Finding Poems

In 1995, Rosalie Richardson was one of the women I interviewed in Sumter about their lives growing up in Jim Crow, South Carolina. These stories have been a rich source of music and insight for me. But sometimes I return to their voices, just as they spoke to me, to remind me of the grace and poetry inherent in the cadence, the syntax and the care for detail in these tellings.
I discovered a found poem in Rosalie Richardson’s retelling of where she was born in 1924 and where she came from:
The town I was born in
was called Statesburg Township
during the time I was born.
It was in Smter County
and its between Highway 261
and the river going to Columbia.
Going over,
that would be the right,
between Horatio,
Borden and Hagwood.
That area.
I was born at home.
mid-doctors,
maybe you do not know of those—
you’ve heard, right? That’s it.
She then went on to talk about growing up on a farm.

I stated cooking at the age of six because when I was six years old Mama and dada had their third child. Mammy is in the bed, as I said, with Mid-doctors, right? No hospital with no meals coming through. I learned to cook on the chimney. There was no stove then, at that particular time. Climbed up on a wooden stool (there wasn’t many chairs, the people the made their own chairs and tables, the men folk, right from the wood), and go over into the barrel to get the meal. Mama would say how much to bring to the bed. The old fashion way. Sift out. And then she would tell me to bring the this and the that to put in it. She would tell me to bring her the water too, and the burning coals from the wood fire, under the pot-a pot that had three legs on it. And doing the bread, cooking, feeding Mama in the bed ntil she could get out. So I have been working a long time.
Another thing about the farm in those days there was cotton. There was something known as millage, and you strp that and that made the syrup. The corn, shell it in the barn and it made the grits and the emal. And the cotton we picked and it would go to the gin house and it would be made into bales and seed. The seed was taken off it and then it would be baled up, and a lot of farmers would save the seed to replant the seed next year. And then we had, what? Peas. Peas within the cornfields, in the corn rows, and those would be ready to be gathered in November—dry, ready to gather. The corn is taken then, too, and picked and put in the barn
Okay, in August the corn would be green. Strip all of that—I think people would call leaf now—pull it off and we would tie it into bundles and we would tie it on the stalk. We had a way of doing that, until it was dry. Then gather that and take it to the barn and put it in what was known as a loft, and that would feed for the animals in the winter.
After the peas had been picked out of the corn field, the corn rows, then all of that would be cut down and then we would go into the woods and cut a huge old type of pine tree, not a great big one—I would say about this—and take it to the house and big a hole in the ground, put it in there, and daddy would nail, maybe about three feets from the ground, crosses like this on it, and a couple of little higher crosses, and it would be those haystacks, they were known as haystacks. They would dry out and that would be feed for the animals during the winter.
There is something humbling about the beauty of this language, the simplicity of the manner and yet the complex weight of the tone and the implications of memory. It is passages like these that make it hard for me to, as Nikky Finney would say, "come to the page lightly" or casually, because you realize that as poet, this is what you must somehow capture. I trust you will find as much pleasure in this simple passage as I have so many times.