The Future

(Detroit, 1950)

Because the jobs were there

and a man could get rich

working on the line, the South

retreated North to Michigan,

whole families eating crackers and baloney

by the side of the road,

changing drivers to keep

moving through corn fields

and foreign towns,

sundown and darkness,

the moon a prophecy of chrome,

the stars 10 million headlights

of the cars they would build.

Ahead lay a city bright with steel;

behind, the dark fields folded

over everything they knew;

and when they dozed

on cramped back seats, they dreamed

such dreams as the road can make,

of drifting on a lake or stream

or lying down in hay to dream of traveling,

so that when they woke to a bump,

a couch, a voice saying, “It’s your turn,”

they were lost to themselves

and took a few moments

to remember their names.

Mostly behind their backs,

the locals called them

rednecks, crackers, goddamned rebs.

Strange to be strange,

in their new neighborhoods,

to be ethnic with a thick accent

and a taste for food the grocers didn’t stock—

hog jowl and blackeyes, turnip greens,

roasting ears, souse-meat—

the butcher shrugging,

the produce man shaking his head.

Sometimes their own voices

took them by surprise,

sounding odd and out of place

in the din of a city bus, ringing

lost in the evening air when

they called their children in for supper.

At work they touched

parts of tomorrow,

next year’s models always

taking shape and vanishing,

the present obsolete, the past

merely a rumor,

all hours blurring

into one continuous moment

of finishing a fragment,

each piece the same piece,

movements identical,

endless, like a punishment in hell.

No way out but back

to their old lives, a future

they already knew by heart,

a few on the road each month

in cars they may have helped assemble,

tokens of their failed success,

legacies for boys to find

years later rusting on some lot,

banged up but still a dream

and fast enough when overhauled

to make them feel they could blast

straight into tomorrow,

as they raced their engines at each stoplight

and cruised their towns in circles.

Copyright Credit: Neal Bowers, "The Future" from Out of the South, published by Louisiana State University Press. Copyright © 2002 by Neal Bowers. Reprinted by permission of Neal Bowers.

Source: Out of the South (Louisiana State University Press, 2002)