Turn Me Loose
Authors: Frank X Walker
Turn Me Loose
THE
UNGHOSTING
OF MEDGAR EVERS
Poems By
Frank X Walker
Published by The University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org
©2013 by Frank X Walker
All rights reserved
Designed by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus
Set in 10/14 Century Old Style
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Walker, Frank X., 1961â
[Poems. Selections]
Turn me loose : the unghosting of Medgar Evers :
poems / by Frank X. Walker.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
-13: 978-0-8203-4541-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN
-10: 0-8203-4541-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Evers, Medgar Wiley, 1925â1963âPoetry.
2. United States-âRace relationsâPoetry. I. Title.
PS
3623.
A
359T87 2013
811â².6âdc23
2012046531
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
ISBN for digital edition: 978-0-8203-4586-4
Dedicated to the
Mississippi Truth Project
and the invisible army
of soldiers for justice
whose names might
never be spoken
.
If I die, it will be in a good cause.
I've been fighting for America just
as much as the soldiers in Vietnam.
I do not believe in violence either by
whites or Negroes. That is why I am
working tirelessly with the
NAACP
in
a peaceful struggle for justice.
â
MEDGAR EVERS
When I go to Hades, I'm going to raise
hell all over Hades till I get to the white
section. For the next 15 years we here
in Mississippi are going to have to do
a lot of shooting to protect our wives
and children from a lot of bad niggers.
â
BYRON DE LA BECKWITH
Answering the Call of Medgar Evers
Michelle S. Hite
Ambiguity over the Confederate Flag
Byron De La Beckwith Dreaming I
Life Apes Art Apes Life: Byron De La Beckwith Reflects on
Birth of a Nation
Unwritten Rules for Young Black Boys Wanting to Live in Mississippi Long Enough to Become Men
PART III LOOK AWAY, LOOK AWAY â¦
Byron De La Beckwith Dreaming II
After Dinner in Money, Mississippi
Harriet Tubman as Villain: A Ghost Story
After the
FBI
Searched the Bayou
Byron De La Beckwith Dreaming III
One-Third of 180 Grams of Lead
One Mississippi, Two Mississippis
HOW DO WE COMPLY?
ANSWERING THE CALL OF MEDGAR EVERS
Kentucky assumes a prominent place in Frank X Walker's five previous poetry collections.
Affrilachia
(2000) was his first collection and serves as the defining text of black life and experience in the Blue-grass State.
Black Box: Poems
(2006) extends Walker's voice and vision of the overlooked lives of black people in Kentucky through a consideration of his own Affrilachian life. Walker's persona poems keenly focus the issues of racial subjectivity and place through the embodied narratives of black subjects with deep Kentucky ties.
Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York
(2004) and
When Winter Come: The Ascension of York
(2008) imagined what life might have been like for York, the lone black man on the Lewis and Clark expedition. York had been enslaved in Louisville, Kentucky, and served as William Clark's body servant. Walker also eloquently lays to rest Kentucky native Isaac Murphy through a graceful imagining of his inner life and a careful crafting of the lives of his dear ones in
Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride
(2010).
Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers
, Walker's most recent collection, turns toward a deeper South, but not away from the subject of the overlooked lives of black people who make up life there.
By most accounts, Medgar Evers's contributions to the modern day civil rights movement have been overlooked if not forgotten in chronicles of the movement and so from modern memory.
1
These
poems masterfully confront this erasure through an engagement with Evers's prominence in the inner workings of white supremacist identity and its manifestation as violence in both formal and informal practices of segregation. This collection underscores the startling incongruity of this contemporary elision given the prominence Evers held as a contestant to the order of white supremacy. To this end, Evers was all but invisible and marginal to assassin Byron De La Beckwith or to the White Citizens Council, the Ku Klux Klan, Governor Ross Barnett, and the Mississippi police. This meant that Evers was also all but invisible as a figure for every black person who dared to challenge formal Jim Crow laws and “Dixie decorum,” which Walker's poems identify as those unwritten rules wherein black people publicly acknowledged their inferiority before whites.
Walker beautifully sets in relief the ways that Medgar Evers's singular life symbolizes black life in Mississippi. These poems create an intimate portrait of what it must have been like for people to live amid state-sanctioned loathing; the effort that must have been required to recover dignity from relentless efforts to infuse indignity into the meaningfulness of blackness, from constantly deflecting racist blows. Walker's consideration of the life and cold-blooded assassination of Evers dramatizes the daily horror of dehumanization that thoroughly sought out every corner of southern existence in an effort to degrade the quality of black life and reduce its quantity to prove this point. Indeed, the specter of Evers proves seriousness of purpose in maintaining white supremacy in the segregated South, especially in Mississippi.
Mississippi could create Halloween in August, memorably making a monstrous mask of young Emmett Till's face eight years before Alabama made ghouls of four little Sunday school girls in September. Mississippi muted the voices of its black majority by denying whole counties of black citizens the right to vote, at the same time amplifying the cry of one black woman whose “Mississippi appendectomy” gave involuntary sterilization its name. Mississippi amplified the voice of a governor whose ardent love for segregation ignited the passions of a crowd sympathetic to blocking one black student's
admittance into law school at Ole Miss and set the symbolic bar for an Alabama governor's stand in another schoolhouse door.
2
Walker's poems paint a vivid picture of Mississippi macabre but also of the elegance that black people made of life there. Such elegance gets imagined just as I remember observing it in my own Affrilachian life. I knew and saw black people who could be quiet together; who when alone could think sweetly or soberly about the other; who enjoyed one another with careful measure; who nurtured one another; who not only slept together but rested together.
I believe
the persona that Walker ascribes to Myrlie Evers, who conjures sweet memories when the smooth sound of Motown plays in her ear.
I see
the children she lays down to bed and the dreams she nurtures in a place that insists she does not belong.
I admire
the hope she continues to sustain and the arguments she continues to make for love.
These poems perform. You not only see the drama unfold but you hear the way that Walker scores it. Music can be heard throughout this work. You not only hear it in reading the epigraphs but also through the interpretative acoustics of the surprising fusion of voices throughout. The opening epigraphs featuring the one instance where Medgar Evers speaks set against the voice of Byron De La Beckwith marvelously frame the “divergent points of view” that Walker identifies in his introduction. Having these two men's words together on the same page reflects the stark differences between points of entry and perspectives on living well in Mississippi. Walker offers his work as an “interruption of the silence” concerning Evers's erasure as a civil rights legend and thus serves as an attempt to address an important oversight in a long and terrible legacy of southern violence. This interruption comes to figure reconciliation and possibly healing from the catastrophic wounding that is marked specifically by the assassination of Evers but that also exceeds his ghost. His final words, “turn me loose,” were an address to history, but his ghost highlights the liveliness of history. Thus, the title, the epigraphs, and the introduction establish the enormity of this project, which I see as the hard work of reconciliation in light of the nature of the wound and given the absurdity of its situatedness in
southern history. Walker brings this point to sonic resonance most profoundly through his thoughtful treatment of “Dixie” and “Strange Fruit.”
The section headings “Dixie Suite,” “Look Away, Look Away â¦,” “Gallant South,” and “Bitter Fruit” reference “Dixie” or “Strange Fruit” respectively. The “Dixie Suite” captures the vast gulf between stark racial impressions of southern life measured by reactions to the song. Amid disputes over the true origin of the song's creation, Mount Vernon, Ohio, native Daniel Decatur Emmett is credited with writing the song.
3
Emmett penned the song as a member of Bryant's Minstrels. “Dixie” assumed its gravity with the onset of the Civil War, when it became the adopted anthem of the Confederacy, and it held its seriousness of purpose when northern and southern bands composed versions of it that were performed throughout the war. While many versions of “Dixie” exist, the voice of the enslaved longing to return to plantation life has endured. Backbreaking and unremitting, unremunerated work gets imagined as tranquil longing through the laboring body of an enslaved person. For those who symbolize those laboring bodies, nostalgia for such a past and pride in this imagined South offends historical recognition of the toll of the historical South upon their lives.