The Change

Thirteen years ago, before bulk barns and

fifth gear diesel tractors, we rode royal blue tractors with

toolboxes big enough to hold a six pack on ice.

In the one hundred fifteen degree summer

heat with air so thick with moisture

you drink as you breathe.

Before the year dusters sprayed

malathion over our clustered bodies, perspiring

while we primed bottom lugs,

those ground level leaves of tobacco,

and it clung to us with black tar so sticky we rolled

eight-inch balls off our arms at night and

Cloroxed our clothes for hours and hours.

Before we were poisoned and

the hospital thought we had been burned in fires,

at least to the third degree,

when the raw, oozing hives that

covered ninety-eight percent of our bodies

from the sprays ordered by the FDA

and spread by landowners,

before anyone had seen

automated machines that top and prime.

While we topped the lavender

blooms of many tiny flowers

gathered into one, gorgeous.

By grasping hold below the petals

with our bare, calloused hands

and twisting downward, quick, hard,

only one time, snapped them off.

Before edgers and herbicides took

what they call weeds,

when we walked for days

through thirty acres and

chopped them out with hoes.

Hoes, made long before from wood and steel

and sometimes (even longer ago)

from wood and deer scapula.

Before the bulk primers came

and we primed all the leaves by hand,

stooped over at the waist for the

lower ones and through the season

gradually rising higher until we stood

and worked simultaneously,

as married to the fields as we were to each other,

carrying up to fifty pounds of fresh

leaves under each arm and sewing them onto

sticks four feet long on a looper

under the shade of a tin-roofed barn, made of shingle,

and poking it up through the rafters inside

to be caught by a hanger who

poked it up higher in the rafters to another

who held a higher position

and so they filled the barn.

And the leaves hung down

like butterfly wings, though

sometimes the color of

luna moths, or Carolina parakeets, when just

an hour ago they had been

laid upon the old wooden

cart trailers pulled behind

the orange Allis-Chalmers tractor

with huge, round fenders and only

a screwdriver and salt in the toolbox,

picked by primers so hot

we would race through the rows

to reach the twenty-five gallon

jugs of water placed throughout

the field to encourage and in attempt to

satisfy our insatiable thirsts

from drinking air which poured

through our pores without breaking

through to our need for more

water in the sun.

Sun we imagined to disappear

yet respected for growing all things on earth

when quenched with rains called forth

by our song and drumming.

Leaves, which weeks later, would be

taken down and the strings pulled

like string on top of a large dog-food bag

and sheeted up into burlap sheets

that bundled over a hundred pounds

when we smashed down with our feet,

but gently smashing,

then thrown up high to

a catcher on a big clapboard trailer

pulled behind two-ton trucks and

taken to market in Fuquay-Varina

and sold to Philip Morris and

Winston-Salem for around a buck a pound.

Leaves cured to a bright leaf,

a golden yellow with the strongest

aroma of tobacco barn curing

and hand grown quality

before the encroachment of

big business in the Reagan era

and the slow murder of method

from a hundred years before.

When the loons cried out in

laughter by the springs and

the bass popped the surface on

the pond, early on, next to

the fields, before that time

when it was unfashionable to

transplant each individual baby plant,

the infant tobacco we nurtured, to

transplant those seedlings to each hill

in the field, the space for that particular plant

and we watched as they would grow.

Before all of this new age, new way,

I was a sharecropper in Willow Springs, North Carolina,

as were you and we were proud to be Tsa la gi

wishing for winter so we could make camp

at Qualla Boundary and Oconaluftee

would be free of tourists and filled with snow

and those of us who held out forever

and had no CIBs would be home again

with our people, while the BIA forgot to watch.

When we still remembered before even the Europeans,

working now shoulder to shoulder with descendants

of their slaves they brought from Africa

when they sold our ancestors as slaves in the Middle East,

that then the tobacco was sacred to all of us and we

prayed whenever we smoked and

did not smoke for pleasure and

I was content and free.

Then they came and changed things

and you left me for a fancy white girl

and I waited on the land

until you brought her back

in that brand new white Trans Am,

purchased from our crop, you gave her

and left her waiting in a motel.

The nearest one was forty miles away,

but near enough for you

and for her and I knew though

I never spoke a word to you

about it, I knew and I kept it to

myself to this day and time and

I never let on

until I left on our anniversary.

I drove the pick-up

down the dirt path by the empty fields

and rented a shack for eighty dollars,

the one with cardboard windows

and a Gillespie house floor design,

with torn and faded floral paper on walls

and linoleum so thin over rotted board

that the floor gave if you weighed over

a hundred pounds. I did not.

And with no running water of any kind, or bathroom.

The one at hilltop, where I could

see out across all the fields

and hunt for meat when I wanted

and find peace.

I heard you remarried

and went into automated farming

and kept up with America.

I watched all of you from the hill

and I waited for the lavender blooms

to return and when it was spring

even the blooms had turned white.

I rolled up my bedroll, remembering before,

when the fields were like waves on a green ocean,

and turned away, away from the change

and corruption of big business on small farms

of traditional agricultural people, and sharecroppers.

Away, so that I could always hold this concise image

of before that time and it

floods my memory.

Source: Dog Road Woman (Coffee House Press, 1997)

Disability Poetics

“Indians in T-shirts”