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“You’ve packed quite the load of fear and loathing into nineteen lines. Does it have to do with your experience as a black woman?”
“I… well…” The poem actually has nothing to do with her skin color. It has to do with a creature that called itself Chet Ondowsky. It looked human, but it wasn’t. It would have killed her if not for Holly and Jerome.
“I withdraw the question,” Emily says. “It’s the poem that should speak, not the poet, and yours speaks clearly. I was just surprised. I was expecting something quite a bit more jejune, given your age.”
“Oh my,” Barbara says, channeling her mother. “Thank you.”
Emily comes around to Barbara’s side of the table and lays the poem on top of Barbara’s folder. Close up she has a cinnamony smell that Barbara doesn’t quite like. If it’s perfume, she maybe should try another brand. Only Barbara doesn’t think it’s perfume, she thinks it’s her.
“Don’t thank me yet. This line doesn’t work.” She taps the fourth line of the poem. “It’s not only clumsy, it’s banal. Lazy. You can’t cut it, the poem is already as brief as it needs to be, so you must replace it with something better. These other lines tell me you are capable of that.”
“All right,” Barbara says. “I’ll think of something.”
“You should. You will. As for this last line, what would you think about changing This is the way birds stitch the sky closed at sunset with This is how? Save a word.” She picks up a spoon by the bowl and begins to jab it up and down. “Long poems can provoke deep feelings, but a short one must stab and stab and be done! Pound, Williams, Walcott! You agree?”
“Yes,” Barbara says. She would probably have agreed to anything at this moment—it’s just so weird—but this she actually does agree with. She doesn’t know Walcott but will look for him or her later.
“All right.” Emily puts the spoon down and resumes her seat. “I will speak to Livvie and tell her you have talent. She may say yes, because talent—especially young talent—always engages her. If she says no, it will be because she is now too infirm to take on a mentee. Will you give me your telephone number and email address? I’ll pass them on to her, and I’ll send her a copy of this poem, if you don’t mind. Make that little change—just scratch it in, please, and don’t bother with the bad line for now. I’ll take a picture of it with my phone. Does that sound like a plan?”
“Sure, yes.” Barbara scratches out the way and adds how.
“If you don’t hear back from her in a week or two, I may be in touch. If, that is, you might consider me as… an interested party.”
She doesn’t use the word mentor, but Barbara is sure from the pause that’s what she means, and on the basis of a single poem!
“That’s wonderful! Thank you so much!”
“Would you like a cookie for the ride home?”
“Oh, I walked,” Barbara says. “I walk a lot. It’s good exercise, especially on nice days like this, and it gives me time to think. Sometimes I drive to school, I got my driver’s license last year, but not so much. If I’m late, I ride my bike.”
“If you’re walking, I insist you take two.”
Emily gets Barbara the cookies. Barbara lifts her mug and takes the final sip as Emily turns around. “Thank you, Professor… Emily. The tea was very good.”
“Glad you enjoyed it,” Emily says, with that same thin smile. Barbara thinks there’s something knowing about it. “Thank you for sharing your work.”
Barbara leaves with her red coat unbuttoned, her red scarf hanging loose instead of wrapped, her knitted red beret cocked rakishly on her head, facemask forgotten in her pocket.
Pretty, Emily thinks. Pretty little pickaninny.
Although that word (and others) comes naturally to mind, if spoken aloud it would surely sully her reputation for the rest of her life in these Puritanical times. Yet she understands and forgives herself, as she forgave herself for certain unkind thoughts about the late Ellen Craslow. Emily Dingman Harris’s formative years occurred in an era when the only black people you saw in the movies or on TV were the servants, where certain candies and jump-rope rhymes contained the n-word, where her own mother was the proud owner of an Agatha Christie first edition with a title so racist that the book was later retitled Ten Little Indians and still later as And Then There Were None.
It’s my upbringing, that’s all. I am not to blame.
And that little girl is talented. Indecently talented for one so young. Not to mention a blackie.
2
When Roddy comes back from his errand, Emily says, “Do you want to see something amusing?”
“I live for amusement, dear one,” he says.
“It’s science and nutrition you live for, but I think this will amuse you. Come with me.”
They go into Emily’s study nook. It was here that she read Barbara’s poem, but that wasn’t all she did. Em goes to CAMS, keyboards the password, and selects the one hidden behind a panel above the refrigerator. It gives a view of the whole kitchen at a slight downward angle. Emily fast-forwards to the point where Emily leaves the room with Barbara’s poem in her hand. Then she pushes play.
“She waits until she hears me close the study door. Watch.”
