Toombs 4

There are many clues to where
we are: Pine trees lined like corn stalks,
onions and pecans fed on sand.
Cotton fields colored like cranberry, flecked harsh
with childhood memories. The people—white,
withered—trail to baptisms and sermons,
pray for harvests. Pumping
wells and frying corn, they gaze at the
minstrels chained to wall, watermelon
wallpaper unthreading. They recite
Little Black Sambo for grandchildren,
after the town library banned it.
I pick the porch cracks under my feet,
imagining those vidalia fingers reaching
from ground to Toombs, Georgia.

I too was grounded—in grade school
for letting black girls braid my
hair, traipsing fingers
past cheeks and ears, dipping
through the strands of my
mother’s interjections. Those girls
later told me, white people
only learn the chorus of the song.