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Overview
Artful and intense, Finney's poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810152168 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/27/2011 |
| Pages: | 116 |
| Sales rank: | 671,367 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
HEAD OFF & SPLIT
POEMSBy NIKKY FINNEY
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2011 Nikky FinneyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-5216-8
Chapter One
The Hard • Headed
Red Velvet
(for Rosa Parks, 1913–2005)
People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was
tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no
more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day.
No—the only thing I was—was tired of giving in.
—ROSA PARKS
i
Montgomery, Alabama, 1955
The setting: A rolling box with wheels
The players: Mr. Joe Singleton, Rev. Scott,
Miss Louise Bennett, Mrs. Rosa Parks,
Jacob & Junie (fraternal twins, fourteen)
The game: Pay your Indian Head to the driver,
then get off the bus.
Then, walk to the door at the end of the bus.
Then, reboard the bus through the Black back door.
(Then, push repeat for fifty years.)
Sometimes, the driver pulled off,
before the paid-in-full customer
could get to the one open door.
Fed up with buses driving off—without them—
just as her foot lifted up, grazing, the steel step:
She was not a child. She was in her forties.
A seamstress. A woman devoted to
handmade things.
She had grown up in a place:
where only white people had power,
where only white people passed good jobs on
to other white people,
where only white people loaned money
to other white people,
where only white people were considered human
by other white people,
where only the children of white people had new
books on the first day of school,
where only white people could drive to the store
at midnight for milk
(without having to watch the rearview).
ii
A seamstress brings fabric and thread, collars & hems,
buttonholes, together. She is one who knows her way
around velvet.
Arching herself over a river of cloth she feels for the bias,
but doesn't cut, not until the straight pins are in place,
marking everything; in time, everything will come together.
Nine months after, December 1, 1955, Claudette
Colvin, fifteen, arrested for keeping her seat; before that,
Mary Louise Smith. The time to act, held by two pins.
iii
The Montgomery seamstress waits and waits for
the Cleveland Avenue bus. She climbs aboard,
row five. The fifth row is the first row of the Colored
section. The bus driver, who tried to put her off that day,
had put her off twelve years before. But twelve years
before she was only twenty-eight, still a child to the
heavy work of resistance.
By forty-two, you have pieced & sewn many things
together in segregated Alabama. You have heard
"Nigger Gal" more times than you can stitch your
manners down. You have smelled fear cut through
the air like sulfur iron from the paper mills. The pants,
shirts, and socks that you have darned perfectly, routinely,
walk perfectly, routinely, by you. (Afternoon. How do.)
Those moving along so snug in your well-made, well-sewn
clothes, spit routinely, narrowly missing your perfectly
pressed sleeve.
By forty-two, your biases are flat, your seams are interlocked,
your patience with fools, razor thin.
By forty-two, your heart is heavy with slavery, lynching,
and the lessons of being "good." You have heard
7,844 Sunday sermons on how God made every
woman in his image. You do a lot of thinking with
a thimble on your thumb. You have hemmed
8,230 skirts for nice, well-meaning white women
in Montgomery. You have let the hem out of
18,809 pant legs for growing white boys. You have
pricked your finger 45,203 times. Held your peace.
iv
December 1, 1955: You didn't notice who was
driving the bus. Not until you got on. Later you
would remember, "All I wanted was to get home."
The bus driver, who put you off when you were
twenty-eight, would never be given the pleasure
of putting you off anything ever again. When he
asks you to move you cross your feet at the ankle.
Well—I'm going to have you arrested.
And you, you with your forty-two years, with your
21,199 perfect zippers, you with your beautiful
nation of perfect seams marching all in place, all
around Montgomery, Alabama, on the backs &
hips of Black & white alike, answer him back,
Well—You may go on and do so.
You are arrested on a Thursday. That night in
Montgomery, Dr. King led the chant, "There
comes a time when people just get tired." (He
wasn't quite right, but he was King.) He asked
you to stand so your people can see you. You
stand. Veritas! You do not speak. The indelible
blue ink still on your thumb saying, Enough!
You think about the qualities of velvet: strength
& sway. How mighty it holds the thread and
won't let go. You pull your purse in close,
the blue lights map out your thumb, blazing
the dark auditorium.
On Courthouse Monday, the sun day dew
sweating the grass, you walk up the sidewalk
in a long-sleeved black dress, your white collar
and deep perfect cuffs holding you high and
starched in the Alabama air. A trim black velvet
hat, a gray coat, white gloves. You hold your
purse close: everything valuable is kept near
the belly, just like you had seen your own mother
do. You are pristine. Persnickety. Particular.
A seamstress. Every thing about you gathered
up and in place. A girl in the crowd, taught not to
shout, shouts, "Oh! She's so sweet looking! Oh!
They done messed with the wrong one now."
You cannot keep messing with a sweet-looking
Black woman who knows her way around velvet.
A woman who can take cotton and gabardine,
seersucker and silk, swirl tapestry, and hang
boiled wool for the house curtains, to the very
millimeter. A woman made of all this is never to
be taken for granted, never to be asked to move
to the back of anything, never ever to be arrested.
A woman who believes she is worthy of every
thing possible. Godly. Grace. Good. Whether you
believe it or not, she has not come to Earth to play
Ring Around Your Rosie on your rolling
circus game of public transportation.
A woman who understands the simplicity pattern,
who wears a circle bracelet of straight pins there,
on the tiny bend of her wrist. A nimble, on-the-dot
woman, who has the help of all things, needle sharp,
silver, dedicated, electric, can pull cloth and others
her way, through the tiny openings she and others
before her have made.
A fastened woman
can be messed with, one too many times.
With straight pins poised in the corner
of her slightly parted lips, waiting to mark
the stitch, her fingers tacking,
looping the blood red wale,
through her softly clenched teeth
she will tell you, without ever looking
your way,
You do what you need to do &
So will I.
Left
Eenee Menee Mainee Mo!
—RUDYARD KIPLING, "A COUNTING-OUT SONG,"
IN LAND AND SEA TALES FOR SCOUTS AND GUIDES, 1923
The woman with cheerleading legs
has been left for dead. She hot paces a roof,
four days, three nights, her leaping fingers,
helium arms rise & fall, pulling at the week-old
baby in the bassinet, pointing to the
eighty-two-year-old grandmother, fanning & raspy
in the New Orleans Saints folding chair.
Eenee Menee Mainee Mo!
Three times a day the helicopter flies
by in a low crawl. The grandmother insists on
not being helpless, so she waves a white handkerchief
that she puts on and takes off her head
toward the cameraman and the pilot who
remembers well the art of his mirrored-eyed
posture in his low-flying helicopter: Bong Son,
Dong Ha, Pleiku, Chu Lai. He makes a slow
Vietcong dip & dive, a move known in Rescue
as the Observation Pass.
The roof is surrounded by broken-levee
water. The people are dark but not broken. Starving,
abandoned, dehydrated, brown & cumulous,
but not broken. The four-hundred-year-old
anniversary of observation begins, again—
Eenee Menee Mainee Mo!
Catch a—
The woman with pom-pom legs waves
her uneven homemade sign:
Pleas Help Pleas
and even if the e has been left off the Pleas e
do you know simply
by looking at her
that it has been left off
because she can't spell
(and therefore is not worth saving)
or was it because the water was rising so fast
there wasn't time?
Eenee Menee Mainee Mo!
Catch a— a—
The low-flying helicopter does not know
the answer. It catches all of this on patriotic tape,
but does not land, and does not drop dictionary,
or ladder.
Regulations require an e be at the end
of any Pleas e before any national response
can be taken.
Therefore, it takes four days before
the national council of observers will consider
dropping one bottle of water, or one case
of dehydrated baby formula, on the roof
where the e has rolled off into the flood,
(but obviously not splashed
loud enough)
where four days later not the mother,
not the baby girl,
but the determined hanky waver,
whom they were both named for,
(and after) has now been covered up
with a green plastic window awning,
pushed over to the side
right where the missing e was last seen.
My mother said to pick
The very best one!
What else would you call it,
Mr. Every-Child-Left-Behind.
Anyone you know
ever left off or put on
an e by mistake?
Potato Po tato e
In the future observation helicopters
will leave the well-observed South and fly
in Kanye-West-Was-Finally-Right formation.
They will arrive over burning San Diego.
The fires there will be put out so well.
The people there will wait in a civilized manner.
And they will receive foie gras and free massage
for all their trouble, while their houses don't
flood, but instead burn calmly to the ground.
The grandmothers were right
about everything.
People who outlived bullwhips & Bull
Connor, historically afraid of water and routinely
fed to crocodiles, left in the sun on the sticky tar-heat
of roofs to roast like pigs, surrounded by
forty feet of churning water, in the summer
of 2005, while the richest country in the world
played the old observation game, studied
the situation: wondered by committee what to do;
counted, in private, by long historical division;
speculated whether or not some people are surely
born ready, accustomed to flood, famine, fear.
My mother said to pick
The very best one
And you are not it!
After all, it was only po' New Orleans,
old bastard city of funny spellers. Nonswimmers
with squeeze-box accordion accents. Who would
be left alive to care?
My Time Up with You
[A rickety porch somewhere in east Texas.]
the air is calamity
The TV camera steadies against the wind, shining
the only good light left on the old woman's face.
Ain't going nowhere. Ain't moving. Not from this house.
The young man does not drop head or microphone.
Go save somebody else. Everybody at 621 already saved.
With her cane she points to the bright orange house numbers.
The young reporter does not speak. The sheriff deputy's
face is ruddy, puffing. He is nearly eating his car radio;
We ARE trying to get out. Roger, we are trying to get out now! Over.
The young "tom brokaw" situates the camera on her face.
Mayree Monroe is chewing down an old bone, taken out
of her mama's mouth. A bone that won't go down.
You say Rita coming? Well, she just gonna have to come on.
Miss Monroe hands the sky everything in her pockets.
Come on Rita girl. Come on gal, get yourself on Mayree's list.
Her eyes & words fall to Mr. Tall Handsome, camera-keeping
up with her every move;
Iss gonna be me and Rita tonight, Baby!
He hoists the great silver eye off his shoulder. Looking
behind, on guard to the loud laughing wind. No time.
He's got to make her understand.
One hour ago when they arrived for this little
human-interest story, he didn't think it would
take this long. How could it take this long? All
up and down the street: Whipping clotheslines.
Spanking trash cans. Snapping live wires.
Twenty-foot vaulted trees. Downspouts playing
steel pan with the trembling ground. Every wild
thing prone to stillness now. Miss Monroe's screen
cracks then pops. The top hinge lunges wild, free.
Miss Monroe, please come with us, everybody has been
evacuated—but you. We need to get in the car now and go.
We really need to go. If we leave without you no one will
come back for you—not even when you change your mind.
He means well. He has a kind voice. Wearing
those You Can Trust Me I Served In The Peace
Corps eyes. He has seen the inside of a church
twice, walking all the way to the front both
times, surprising even his mother as he dropped
to his knees.
The old woman, three times his age, points, then
claps her hands like a much younger woman.
When she does her top teeth shift, slip. She stands.
Using both hands she smoothes down the cotton
fabric from hipline to another invisible mark just
above her knee. She does this in one fluid motion.
This is the oldest signal in the Western Hemisphere
between an old Black woman and whosoever
her company happens to be.
My time up with you her standing-up legs and
smoothing-down hand signals say. But the young
"tom brokaw" has not studied his field guide
to Black women.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from HEAD OFF & SPLIT by NIKKY FINNEY Copyright © 2011 by Nikky Finney. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsResurrection of the Errand Girl: An IntroductionThe Hard - HeadedRed VelvetLeftMy Time Up with YouPlunderThe Condoleezza Suite Concerto no. 5: Condoleezza & Intransigence Concerto no. 7: Condoleezza {working out} at the Watergate Concerto no. 11: Condoleezza and the Chickering Concerto no. 12: Condoleezza Visits NYC {during hurricane season}The Head - over - HeelsThunderbolt of JoveThe AureoleShaker: Wilma Rudolph Appears While Riding the Althea GibsonHighway HomeCattailsHeirloomOrangerieThe ClitorisBrown Girl Levitation, 1962-1989The Head - WatersDancing with StromSegregation, ForeverNegroes with GunsHash MarksMen Who Give Milk 1Alice ButlerPenguin, Mullet, BreadLiberty Street SeafoodHead Off & SplitInstruction, Final: To Brown Poets from Black Girl with Silver LeicaWhat People are Saying About This
"Nikky Finney has been a fine poet much too long to say that this latest treasure is her promise coming into being. She exploded with so much talent with On Wings Made of Gauze and beautifully matured with Rice, yet Head Off & Split takes the promise of youth with the control of adulthood to bring her greatest exploration. Honest, searing, searching. We all, especially now, need this book of poems; we all, especially now, need this poet."—Nikki Giovanni, author of Bicycles
"With Head Off & Split, Nikky Finney establishes herself as one of the most eloquent, urgent, fearless and necessary poets writing in America today. What makes this book as important as anything published in the last decade is the irresistible music, the formal dexterity and the imaginative leaps she makes with metaphor and language in these simply stunning poems. This is a very, very important achievement."—Kwame Dawes, author of Hope's Hospice
"Beginning with the sweepingly inclusive and powerful 'Red Velvet,' a Middle Passage poem for our times, Nikky Finney takes the reader to a wonderfully alive world where the musical possibilities of language overflow with surprise and innovation. Finney has an ear to go along with the wild-ness of her imagination, which sweeps through history like a pair of wings. Her carefully modulated free verse is always purposeful in its desire to move the reader in a way that allows us intimate access to necessary observations about ourselves. These poems, in other words, have the power to save us."—Bruce Weigl, author of What Saves Us
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