from Saying Grace

for my mother

the living

1.

After Independence Day

all our toys began to tear

up, school growing sweet

on our tongues. We had

already cut & hoed

the cotton into rows, weeds

piled useless as Confederate

bills. September meant picking

& half-days at Springfield, us colored

grades let off at noon to pick

the valuable white till

nightfall. My hands, civil

& slow, didn’t even deserve

my behind on the picking truck,

but Unc Chock ran the thing

& Mama would’ve killed him dead

if he’d dreamt of trying

to get salty. The money was bad

like all money then, not near

as green or wide. Three dollars

for a hundred pounds, better part

of a day. I barely kept up, hands swole up

like unpicked fruit. No matter when

she started, Frankie plucked fifteen pounds

more, food for two, a new

Easter dress. Summers I turned

so black & bent, all because I’d rather

pick with friends than sling weeds

alone, than stuff my mattress green.

2.

Winters, when the white king

had gone, we slept like fish, still

moving. We walked back home

for lunch & retraced after school, changing

into our other pair of drawers

before we chored the stove’s ash. No one

got gas till after the War. Each November

brought a boxcar from the Atchison

Topeka & Santa Fe; for a share,

Lopez balanced it home on his flatbed,

a whale from the hunt. Once full

of hobos, that bell we burnt kept us

from freezing all season long. Before

tossing each board in, I would run

my hands across the wood speech

of burns, carvings warning

Unfriendly Conductor, Town of No

Sleep. Leftover wood turned

to toys; three boards & somebody’s

old rollerskate became a summer

scooter. Bored, what was that?

We were too busy being poor

in that house air-conditioned all winter,

too busy sharing everything, even

bathwater evenings by the pipe stove.

No plumbing, no rats, only mice thick

enough to believe we had more

than they did.

Copyright Credit: Kevin Young, “Saying Grace” from Most Way Home. Copyright © 1995 by Kevin Young. Reprinted with the permission of Zoland Books/Steerforth Press.

Source: Most Way Home (Zoland Books, 1995)