrow in the Delta, and mud channels pushed back, creating one moving monster of water and all that it carried with it—houses and trees, bodies and parts of all those things and more.  Sol heard the cries and saw the red mud rising like the terror inside him. The water was rising so fast that their cotton field was becoming just a spit of land surrounded by water, a long finger pointing east.  They all ran from it, they had to.

“We go now and we go on foot!” Virgil shouted.  Nobody knows how to swim, he thought, but the wagon will just slow us down. “Leave everything,” he called to Lizzie who had climbed onto the horse that was slowly sinking into the mud.  

While the others rushed to join the lines of people heading east away from the rising tide, carrying whatever they could, Sol ran directly for the shed and jumped up for the highest nail where he’d hidden his slide whistle from his father.  He’d made it himself from an old bicycle pump, fashioning it on a picture he’d seen in a magazine.  Someday he would play the slide in his own band, but his father thought the slide was nonsense and talk of a band was even worse.  He thought singing should be confined to church.

Sol felt the river seeping into his shoes. The floorboards were turning red.  It was coming to get him!  He stuck the slide whistle into his shirt and splashed his way out.  The water soaked his legs, the slosh and grit of it, the sweat of it in the swelter of day, the cold and chill of it at night.  Added to that was everyone’s abiding terror that the white people might do anything at all in their panic.  They were never safe when white people were scared.

He spied his mother and grabbed her hand to calm the panic expanding inside him, higher in his body with a faster heartbeat, each time it rose.  “Sol-o-mon!” Lizzie sang out, tugging his arm to pull him to one side of her with Virgil on the other. “Stay close. That beast is fast and it is deep.”  

They joined the line with the others, holding onto each other, trudging the flat land east, away from the river with its creeping, rising tide, slipping on mud banks, climbing levees, whatever high ground they could find, and always watching where the birds flew to follow and rest with them on a roof or in a treetop.  Stories passed among them about black men in Greenville being taken at gunpoint to the levees, forced to dig, to pile sand, to be back enslaved to the white man’s will, shot dead if they refused, drowned if they faltered, and to survive if they were lucky. 

Sol was silent.  His heartbeat began to slow to an even rhythm, from knowing his mother was there.  He didn’t have to be touching her or even see her to feel her presence.  He’d learned from an early age, even when he was left alone in the shade, lying in an old crate stuffed with cotton while Lizzie was pumping at the washboard or spreading cotton sheets across clotheslines.   He could hear her breathing hard and it comforted him.  He could smell the sweat of her body, the bite of milk that had soured on her apron.  His tongue would begin to suck his cheeks and his lips would quiver just from her nearness.  Sol learned to whimper instead of crying out for his mother.  He knew early in his life that she would always come to him.  If not at once when he wanted her to, then eventually.  As a young boy, Sol never minded his mother kissing him, even in front of other boys who would scrunch their noses and turn away, mocking him.  Lizzie’s hands were as big as a man’s, but they were hands that had never struck him.  As Sol grew into a man he began to appreciate his mother’s beauty hiding in all that Mississippi dirt and sweat.  When she relaxed in the evening under a tree or dressed herself for church, he felt a stiff, reliable kind of pride-- her face framed by a straw hat, her teeth large and strong, her arms smooth and her step steady.  Who wouldn’t love a mother like that? he thought.  I’ll find me a wife just like Lizzie.

On that first day Solomon, Lizzie and Virgil clung to each other like mud on shoe bottoms.  Linked together through their arms and hands, the three of them were like one silky machine humming along with the others.  Virgil led the singing with his enormous voice, but first he said those special words to everybody:  “I dedicate this song to my son, Solomon.” And then everybody sang into the night air.

Walk together children

Don't you get weary

Walk together children 

Don't you get weary

Oh, talk together children

Don't you get weary

There's a great camp meeting in the promised land

 Sol Later they liked to brag about how they outwalked the Mississippi, how they found dry land and kind, generous people along the way who offered a cup of clean water, or a roasted potato, maybe a dry place to sleep.   They were even happy then, when Lizzie shaded her eyes with her hand, pointing to the thin line of pink along the horizon at sunset—“God’s paintbrush,” she said reverently, and Sol searched for anything that would burn so they could have a fire.  Then Virgil’s enormous voice filled the air as night drew closer, and Sol felt the comfort, singing along quietly under his breath.

There was a time, before Sol’s voice changed to a man’s, father and son used to harmonize.  Virgil was the bass and Sol was the tenor then. Then Sol’s voice began to change, at first cracking and unable to find its steady course, then settling into a baritone, until finally, as the boy reached his late teens, it fell into the bass range.  No longer did Virgil want to sing with Sol since their sounds were no longer unique or harmonious.  Virgil said they sounded like two pigs in heat.  Once Sol tried to fake a higher voice just so Virgil would sing with him.  He missed his father’s attention.  There was nothing he wished for more than to sing as they had.  Virgil said that Sol sounded like a weasel in heat.  Sol walked away from his father’s taunting with a bitterness and blame that spoiled the harmonious sweetness they had shared.  And a competition ensued with tense, unwritten rules.  One never sang when the other was singing.  One never admired or praised the other for their singing.  They never spoke of it.   The competition included both singing and Lizzie. 

Many days later Sol, Virgil and Lizzie found their way to her family—the Moores—where, farm outside of Starkville, at last they could rest.  Maybe they would stay there or maybe they would go on up to New Albany where Virgil’s people, the Brysons, lived.  One thing for sure, they knew they were not returning to the Delta.

Lizzie’s family stayed on the farm--Sol’s grandfather, Dick (everybody called him Granddaddy) and grandmother Emma (everybody called her Big Mama), plus his aunties—Mollie, Lelia and Lucy--all except the oldest, Julia, who had disappeared the previous year.   Nobody knew where she was.  They had stopped looking, stopped asking.  

Dick Moore had fought with the Union Colored Troops during the Civil War, and still, sixty years later, visitors respectfully referred to him as Corporal.  He carried himself like a soldier, straight- backed and grim.  He didn’t say much but he didn’t have to--he had made much of his life, and everyone could see that.  After the war,  in January 1868, Emma Parham had married Dick Moore on a warm day, years after they had met when Dick escaped the Alabama planation during the war that ripped open the land, the people, everything, after the old man in Washington emancipated them, and after Dick fled to the Union Army and enlisted for two and a half years, mustering in at Corinth in 1863 and mustering out at Baton Rouge on the last day of 1865.  Eventually Dick and Emma harnessed a mule and rode for days to Starkville where Dick claimed the acres Lincoln had promised freedmen for their service to the Union.

It was beautiful, rolling farmland.   There was a creek full of sunfish at the bottom of a hill, and there were six houses—a larger cabin that Granddaddy and Big Mama lived in and five identical small ones, all in a row, leading downhill to the creek.  The cabin sat across from a straight row of daughters’ houses and a bit up the hill from them, “so we can keep an eye on you,” Dick had said when he finished the last one.  He’d built them one by one in the girls’ age order, with Julia’s first, then Lizzie’s, and so on.  “That way,” he told Emma at the time, “maybe they’ll stay.”

There was one called “Lizzie’s House,” where Lizzie and Virgil and Sol stayed, two rooms and a front porch with a view of the woodland, the ducks, the sunset. To Sol, Granddaddy meant safety and Big Mama meant plenty.  Pale rhododendrons and bright azaleas bloomed wild, bits of cotton floated through the warm air, and even the mosquitoes were kind and left him alone. To Sol this place was a bit of heaven.  Big Mama kept chickens, so he could have an egg every day if he wanted one, and he and Lizzie could bake cornbread together.  Granddaddy gave the blessing at every meal, just like a pastor, which he was not. 

On that first morning home, even though each sister had her own little house, they all came to Big Mama’s kitchen to eat.  Lizzie was up early with her mother, rolling out the dough and patting the biscuits.  Soon the cousins, Ernest, Suda and Corene pushed open the screen door, letting it slam, and busying themselves with pumping water, clattering pans, passing biscuits and eggs.  Uncle J.D. and aunties Lelia and Lucy were there, too, all the females in aprons, all the males in denim, all hands washed as Big Mama required at her table.  The men announced they were hungry and Suda could not find her doll and Corene needed someone to tie her bow.  

Lizzie laughed at the sudden and unfamiliar commotion, the warmth of her family rising inside her like liquid.  She wiped her hands to embrace them one by one, to look each one in the eye, as it was her way to do.  She tied Corene’s bow and sat at the long oak table.

“Been way too long,” J.D. started.

“Brother, yes,” she said, whispering, “Anybody heard from Julia?”

The two younger sisters shook their heads and rolled their eyes to let Lizzie know there was more to the story than could be told at the table.

“I hear you’re planning a wedding,” she said to Lelia, who was about ten years her younger.  “Make it like mine, Lelia.  You were just a kid, probably don’t remember when Virgil and I were hitched.”

“Tell us,” said Lelia, “tell us.”  She had both girls’ attention and J.D. was listening too.

“Well, it’s not that it was such a big wedding.  More that it was true love—meant to be,” she began and the girls swooned.  “We met here in Starkville when Virgil was laying tracks and cross ties.”

“Pounding spikes and hammering the timbers, Virgil used to brag,” said her sister, Lucy.  “I remember that like it was yesterday.”

“Well, Big Mama invited the whole railroad crew to supper after church one Sunday to meet her daughters.”  At the sound of her name, Big Mama came to the table, a bowl on her hip and a wooden spoon in her hand, and they turned their eyes to watch her.

“And Virgil, he liked Emma and Mollie and Lizzie, but Lizzie was the one we wanted married next,” said Big Mama.  “Uh huh.  She was fourteen already.”  Big Mama nodded and nobody said a word.  “And Virgil knew there was an order to such things,” she added, catching each listener’s eye and turning her back.   Lizzie broke the silence.

“Solomon was born the next year,” she explained.

“And you never had another child after that?” asked Corene, and J.D. felt mortified by the question.  He cleared his throat to change the subject when Lizzie responded.

“The Lord never saw His way to making that happen,” Lizzie said.  “Or maybe it’s on account of my “woman problems.”  And she didn’t tell it to them, but she had to agree with her husband who had told her he always wondered if there was something wrong with his seed, and if God was punishing him for spilling it in too many wrong places.  As God-fearing a man as he was, he had his weakness—women.  The screen door slammed shut and Virgil came inside.

“Morning, everybody,” he said, cheerful as a chipmunk.  The girls replied all around and Big Mama bought Virgil a cup of coffee.  Big Mama was a dark-skinned woman with hair straighter than the others, on account of some Chickasaw blood, she said, and she pulled it back and tied it in the back to keep it from falling into her face and their food.

“Thank you, M’am,” he said, smiling, bringing the hot, black liquid and its sweet steam right under his nose.

“I was trying to remember,” began J.D.  “When was it you all left here for the Delta anyway?” Lizzie waited for Virgil to reply because he had been the one who wanted to get away from her family, especially from the tension between him and her parents.  

“Well, it was when Solomon was old enough to do his share,” said Virgil in a light voice, not wanting to complain about the backbreaking work they’d done in those hot, buzzy fields, plowing and planting cotton in one season, chopping the next, and picking the last.   “I didn’t mind the work.  Honed the edge of my hoe splinter thin and iron strong,” he said proudly. Yep.  One year, in my rush to get the most cotton bolls into the machine, I lost three fingers,” he said, holding up his right hand.  They all knew the story—the whizzing saws inside the cotton gin.  How he was unable to pick cotton that fall, so Lizzie and Sol picked his share and their own, too. 

When the Moore sisters began to fight, the fighting infested the others, too.   “The girls are at it again,” Big Mama said, “and only a week since Lizzie’s been back.” “Every time a new man comes onto this land, Mollie starts.   It’s a shame.” 

Over the years Lizzie had gotten used to the fact that Virgil was a pretty man and women liked him.  He wasn’t a big man or a fancy man, but he was a charmer with a dimple in one cheek and an easy smile.  His eyes had a way of talking that his mouth lacked.  So this time Lizzie didn’t say a word to him, but when she saw Mollie leaning into him, making herself and her little house open to Virgil, she warned her younger sister.

“You stay away from him. I’ll kill you, I will.” 

“I’ll kill you, I will,” Mollie taunted back. 

Something in Sol liked to hear his mother fight like that, to see a fire explode in her, make her not just his mama, but something more.  Silently he took her side, but he didn’t believe she’d kill anybody--why, her heart was so big she had trouble wringing the necks of chickens when it needed doing.  

At night Sol fell asleep on the floor beside his parents, where he could feel their silent coldness.  He was used to feelings coming and going, crossing like trains on the tracks.  But when he woke in the night and his daddy’s side of the bed was empty, and he saw a lamp in Mollie’s window and his mama sliding a shotgun underneath the bed, then Sol knew then that this bit of heaven was ending and they would have to move on.  

He got up to use the outhouse. Low sounds came from the cabin window of Mollie’s house.   On his way back he could hear his father and his aunt talking. Sol tiptoed to the spot beneath the window to listen.  He heard his father say to Mollie, “Well, the boy never could carry a tune anyway.”  Sol didn’t cry or whimper, but ran back to Lizzie’s house.

The next morning Sol grabbed an apron and boiled coffee, adding a beaten egg and crushed shells to the grounds to make it smooth.  Virgil sat at the table devouring blackberry jam and biscuits like he’d swallowed so much Mississippi dirt that he needed something sweet to go with it.   Sol saw Granddaddy coming from the bedroom and he poured a steaming cup of coffee for him, too.   Granddaddy dropped a metal strongbox on the table right by where Sol stood.  It looked like something he might have salvaged from a Confederate garrison during the war.  Inside was a roll of ten dollar bills the size of Big Mama’s fist.  Granddaddy counted out some of the money slowly, like he knew just how much things cost.

“Here you go, little man,” he said, putting a pile of bills in the pocket of Sol’s apron.  “It’s time you began taking care of your mama.”  Virgil glanced at the roll of bills.  “Now, “ Granddaddy continued, “you go to town and get two tickets on the Illinois Central so you and your Mama can ride all the way to New Albany.”  He stared at Virgil who did not look up from his plate.   “Your daddy here,” he nodded at Virgil, “looks like he’s got more energy than one man needs.  Why he can just walk to New Albany. The road will do him good.”  Sol knew that Virgil had heard what Dick said, but he also knew his father would not react to being shamed in front of his own son.  Maybe he’d walk to New Albany and maybe he wouldn’t, thought Sol, but he wouldn’t let them know.  That’s for sure.

That night Virgil visited Mollie’s cabin again and the whole farm knew it, what with the windows open and Mollie singing Bessie Smith and Virgil backing up a chord in bass harmony—announcing their dirty stuff for everybody to hear.Sol saw Lizzie softly close the door to her house up the hill and he felt that sharp cut in his gut again.   “You hurting my mama!” he cried outside of Mollie’s house.  He knew he couldn’t out-fight the man, but maybe he could out-sing him.   He started with the “St. Louis Blues.”

The door to Mollie’s cabin popped open and Virgil appeared on the porch, pulling his suspenders up around his small shoulders and scanning the yard.  He stepped down to the grass and circled the cabin, slowly, deliberately, looking for Solomon.  Leila and Lucy raced to get Lizzie and they all three hurried to the big porch to where Dick and Big Mama were sitting in their rocking chairs.  

“I’m gonna go stop those two now,” Dick said reaching forward for the railing to pull himself up.   His body teetered as he rose.  

“No, Daddy!” shouted Lizzie. “This is something Solomon’s going to do for himself at last.”  Her words surprised them.

Unlike his usual pattern of repenting to the Lord and of begging Lizzie for forgiveness, Virgil returned to Mollie’s cabin and closed the door without a sound.  Soon the kerosene lamp glowed in the window behind the curtains.  Then the singing began.  The family listened in the dark as Mollie’s high notes and Virgil’s low notes strained to be heard, then turned to full-throated tones that seemed to rumble down the hill past Lizzie’s house.  Sol was in the yard, still circling, then standing still, putting all of his life into his voice, deep and dark, he sang “I hate to see that evening sun go down,” like he was the one making it go down against his own will, and the other voices soon faded and Sol’s was the only one in the night.  That was when he reached inside his shirt between the buttons that Lizzie had sewed on the front, wrapped his fingers around the slide whistle and pulled it out into the air.  He wet the reed that he had shaved thin until it fit perfectly into the mouthpiece at the top of the tube.  He brought clean saliva from the back of his throat, let it fall lazily in whatever pattern it made, and wet his lips inside and out, pulling the reed through them over and over until it was just the right mix of soft and stiff.  Then he began to blow into the whistle, softly at first, until he had the slide arm in place;  then he filled his chest with air and softened his wet mouth again, blowing with all might so the sound would carry back to the Delta.  He pulled the whistle’s slide slowly so that its taunting would rise and fall in a mocking rebuke, announcing to the world that his father was a mean-talking, hypocritical SOB.  Sol did not have to say a disrespectful word.   The shadows fell over him and slipped past Leila’s house into the foundation of Lucy’s house at the bottom.  Julia’s house stood empty at the top of the hill.  Mollie’s shadow stood by the window to her cabin as she closed the windows and Sol’s last clear note sounded in the damp Mississippi air.   It wasn’t long before the farm was so silent that only the crickets and the frogs had anything to say.

In the cooling night air, Sol turned toward his mother’s house.  There was a kerosene lamp shining in the window but the wick was burning low.  Could Lizzie be asleep? he wondered.  He needed her strong arms around him and climbed the two wooden steps to the little porch.  He was worried about entering the house.  How would his mother feel about his shaming his father?  He was her husband and she was  a loyal wife, after all.  Afraid to know and afraid not to know, he sat on the old bench and leaned back against the house.  There was no pleasure in this victory, if it was a victory, and he could only find that out from Lizzie.  He got up and tiptoed to the door.  He turned the knob and stepped inside.  He looked around.  Was she there?  He went to the table to turn up the lamp.  His pallet was tidy on the floor.  His parents’ bed covers were messy and nobody was there.  He looked out the window—maybe she was out there looking for him—but there was not a sound or a sight to be had.  Just dark and quiet.  He could not sense Lizzie anywhere and he began to panic.  Had his father killed her?  Taken her away?  There were no big hands to hold his, no arms to comfort, no approving kiss.  Sol was too old to cry and too tired to go searching for her, but he would not stay in that place of No Lizzie.  He ran outside, slamming the door, cracking the night’s silence as he went. 

In the morning, when Big Mama stepped out in the damp grass and growing light, she thanked the Lord for the day He’d given them.  She found her grandson leaning against the outhouse, humming to himself.  Solomon’s a man now, she thought. That little boy is gone, dammit, he’s a goddam man.   

“Come on now,” she said gently and brought him in.  

Granddaddy was only partially dressed, still in the long johns he wore year round.  He was pulling up his overalls when Sol stepped inside the cabin and sat at the table. “Well, young man,” Granddaddy said.  “You sure gave your Daddy your own brand of a what for.” He looked up at his smirking grandson. 

An emotion stuck in Sol’s throat and Dick recognized it—the moment before a grown man breaks into tears. The old sofa creaked as Dick leaned against a pillow and pulled his grandson’s body up against his own, holding him firmly in both arms like he did frightened, homesick soldiers during the war.   Sol’s fists opened slowly then and rested gently on the folded quilt that lay across the sofa’s back.  His breathing quickened as hurt rolled down his cheeks in thick lines and fell wet and heavy onto the cloth of Dick’s overalls. 

“Well, well, well,” said Dick, like it was just another day.  Sol looked up at him.  “Unfortunately, you had to be the one to teach your daddy not to take what is not given.  The seventh’s commandment, you know. And the sixth,” he added.  “It’s the Lord’s Word.”  The old man drew a deep breath. “Solomon, where’s that money I gave you for train tickets you so you and your mama can ride to New Albany?  Did your daddy take it from you?”

Sol grinned.  “Oh, no, Granddaddy.  I bought the tickets and buried them in a box by the henhouse.”  

No one ever spoke of the victory Sol had over his father, because Virgil had started it, because two wrongs don’t make a right, because it is a confusing thing to defeat your own father and, strangely, Sol thought, pride is not a part of it.  Sol knew what he liked and arguing was not one of those things.  He’d been shocked by the intensity of what had happened.   He kept quiet about it.  Big Mama brought Sol some buttermilk and they left him on the sofa to sleep. 

Out on the porch of Lizzie’s House, Virgil was whimpering, begging Lizzie for forgiveness.  

“Your pride is hurt,” Lizzie said. “That’s natural.   Solomon out-sung you and you couldn’t enjoy the night the way you’d planned it. “ 

“But darlin’, you know it’s only you.  You and me.  We should take those tickets back home ourselves.  Leave Solomon here.  He likes it here, you can tell.  And the country would be good for him.”  He tried to catch her eye, but Lizzie wasn’t letting him.  She poured the last bit of whiskey she could find into him and let Virgil lie in her lap one more time. 

“I know, honey, I know,” she said, stroking his foolish head, sighing, thinking that they’d run away from one nightmare in the Delta right into another.  

“And it’s a long, long walk to New Albany.  I just don’t think I could walk that far.”  Virgil smiled and settled into her lap, finding his place again, like he always did.

“Oh, it is a long way, isn’t it?” she replied.

Virgil woke to the fading sound of a train whistle, crazy from not being in his own charge, and without his wife and unable to speak.  He thought of Mollie and knew that for Lizzie’s sake, he had deserved what he got.  He forgave himself, but could he ever forgive Solomon?   That day he sought everywhere the comforting heat of the sun on his face while he sipped Big Mama’s sweet tea through a straw.  Days later, Virgil decided to follow the railroad tracks to New Albany instead of taking the road through Tupelo.  The day he left the Moore farm, Mollie stayed out of sight all day, moving aside the curtain on her window only one time to peek.  She had her own shame to work out.   Big Mama and Leila and Lucy were in the kitchen while Dick just kept rocking on the front porch, keeping his eye on Virgil’s back until he saw it disappear up and over the hill.   

Along the way Virgil met hobos in their camps and joined them in a careful, but friendly way, sharing the food Big Mama had packed for the trip, turning his pockets inside out to show himself penniless, not worth robbing.  There were five men and they all seemed to be loners, but they shared their smokes and their campfire.  They took turns keeping watch for wolves and worse while the others slept. In the morning, the men showed Virgil how to hop a freight train, how to judge its speed and measure your own, avoid the railroad guards, stay away from the coupling, find the open door, a steady handle, locate the right-size mound next to the track to take off from.  It involved complicated maneuvers and it took Virgil all of one day and most of the next before he gave up and decided to walk. He laughed.  His farming days were over, he knew.  He would try to get his old railroad job back. He could hardly wait to get home to tell Lizzie and to see his parents.  But he didn’t care if he ever saw Solomon again. 

Over the next few years, as Sol grew into a New Albany Bryson, he stayed out of his father’s way and spent most of his time at the local colored school trying to catch up with what his cousins had already learned.  In the Delta, he’d been unable to attend school most of the time because of crop schedules, and the fearsome distances he’d have had to walk not knowing if white people would bother him, and because his parents couldn’t pay the heating fee that was required by the colored schools in winter.  When he wasn’t doing reading and writing lessons, he sometimes hauled water and peeled vegetables with Lizzie in white people’s kitchens. On Sundays they attended church together at Hall’s Chapel on the corner.  Although Virgil stayed home, Virgil’s father, called Daddy Bob, his brother, called Uncle Henry, his mother, Granny Siller, and all the others gathered outside to walk down the dirt road together, meeting other families along the way, making small talk.  The women and girls in the family committed the sin of pride on Sundays when they adorned their natural beauty in layers of pastel cotton that Granny Siller had dyed herself.  They wrapped soft sashes around their slim waists and tied woven bonnets with ribbons to keep the sun off their faces.  They flirted with Sol who wore a blue suit and sang a solo in the Sunday choir.

Sol liked to brag to his cousins about the juke joints in the Delta, acting like he’d frequented them.  He hadn’t.  Lizzie never would have allowed that kind of devil’s work, but that hadn’t kept Sol from standing outside and listening.  When they all sat around in summer after sunset, if someone else started an evening blues tune or a work song, he’d add his bass to it, and some workhouse song gutteral, “a note or two, here and there, to taste,” he’d say, “the way a good cook adds pepper.”   

Take this hammer, (Uh!) carry it to the captain, ( Uh!)

Take this hammer, (Uh!) carry it to the captain (Uh!)

Take this hammer, (Uh!) carry it to the captain (Uh!)

Tell him I’m gone, tell him I’m gone. 

Virgil never joined the singing, but Lizzie could tell he wanted to.

“Tell that boy to get himself into trade school,” Virgil told Lizzie one day, right in front of Sol, not speaking to him directly.  Sol wasn’t interested in learning a trade.  He had a natural talent he intended to use—his voice, a round tone, smooth as sunflower oil rolling down the throat.  Daddy Bob had bought a radio for the house—they were the first Negroes in New Albany to own one.  The cousins would come over in the evenings to listen to music coming out of Chicago and Harlem.   They danced to Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey’s tunes to get the music out of them and into their limbs, into their feet, but when Paul Robeson’s voice came over the airwaves, everybody stood completely still to let the mood soak deeper inside.  Paul Robeson, Sol thought— football player, Broadway star, the man with the voice, another singer from Harlem.  “That’s what I want,” he said.  That’s where I’ll go.  That’s who I’ll be.”

“Chicago,” they insisted to Sol.  “Not New York.  We know people in Chicago.  We don’t know anybody in Harlem.  Why that’s another country.”  

“Harlem!” Sol smiled.  Everybody could see the stars in his eyes.  “I’ll find Paul Robeson, I’ll sing spirituals.  I’ll be on Broadway like him.”  Sol’s mind was made up and they could respect that—the boy was a man now and everybody knew he had real talent—if he had a chance, he should take it.

Virgil was working out of town the day Sol said goodbye to Mississippi, and the rest of the family, Uncle Henry and the cousins all came to the station to see him off.  They’d seen lots of young men leave New Albany, and the scene was a common one.  A boy might have to travel alone, but no one left without family seeing them off.  They even pooled their money for Sol’s ticket, but they came up short.

“That’s alright,” he said, upbeat.  “It’s enough to get me to Washington, D.C.  Why that’s almost next door to New York.  I’ll find a job and get the rest of the way on my own.  Much obliged.”  

At the platform by the colored car, he turned to face Lizzie.  His mother had worn her Sunday best, even the straw hat he’d once found, cleaned up and given to her one Easter.  There they stood, their arms around each other, their eyes drinking in a long last look.  

Suddenly, Lizzie pushed Sol away.  “You go on now,” she said.  She took a deep breath then and exhaled a hum as strong and long as the train he was about to board.  “You come back,” she sang out to him, but Sol did not hear.

On the train Sol took an aisle seat and looked around at the crowded car that had come up all the way from New Orleans.  By the door at one end of the car he saw a Pullman porter in a dark suit with shiny buttons down the front.  The porter straightened his cap and eyed Sol, approaching him with a broad smile and a crisp ten-dollar bill, folded lengthwise.  He held it between his fingers as if paying for something. He leaned in, whispering to Sol.

“I used to work with your daddy.  He asked me to give this to you.”  

Sol Bryson joined the great migration north, taking a train from Union County, Mississippi and arriving at Union Station, Washington, D.C. where he found a white marble city full of black people--with a respected university, a vibrant community, and a spirit of freedom and insistence that became his own.  Sol rented a room for ten dollars per month at 726 Second Street N. W., and he looked for a job.  Two things he knew for sure--how to cook and how to sing.   Everybody needs to eat, he thought.  And everybody needs a song. 

Author’s Note:  Sol Brtyson was my father-in-law who was blessed with a beautiful baritone voice. The dates, places, and characters in this story are real, but the facts are imagined.  I call this form “family fiction.”

Summer of Love

This memoir excerpt was published i Northern Colorado Writers Anthology, Spring 2023.

In June 1967 Pete learned he had been selected for a summer job in California with the Student Health Project, a federal anti-poverty program.  He asked and I said yes and watched him move into action.  Pete was the great planner, the great provider, controller, idea man, with notes on index cards in his pocket and boxes of loose change on the dashboard.  We had to get to California soon.  But where to get married? The District, where I lived, had a waiting period for blood testing; Virginia, where Pete lived, prohibited interracial marriage. The laws of slavery had written that one-part Negro blood meant you were the master's property, and Jim Crow titrated blood along similar lines.

      One week the law was violence; the next week the law was liberation, and (to paraphrase Dinah Washington) what a different a week can make. On June 12, 1967, a date now known as Loving Day, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Loving vs. Virginia, struck down anti-miscegenation laws, starting with the one in Virginia.  Aware of the historical moment we occupied, Pete called ahead to let the Arlington County Courthouse clerks know when we were coming. The person he spoke with was flustered and said that they were not ready. They said that we should wait, but we were not waiting for Virginia anymore.      

     “We’ve not received the Supreme Court’s order back from the Attorney General yet,” the clerk said to him.  Oh, cradle of the Bill of Right, get your foot off our necks!

     “Well, we’re coming,” Pete replied.   “We’ll be there Friday, so I guess we’ll have to bring a Washington Post reporter with us.”   Pete was bluffing, of course, about the reporter.  But when we appeared on June 16 at the courthouse, no one blinked an eye.  The forms asked about our bloodlines, and in the box marked "race," Pete wrote "B" for Black and I wrote "H" for human.  The justice of the peace, who was also a Baptist minister, seemed excited to perform the ceremony—not because we were the first interracial couple in Virginia’s history—I’m not sure if he even noticed that—but because he had composed what was then something new, an ecumenical wedding service between a Christian and a Jew.  He was planning to use it the following week and said he’d like to practice his ceremony on us—since Pete was B for Baptist and I was H for Hebrew!  Ours was a short wedding ceremony in chambers with four of our friends, and a judge prattling on about Adam and Eve and a babbling brook.  We suppressed giggles, rolled our eyes, and got out of there as fast as we could.

The next day, we loaded up Pete’s taxicab with its new $29.99 Earl Scheib aqua blue paint job.  Then Pete and I, like thousands of young people that summer, went to San Francisco, where we lived in Haight Ashbury.  After all, it was the Summer of Love.

A Tour of East Colfax Avenue, Denver, Colorado, circa 1974

The New York Quarterly in 2022.

To wander East Colfax Avenue in the 1970s is to be young, female, angry and ripe, a June tomato planted early, reddens on the vine, splits open and bleeds. It runs down your leg and stains the street. You don’t stop, you don’t wipe, you let it remain, to remind us of the disappeared women, to remember Joan Little, the inmate who refused the guard in the prison kitchen with an ice pick. You stop to look in a storefront window between Race Street and Vine. It is Woman-to-Woman Bookstore, where more ideas are born on the stuffed sofa in the basement than there are books on the shelves. Sniff the fresh carpentry, leave late after Saba’s Judo class, stop by the Satire Lounge, sit on the kitchen side, where Flacco smothers burritos with sour cream and green chile and Linda serves it up. Watch out, the plate is hot. This is a time that exists in our mouths, the melting cheese of desire and the hot peppers of language. You are licking your fingers, young and inky. You are fired up Hey, hey ho ho, patriarchy has got to go. You are hawking our monthly newspaper at 9 th & Corona, Big Mama Rag, pages and pages of women on the rag, on the rage, on the Rag Mama Rag, her words, her glory and her size, the fact that she is alive and sells for twenty-five cents. An underground newspaper, literally, she has arisen from a basement on Gaylord Street. Once the FBI paid an informant to burgle that office, trash files, pour glue in your Smith Corona. It put Big Mama on the front page and our bad-ass Pat Schroeder pushed Congress to investigate. Now, forget Gaylord Street, and join the tour, take a right on Colfax with hundreds of others to Take Back the Night. Pass the porn parlor and the strip joints. After all, it is U.S. 40 in the city, and hey, there’s Sid King himself, egging on the hecklers, as a pack of dykes steps up to face them off—lavender tee shirts, tiny tits, tight jeans, uh uh uh uh uh. On your right, the immaculate Cathedral, as expected, turns its back on us as we march by, However you dress, wherever you go,yes means yes and no means no. But it needn’t have bothered, as each cross street disappears as we pass by on Colfax. We lead an invisible parade of passion and principles that marches still. Something that is a permanent marker on the asphalt, embossed on the avenue itself. It stains your fingertips after you read it, you can’t get it off you, why would you want to, why even try?

If It’s True, It Must Also Be Beautiful

Nominated for Best of the Net 2020

BLAST, The Missouri Review’s online-only prose anthology, features fiction and nonfiction too lively to be confined between the covers of a print journal. Jacqueline St. Joan’s story “If It’s True, It Must Also Be Beautiful” is infused with rich historical detail drawn from the author’s research into her own family’s history–research that has inspired a collection in process.

———————

Glenties, County Donegal, Ireland 1819 

I pray I’m not breaking the sacred seal of the confessional to tell you that the townspeople think Nancy Boyle is a bit strange—but lovely. Of course, they don’t say so to her face, as she already has pride aplenty and doesn’t need a drop more. The general opinion is that Nancy’s vanity is due to the sad fact that she is an only child, which is her mother’s sorrow—and now that sorrow is turning to shame, what with Nancy being with child, but unmarried. When Richard Moore confessed to me his willingness to wed Nancy Boyle and take her to America, I asked her parents, Peter and Margaret Boyle, and Nancy herself, to meet me at the rectory. And, later, to join Richard Moore in a cup of tea at their house so we could discuss what was to be done. As the town’s only priest, I knew it was my duty, even though this kind of thing should be the Lord’s doing and not mine.

I plan to say little or nothing at our meeting, and I am a bit late, snapping the horse’s reins as we ride through County Donegal, a vast landscape of stubbly fields where stumps and roots from the old forests are scattered here and there. Cloud formations broad as the fields reflect off frosty lakes, run pink to red in the late winter sunsets; and just before evening, all the colors fade like dried blood. The Boyles’ home at Glenties is more than a hovel but less than a farmhouse. Once inside, I feel a bit trapped with curtains of gray rain closing in, and for a moment I long for a sight into the distance, but the few windows are foggy. Before I take a seat, I make the sign of the cross and bless the house.

“May the Good Lord bless the four corners of this house. Bless the door that opens wide to stranger and to kin. And bless them all who come within.”

“Amen,” says Margaret, getting up from her knees, leaning on her husband’s arm.

The house is a thatched, modest place improved largely by Margaret’s sense of organization and her insistence on cleanliness, as well as Nancy’s pencil sketches that adorn one corner. Peter Boyle, in his fresh white shirt, sits with the young couple, Richard and Nancy, lighting his little clay pipe. Margaret, with her unwashed hair pulled back tightly into a bun the size of a biscuit, stays behind her husband. Nancy is silent in what must be her best dress, moss green and modest, around her neck, a tiny cross from St. Patrick’s Day. Richard, in his common linen shirt, waistcoat, and heavy black boots, is telling Peter about Europe where, four year earlier, he fought with the Irish 44th Regiment in the British Army at Waterloo and then joined the occupation of Paris. Peter interrupts Richard and looks my way.

“Something for a rainy weather, Father?” he asks, already starting to pour from the old jug. Recently Peter has become an old man crippled by life. “Will ya take another drop?” Peter asks Richard. Richard squeezes his lips together and shakes his head. Peter leans forward, craning his thick neck toward the window, wiping the glass with his fingers. His face makes a shadowy reflection, the chair rocks, and he fumbles. “Looking for me hound,” he says. “Did ya see her out the door, Father?”

“I didn’t,” I say.

“That dirty dog is not coming into my house,” insists Margaret, sniffing in Nancy’s direction.

Peter looks at Margaret, who refuses to return his gaze. “Well, it looks like rain, so she’d best be coming in.” He strains to stand, and Richard reaches to steady the old man. Don’t bother,” he says, slapping Richard’s hand away, making light of his injury and its unending pain. “Ox got the best of me . . . long time ago now.”

Margaret sits behind her husband with her needles and patches in her lap. She runs her palm across the handiwork and relaxes back into the chair. Her nose is red from a head cold or from crying, or maybe both. She takes a white handkerchief from her dress pocket and blows her nose. Margaret’s political opinions are well known, and she is not at all sure about this Richard Moore. She does not cater to Irishmen who take up arms for the Protestants to fight Catholics—even Catholics who are French.

“Sure and it must be a mortal sin, Father,” she said to me at the rectory when I mentioned Richard Moore as a husband for Nancy. Margaret is old enough to remember when it used to be hunting season for priests in Donegal and the Holy Mass could only be celebrated in hiding. Once, the English arrested her own kin for not paying their taxes and their tithes. “They were screaming for help to us—we were also the helpless—as they carted them away.” Whenever she tells that story, she cries like the child she was when it happened. Margaret cheered with the others when a landlord was shot after evicting a dozen families. She said it did her heart good to know there were those who opposed the tyrants. And she still can speak what was our own Irish tongue, before it was outlawed by the English and forgotten by the people.

Now Nancy—her only surviving child—first raped by a stranger while she was salmon fishing at Lough Anna and now having to make the devil’s choice—bear a child unwed or marry a traitor like Richard Moore. That’s how Margaret sees it. “God forgive me,” she pleaded to me, “but I pray He takes that child back, so I may have my only daughter again, or I’ll raise that baby for her! Who knows where this fellow might take her—India or Canada or some wild place called Ohio?” Margaret does not want Nancy going away at all, especially not so far away. It will be a kind of death for her, another endless ache. Still, she is a practical woman and knows there is a big problem and a task at hand: to nab a good one for Nancy—quick, before her star fades.

Richard Moore sits, wicker chair by wicker chair, next to Nancy Boyle and the glowing fire. He holds out his cup so Peter can pour the whiskey. Maybe the drink will help with the talking. We say what we do know how to say:

Take another drop?
That’s a fine hound ya got out there. 

Oh, it’s not worth a cuckoo’s spittle. 

Richard is a tall man, lean and straight-backed with ruddy skin, sandy hair, and soft, lidded, pleading eyes. He is the kind of man who lives in the future—planning, dreaming, saving today for tomorrow, restrained—like a real man should be. He’s a bit of a snob, bragging to me that he understood the “peasant mentality” and all; but, to be fair, Richard’s had lots of experience with it since his return from the British Army—mean looks, challenges to fistfights, dirty names and curses that follow him on the street. It’s another reason he plans to get away—plus the intoxicating idea of being landed. The look he’s giving Nancy says to me it’s more than land he craves. And not just her beauty, he told me in private, but it’s something else in her that he needs.

“Not the way a drunk needs a drink, Father,” he explained, “or the way a child needs a mother, more like a sinner needs a priest.” We laughed about it then. Still, we all agreed that everybody in the room must consent to a marriage and a voyage to America. Richard knows he has the advantage, given Nancy’s condition, but he senses Nancy’s uncertainty and her mother’s outright disdain.

Nancy pours for her mother and herself from a china teapot—chipped and cracked in several places but repaired and painted with delicate bluebells and catmint. Her long black hair is tied up with hemmed strips of cloth she saved from her mother’s old dresses. Several long wavy strands refuse to be confined.

“Our Nancy brewed that tea from chamomile she picked herself,” Peter says, pausing, pointing up at the tied bunches of dried wild plants suspended from the rafters—nettle leaves, dandelion root, calendula flowers, and thyme. “Not a lazy bone in that girl’s body.” He smiles, then looks away, grimacing. The mention of Nancy’s body causes the embarrassing memory of its condition to rise in all our minds. Margaret blushes, but Nancy does not. It is not clear whether Nancy will accept Richard, but her dark eyes shine when she looks into his. It is a bold step for a young woman—to let a man know she will look that directly and deeply.

Peter is at the window with his cane, acting like he’s checking for weather, but we all know knows he’s hoping to catch sight of the dog. He has a chicken bone in his hand.

“That hound ought to be catching her own birds,” Margaret shouts to Peter, which starts her coughing fit. Nancy turns away from her parents’ squabble and faces the raindrops catching on the windowpane and offering their soothing soft sound.

Richard is nodding too much, talking too fast, as he makes his case to Peter, when it’s Margaret he should be convincing.

“Our sergeant saw the broadsheets outside the American Land Office in London, and he told us all about it,” Richard is saying. “Best financial opportunity in history—lots of land for very little money, rich land with water and forests full of deer and game of all sorts. They are wanting people along the Ohio River.” Now his hands and arms spread open and his eyes include us all. “You only have to put a quarter down and build a small cabin within two years, they give you a loan, and it’s yours, on the installment plan. ‘Land is freedom,’” he quotes the land company brochure. To Richard, America is a giant step away from being an Irish cottier and a tiny step closer to becoming gentry.

“I hear there are savages in Ohio,” Peter comments, leaning forward, placing his elbows on his knees for balance, and getting just that much closer to Richard. He is asking the questions he thinks Nancy must be mulling.

“Savages are everywhere,” Richard responds quietly, “like what happened to Nancy.” Everybody knows it was rape, and as it was a stranger who’d done it, and the officials caught him, too, and jailed him quick. The man rushed to confess like a sinner on Good Friday, so they don’t fault Nancy. Still, there is some unwarranted shame, plus nobody knows what will happen to a bastard child like that, God love him. “But you don’t have to worry,” Richard is explaining, “the Americans have fought off most and made treaties with the others. They’re only selling land where the Indians have moved far away.” He pauses, uncertain whether Peter is convinced. Margaret signals to Nancy to pour her another cup and clears her throat to be heard. She does not look up or speak to anyone in particular.

“God punishes those who take land from the ones it truly belongs to—the ones who had it first,” she says. We know she is talking, not about America, but about Ireland.

“I hear there’s a Petition to the British Parliament for Catholic Emancipation,” Richard says, changing the subject.

“Pray God,” she replies, and we all mutter agreement.

“But there’s lots of Irish in America already, so we’ll stick together,” Richard laughs. “They say that’s why they call it O’Hio.” Peter and I chuckle, as expected, but the joke falls flat. “Plus I’m pretty good with a pistol and a musket,” Richard adds, and thunder cracks. Nancy startles at the mix of it—the thunder, the pistol and the musket. She must want his promise of protection.

Richard is from nearby village of Ardara. He and Nancy were childhood sweethearts of a sort as youngsters in school at St. Brendan’s, and, when I asked her, she said she’s always carried what she called “a feeling” about Richard. She did not say just what the feeling was, and I did not ask. His family is respectable—good Catholics and hard workers; they even own cows, pigs, chickens, and goats. In the early days, before the incident with the ox, Peter cut turf with the Richard’s family for the church when it was being built and mixed the limestone too. Margaret tatted lace for the altar cloths and the curtains. Nancy was only three years old when they buried their firstborn son, taken by brain fever, in a tiny grave behind the church, so St. Brendan’s is a place precious to them. Nancy and Richard grew up, and he went away to war. Now Nancy is a grown woman, not one to fancy a man’s pity, but she must wonder who would marry her. What will happen to her? Will she remain a spinster at her wheel in her parents’ home? So when I told them that Richard asked to visit, to ask for her hand, her father said to her at the rectory out loud and clearly before God, “Nancy, I want ya to have a new and better life. Love him,” he said, “and let him love you.”

Peter opens the subject a bit. “Have ya saved enough money for the down payment and all that?”

“I have, sir. Plus enough for the voyage, and the carriage travel, plus the things we’ll need—a one-room cabin to start,” he adds, looking around their one-room cabin. Richard glances at Nancy, and she smiles, looking excited. “We’ll have to work hard and send crops to market to pay for the installments,” he says. Nancy nods her understanding of the hard labor he is asking of her. “But we’ll get land along the river, so we won’t have far to go to market.”

Peter interrupts. “I’d like ya to have all the money before ya go. If you’re wanting to take our girl all the way to Ohio, you’d best have all of it.” Peter’s words draw Richard’s eyes toward him. “I’m afraid there will be no dowry,” he says plainly. “Crops have been few.”

“And the landlord takes most,” adds Margaret, “and the King just keeps placing more and more debt on us.” She pauses when she sees Peter pour himself yet another one. She’s used to counting them, and lets him know it with a side glance. She brags, “Why, Peter used to make horse collars, but no more now that the English replaced ours with their own.” She told me she wonders what ideas Richard picked up from the English while he was in the Army? She wants him to know that her husband is not lazy. She gets up to put on the kettle, turning her back to the fellow who intends to take her Nancy away, and she reaches for a dishtowel so fresh she must have put it out just before he knocked on the door.

“Of course,” says Richard, pouring himself a small one. “None expected. Not in America. A dowry is an old-fashioned idea anyway. And there’s no rush to sail. We can live in Donegal and save for the rest, if that is your wish.”

Nancy is squirming in what Richard is weaving—I imagine her drawing the line of his profile down the center of a page, a kind of a heart-shaped face, a pouty mouth, always a little bit open, and shining light eyes. But what moves him inside, she wonders? She hungers for real contact, not an imitation of it, and she may be terrified, but she looks completely calm. Richard is a handsome, traveled, God-fearing man with some money in his pocket and big dreams. Nancy has dreams herself—to make a home, of course, but she also dreams—she told me—to cross the ocean and find a new place to be, new lakes and skies to draw with her colored pencils, new earth in which to plant seeds she would take with her to this Ohio. Is Richard the best opportunity in history or just another English speculation? Is she a fool to go with a man whose soul she does not know? Or is she the luckiest girl in the county to have Richard Moore at her parents’ hearth asking for her hand?

Nancy is a dreamer. Oh, she does her work—about half, anyway—and then she appears in the woods with her herb bag or by the river or the lake with her fishing net and the pencils and paper she must have. She scrubs floors at the manor and cleans shit houses for the shillings to buy them. But the pictures Nancy draws can break something open inside you. And Richard has not even seen any of them up close. Margaret silently rearranges the baskets and the pans near the stove. Nancy brings her the old teapot and stands close enough to her mother to listen to the rhythm of her breathing, and I realize that Nancy will be homesick for this old woman.

What will Richard say next, to sign off on this contract? He’s not hearing any objection from Margaret; if she feels one, she is keeping it to herself. And Peter is with him. Anyone can sense that. Richard turns to Nancy, who is moving away from her mother and stepping into the corner where her bonnet hangs on a ten-penny nail. There’s a small statue of the Virgin Mary, and Nancy’s sketches are tacked to the wall.

“Come,” Nancy says, gesturing for Richard to take her outstretched hand, and I can imagine her gesturing to him like that through the years, allowing him to be closer and closer. He draws himself up next to her. Margaret looks pleased. She tries to catch Peter’s eye to share their knowing of what Nancy is doing—she’s putting Richard to the test. They trust that Nancy knows how to get to the heart of the matter. Peter opens the door to let the hound in from the cold. There is a quick, electric scent in the air, and then the door shuts. She’s a skinny brown thing and she smells like a barnyard. The dog goes straight to Richard, sniffing his boots suspiciously. Peter upends his cup of whiskey, then limps to add a chunk of peat to the fire. When he stumbles, Margaret is there to catch his arm. There is a shift of light toward evening. Margaret reaches for candles while sheets of rain drench the fields of Donegal, the lake overflows its banks, and the young salmon hide in murky water under a darkened, colorless sky.

Nancy and Richard stand in front of her three drawings, their backs to her parents. Nancy points to her sketch of Lough Anna. It is a large drawing, the size of a side table, and it is tacked to the wall. It shines in silver shadings with such detail that I swear I can see wrens in the distant trees beyond the water’s edge, the flat hills at a distance, the burly cloudbanks of winter. Richard tilts his head, reading the corner date.

“You drew this recently?”

Nancy nods.

How can this drawing be so beautiful when something so terrible happened to her there? There is no trace of pain in it, but neither is it a pretense; it is more like a place that has held so much for so long that it has incorporated all of that into itself.

Nancy watches Richard’s confused response to her work and points to the second sketch. The thick paper is creamy and rectangular. It is a colored drawing of a faceless soldier. Richard’s eyes widen; obviously, he recognizes himself in it. There are no marching lines of young men in their bright stockings and red coats, no fifes and drums. No, none of that. It shows a lonely man sitting on the ground, his back to a wall, his bare head thick with reddish, matted hair and resting in his hands. Bones on bones, muscles on muscles. Against the wall is a musket, and on the ground, a three-cornered hat and an old rucksack. The soldier is crying; he is crippled by war, but will not let it show, and the artist is kind enough to respect that. Richard takes a sharp breath, and I know what he is remembering. He once described to me his pal, Paddy—how he’d abandoned Paddy on the field to die alone—and he is thinking of the stunned eyes of the French soldier who cried out to God, “Mon Dieu,” when Richard’s saber cut open the boy’s guts. Richard doesn’t look at Nancy, who must know all these things that are broken inside him.

Nancy reaches for the last drawing. She removes the slender nail and places the paper in Richard’s trembling hands. It is another black-and-white pencil sketch of a gray, shimmering graveyard where a little girl stands, looking up at her mother, whose face is soaked with tears and whose thin body is heavy with grief. What could be a worse sight for a child to see? And its weight is doubled by being recalled on the page and now tripled in the seeing of it. A single tear appears in the corner of Richard’s eye. Nancy’s gaze follows the tear as it reaches the peak of his cheekbone and falls onto his boot. She bends down, takes the drop with her finger. She places it on her tongue, and drinks his tear.

***Author’s note:

Richard and Nancy Moore were my great-great-grandparents. This story is part of a collection of short historical fiction I am writing—what I call “family fiction,” as it is based on deep research into my own and my former husband’s ancestry. Richard and Nancy arrived in New York in1825 from New Brunswick, Canada, on the schooner Lady Hunter, accompanying an unnamed girl. With my cousin’s help, we identified and visited the seventy acres in Salineville, Ohio, (about twelve miles west of the Ohio River) that Richard Moore purchased from the US Government as evidenced by a deed signed by President Andrew Jackson in 1831—one year after the Indian Removal Act forced the native people of that area to migrate west of the Mississippi River. Research for this story included a visit to Glenties and Ardara in County Donegal, as well as research in museums, churches, and other historical sites in Ireland. In writing this family fiction, I tried to rely on documented facts, and the rest I had to imagine.

My Sisters Made of Light

In 1958 the air was still sour with the stench of the slaughters that had occurred eleven years earlier when the British ran like dogs and India cracked. The blade that slashed the map also partitioned the bodies of the people, etching fear in their bellies and revenge in their hearts. Ten million people migrated. Lines and lines of Hindus from the Indus River Valley, in what would later be designated “Pakistan,” packed their lorries, rode bullocks, and walked, to cross the border into India. Lines and lines of Muslims from India carried all that they owned to be part of the new Islamic nation. Rioting occurred first in Calcutta and then spread to Punjab. The refugees scouted the routes to avoid one another in the passing. If a trainful of Hindus was murdered by Muslims from Lahore (and they were), then a trainful of Muslims would be murdered by Sikhs and Hindus from Amritsar (and they were). Entire families were butchered and their body parts were delivered by horseback to their villages. The people emptied baskets of breasts and pails of penises onto the ground—even the stubs of baby penises with scrotums like tiny figs. The soil was soaked with all the lost futures, and when it was done, when the trauma finally subsided to abide in the bodies of the people, they had to plant seeds in, and eat the fruit of, the same earth. Sikhs and Muslims alike knew the taste of each other’s blood well, and they kept to their own.

Kulraj and Nafeesa in London. Romeo and Juliet in Verona. A Muslim and a Sikh in Pakistan. All of history conspired against them, but no matter. They would find a new way.

MY SISTERS MADE OF LIGHT READING GUIDE
The questions and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your reading of Jacqueline St. Joan’s My Sisters Made of Light, a drama set inside Pakistan’s human rights movement, 1957 to 1994. My Sisters Made of Light follows three generations of a Pakistani family as they make their way through life in the political, social, and religious maze that is their motherland. This novel pulls readers into the fascinating, heartbreaking, and often terrifying world of honor crimes against women in Pakistan through the life and family history of Ujala, a dedicated teacher. When Ujala decides to follow the path for which her mother has prepared her, she goes a little crazy before she pushes aside fears for her own safety to help other women escape from the impossible situations. 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: 

1. How does St. Joan’s use of alternating Ujala’s first-person narrative with the narrator’s third-person narrative from 1958 (when her parents met) and 1983 (when her mother died) affect your response to, and involvement with, the characters?

2. Nafeesa says she wants to return to Pakistan from London to say goodbye to Jameel. Her Aunt Najma opposes this and urges Nafeesa and Kulraj to stay in London. Why does Nafeesa insist? Why does Kulraj comply with her wishes? Are they brave or foolish to return? Why?

3. Nafeesa never tells her children about what happened to her in Shalimar Garden even though Kulraj thinks they are old enough to know. Would you tell your children? Why does Jabril Kazzaz agree that they should not be told even as adults? Do you think these children as adults may have “known” what happened on some deeper level? Why or why not?

4. Which sister--Reshma, Ujala, Faisa, or Meena--is most complex? Who is most straightforward? Which was your favorite and why?

5. Do you think that major male characters—Kulraj Singh, Jabril Kazzaz, Amir-- are “too good?” How will they manage to go on without the women in the family?

6. What image would you use to describe the structure of the novel as it moves around in time? A tree? A river? A circle? Did you find its non-chronological structure satisfying? Disturbing? Didn’t notice?

7. What does Rahima Mai’s response to both Yusuf’s bribe and to the escape plan reveal about her character? Is Rahima Mai better off without Ujala in her life?

8. What is the significance of the fact that Ujala decides to carry a gun?

9. How has reading this book affected the way you think about Muslims as a group? About Islam as a religion? Did you notice other religions in the novel?

10. What do the author’s Acknowledgements at the end of the book tell you about her? About Pakistan? As an outsider, is she qualified to write such a story?

11. How did you use the map of Paksitan and the Family Tree throughout your reading of My Sisters Made of Light?

12. One reviewer writes: “In her writing, St. Joan comes much closer to Kristof [Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times columnist] than she does to [Stieg] Larsson, [author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo] though with a healthy dash of Harriet Beecher Stowe.” What do you think this reviewer means? Do you agree?

13. How does the novel affect your response to the social and political conditions in Pakistan? Do you find yourself being more understanding or more judgmental of Pakistanis and/or their leaders?

14. Were you unsympathetic to any of the honor crime victims—Bilquis? Khanum? Chanda? Nafeesa? Others?

15. Is Reshma, the oldest sister, an admirable character? What major factor changes her attitude in the course of the story?

16. Ujala recounts a conversation she had with Lia Chee: “American empire?” Lia said. She did not like to hear me call her country by the term the rest of the world used. “Now you sound like a fundie.” “Just a turn of phrase,” I said, “but ‘empire’ does signify something. You know what I mean?” Do you know what she means? How did you, as an American, react to Ujala’s calling America an “empire?”

17. Which visual images in the novel are the most memorable for you? Why?

18. How does My Sisters Made of Light highlight the conflict between the conservative and the liberal elements in Pakistani society? What role do class, religion, and ethnicity play in honor crimes?

19. Is My Sisters Made of Light a love story? a hero's journey? a social commentary? a political novel?

20. What do you find most disturbing/satisfying about the novel's denouement? If you find yourself imagining an alternate ending, what would that ending be?

21. What meaning, if any, do you find in the book’s title?

Ten Ways of Looking at the West

Sage Green Journal (http://sagegreenjournal.org/jacqueline-st.-joan.html)

I

I drive the canyons of the West

Deliberately,

The way I drag my finger between

The shoulder blades of the cat.

II

The earth fired this mountain

Before it was the West, before

Weber or Madison or Curtis

before Morrison or Mancos,

Dakota or Jurrasic.

III

Flaming Gorge ,

One gigantic rock

Sliced red on the diagonal,

Stacked from floor to

The heaven of the West.

IV

Was it in the West that I loved you?

Pre-Cambrian? Or before that?

Tonight I sleep at the edge of your canyon.

I listen to your starry wind.

V

Golden light of autumn

Wide, scattered rolls of hay

Shades of lavender and horses,

The sky and fences of the West.

VI

In the face of the wide open

Thighs of the West,

I am shy.

VII

I see the snow-capped sea monster

In the bony Western spine

Of a mountain range risen and resting.

VIII

Sweetwater.

Deer Lodge.

Steamboat Springs.

My tongue plays

The words of the West.

IX

All afternoon the crows

Are calling, racing around

The treetops of the West.

X

Bring the Western sky inside you

Peace is blue.

A Mother's Advice to her Children

Selected Poem from What Remains (Turkey Buzzard Press, 2016).

If you ever get the chance, live with an artist.

Live with an artist and you begin to notice

the shapes of things. 

Even the air around the enormous

sprig of forsythia

in the beer bottle,

the way its presence

makes the room fade away,

its relationship with the white wall,

its simple canvas.

Live with an artist and expect food

to slow cook all day

just for the odors of chiles,

the moisture in the kitchen

the falling apart of the meat inside the pot.

You needn't gather the cats.  They will find you.

Move in with an artist at least once.

Plant plenty of daffodils,

whatever you can afford. 

And study the light

all day and in every season

before you decide to do

much else.

Live with an artist. 

Stay as long as you can. 

Leave if you must, then live with

an accountant.

Third Place, The Colorado Lawyer Poetry Contest, 2006.

---

A POEM FROM THE BOOK WHAT REMAINS

Restraining Order

Selected Poem from What Remains (Turkey Buzzard Press, 2016).

I am watching the freckles

on the back of my fingers

multiply and divide like

lovers under the lens.  The

speaker at my podium

says:  He's my pimp.  Tore

a branch from a tree.   Beat

me.  The branch broke.

I am lifting the law books

down, a  browning obsolete

boulder older than I am,

the weight of a witness

of losses.  The letters of the

law chew on my fingernails,

and now she is saying:

Choked me  . . .  can't

remember the rest.

I am skin closed in

this chair in this black cloth

swallowing more water these days

staying tempered, staying cool,

a surgeon dusting her hands

for powder burns, and suddenly

I look at her, wide-eyed, broken: 

He shouted he'd

kill me.  I don't know if he will.

I am blotting the battered  bench

with a clawed Kleenex, aligning my

pencils just so.  She says justice.  She says

justice.  She says:  He dragged me by my hair. 

My head broke the mirror. 

Do you need to see the pictures? 

First Place, The Colorado Lawyer Poetry Contest, 2006.

---

A POEM FROM THE BOOK WHAT REMAINS.

White Rain

Although it is summer evening,

hair spray and Nescafé

smell so strong and familiar

it makes one wonder if it is morning or night.

In the tiny yellow bathroom,

the girl takes her seat facing

the wall full of tiles interlocking

like arms squaring to lift their black centers.

The mother untwists the rubber band

and a few strands snap.  She leans

her belly into the girl's spine. 

Lightly the amber brush, then

the wide speckled comb

untangle the limp brown hair.

The mother's hands smooth

the girl's skull, circle it at the crown,

wrap the red rubber band around the hank

quickly, perfectly, twice,

as if it were an entire plant of celery in her hands.

All is luminous:  approaching blonde.

Every Saturday the mother's Irish hands

pour the gold over the girl's head;

then the piercing scent of sliced lemons,

and a warm water veil

flows down from a white kitchen cup. 

The sun slants through the slats of the blinds,

falls on a thick lemon shell rocking

on its shiny pocked rind,

its soft white center slimy and spent.

The mother reaches for the slim girl

waiting on the back of the bottle.

She is my mother in a cotton housedress,

and I am the freckled eleven year old,

who, more than anything else

wants to be able to sleep over

an entire night at a friend's house,

without waking homesick in the inconsolable night:

Will you drive me home now please?

I worry that my mother is alone there. 

I have to get back to her.

I remember the brittle knots

ripped from the bristles of  those days, 

when your hands held my head

in the kitchen sink, my naked back cold and wet,

the sounds of water pounding,

my heavy head rocked slowly,

involuntarily, and looked up at you,

like it was someone else's head,

maybe your head,

turning, as it did years later

from the front seat of the car,

when you first saw your grandchild,

part black, part jew, part you--

six years old sitting next to me in the back seat,

her best dress tied with a wide blue ribbon. 

She was waiting to meet you, when,

smiling, you turned your gray head,

reached your hand back naturally to touch her,

and that same hand that washed my hair

recoiled from her nappy head like the snake

that lived under the screen porch

of your childhood where you pumped

the water from the cistern into the bucket,

the screen door slapped hard, twice

and  your younger sisters lined up

at the farmhouse sink every Saturday.

where you tied on your mother's bleached apron,

and washed them over and over

head after head, 

girl after girl

in the same white water,

careful not to waste the rain.

Honorable Mention, The Colorado Lawyer Poetry Contest, 2006.

Life in Two seasons: Love Here, Love Gone

It is a world of birds here in the morning.  Busy magpies with sticks.  Occasional duck couples settle into the lake.  A thousand starlings fill the empty branches of an enormous poplar. When I look up at the tree again, and the black birds have all departed without a sound, without a trace.   I am stunned.  I  grieved the whole year my last child left home.  When I dream at the change of seasons,  it is often about them as little children, as they were then, sleek and wild, our life full of surprise and struggle.  In the dreams we are together again, as if they arrive and depart from me regularly due to the energy and excitement of the equinoxes.  All the seasons of my life  circle around and I can be all ages.

There was a thrill last Fall, driving along Cherry Creek, my hands on the wheel,  traffic rushing the other way, my eyes watching the flock of wild geese flying overhead.  It was more than one flock, there were twenty, then thirty or more geese.  Oh, my, here they come.  They are honking the familiar uh-whonk, uh-whonk.  Even more.  And more.  They kept sweeping along, crossing the flood plain at fifty feet.    My head was halfway out the window, twisted upwards, peering into the heavens, and I was starting to slow traffic behind me.  I stopped counting at a hundred. I glanced at the oblivious drivers passing, lighting cigarettes, their windows up.   Look everyone.  They're back!  Look now!    I almost began honking my horn.  Listen to them.  Please just look!  I remember how I felt when their feathered underbellies, their horns honking, their wide winging and careening confluence graced my day, opening my mind from its tight nucleus of pettiness to the fabulous expanse of the wild world.  I felt lonely for the people of Denver, the ones who didn't notice them.   At that moment I envied the families of geese for their very familyness.  I was a  lone human being,   joyful in their presence. 

The first time I noticed Canada geese flying was an October several years before.  My daughter Dana had just entered college, so I sold our Victorian home near City Park and bought a simple,  large, inexpensive townhouse for myself.  I was smoking a cigarette on my tiny, concrete patio, resting from unpacking, surrounded by a privacy fence and the top windows of  my new boxed neighborhood.  The geese appeared suddenly, and it had the same effect as later on the day down by Cherry Creek.  Taking my breath with them, they soared over, not thirty feet above my head, forty or fifty geese en route to New Mexico, honking at dusk.  Throughout that autumn I would listen for their arrivals, and run out on the balcony, the patio, the driveway, anywhere,  anytime--toothpaste on my lips, or laundry detergent in hand, nightgown, glasses or no glasses--just so I could feel that sensation when flocks fly over:    I hear you.  You are beautiful.  Take me with you. 

When love is new it is like wild geese skimming the ground.   Once I fell in love with someone I shouldn't have--like that, out of the blue.    It was the season of endings for me.  My father had died the month before, and my world was starting to shift on the diagonal.  There was something about the shape of neck and the way I felt completely safe: a deep need I fell into.  I remember standing in the naked dark facing out the bedroom window, watching the rain fall on the pines in streetlight.  It was a kind of magic sprinkling over my life,  entirely elemental and transient.

Today when I searched for the Canada geese, I returned to the place where I raised my own brood--in the neighborhood near City Park.  If they were anywhere they would be there among the mallards and the blackbirds, the cattails, the joggers, the drug dealers.   I've seen them congregate there for over twenty-five years--not flying really, but swimming, eating, sunning in the park, where I'd steer my toddlers away from the goose poop and onto the gravel of the playground.  I circled the avenues around the barren park until I found one flock, only ten geese, grazing the sports field directly north of the Museum of Natural History.  They were one whole team and a coach, feeding on the brown grass of the infield between first and second base. Geese prefer the wide open spaces where they can keep an advantage over their opponents.

These ten compact, well-proportioned geese are small, maybe ten pounds each.  I have a heavy cat at home, just about their size and weight, which gives me an idea of what it would be like to hold one close to me, to carry it around the house showing it my things, feeling it relax over my shoulder, trusting.  Canada geese appear to be gray, an impression created by the shaded scrims of neutral grays, browns, whites, and blacks.  The feathers are smooth, as if someone had just combed each goose and sent it outside to play.  They have long pointed bills for eating, and a snowy bib under their chins.  Their necks are very long and black with a white chin strap at their jawline, giving them a dignified, uniform, slightly military carriage.

I am bundled in goose down myself this morning, plus fleece pants, a baseball cap, dark gloves and glasses.  I woke early to the click of furnace igniting, feeling the warmth of the down comforter my son Chris gave me for Christmas.  My cats lay still like three piles of furry need and hunger staring at me on my old country bed.  But  I dressed quickly and went out in the March morning to sit in right field pretending to ignore Canada geese, trying to appear non-threatening.  The geese have had me under constant observation since before I got out of my car.  The sentinel goose, its stalk of a neck straighter and higher than the others, scans the field with a three-quarters range of vision.  Ignore me, I think.  Imagine I'm a squirrel.  He continues as sentry while the others feed.  The eating is intense.  They seem to peck and pull at the grass repeatedly forty or fifty times per minute, then rest for thirty seconds or so.  Several sleek feathers float on the tips of brown grass, preened and discarded, fletching the park.  I tug on the bill of my cap, scanning the ground like a goose.  Indeed, even though the lawn looks entirely brown, there are short blades of new green growth all over the area, and under my knees.  I could lean over to bite them off with my own teeth, if I only had a bill that was long enough and sharp. 

Colorado Boulevard traffic continues steadily just fifty yards to the east.  A service road between the museum and the zoo is mostly empty.   An occasional car or light truck passes.  I know a man is behind me in the parking lot; I hear his engine turn over.  I am having a hard time keeping my mind on geese.  They seem to fade into the cityscape along with the asphalt, the yellow brick, the steel posts.  I remember the Kelly green uniforms Dana wore to play soccer with the Leprechauns over in that field.  The humming of the traffic and the constant feeding gestures of the birds make me sleepy in the cold morning air.  To observe is to keep my mind on the goose.  But my mind slips into memories of last night, when Chris came over for dinner.  I'm drawn back to something about the way he sliced a hunk of fresh bread.  My mind is re-writing my life, like it always does when loosened.  Given enough freedom, it would keep mixing memory with perception, present me with innumerable versions of my past, and then convince me by its trickery that each and every story  was the truth.  Exuberance can be my downfall, since I can convince myself of the rightness of almost anything if I can work up enough interest and excitement about it.  Since for now the geese have wrested my imagination away from other possible interests, it becomes the geese that I both fear and desire.

Now they look neither fearful nor desirable.  They have taken positions five to ten feet apart from each other, covering the outfield methodically, like the teeth of an infield tractor smoothing the ground between innings.    I move ten feet closer to them, very, very  slowly. 

One of the geese-- I have no idea which one, since the only ones I can begin to distinguish are the sentry and its nearby mate--begins to lead the others from this baseball diamond to the next.  This happens very calmly, quietly; they are lining up single-file like first-graders crossing the field, heading to the edge of the infield in the middle diamond. 

Today the lead couple takes turns, one leading the flock, and the other one bringing up the rear. They have their long feathered periscopes up, scanning as they go. This couple has mated for life, as I have done.   Several times.  Geese literature is full of  romance--the courting, the calling, the defending, the harmless fighting, the mounting, the language before, during and after love.  I read a story about Duke, a gander whose little family of goose, two yearlings, and two goslings was shot down one by one from a hunter's blind in a Wisconsin field adjacent to Heron Marsh.   Duke flew high and fast and barely escaped massacre himself while listening to the cries of his daughters below.  Duke circled around and returned after dark, honking loudly.   No response. 

Uh-whonk!  Uh-whonk!  Silence.
Uh-whonk!  Uh-whonk!  Only the background of bullfrogs and cicadas.

Duke stayed in that refuge the entire winter, forgoing the tender grasses of the south for acorns so that he could remain near the piece of  sky where he last saw his mate.  He stayed alert, sounding the distress cry of separated, lost, and widowed geese:  oh!-oo, oh!-oo.  He was attuned to the sound of all birds in his desperation to hear the responding call of his familiars.  The gamekeepers named him Duke, and fed him grain all winter.  oh!--oo,  oh!-oo.

The next Spring Canada geese returned to the refuge, but Duke kept to himself.  One day he saw a lone goose swimming,  and although it was not his missing mate, he replied when she called to him:  Uh-whonk!  They swam together that day, and he watched while she fed,  and she watched while he fed.  The gamekeepers noticed they spent most of their days together:  "Looks like Duke has found his Duchess," they remarked.  Seeing the geese together so constantly also relieved something in the men.   Duchess led Duke on a walk to the other side of the marsh, where ducks dove and emerged from the deep lake with fresh tendrils of cattail roots clinging to their backs and their feet.  The ducks shook off the vegetation, a delicious meal for the two geese, who floated steadily a short distance behind them.

The other Canadas continued north, eager to begin their Spring nesting.  Duke had walked and swam and fed with Duchess, but, since he had mated for life with a different goose,  he had restrained himself from mounting her.  He would wait until they flew north together.  One morning he flew high, calling to her to follow him, while hundreds of geese all over Heron Marsh were lifting into the skies.  She called back to him, flapping her wings furiously, honking and honking,  until she was exhausted from the effort.  She never left the ground.  Duke watched her from above, circling around, as she turned from him and floated towards center of the lake to rest.  He called to her again.  This time she moved towards the edge of the water, walked out of the lake, again beating and shaking over and over, calling to Duke:  uh whonk!  uh whonk!  But Duchess could not fly.  She carried a piece of metal deep in the tissues of her chest, and although one wing was wide and open, the other was contracted next to her.  When she attempted expansion, the wing would fail.

Duke left Duchess there that day, and didn't return until Fall.  The men saw a lone Canada circling several hundred feet above the refuge, as was his way, as he always did at first, and they knew it was Duke because he was so high and alone.  He called down to the refuge, unable to spy her among the thousands that had landed.  He called again and again, until the goose he was looking for, the one who waited for him, floated quietly around a mound of bulrushes, her eyes scanning the sky where she heard his call.  Uh-wonk, uh-wonk uh-wonk,  she repeated, beating her wings  enthusiastically  in the water, splashing, calling his attention to her.    Within minutes, she heard his low short grunt, as Duke planed down and settled in beside her to stay.

When love grows cold it is like an invisible wild goose silent and circling.  There is a man is Wisconsin who fell in love with me because, he said, I was not like the woman back home.   He said I listened to him without criticism, or grasping, or expectations.  Then he lied to me once;  so  I packed his bags for him, without criticism, or grasping, or expectations, and dropped him at a the sign marked "Departures," so he could catch the next flight out.  What exactly happens at times like that I do not know.  He is a good man,  really  a very sweet man, and the truth is I could have loved him back.  I see myself  sitting in front of a cup of cold coffee with tears rolling down my face.  I see him not knowing what to say.  I see him wanting to fix it.   He married the woman back home and quickly regretted it, which he wrote to let me know.   Now he calls me long-distance whenever business takes him out of town.  We never  really know how much time we will have together.

Geese usually fly in tandem, one resting on the curve of air behind the other one's flight.  Geese find City Park every Spring and every Fall, where they mix with the local Canadas, and stay for a day or two or three to eat their fill before moving where their instincts direct.  Human history is part of their history in Denver.   Canadas choose to land in Denver during their migration, in part because other Canadas reside here year round.  The presence of others in a place is one way a  high-flying goose decides where to land to feed.  They conclude, as most travelers do, that where others have found safety, water, and food, they can find the same.  It's like choosing a restaurant in a strange town by the number of cars lined up in its parking lot at supper time.  

Why did some geese decide to make Denver their home?  Until outlawed  in 1935, one woman raised Canada geese to sell them as live decoys to hunters who, without the live decoys, were unable to match their own wits against the intelligence of the geese.  The decoy Canadas would  attract flocks of migrating wild geese.  People exploited the strong family ties of these birds by separating mated pairs from their young.  The birds would begin calling to each other: a loud peeping of lost goslings alternating with an alarmed honking cry of the parents. 

Thus  the distress would attract wild birds from other flocks as well.   After this practice was banned, the descendants of the decoys and the descendants of geese injured in these killings, became the local non-migrating population who remain year 'round in the generous and open parks of Denver.  Today if a local goose is separated from her goslings, and she calls to them in her panic, she can expect to hear in reply, a rapid series of light, soft notes--wheeoo, wheeoo--the coos of contentment sounded by goslings to express their relief at being found. I remember homesickness as a child as a longing so full of dread and disorientation that to spend the night two blocks away from my mother was physically painful.  The only relief was to hurry home, with no spoken explanations, and fall asleep to the canned laughter of the 1950s, my mother's favorite shows on the TV downstairs.  Now I don't know who I really feared for, my mother or myself, since the emotional distinctions between us were weak in those days.  Since my father worked nights, and since my older sisters had married, now if I slept over at a girlfriend's,  my mother was home by herself. She never complained that I left her alone, or even hinted that I should come home early.  But there was something in the tone of her voice, the quality of her breathing, that let me know that really she'd be much happier if I was home with her.  And I would no longer be homesick--that sense of unending loss and displacement.

When my son was an infant, I placed him carefully in his green carriage and wheeled him to the store, where slept there while I shopped. 

Attracted by  shoes in the next department, I moved away from him and for the next five minutes I forgot I was a mother.   Then, remembering, I rushed to him--certain I would be punished by an empty place in the carriage where he used to be.   I felt alarm, grief, shame--at the fragility and randomness of human error--to lose something  so fundamental to your life in such a casual and final way, a way that could cause someone to raise the question of whether  I should be trusted with the task at all.  Imagine then having developed in your life a strong sense of direction and  belonging, and suddenly losing yourself, the home you return to. 

Today I hear a lone helicopter chopping above City Park.  Unseen birds calling from somewhere to the west.  A truck downshifting.  Seals barking from inside the zoo.  The heavy equipment generator humming.  The piercing cry of a peacock.  Ten silent Canada geese eating peacefully in a park in the U.S.A.  Suddenly, another flock of geese circles fifty feet above.   Ten more Canada geese calling from above me!  The sentinel replies to the calling goose.  They circle again.  But, of course, they see me, and circle away from the baseball field in the direction of the lake.  They are flying high, running reconnaissance, scanning the skies for safe feeding grounds near the locals.  I asked one expert who has been studying wild birds in Colorado for over thirty years how to tell the migrants from the locals.  "That's pretty hard," he said, "Honestly, lady, I have no idea."  I am guessing then that these geese flying high above me are probably early migrants, having departed New Mexico for an early nesting in Alberta or Saskatchewan.  They are stopping here to rest and to feed before continuing their flight north. I like to think they  are the ones most longing for home.  

I focus my attention on the Canada geese feeding on the lawn.   I count twenty-eight.  They  are feeding in the same areas, passionately pulling the new grass up by  helpless roots. I cannot tell if there are now three flocks or two;  but from the way they are grouped around the lawn, either theory  is plausible.  I find out in the only way I can:  I get up.  Immediately three goose heads shoot their full vertical lengths. Three sentries are on duty, and I conclude there are, in fact, three flocks of Canada geese on the lawn west of the museum in City Park.  I turn to step away from them and hear three honks behind me;  I keep going and leave the question open, as to whether they are confirming my finding that they are three flocks or objecting to my departure.

The Canada geese spend half of their lives arriving and departing, skirting climate and food supplies in both directions.  They depart Canada in early Fall each year.  Those that fly over Colorado gather in a staging area near Calgary like thousands of troops assembling for a mission.  They  converge to follow one of twelve migration corridors, each one 30 to 50 miles wide.  The goal for the geese is not only arrival, but survival.  From the heights of the sky, they search for waterways, the most likely indicator of new vegetation growth.  They prefer the young green vegetation of early Spring, and grain, when they can find it.  Like all travelers, they must combat fatigue, hunger, disorientation.  And in the Fall, the geese are all under fire.   Wild geese  are careful and rarely make the same mistake twice.  Once they have witnessed the slaughter of their own, or been pipped themselves, if they survive the aftermath of it, they will likely avoid that killing ground for the rest of their lives.  Survivors go where there is refuge from the gun.

The Canadas that fly over Denver are the Highline Population that breed in the high plains of the corridor that runs along the east side of the Canadian Rockies, across Alberta and Saskatchewan, into Montana, Wyoming, and ending in the marshes of New Mexico at the Bosque del Apache refuge south of Santa Fe.  They are three kinds:  Western, Great Basin, and Giant Canada Geese, and, if they survive the journey, they will remain south until Spring.  If feeding drives them south, surely sex drives them north.  They sense the vernal shift in the angle of the earth's relation to the sun, and the geese begin departing in small flocks, and at a more leisurely pace than in the Fall.  Often the yearlings join other flocks, as the Canadas begin their flight north to the birthplace of the mother goose, who returns to nest in her own brooding ground.  There they will mate again, and she will lay five or more eggs, and incubate them with her body, while the gander surveys dangers, threatening any comers with his strong, long neck, his extended tongue, his horrifying hiss, and the display of his daring wings.  In the short summer months they will raise the goslings to young geese, spend a month  molting, all of them flightless while they grow new feathers.  Then just in time for the Fall chill, new growth and full-fledglings  prompt them into the southern skies. 

Almost every state in the union witnesses the great migration.  The magical navigation  of the geese is a result of their uncommon strength and range of vision.  They can recognize landmarks and  read the paths of waterways as they fly, travel by starlight at night and by magnetic fields in cloudy weather. With tail winds they may easily fly forty or fifty miles per hour 100 feet or more above the earth's surface. I asked my expert how long does it take them to get to Denver from Calgary.  Days?  Weeks?  Months?             

"Well,"  he said, "That's a tough one too.  But I can tell you this.  There was one time when I was down near La Junta and some of the boys there kept in touch by short wave with the boys up north.  They'd call down in the Fall just as soon as the geese took right off.  This one time they got the call as usual, but there was  a terrible storm near Calgary, high blowing winds, rain, cold, and all the geese took off in it.  Headed south.  They were all very worried about them."  He paused.  "You won't believe this, but the geese were in La Junta the next day!  So that's what they can do when they put their minds to it and have a good wind to carry them."

Today the newly arrived flock  lands east of Ferril Lake, where they have a postcard view of the boathouse, the downtown skyline and brilliant Mount Evans.  Spots of frost on the grass seem to puff up and then melt.  The sun sends winter luminance over a circular collection of brambles in a flagstone courtyard where  yellow roses reign in summer.  The new flock did choose to land where others already were.  Thirty geese are now feeding in this open area west of the museum, where once I met someone else's husband secretly for lunch.  One Canada looks up at me and sounds a soft low, intimate little grunt . He is very handsome;  I decide he is responsible and strong, the marrying kind.  He continues eating, and every few steps emits one low, steady honk in my direction.   I see what I assume to be the wife come running to him from behind me.   She is only slightly smaller, does no honking while they eat, and even though she could--and often does do it as well--she lets him do all the sentinel work for the entire flock.  

Since geese are rarely alone, almost always at least in a couple, and often traveling in extended families of other geese, communication is paramount for both individual and group survival.  It is by their honks that you know them. When they talk, what do they say?   The low, short repeated grunt I was hearing, is one mate calling the other, "Come, come."  Researchers have classified the lexicon of the geese into ten comments:  hissing at threat; honking  to advertise one's presence and to greet a separated mate; the kum! kum! kum! grunt I had been hearing this fellow make;  a loud, prolonged, snoring sound peculiar to the male and directed only at his mate;   the after-sex  snore, light and brief;  the scream of pain when bitten;   distress due to separation or attack;  loud peeping when lost;  and a rapid series of light soft notes made by lost goslings when found.  

"What if there be no more goose music?"  naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote, expressing his fears of the destruction of the natural world in our time. Imagine the silence in the great expanse of history and geography. 

Historically, ancestors of the Canada geese emerged fifty million years ago, when mammals were only beginning to appear on earth.  Geographically, today the dappled blue expanse of water and land on a map of North America is Canada, where the  generous lakes and snaking rivers of the North provide safe harbor for the birds, where they can mate, sleep, incubate their eggs until the chicks pip.  Imagine the migrating hordes of the past and the future converging to darken the sky, circling the West, lower and lower, putting out their webs, braking with their wings and surfing along the water, now folding their wings, now floating together becoming one goose.  Now hear a low short grunt, as a second goose planes down and settles in beside the first.                 

A portion of this essay was published as “In Flight,” in Empire Magazine, Sunday Denver Post, Oct. 1996.
Copyright Jacqueline St. Joan, 1996.

Meeting the Dalai Lama in Tibet

Winner of the Silver Solas Women's Travel Writing Award, 2009
The best account by a woman of an encounter or experience on the road.

Don’t take photos of the Dalai Lama into Tibet, my more experienced traveling friends advised me.  As did the U.S. State Department, the Free Tibet website and my travel guidebook.  There had been a time, well past the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when photos of the Dalai Lama were as common on the streets of Lhasa as soldiers, but in 1994 a political crackdown resumed and people with those photos were suspected of treason, were beaten and imprisoned.  In Tibet, religion and politics can clash at any time, any place, and with serious consequences--not to tourists, but to those who remain behind.  So I did not take photos of the Dalai Lama.  Instead, when I asked my teacher, Thrangu Rinpoche for advice about traveling in Tibet for a week, he said:  “Take your prayer book.  And use it.” 

In August, I travel for five days on a road trip from Kathmandu, Nepal to Lhasa, Tibet, with twenty-one people and a travel guide. Two or three fellow travelers—mostly Europeans and Asians--are spiritual pilgrims, but most are simply seeing the world on low budgets and this tour is the cheapest route to Lhasa.  There is one other American in the group, whose name by coincidence, is also Jacqueline.  She is 28 years old, was raised in Long Island, is living in Hong Kong, and she speaks Mandarin. An experienced Asian traveler, Jacqueline is very competent at negotiating difficulties, and she is bold about going off the beaten path for small adventures.  I have none of these qualities, but I do know one or two things about Buddhism, which she does not, so this knowledge makes me valuable to her.

We travel during the summer monsoon, around piles of landslides, under sudden waterfalls, along the edges of steep cliffs above muddy rivers.    As the bus climbs, the world becomes dreamy, as the elements dissolve into each other.  Long waterfalls drop into air, become river. Earth melts into water.  Local people are digging and moving the earth, diverting water, packing rocks and sand in an effort to control the flow.

It is the first day out, and I am taking photographs like a mad tourist, as if this might be my last trip anywhere.  But when we reach the bridge over the river between Nepal and Tibet, our guide waggles his finger,  “Stop taking photos,” he says.  Soon we will walk across and enter China.”  China?  I think, already developing an attitude that rejects China as Tibet.  It’s Tibet, not China, I think, but I say nothing.  As the days ahead reveal, I am wrong.  Tibet is China and China is Tibet, as inseparable as nirvana and samsara.

At the border our two vehicles join a line so that officials can check our documents.  We wait and and wait.  Local moneychangers stick their friendly faces into our windows, asking, “Yuans for rupees?  Yuans for rupees?”  One young Tibetan man with bright eyes returns again and again, asking, in tourist-only English where we are from.  He is looking at our things piled deep inside the Jeep.  Our government-required guide closes his eyes, says nothing.  The young man with the sparkling eyes seems to be telling me his name.  I finger the red protection cord, given to me by Thrangu Rinpoche and tied around my neck, as I point to my heart.  “Tsering Longchen,” I say, introducing myself with the Tibetan name I received on the day I took refuge.  I feel slightly embarrassed to call myself “Melodious Long Life,” but his sparkling eyes blink.  He smiles and whispers the words I will hear again and again during this trip.  “Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama,” giving me, and then the others with me, the universal thumbs up sign.  Recalling the prohibition on public mention of the Dalai Lama, I look at the guide nervously.  He sits with his long arms around his folded legs, cramped in the back of the Jeep, head resting on his knees.  He appears to be sleeping.  But still I worry.  What have I done? There are military and government officials all around.  Is this a touching, personal moment, or is it a set up designed to entrap, to cause us to offer a forbidden picture of the Dalai Lama? Or is this just a young man in Levis trying to make some money? After all, we are in China.

The officials require that our group spend the night in the rainy border town.  They have been trying by phone to get approval from Beijing for the entry of a French diplomat, a member our group.   But Beijing is time zones away, and the offices there are all closed.  At the town’s best hotel, I have a sleepless night in a small dank room where water soaks everything.  Even the walls drip.   Loud music and a neon sign keep me awake.  I walk outside to watch soldiers and young women entering and leaving the bar across the street.  The next morning, the diplomat is sent back over the bridge into Nepal, and our Jeep continues climbing the wet, green mountains.  People are working everywhere in this remote, rural place--rebuilding roads, stringing telephone wire, herding yaks, washing clothes along the road.  Eventually we enter a high mountain plateau with wide skies and dry land, and our spirits relax. Om mani peme hung is written on the landscape above mud-brick villages.  They are white stones arranged on the side of the mountain, boulders large enough that you can read them easily from a mile away.

Over the next two days we visit the usual stops—one of Milarepa’s many caves, an 18,000 ft. pass planted with prayer flags, soup at a local teahouse in a mountain town. The town is only a few blocks long (if you can call them blocks), with a few shops, horses tied to posts, and grinning, mucky  children hiding near their mother’s skirts.  It looks like old photos I’ve seen of Colorado mining towns circa 1860.  Then I see Jacqueline through a window, surrounded by several women who are laughing, lifting their aprons, pointing at Jacqueline.  She has transformed herself from a sharply dressed chick traveler into a modest Tibetan maiden.  She is wearing a chuba, and an apron, and her dark hair has been braided, woven with ribbons, and fastened to the top of her head. Later she tells me, “Oh, I do this wherever I go.  It always draws people to me—to see a Western woman in their local dress. They love it.  They always do.”  Lucky for me, that night we are designated as roommates and despite our thirty-year age difference—we become devoted companions.

 At Tashilhunpo Monastery, the seat of the Panchen Lama, Jacqueline and I stand in line, waiting to enter with fifty others.  Most are tourists, but some are Tibetan pilgrims--very tall men with scarves tied around their heads, and women with long dark hair, braided with rectangular pieces of coral, turquoise and amber--three or four inches long. Inside, we follow their lead—touching holy objects, tossing money offerings, draping khatas, and scooping yak butter with spoons from oily bags to add to the plentiful, glowing lamps. A Tibetan man with a young child stops me to hand me my mala, which I had not realized I had dropped.  The boy points to my prayer book, a tattered notebook-sized collection of prayers, practices, and bright photographs from a retreat I attended.  It has an ink-drawn Sanskrit seed syllable, Hung on a pale yellow cover, and is held together by black plastic binding.  Quickly others gather around us, intently paging through the text.  The man skips over the written chants and instead looks for pictures.  At each one he stops to absorb the colorful image pasted on the page.  Are they disappointed not to find photos of the Dalai Lama inside? Do they know the names of these Buddhist icons?  Have they had any teaching in the past forty years of Chinese occupation? 

“Guru Rinpoche—,” I say, pointing to one image after another. “Padmasambhava,”

“Ohh,” the man says. 

“Chenresig,” I say, and they all nod. 

“Chenresig.  Chenresig,” they repeat each other happily, seeming satisfied.

Later that afternoon Jacqueline and I leave the tourist path and follow behind two old monks back into their living area, where brick buildings form a courtyard.   One building has potted flowers in front of it.  Pink hollyhocks peek from inside a garden wall where I see a shaded place with a bench.  I am happy to take a rest.  A young monk is leaning out a window above us, watching.  Jacqueline gestures with her camera to ask if we can take his photo.  He signals “No,” and disappears.  But soon he is down in the garden with us, where he poses with her under the tree, and I take the shot.  Jacqueline speaks to him in Chinese, but he does not respond. He leads us inside the building and upstairs into his cell. The room is larger than I’d expected, but still, it is small.  There is shrine and books, and his clothes are folded in one corner.  The room is not very clean, but it is organized. He gestures for me to sit next to him on his prayer rug.  When I show him my prayer book, he becomes very excited to see the picture of Chenresig.  He looks back and forth at us, one to the other, and we wait for him to find a way to communicate without language.  He points to his eye, then to the picture of Chenresig, and signals, his hand over his head, as if indicating the past.  Then I hear the whispered words again, “Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama.”  Is he telling us he has seen the Dalai Lama?  Could that be?  I have read that some monks do cross the Himalayas covertly, going back and forth into India, to visit family in Dharmasala and to hear the Dalai Lama teach.  I explain to Jacqueline that Tibetans consider the Dalai Lama to be a living, human manifestation of Chenresig, the mind of compassion, loving-kindness and wisdom.  As I am speaking, the monk becomes excited again, yes, yes, he says in Tibetan, giving us the nod of understanding, of communication.

The next day we drive through enormous valleys, passing villages and                          barley fields studded with stupas (chortens) and prayers flags.  We come upon a work team painting a yellow line down the center of the road—a very strange sight in this vast place.  Vehicles stop while the machines drip paint.  Children gather at the car windows, “Hall-o.  Hall-o,” they call out.  Our guide hands each one a cigarette, which they place between their lips triumphantly. Two hours later we reach Gyantse, home of the largest and most famous stupa, Kumbum.  The following day Yamdrok-Tso Lake, home of the wrathful deities, and Kamba-Law pass (16, 000 ft).  Finally, we see a buddha carved into a wall, suffocated by colorful prayer flags and white khatas.  We have reached the outskirts of Lhasa. 

My first impression of Lhasa is of fast-paced open street markets in the ubiquitous white-tiled buildings that the Chinese government builds.  They line the streets, hiding even the grand Potala palace from our view.  Our hotel, although modest, feels like a palace to me.  The entrance is beautifully flowered and we have our first sit-down toilet.  We dine, walk kora around the Jokhang, and I sleep long and deep until morning. After breakfast we climb the steep path to tour the Potala. Along the way I catch my sleeve on a bush of nettles, and at once my arm and hand itch.  I scratch furiously. I ask our guide if he has seen the film, “Seven Years in Tibet,” and he nods.  “Here in Lhasa?” I ask.  He nods.  “It was filmed here,” I say, showing off my knowledge.  Suddenly, his face hardens.  “And many people were imprisoned because of it,” he replies.

In one of the Potala’s thousands of shrine rooms, I search again for old monks--                 on the theory that they are the ones most likely to be legitimate, trained, devoted.  I find one sitting on the floor in silence, his prayer beads flowing through his fingers.  I sit beside him, open my book and chant the hundred-syllable mantra quietly.   Moments later, recognizing the prayer, he joins me.  After awhile when I re- join the tour, I give him a few coins.  He smiles back and whispers, “Dalai Lama.  Dalai Lama,” both of his dirty, old thumbs pointing straight up.

I enter the large audience room where the Dalai Lama would receive guests.  There are images of earlier Dalai Lamas, but none of the Fourteenth.  After six days, I have not seen one image of him in Tibet.  However, in front his wide, vacant chair along a passage where pilgrims would have come to offer a khata and receive his blessing, a narrow tapestry is suspended, on which is printed the Kalachakra, the mantra of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.   The cloth is smudged and worn thin from all the fingers that have touched its skin.  Pilgrims pass the empty chair—he is not there, they know--but they recognize the Kalachakra symbol as readily as they would know his face.

In the afternoon we visit Sera Monastery, across the valley from the Potala.  Red-robed monks are debating in the courtyard, the older ones circling the younger ones who sit in the center quoting texts and make their arguments.   The older ones laugh and then become stern.  It is difficult to know if this activity is for the tourists or for the monks’ training.  Probably both.  On a back wall we see an ancient mural of a diety with a musical instrument.  The mural has been battered mercilessly, and the head of each monk has been hammered out deliberately, one by one.  Then, hanging from a tree branch above, my eye catches the shape of a cap.  Can it be?  Yes--a Colorado Rockies baseball cap—from my hometown.

By late afternoon, I have had my fill of murals, statues, and butter lamps.  I decide to wait for the tour bus while Jacqueline continues exploring without me.  But twenty minutes later I see her running toward me, her apron flying, her eyes red and wet.  She’s been crying. 

“Come!” she calls out.  “Come right away.  You have to meet this man!  Bring the prayerbook!” 

I gather my things and follow behind, up around in back, along a narrow wall to an area outside a row of monk cells.  I bend down to look into the room and there he is, sitting cross-legged by the window in an afternoon shaft of light.  He is, or once was, a fairly big man.  Now he is old, bald, has a wide nose and ears that my mother would describe as “jug ears.”   He has straggly white hair on his chin. He is smiling at us, his blue eyes looking curious. 

The lama extends his hand, invites us in.  We have to more or less climb into the room.  I have an urge to do prostrations, but I do not.  I have no khata, no yak butter, nothing to offer.  He gestures for me to sit in front of him and I sit cross-legged, my knees a few feet away from his.  Jacqueline squats nearby.  “Show him the book!  Show him the book!” she says with urgency in her voice that I have never heard before, and I begin what has become our usual routine when we find an elderly monk.  I show him my protection cord.  I tell him my teacher’s name.  I turn over my prayer book and offer it to him.  When the lama sees the cover, he looks softly into my eyes, and says, reverently, “Hung.”  I nod and repeat, “Hung.”  We speak the word back and forth to each other several times, as if we were naming a baby.  Then I begin to turn the pages to show him the colorful image of Guru Rinpoche.  He takes the book and moves it in, closer to his eyes, then smiles when he recognizes the image.  Om Ah Hung Benzra Guru Pema Siddhi Hung, he says to me, and I join his recitation.  He smiles with enormous pleasure.  But the second time I speak the mantra, his smile fades, his face tightens, and he repeats the mantra slowly, adding another syllable to it that I had dropped, emphasizing my error.  I repeat it two or three times until I get it right, then he smiles, gesturing with an open palm toward Jacqueline.  He wants me to teach it to her! Jacqueline recognizes the nature of the moment, of the man, and readily repeats Om Ah Hung Benzra Guru Pema Siddhi Hung.

We sit in silence for a while. I realize that young man is observing us from several feet away, and he seems to be amused.    He appears to be a security guard or perhaps an attendant. Jacqueline’s mouth is twitching.  “Pictures of D.L.,” she mumbles through her teeth, not moving her mouth.  “Over my shoulder.”  She is throwing her glance over her shoulder.  I am trying to see, but it is dark and it seems rude to look away during this meditation.  Suddenly, the lama nods toward the back wall, “Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama” he says, in a relaxed way, as if introducing another guest.  No whispering, no hidden thumbs up.  Just a simple, direct pointing to the far wall, where more than a dozen photos of the Dalai Lama are taped--the Dalai Lama as a boy, as a young man, as an old man. I can’t understand how the lama can have them, but he does.  He is full of happiness and entirely unafraid.  The energy in the room is stronger even than the wind I felt in Milarepa’s cave.

The next day our group tour takes us to Norbulinka, the Dalai Lama’s summer palace, where only a few rooms are accessible to tourists.  Our guide is a middle-aged man wearing round spectacles, a long black coat, and a soft hat with a brim.  His English is very good.  The murals in the first room depict the entire history of Buddhism, images of many of the great masters from the past sweeping across the wall. The very last picture in the far corner is of the young Fourteenth Dalai Lama.  “The only public image of him that is permitted in Tibet,” the guide tells.   Later, when we are the only tourists remaining, the guide tells us that he was once a monk.  We walk together through a short hallway where there is no security camera.  The guide touches my arm and lowers his voice, “We have no human rights in Tibet.  Don’t forget Tibet.  Don’t forget Tibet.”  The passageway ends, we enter the second room where we join the others, and suddenly he becomes merely a tour guide again.

Stones laid out on a hillside.  Mantras as daily reminders.  Sacred cloth greasy with devotion.  Forbidden images pasted on a private wall.  Whispers. Thumbs up. Symbols of the enlightened mind.  Over and over Tibetans let us know that the Dalai Lama lives, not only in Dharamsala, but also in Tibet--in the minds of the people who wait for him still.

Silver Award, Women’s Travel Writing, Solas Travel Writing Award 2009

a beautiful thing

Published in Mountain Talking, Fall, 2016 and Sage Green Journal

It is a beautiful thing to wake

in the dark chill of October

and go out into it

where a crescent moon

and two stars appear both ahead

and in the rear view mirror

before you even leave home

to sit on the floor with it

kneecap to kneecap

inhaling the dark clarinet

of your body

only the breath of the tires

the train’s long choo-choo

searching in the rubble of itself

your pounding throat, a bratty knee

a molecule of coffee still clinging

to the root of  your tongue

your eyelids lower now

and in front of you wrapped shoulders

of a robe folded with her empty hands

that her, that you, that teacher

with the one word lesson

Dead Baby

Published in The Denver Quarterly

There's a dead baby in your yard

the newsboy said when he knocked on the door.

It was over by the fence.  It was naked. It was blue. 

It was bloody placenta all over the ground

and red spots on the fence.  Red spots on the fence

led them over the top to the trail of blood

in the neighbor's yard

to the back door

and into the room

of a 13 year old, the childless mother

of the dead baby in the yard next door.

I heard a cry late last night,

a neighbor reported,

Thought it was a cat or a bird

What did she do alone in that room?

Teddy bear stuffed in her mouth?

Her legs pumping the mantra of a child

giving birth all alone:  Get rid of it,

 then wash up, no one will know

Did she rise up then

Get rid of it

and take the baby to the fence?

Go wash up, it's gone now, no one will know

it's over, we’re dying, wash up now,

it's gone over the fence . . .

There's a dead baby in your yard

the newsboy said when he knocked on the door.

It was over by the fence.

It was wrapped in slick papers

the Sunday supplement

multicolored  ink-stains

and bloody from the birth,

yellow rubber gloves flopped in a puddle,

man-sized gloves.  Playtex

what you use

to wash the whitewalls on tires

to strip furniture

to clean the oven

or to pull out a baby that doesn't want to come

when you don't know what you're doing

so you reach in and pull harder

and the head comes out and it's blue

and the cord's wrapped around

and you don't know what you're doing

and you reach in and pull harder

and the yellow gloves pull harder

and you're scared

and it's blue and we’re dying,

so you reach for the Parade section

and roll the baby in it

and you don't know what you're doing

and you're sorry

and you drop it over the fence

hand over head, like a kid mailing a letter

and you turn the gloves inside out,

drop them and run home before dark.

There's a dead baby in your yard

the newsboy said when he knocked on the door.,

It was over by the fence.

It was dressed in white lace

a christening gown

layers of white on white,

the baby had been washed,

the clothes had been pressed

it had all been prepared,

a small bonnet crocheted

a pearl ribbon woven through.

It was wrapped in a cover

a hand-knitted blanket,

the edges folded back,

the kind a grandmother would weave

the perfect baby, the kind a grandmother

would dream of

the son she'd never had,

the one she could spoil,

the one she deserved.

There's a dead baby in your yard

the newsboy said when he knocked on the door.

It was over by the fence where the Granddaddy

leaned against it, a post to divide his property

from yours.  Don’t know nothing 'bout no fence,

the Granddaddy said.  So now she's knocked up

and squalling out back,

serves her right for running around

serves her right for backtalking me.

The neighbor next door

was the one who was right

who heard late that night

the cat and the bird.

Take me to the fence,

the baby had begged them,

and when the newsboy arrived

he saw an alley cat out back

tugging at  some meat.  He heard

a single black bird

a cry in the wind. 

He rushed to tell all of them

what all of them already knew.

There's a dead baby in our yard

the newsboy says,

and something knocks at our door.

The Denver Quarterly, Summer 1993

Letter to Muriel Rukeyser at the End of the Twentieth Century

Your poems shock

the way waterlilies burning in a museum

shock the moneyed.  With fragrant treason you begged even the rich,

to understand, As you spoke to each generation as that generation,

your dark hair curled in the thirties

by a passion electric for justice. 

You named what we were taught to despise in the stone insanity

of the first century of world wars.  You said clitoris, and you said

penis, and with the reverence of the condemned you said asshole,

peeling off the mask of Orpheus, speaking to the yet unborn,

admitting to the torn life, begging: please no more mythologies.

You made contact like a pilot to a radio tower, the shaking wheels

of your single engine extending to touch down.

And when the young were going and going to war to war,

you slurred your words on the Senate floor

with thousands of others, jailed, one-half your limbs

stroked out in the fire of your brain, those slurring leaves of water lilies,

stepping stones to the cloud of the world.

As for us, yes, the young still go to war,

and wars continue at the speed of darkness,

not the world wars you expected, but the others,

Wars of despisals in our countries, in our cities, in other countries and cities.

Promises and solidarity collapsed, and in the confusion

justice circles this sweating planet, looking for somewhere to land.

The newspaper still arrive with their even more careless stories:

Union Carbide, high 46, low 45 3/8,f close: 45 ½, sales 482,800

JUDGE THOMAS:  I have never asked to be nominated. . .

Mr. Chairman, I am a victim of this process

PROFESSOR HILL:  I would have been more comfortable to remain silent. . .

I took no initiative to inform anyone. . . I could not keep silent.

A voice flew out of the river,

smoke of the poems we still try to write.

We too are more or less insane,

and even now through time

we witness the buried life.

At the end of this millennium

we are still writing our poems,

born as we were

in the first century

of the aftermath of world wars.

What Zero Looks Like

He says, What’s the biggest number? 

What’s out there, after atmosphere and space?

We are driving home from preschool. 

There is no biggest number, I say. 

There is always one more. 

He is quiet then, strapped in his car seat,

packing his cheek with one grape

after the other.

I open and close like the sliding doors of my mini-van,

watching him in the rearview mirror of my life.

 How much to say? 

How much not to say?

He says, After the oxygen we breathe

there is space that goes on and on and on. 

It’s called zero.  I stop myself from saying

that it’s not zero, it’s infinity. 

His feet kick against the back of the driver’s seat. 

Zero is when there is nothing, I say, adding

Would you like a cheese cracker?

He says, No thanks.  I’ll have zero cheese crackers. 

Then, to make a point he adds,

And no one knows what zero looks like. 

I am propelled again, a bell, a wooden clapper,

then silence along with the traffic. 

I pull up to the front of the house,

and go around to Nico’s side of the van. 

The capsule pops open he emerges

by his own propulsion, standing on the edge,

about to take one big step onto the curb. 

He holds out a trashy cluster of stems

without one fruit left on it. 

That’s what zero looks like,” he says,

and he drops it into my hand. 

First Place, Lyrical Poetry, Columbine Poets of Colorado, 2015

Re-stitching The Sky

I.

Vees of geese are sewing Denver back into its morning,

            where telescopic, multifaceted periscopes

            take in the entire dance & climb.

To the west, snow- peaked triangles; downtown,

             rectangles of finance & domes of government;

            under the interstate, warehouses of industry &

             puffs of cottonwood along the river.

The city’s trains with their lines of fat tankers & flats

            coo into the sunrise.

Semi trucks’ engines turned over earlier in the dark,

            when busy moms woke early for coffee,

            just to be still & alone.

From my back deck I watch the geese

            stitching with their black needles,

            I know they are only a speck of the dance

            & this moment is all of it.

II.

Even DNA dances--microscopic, subatomic, or less—

            beyond what I can imagine the body to be.

Our molecules jump their charged moments & surge,

            not with purpose or place, but to move.

My heart pumps quarts every minute through

            lengths of blood vessels that, stretched out,

            could criss-cross the Pacific Ocean twice.

Fifty-two bones in my feet, flat as a deck of cards,

            lucky to have ligaments & tendons, to bend & twist,

            to allow both a curtsy & a kick.

III.

A dozen women spaced apart in a studio with a wooden floor &

            walls of mirrors, where, for one hour,

            we will be a universe of movement.

First we buzz, wondering what the music will be this time—

            strings for a Bollywood hip shaking,

            Indian windpipes cooing,

            blues from a pained throat, or

            jazz hands spread in surprise, a

             hip hop fist pumping,

            a stomping jig, or a Charleston swing?

It starts inside a moment, but then a step forward & back,

            a repetition & reversal, as our faces become our real faces

            --no chit chat, none of that;     

            bones find their right places & skin begins to cleanse itself.

We attend the beat as the voices of the universe

            announce themselves, an unexpected horn

            blares in the heating & cooling of prayer.

When we did that, we were wild geese re-stitching the sky.

IV.

Life is not a dance exactly; what I am trying to say is that

            both are an outside movement from

            an inside moment that will not stay put.

When I say the geese dance, it is a metaphor for their search

            for food, the driven constant work of their sleek bodies.

When a family of waddlers blocks the park road—

            some taking their own sweet time to cross over,

            some waiting,

            others daring forward then changing their minds,

            I stop my car for them in my capsule of amazement.

I want to wrap my arms around one of the big ones

            & carry it onto the dance floor, switch off all the lights

            --no others, just me & the music & the goose.

Teach me, I say, flipping a switch on the sound system,

            hoping it’s something the goose likes.

V.

In the front of the studio the goose faces away for a moment, listening

            & when she turns back to me & opens her beak,

            she cries out the slow deep voice of gospel:

            I don’t know how my mother walked her trouble down. 

            I don’t know how my father stood his ground. . .

            I don’t know why the angels woke me up this morning soon

            I don’t know why blood runs thru my veins. . .*

She stands so still there, a bird with the blues,

            maybe thinking of her parents fallen in a field

            somewhere over Nebraska,

            or her stolen egg,

            a lost fledgling,

            & I stand with her until her relentless eye closes

            & she takes a step backward. 

I take a step backward.

*From “I Remember, I Believe,” by Bernice Johnson Reagon

Jackie published 250 copies of her poem book, Re-stitching the Sky, signed and numbered, handset, designed, letterpress printing with sewn binding done by Tom Parson (http://www.letterpressdepot.com). This book is not for sale, but may be used for educational purposes.

Turkey Buzzard Press
https://www.coloradopoetscenter.org/eWords/issue25/turkeyBuzzard.html

Cough Drop Joe

This “family fiction,” won the 2019 Black Sheep Award of the Colorado Genealogical Society

In those days I’d take the train from Union Station in Denver, my home town, to Union Station in Washington, D.C., where the reporting work was.  It took a couple of days, but it gave me time to do some writing in the dining car that had a quiet bartender, and to watch the country roll by.  There were hobo camps along the rails--you could tell by the smoke.  I could take a close up look at them and then roll on by, settle back, open a book or pick up a pen. 

            I was working on a piece about one of Washington’s local characters—a kind of tramp himself, a tortured soul, but one that somebody must have loved.  His name was Joseph Ratto, an old Italian who was known around D.C as “Cough Drop Joe.”  He got his name from one of his many trades—selling those smelly Lewis’ cough drops to politicians returning to the Capitol from their martini lunches at the Old Ebbitt Grill or the Occidental.  He picked up a few cents that way and got to rub elbows with the high and mighty.  Everybody in D.C. knew Joe as the man who had held the horse of John Wilkes Booth outside the Ford Theatre on April 14, 1865.  . . Or did he?

            It was seventy years after the assassination, Joe Ratto was in his eighties, and I was determined to get the story before he passed from this earth.  Joe had a back room above a second-hand furniture store.  He was friends with the padre at Holy Rosary and I’d heard he went to late Mass on Sunday mornings, so that’s where I caught up with him. 

It was a warm autumn day, the kind that holds the sharp scent of boxwood in the air.  Joe was blessing himself with holy water when he came through the church door and he leaned his body against it, holding it for a few old women who followed. Joe was only about five feet tall and was wearing the double-breasted winter coat I’d seen him in for many years.  The coat almost reached the ground.  He had a brimmed felt hat in his hand.  That hat had seen better days.  He pulled it down to his ears and buttoned his vest.  His leather shoes were filthy and all his clothes were wrinkled.  As I approached, Joe looked up at me with his murky eyes, and he took my hand when I extended mine.  He didn’t quite smile, but his long white moustache curled a little around his mouth.

“Buongiorno,” I said, hoping my accent would please him.

“I speak English, young man” he said with a thick accent.  “Do you?”  Then he laughed and I laughed and I knew we were off to a great start despite my misstep.  I offered to take him to lunch—“wherever you want to go,” I promised him.  We were standing in the alley behind the church,  “The Willard,” he said right away.  “My niece married a cook at the Willard, you know—although the Casassas always called him a chef.  They were a bit high and mighty, you know, pearl necklaces and tinted photographs for all the daughters, stuff like that.”  We started out of the alley and he turned his head in my direction.   “You want to know what they all want to know… did I hold that getaway horse or didn’t I?”  He gave me an opening so I took it.

            “Well, Mr. Ratto, did you?”  He burst out laughing

“Didja hold the horse, Old Joe?  Didja make some money on it, Joe?  Didja hold it long?  Did you hold it tight? Didja?  Didja? Didja?”  His voice was low as he shook his head and upper body.  I said nothing.  He was getting mad.  “Just like all those loafers and newspaper boys—the ones selling the Post in the morning, the Star in the evening.  They were a scary lot when I was younger, the way they’d follow me down the street with their newspaper sacks slung over their shoulders.  On each corner another one would join in.  “Didja hold Booth’s horse?  The man killed Lincoln!  Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!” All my life they’ve been circling me, pointing their inky fingers in my face, spitting out their ugly words.  ‘They can’t prove it!’ I’d yell back at them.  ‘A man’s innocent until they can prove it!’” 

“That’s the American way,” I agreed.  I’d heard that old Joe would chase his tormentors with a cue stick he carried for protection. Lots of people saw him coming and poked fun at him because the John Wilkes Booth horse rumor had become part of Washington lore and an immigrant like Joe was an easy target. 

We walked down F Street in silence.  He was strong and solid for an old man, but his steps were short.  At 11th Street I took his elbow at the curb and he jerked it away, giving me a look that told me he was insulted.  Then we walked slowly side by side.  I wondered why he was giving me this interview and just how much he would admit.  “Where are your people from?” I asked.

“Northern Italy,” he grumbled, then paused and looked up at me.  “Not southern. . . get that part right,” he insisted, gesturing with his fingers in the air.  “I was just a kid, but I remember a big sailing ship and all of us piled in together--parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, everybody starving from those freezing winters and the killing frost that ruined the early crops.  They were all peasants.  Everybody was—contadino—so there was no shame.  We grew God’s good food. Grazie Dio!”  He looked into the blue sky.  His eyes had a milky look; he probably was half blind.  I hailed a Diamond cab and it dropped us on Pennsylvania Avenue at the Willard Hotel catty corner from the White House. 

The uniformed doorman opened the cab door, appearing shocked to see a man in Joe’s dirty condition.  I rushed around to take Joe’s arm and we walked down the carpet under the arched awning together.  I knew the maître d’ who gave us a corner table in the back of the dining room.  He took Joe’s coat and hat, holding them with one extended finger.  Joe’s hair was oily and raggedy but still fairly thick.  He held onto the table as I put the chair behind him and then he plopped down.  He was tired from the walk.  His fingers soiled the white tablecloth.

“Cocktail?” I asked.

            “Vino,” he said, not looking up at the waiter.  “Vino rosso.  Italiano.”  Joe scanned the room—the delicate murals on the thick columns and ceiling, the wooden paneling, the tile floor.  A little smile appeared.  “And olives,” he added looking up at me with a wish on his face.  I ordered the olives and a Campari and I waited for Joe to open up.  I’d heard that over beer Joe had told one confidante that he never held Booth’s horse, but that he had confessed to another that he actually did.  Probably Father DeCarlo at Holy Rosary was the only one who really knew the truth. 

“You have family here?” I asked.

“Oh, the Rattos have pushed fruit carts and vegetable carts of all kinds on every side of every marble building in this town.  Probably some paisano pushed these olives right into this restaurant.”  He sipped wine from the crystal glass like a gentleman.  I downed my Compari and called for another. 

“And you?  Did you have a pushcart too?”

“I was a ragpicker for years,” he said with no shame.  “Trash cans, gum wrappers, tin foil, anything on the street.  Peddling old newspapers was my specialty.  Thank God for your monkey business or I’d have starved years ago.”   He jabbed his elbow in my direction.  “I had my own cart once.  I’d collect yesterday’s newspapers and take them to all the vendors, to wrap up the apples and oranges, the lettuce and tomatoes.  Then I knew all the vendors and had the muscles to push that cart.”  Soon he was slicing his filet into tiny pieces and taking bites of the buttered potatoes with fresh parsley.  He had ordered the best beef on the menu, so I was feeling entitled to ask what I wanted to know.

“So tell me about the Ford Theatre that night that in ’65.  Were you there?”  He chewed as he considered my question.

“You’re gonna tell it straight for once?” he asked, pointing his fork in my direction.

“Just like you tell it to me, Joe.  Just like you tell it to me.”  He buttered his Parker roll.

“Yes, I was there.”

“Ok.  You were there.  Tell me more.”

“Hold your horses, young man.  I’d like another vino, per favore.”  I signaled the waiter while Joe ate.  I wondered what would come next.  There were those who said he never told the truth about his role in the assassination, but that he traded on it—maybe like he was doing with me—for a hot meal or a little fame.

“I was an eleven years old twerp,” he began.  “Slogging for my uncle--my father died on the boat and my mother died in childbirth soon after the ship landed in Philadelphia.  Riposare in pace. My uncle took me in and we moved to D.C. when I was so young I don’t even recall when.  But my job in the family was to pick up money wherever I could and put it in the biscotti jar by the stove where we all put money for food.  I did odd jobs, and sometimes I did hold horses for people at the theatre.  It was hard work. Those were very big horses and I was a very small boy.  But it was one of the best ways to earn a nickel—those who came late didn’t have time to find a stable, so us boys would hang around outside hoping to get one.  They let us do it.  It was a service.”  Joe held his fork in abeyance and kept his eyes on his plate as he spoke.

“It was honest work,” I said.

“It was,” he agreed, and his voice choked up and a tear rolled down his cheek.  The waiter took away his empty plate.  Joe did not look up as he spoke.  “Booth was a famous actor.  Everybody knew him, they said, but I didn’t.  I was just a kid.  What did I know?  He needed somebody to hold his horse and I was there.  So yes, I did hold it.  Did I know about his getaway plan?  No.  Were we for the Union?  We were.  Did I love Old Abe.  Yes, I did. We all did.”  He looked up at me.   His eyes were wet.  His cheeks.  His moustache.   “And you see the penance I have had to pay for the past seventy years?”  He swallowed hard and then he spoke:  “Isn’t it enough, mister?  Isn’t it enough?”

There before me was a broken man with the soul of a boy who did wrong by trying to do right.  He was an eccentric, haunted by a memory that may or may not even have been truly his own. Joe believed the story, but I had to wonder.  Was his memory the result of his tormentors?  The rumor mongers?  The newsmen like me who wanted a story? 

Suddenly he smiled.

“They’ll never prove it,” he said, returning to his gelato.  “They’ll never prove it.”

***

Reports on “Cough Drop Joe,” published after his death, indicate he was buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Washington, D.C.  by a “distant relative,” who I know, because my mother told me and the cemetery records confirm, was our kind grandmother, Blanche Casassa Sheaffer.  She bought a casket and had a headstone carved for Joseph Ratto (1854-1946) where she is now buried along with our grandfather, our parents, aunt, and of course, Uncle Joe.  Our grandmother’s own mother’s birth name was Ratto, and although I’ve not yet been able to determine exactly how we are related to Cough Drop Joe, I believe we must be. I’ve visited the small town in Italy where the Casassas came from and noticed plenty of Rattos buried in the cemetery there.

My primary source for this fictional account is an interview conducted in the 1930s by Denver writer, Donald Bloch, who eventually wrote Joe’s story.Bloch returned to Denver and became proprietor of Collectors’ Center, 1640 Arapahoe Street, specializing in rare books and collections.In 1969 the story was published and filed in Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection.As recently as 2007, a Lincoln historian, in his book, Lincoln Legends: Myths, Hoaxes, and Confabulations Associated with Our Greatest President, identifies “Peanut” John Burroughs, Nathan Simms, and “Coughdrop” Joey Ratto, all of whom allegedly held Booth's getaway horse outside Ford's Theatre the night of the assassination.

The Left Margin

I love the margins,

the left margin

that anticipates comment,

leaves room for

corrections, doodles,

the right margin

that keeps me from

going too far,

returns me to the edges

that tidy up

this jar of beans

Second Place, Free Verse, Columbine Poets of Colorado, 2016