clarksdale

This is a prose poem that I wrote for inclusion in a zine that I’m actually somewhat hesitant to publish, because it examines my feelings on growing up white in the American South and I worry about sounding whiny. But I’m generally happy with this poem, out of all of them.

I always knew we were getting close to Clarksdale when I saw the kudzu vines out the car window. Green, no matter the season; a green wall that stretched for miles down the highway. ‘The vine that ate the South,’ my mother said as we drove through the colonised landscape.

When Gran and Grandpa were both still alive, we stayed in their farmhouse at the edge of town, amongst their magnolias that always seemed to be blooming, their pecan trees lined up and yielding, in autumn, their rich nuts. None of my aunts stayed in Mississippi, only crazy Cousin Jane, who taught me how to taste the notes in Theakston’s Old Peculiar when I was ten. My mom and Jane burnt down a barn once. Mom was six, teaching a five-year-old Jane to smoke.

You could never take Cousin Jane anywhere. At Thanksgiving one year, in Gran’s dining room, picking at macaroni and collard greens, surrounded by family that had fled to other cities, she spoke loudly about a relative who had ‘an unfortunate taste for dark meat.’ My sister and I thought she was talking about turkey. It was our last Thanksgiving in Clarksdale.

As my sister and I grew older, our mother’s old porcelain dolls – pert-lipped belles called Mary-Jane and Martha-Ann – and strolls around the homestead were no longer enough to occupy us. We’d wait in the car during shopping trips to Save-a-Lot; one time we saw a cinema – in Clarksdale! – but Mom wouldn’t take us because it was ‘the black movie theatre’, and that mattered for some inscrutable reason.

Eventually my mother and aunts talked Grandpa into selling the farm that he had inherited from his father, and his father before him, back to John Clark, who though he refused to keep slaves married a plantation belle. (The spirit of the hungry kudzu vine, inescapable, always there.) Gran and Grandpa moved to assisted living, and we moved to the Best Western on State Street, one of many roadside inns off the 49 on the crossroads between Abe’s Barbecue and the 322.

Clarksdale was a collection of old buildings between which we were shuttled in cars. The Blues Museum. Ground Zero. St George’s Episcopal Church. Madidi’s, where elderly whites were seated adjacent to black tourists and served by smiling black waiters, like plantation belles. It made me uncomfortable, and I wondered, as I still do sometimes, how much of Clarksdale I never got to see because of this Venn diagram of white and black that had imprinted itself into the fabric of my mother’s life.

One time she made my sister and I be pages in a debutante ball. The Clarksdale page girls stuck together in a stuck-up clique of magnolia skin and heavy makeup; my sister, the exotically half-Jewish beauty from Texas, got hit on a lot; and I, with my skinny arms and pixie haircut, got sideways Southern looks for headbanging to a Nirvana song at a party. Mom stuck us in stupid green dresses that, after the debutante ball, we rolled down the hotel hall in, sullying them because we never had to wear them ever, ever again.

I took my guitar to Grandpa’s funeral. After the church service at St George’s, my cousin and I sat outside the reception playing, and I thought about Robert Johnson sat at the crossroads strumming his guitar until the tall dark man came and tuned it for him. I wondered who would come for me at the crossroads. Not Papa Legba; not even the Devil; maybe just the spirit, the hungry grasping spirit, of the kudzu vine.

I always thought I’d go back when Gran died, but by the time she passed I lived not in Texas but across the sea, and I couldn’t go to her send-off at St George’s, didn’t see my Southern diaspora family return to mourn their one remaining link to the place, take a final circuit to the Blues Museum, Ground Zero, Madidi’s, and then depart, possibly forever. Will I see Clarksdale again? Do I want to see it again? Or will I always, always feel hungry, grasping, invading a place that isn’t mine?