BRASIL AS A GIRL

When I was 12, my family moved to Brazil for a year. It took over a day of travel by plane to get there, with stops and transfers in Houston, Miami, Lima and Caracas before we arrived in Rio de Janeiro. We stayed a few days in Rio at the Hotel Gloria on the Ipanema, a grande dame of a hotel that is amazingly still there. (Maggie and Bill Barnett at Hotel Gloria pool, December 1967) According to my childhood diary, we arrived in Rio on 14 December 1967.

(Hotel Gloria pool as it looks now, still the same)

(Hotel Gloria, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil -- the first place I ever drank guaraná)

We went on to Salvador (Bahia) for a day, then arrived in Aracaju where we would live.
(Map of Brasil showing Aracaju.)

Aracaju is the capital of Sergipe, the smallest Brazilian state. It was then a city of around 100,000, located where the River Sergipe emptied into the South Atlantic. The main commerce centered on coffee and sugar, and on weekdays until noon the smell of roasting coffee penetrated every room in the city.

(Wetlands near Aracaju.)

We rented a stucco house that was on the very last paved street near the southwestern edge, bordering on a swamp and then jungle. (It's now an urban neighborhood.) Our address was Rua Construtor Joao Alves #47. Just around the corner was the house of my father's boss, Bill Paetzold, and his much younger Danish trophy wife, Hanne, who became my only friend and my first serious crush.

Our year in Brasil, 1967-1968, was When It All Changed for me. For the first time, my family did not include my older brother, who had been left behind in the States to attend college. My freedom from his tortures utterly changed me. I stopped having asthma that year, and stopped being anorexic. I defied my mother (a first for me) by refusing to continue with the correspondence course she ordered to teach me and my little brother Bill -- there were no English-language grade schools in Aracaju. Instead, I created my own course of study, despite her daily worry and verbal beratement about how I was going to lose a year of school.

I read voraciously, anything I could find in English, including my first murder mysteries and science fiction. I read my way through Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Poe, and Dorothy Parker. I also read my way through our Encyclopedia Britannica. I studied geology and physics, I devoured history, and I began writing sonnets.

When we returned to the States, in the middle of what should have been my eighth grade year, I was at first told by the rural school I entered that I'd have to repeat a grade. My mother, however, switched over from being my detractor to being my ally and demanded I be tested first. In every subject, I placed at least sophomore level college -- in literature and history, I tested far above that. The school immediately offered to place me at least two grades ahead, but Mama refused. She herself had been moved ahead two grades in school and suffered socially. I remain grateful she advocated for me in this regard; I'd have been destroyed by peer pressure otherwise.

I was utterly happy in Brazil. I liked the tropics, I was healthy for the first time since toddlerhood, my brain was growing by leaps and bounds, and we had enough money. I was suddenly relieved of the responsibility of caring for my mother and little brother. This responsibility would return even more intensely when we came back to the States, but I didn't know that yet.

(Entry from Maggie's diary while she lived in Brazil, from 31 March 1968.)

It was an enormously political time, and I began acquiring a radical outlook that year, very much assisted by Hanne but also what was in the air. I first started thinking of myself as a woman, and as a lesbian, that year (something I still kept secret). I also kept secret my growing pacifism and anti-war stance. Moving from a small town in Texas where we had been seriously poor to a country where we were now able to save money and where poverty took on another whole dimension gave me my first shoves into class consciousness, and a new outlook on racism. And the ability to see how women and girls from another culture were oppressed (as they very much were in Brasil) enabled me to understand, thanks to Hanne's insistence I drop my ethnocentrism, that we were just as oppressed in the U.S., although it was expressed in different ways.

I began listening to rock music, another change my mother didn't appreciate. It was a great year for rock and folk, and I acquired whatever American albums I could find there. But I also became a fan of the Brazilian rock idol Roberto Carlos, whose blockbuster movie Ritmo en Aventura hit the screen in November 1967.
(Roberto Carlos in Ritmo en Aventura, 1967)

Hanne took me to see it several times, in non-air-conditioned funky theaters full of shrieking fans. I still have that album, and I often break into one of the songs from it, especially "Quando" --
Quando você se separou de mim
Quase que a minha vida teve fim
Sofri, chorei, tanto que nem sei
Tudo o que chorei por você, por você

or my favorite, "E Por Isso Estou Aqui":
Olha dentro dos meus olhos
Vê quanta tristeza de chorar por ti, por ti
Olha eu já não podia mais viver sozinho
E por isso eu estou aqui

De saudade eu chorei e até pensei que ia morrer
Juro que eu não sabia
Que viver sem ti
Eu não poderia

Olha quero te dizer todo aquele pranto
Que chorei por ti, por ti
Tinha uma saudade imensa de alguém que pensa
E morre por ti

To hear clips from these songs, go to the Roberto Carlos official website and click on the song link. To see a five-minute compilation from the movie, including the speed-racer chase up to Corcovado while Roberto belts out "Eu Sou Terrível" or the harpsichord-backed version of Roberto singing "E Por Isso Estou Aqui", go to the filmography page here and click on the movie camera icon.

Tapwater was not potable for us in Brazil -- I got dysentery twice from drinking local water, the second time becoming dangerously ill -- so all our water had to be boiled and stored, because bottled water was not available then. To give me and Bill something else to drink (we couldn't have milk, either, and the bottled fruit juices contained local water), Mama allowed us to have a soft drink called Guaraná, a lovely golden concoction on which we developed an almost immediate dependence. We'd get jittery and headachy if we didn't have several a day.
(Guaraná cola)

Mama was bothered by our consumption, but still considered it a better choice than Coke, which she felt was not appropriate for children because of caffeine. According to Wikipedia, "A 2007 human pilot study assessed acute behavioral effects to four doses (37.5 mg, 75 mg, 150 mg and 300 mg) of guaraná extract. Memory, alertness and mood were increased by the two lower doses, confirming previous results of cognitive improvement following 75 mg guaraná." It wasn't until I was in my 20s that I discovered the main ingredient in this mate-like drink is the equivalent of 2.5 times the caffeine of a Coca-Cola. Yeah, baby.

We all became avid eaters of acarajé, which was sold by street vendors as well as in local restaurants. These bean fritters originated in Western Africa, but with the slave trade they spread to the Caribbean and into South America and Brazil. Crispy on the outside and creamy in the middle, they are variously known as akra, acra, accra, acrat and acarajé. In my book Ginny Bates, the main character Myra makes acarajé for her friends and family, and I'm including her recipe below.
(Brasilian woman making acarajé.)

I've written a great deal about Brazil, since it launched me into womanhood. One poem I've already posted, "Brazil As A Girl". Other poems follow, as well as a section of narrative memoir. Since I have only the one photograph of me from that entire year, and it's a fuzzy Polaroid, my word descriptions will have to stand in for images of me.

(Acarajé.)

ACARAJÉ (MYRA'S HOT BLACK BEAN FRITTERS)
This is a dish of fried bean cakes with a sauce or other ingredients folded into them that is sold by street vendors in Brazil and which Myra remembers vividly from her childhood. She's recreated the recipe, only she prefers to use black beans instead of the traditional black-eyed peas.
INGREDIENTS FOR FRITTERS:
2 cups of black beans, soaked overnight
2 cloves of garlic
1.5 tablespoons freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1-2 cups of canola or peanut oil for deep frying
3 tablespoons dendé or palm oil added to frying oil (cannot be used for other cooking because of strong flavor)
PREPARATION OF FRITTERS:
Rub the peel off the beans, either between your palms in a bowl of water or against a dishtowel. Combine all the ingredients except the oils in a blender or food processor and blend until you get a dough. Transfer to a mixing bowl. Stir the mixture often to re-incorporate watery seepage.
Heat the oil to 350 degrees F. Deep-fry spoonfuls of dough for 8 minutes or until crispy. Drain on brown paper.
Split the acarajé and let people fill them with their preferred fillings.
INGREDIENTS FOR PIMENTA CAMARÃO (HOT SHRIMP SAUCE):
1/2 cup sundried shrimp
3/4 cup chopped onion
1 teaspoon freshly peeled ginger
1/2 teaspoon pepperoncino
2 tablespoons olive oil
Kosher salt to taste
PREPARATION OF PIMENTA CAMARÃO:
(Makes about 1-1/4 cups) Soak the shrimp in cold water to cover for 30 minutes. Drain and puree in a food processor with onion, ginger and pepperoncino. Heat the oil in a skillet and sauté the hot shrimp sauce for about 5 minutes. Season with salt to taste. Transfer to a bowl and serve with acarajé.
INGREDIENTS FOR VATAPÁ SAUCE:
1/2 cup sundried shrimp
1/2 cup fresh peanuts
1/2 cup fresh cashews
1/4 cup coconut milk
2 tablespoons olive oil
Kosher salt to taste
PREPARATION OF VATAPÁ SAUCE:
(Makes about 1-3/4 cups paste) Soak the shrimp in cold water to cover for 30 minutes. Drain and puree in a food processor with the nuts and coconut milk. Heat the oil in a skillet and sauté the vatapá for about 5 minutes. Season with salt to taste. Transfer to a bowl and serve with acarajé.
OTHER FILLINGS: Diced tomato.


(Sapo gigante -- the Brazilian version we saw was much larger than this)

SAPO GIGANTE

When I was 12, my family went to Brazil for a year. We lived in a small riverport named Aracaju, in a house on a block-long street that was at the very edge of the settled area. Behind our back yard was a swamp, and beyond that was jungle. My brother Bill (age 8) and I were under dire threat to never set foot off our street, and we obeyed. My mother was not someone to trifle with when it came to limits. At least, the ones she had already articulated.

During the middle of the day, it was hot beyond description. We had no air conditioning -- nobody we knew did -- so my mother would lie down after lunch in her bedroom with a fan blowing. I would sprawl on the living couch, listening to rock albums that my mother hated (volume turned very low) and reading poets that I later found out were lesbian and gay. If I had real privacy, I would fantasize about the convent one block away. Bill would play with his Hot Wheels and plastic army men on our tiled patio, waiting for the other kids on the block to get up from their naps and be available again. I mean, everybody went dormant in the middle of the day -- the stores shut down, the buses stopped running during the middle of the day. Only an idiot would venture out into that kind of heat.

One day, Bill ran into the house and told me breathlessly "There's something weird next door, come on". I followed him languidly. The house next door, at the very end of the block, had been empty for a couple of months. The gate was locked but Bill scaled the metal fence and so did I. Once in the small front area, I could hear what he was talking about. There was an intermittent boomy, resonant kind of sound coming from the front porch, which was enclosed by stucco, tiled and gated. We crept close and listened. It was a completely foreign sound, and it echoed off the tiles.

I was the oldest, and it was my job to not be a coward. So, I found a ledge to use as footing and shimmied up the stucco to look, cautiously, over the porch wall into the tiled area. As soon as I did, I about crapped myself. Backed into the corner, looking up at me, was the biggest bullfrog I had ever seen. Think cocker spaniel -- no, think bulldog. I'm not exaggerating. It had a browny, wart-covered skin, and as I stared in horror, it billowed out its throat and that sound came from it.

I dropped back down to the ground, light in the head. Bill was saying "What, what is it?"

"Bullfrog" I said. "Nuh-uh" he responded.

"Swear" I replied. "C'mon, I'll give you a boost, look for yourself."

He gave a little scream, which he later denied, and tumbled back down next to me.

"Can we keep it?" he said.

"No way" I said, "They'll never let us have anything that cool. Remember how Mama freaked out about the giant spiders?"

Before we left for Brazil, Mama had "redd up" as we called it, and discovered in the jungles there were giant spiders big enough to eat mice, birds and frogs instead of insects. Spiders big around as a dinner plate. Mama had gone pale and sweaty, and told us we were never, ever to approach any spiders of any size in Brazil. Then she had wheeled on my father and begun yelling about the time I was a baby in Calcutta and came within inches of putting my little hand on a cobra behind the living room drapes.

So, Brazilian pets were a no-go, I was pretty certain. Bill didn't want to give up, however. He pleaded "She's asleep, all the way in the back, she won't know for a while!" We looked at each other for a long moment and, well, until he died we fought over whose idea it was. But one of us whispered "We could take it home and set it loose in her bedroom while she's sleeping" and the other said "Yeah!"

There was only one door out of her bedroom, and her bed was all the way on the far side of the room from the door.

At this point, I want to remind everybody that we had no idea on earth at this time that my mother had a serious heart condition.

The next question was, how to catch it? After we both shoved "Not me" back and forth at each other a few times, older and more brilliant minds came up with a solution. All of our household belongings had been shipped to Brazil via freighter, packed into wooden crates. These were all still stored in our garage, for the time we'd need them again. We skedaddled to the garage and found a book crate, about 2 feet high by 3 feet in the other two dimensions, made of pine with a stout wooden lid. We hauled this next door and sat down in the shade to do some strategerizin', as W would say.

Touching the behemoth was out of the question. (As it turns out, they can be toxic, but for us it was just the ick factor.) Finally we decided to drop the crate open-side up on top of the toad from over the porch wall, then slide the lid underneath it, turn the crate back over and wah-lah.

I had the job of doing the drop, because as skinny as I was, I still out-muscled Bill. I perched myself on the edge of the porch wall, and that thing looked at me with deep suspicion. I momentarily wondered how in the world it had gotten onto the porch in the first place -- could it jump that high? Not a good question to allow into your thoughts at that particular moment. Where it had come from was clear enough -- the swamp next door.

I took the crate from Bill and dropped it swiftly on the toad. There was a double crash, the first of the wood hitting the tile floor and the second of the toad slamming itself against the upper side of the box. The second crash was much louder. I screamed at Bill to help and slid my legs over the side to stand on the crate. I could feel the percussion against the bottoms of my sneakers as that thing jumped over and over again. When it finally stopped, I was soaked in sweat. Bill had not gotten onto the porch with me, but was sitting on the side, staring at me with huge eyes.

"Get the lid" I commanded. Once we had it, however, logistics again became a palsy-inducing issue. Somebody had to hold the crate down firmly enough to keep Swampthing from pushing its way out but still allowing the lid to slide under. Logically, since I was stronger, I should be the one providing the muscle, and Bill was all for being the lid-slider. But -- if I stopped standing on the crate, would I really be strong enough to hold it down? The toad had become supernatural now in my mind. Clearly it was pissed off, and clearly it knew I was the one who had imprisoned it.

Finally we just did it, and it worked. The toad didn't slam around any more, not during this procedure or when we slowly inverted the crate and got it upright, lid still on it. We sat down on it, weak with relief, and took a rest.

I actually don't remember getting it over the porch wall and the outer wall. Perhaps we tied it up with rope, although the rope was gone a few minutes later, as you'll learn. At any rate, we got it into our house and at the end of the long hall that led to Mama's bedroom.

And that's when the giggles hit us. We were imagining her reaction when she woke up from a torpid, tropical slumber to that creature in her room. It was the most deliciously wicked thing either of us had ever done, and we couldn't stop our hysterics. We sat on the lid and covering our mouths brutally with both hands, but we kept setting each other off, and every now and then the toad would slam up against the lid, thumping our asses, and that would make me almost pass out from combined terror and delight.

We were in such a frenzy that we failed to hear Daddy's Jeep pull up out front. He worked in the jungle all day with a seismic crew and usually didn't get home until dinner time, at dark. For some reason, he got off very early that day. Mama always jumped into the story at this point and said it was god's will. At any rate, suddenly there was a large shadow standing between us and the front rooms, and Daddy saying "What're you two kids doing?"

Bill definitely led the way at this point. Without a moment's hesitation, he bolted for his bedroom down the hall -- there was no door to the outside from where we were, Daddy was blocking it, but Bill's bedroom window had a screen out, not yet repaired. Bill did a neat hurdle over the sill and vanished down the outdoor corridor to the front of the house. I was right behind him. He went in one direction -- to Obano's house, to cry sanctuary there -- and I went to Hanne's. Hanne's much older husband worked with my father, and she found my story so entertaining I had to tell it six times when I got there.

Since we were absent the premises, at this point Mama and Daddy would pick up the telling of this family legend. Daddy watched us flee headlong down the hall, make a left into Bill's room, then heard our footsteps thundering to the front. Completely unconcerned, he walked over to the crate and lifted the lid.

Mama would jump in now, saying "I was sound asleep when I heard a girl screaming in the hall, one long scream after another. I knew it wasn't Margaret (that's me) but I couldn't figure out how it was. I staggered to the door and opened it to see Harold sitting on a crate, white as a ghost. It was him screaming."

Daddy would then say "I pitched my voice high to disorient the toad."

They would never tell us what they did with it. We shambled nervously back at dinnertime, where we found our parents eating and no places set for us. Mama refused to talk to us or acknowledge our presence for two days. Daddy caved and got us food from the pots in the kitchen, but we had to eat in our rooms. He joined us and got the story from us, and he laughed so hard he almost choked. Three days later, Mama finally saw the humor in it, too.

Yet it wasn't until Bill and I brought home the fer-de-lance in a mayonnaise jar that Mama laid down an absolute law about no contact with Brazilian wildlife of any sort. Fer-de-lances are small and beautiful, a jewel of a snake. Their venom kills adults in less than a minute. There was no known antivenin. But that's another story.


BAHIA 1967


The airport in Bahia had open windows
Beyond the tarmac were unfamiliar trees
The children kept asking if we might
see monkeys, kept asking for something else
to drink, why can't we eat the ice

The plane was there, we could see it
but men had pulled apart one engine
Pieces of metal flashed in the sun

I spoke not a single word of Portugese
I kept opening my phrasebook, trying
to memorize anything useful but if I
did not keep my eyes on the children
every single second one of them walked away
into the crowd that contained crates of chickens
and dogs on ropes, were they really going to
let those dogs on the plane?

The loudspeaker had a short
but I couldn't have made out
a word in any case

Ourr boarding passes were
kelly green plastic squares, I kept track of
the people nearby who had the same color passes
If they got up to talk to an agent, or stand at
the window, I did too, hissing at the children
to grab their bags, come on, this might be it

What kind of mother would drag her children
onto a plane that obviously needed major repairs
At least if it went down, we would all be
together. I had no idea if the jungle here
had monkeys, or snakes, or giant black scorpions

The phrasebook said Thank you was Obrigada
which seemed to mean I'm much obliged

When my son tried to wander off one more time
I was going to declare out loud if he got lost
I planned to just leave him behind. His pale
face would go bloodless but nobody here would
understand what I had said


© Maggie Jochild, 27 April 2006, 5:41 a.m.


BAKER’S DOZEN


She was twelve. In another month, when she
hoped the drenching afternoon rain would stop
soaking pocks of stucco from the outer
courtyard walls of her family’s renthouse
here in this riverine, coastal city
As all Brazilian cities are coastal
or riverine -- she hoped her birthday would be
sunny again as she became a
teenager. This age right now, still one thing
but almost another, reminded her
of the thick french rolls, fist-sized, her mother
bought at the padaria each morning
before the rest were awake. They came in
a baker's dozen, usually but
not always thirteen for the price of twelve.
Her mother carried them home wrapped in brown
paper and string, laid them in the center
of the long rosewood table – still warm, crusts
chewy in a way adults preferred, to
be spilled out with a small dusting of flour
by whoever got up next, arriving
torpid, barefoot down the long gleaming hall
to that central room with rain-streaked windows
into the smell of simmering cocoa
Made with powdered milk, of course – “Trichinosis”
her mother told them as if they knew what
that was – but real chocolate, shaved from bricks
dark and bitter, cocoa so strong that when
she dipped torn rolls into it, she could not
say whether she was softening the crust
or mellowing the pungent chocolate.
Yeast and cacao, her breakfast all that year
leading into womanhood.

She lived free that year, had bought her freedom
by betraying her mother, speaking up
against all custom when her father came
home with one more overseas job offer
Siding with him against her mother’s need
to stay small-town, her ravenous hunger
for adult backup. She wanted to move
because it would mean enough money for
store-bought dresses, armor against the shivs
of junior high, but even more because
it would get her thoroughly away from
her just-graduated eldest brother,
the football player who hunted her
with tortures both casual and secret.
Another continent was enough room
to unlatch her cage, let her imagine
desire without invasion or disgust.

After breakfast, she sat in the front room
where equatorial sun slanted in
brightest through lacquered lattices to read
every last thing she could scrounge from the one
biblioteca that sold English print.
That year she discovered Millay, Richard
Halliburton and Mazo de la Roche.
She read her first Auden, and listened to
Aretha Franklin records, lying back
with closed eyes and face, daydreaming about
the convent just a block from their front door.

A block away was the plaza, and one
whole side was the convent, with walls high to
block most thievery or observation.
The cloister itself stood taller than its
walls, so the upper rooms were exposed if
shutters were left open. These were narrow
sleeping cells: unpainted plaster walls, no
closet, presumably an iron cot
beneath the single wooden crucifix.
The sisters wore grey with white wimples. They
worked all day, laundering, gardening, feeding
the poor, scrubbing an already spotless
entryway. She was in love with every
single one of them. Her dreams centered on
somehow coming to live with them – perhaps
her family is suddenly killed in
a disaster that leaves her intact save
for her memory, and no one knows she
is American. She is given to
the nuns to raise. She sleeps in one of the
cells. She is tucked in at night by one young
sister – and here is the launch pier, from here
she is no longer twelve almost thirteen.

Every other day she walked with her
family to the combi stop beside
the convent, where they could catch a ride to
downtown. If no van was in sight, her mom
allowed them to buy acarajé from
the old woman whose stall claimed that corner.
She fried it as they waited, black beans torched
with spices even her mother could not
name, a crisp cake that made her eyes run, her
throat burn for hours, poured into paper
twists that soaked up the grease. They sat on an
stone ledge opposite the convent to eat
taking small bites, and she could look into
those upper rooms to near satisfaction.

Every now and then, a sister slid
grey and furtive from the side gate to hand
over coins to buy not acarajé
but a pink-and-white striped bag bulging with
peeled chunks of sugar cane. Forbidden treat,
açucar at its most elemental.
Something to suck on during evenings
of prayer. When she imagined those closed
lips and the cane hidden behind them, tongues
teasing out the dark raw juice, she would grow
dizzy and cast a quick glance to see if
her mother was watching her.

But her mother would be loudly counting
their combi fares, engaged in her hopeless
Yanqí struggle to pass on her oldest
bills to the urchin throwaways who clung
to each combi, leaving seats for paying
riders, boys in sandals and rags whose smell
was beyond belief, boys who leered at her –
Despite their starved frames, they were likely her
age, maybe older – but she was having
none of them. Not ever. This much, she knew
already.

© Maggie Jochild, 25 November 2002, 6 p.m.


ARACAJU YARDS


Waking up in heat already torpid to
the familiar sound of new concrete being
troweled down onto old
Then the measured shatter of glass as
bottles are broken by judicious
hammer into lacerating spikes
to be stuck like candles into the concrete
frosting atop each wall. Today

It's the neighbor's house next door. These
cut-rate defenses are renewed
every so often, as the desperate find
ways over and through. Crews
with carts come down our street, offering. You

Pay them a small sum, and must
stand out there, to be sure
they don't leave a loose-toothed weakness
where their friends will know to come
later, when you are in town. Once
I learned how we pay the poor
to please, please leave us alone

I can see the makeshift razorwire
anywhere I look


© Maggie Jochild, 1 December 2004, 1:45 p.m.

(Praia de Atalaia, on the South Atlantic just outside Aracaju.)

TURNING YEAR IN BRAZIL


The only ice cream they would let me get was grey sorbet
made from prunes. I chose guaraná instead, a golden
maté drink jiggered full of caffeine. It was so hot.
Hot all the time. Hot at three in the morning.

Mama let me choose fabric for shorts, any print
from bolts of loose cheap weave in hot oil colors.
When the first pair came off the Singer, she
blew a smoke ring and, peering through it, said
I looked like a two-bit chippie. But my legs
were bare, and I loved the orange/lime/magenta.

The Danish woman around the corner who married
my daddy's buffoon of a crew chief, she told me
Americans did not invent freedom, we were not
the best country in the world, we held onto slavery
long after Europe saw the light. She painted
my nails to match my shorts and one day as we
sat on dunes overlooking the South Atlantic
squinting at my family shrieking in the surf,

She told me I would grow up and leave them.
Find my own way of living, love someone else
more than them --- much more than them.
With a click, the light shifted and faces
I knew best became photographs I would hang
on walls I didn't have yet but could imagine


© Maggie Jochild, 6 June, 3:30 a.m.


STONEWALL


They have persuaded the men, who spend all day
in the jungle working, to use a Saturday in driving
the perilous roads to Itabaia. There is a cathedral
the women want to see. Her mother packs a lunch
of potted meat sandwiches, fruit and iced beer for
the adults, Guarana for the kids. With them are her
father's young boss and his Danish wife plus their
two-year-old. Her father is furious that his boss is
so much younger, and so they are all on best behavior.

But she did not care. She was in love. With Hanne,
her father's boss's wife. Hanne is lonely, and the other
crew wives do not like her. So in the afternoons,
while the rest of Brazil naps, she goes to Hanne's house
where they play chess and talk. Hanne has reel-to-reel
tapes of music from every continent, and comedy by
Peter Sellers. She does not think America is the best
country in the world. She treats the thirteen-year-old
like a friend. It is enough to make anyone fall in love.

The cathedral is crumbling, and none of them are
Catholic, anyhow. She'd rather be in the car, pressed
against Hanne, helping hold her daughter. They of
course get lost for a time, none of the gravel (at best)
roads are marked, and suddenly there are monkeys in
all the trees around the Land Rover, hooting and leaping.
They stop at a salt factory for directions. Paddies of sea
water have been canalled in and sealed off, to evaporate.
In tin warehouses are mountains of salt. The children
are allowed to slide down the briny slopes as if they
were snow. She does not want to be one of the children,
but she cannot resist. She is sorry minutes later, as the salt
works its way into unknown cuts and leaves her skin agasp
for air. There is not enough water to wash them all off.

They had planned to stop at a beach, but on the way,
they pass an unexpected colonial house turned
into a wayside, complete with pool. There are tables
with umbrellas, and cold drinks. The adults are easy
to persuade. She is ashamed that she does not yet know
how to swim, but Hanne laughs gaily and says she will
join her in the pool. They change in separate stalls.

The pool is deep green, fed at the bottom by springs.
Hanne's swimsuit is iridescent blue, her hair red gold.
She has the careless affection of Europeans; she is allowed
to hold onto Hanne rather than the side of the pool.
They talk softly, as if they are sprawled alone on the floor
of Hanne's house with only a chessboard between them.
She knows she will never forget this instant, these
colors, the cast of light, and her sudden awareness that
every man around the pool, including her father, wants
what she has in her arms right now. She is also aware
of her mother's jealousy. She is exultant. She means to
have a life soaked through with this difference, the kind
of intimacy she does not see in the lives of any adult she knows.

Last month at the beach, Hanne turned to her as they sat
on the dunes, watching their families in the surf, and said,
serious, "You will leave them, you know. You will leave
your family. You will have your own life, your own
place, your own way of living. They will not be at the
center of your days any more." It was the most important
thing anyone ever said to her, El in the burning bush.

Two weeks later, they had retrieved several weeks’ worth
of out-of-date Time Magazines at the only English bookstore
here in this industrial city. Because there were so many, her
mother had been persuaded to let her have half, instead of
claiming them all first. She sat solitary in the front room,
hungrily turning the pages for news of home. And there it
was, a small article, about a police raid on a bar, in a small
town apparently named Greenwich Village. Except the people
in the bar fought back. The article was derisive; but that
word was there in print, the first time she'd ever seen it.
She instantly hid the magazine under her shirt. Feigning a
trip to the bathroom, she got to her room and transferred it
under her mattress. After everyone was asleep that night,
she pulled out the flashlight she'd stolen from her father
and read the article over and over. She had a people. She
had a place to go. There were others like her.

A year into their two-year hitch, her father's company decided
to send him to Singapore instead. Just like that. Hanne gave
them a farewell dinner. They'd never see each other again.
She did not know how to bear it. She focused on the goodbye,
the chance to pull Hanne aside and tell her how she felt. But
the adults never left them alone. Finally, she had to kiss Hanne
on the cheek, sobbing, and say "I love you" on the tarmac at
the airport. Hanne hugged her, said "I love you too." But not
the way she had imagined it. They had to help her --actually,
haul her up the stairs to the plane.

She could not stop crying. Her mother yelled at her with
open scorn, but even that didn't stop her. There were
transfers and stopovers -- plane travel was still the
leapfrogging across maps seen in old newsreels --
By the time they reach the states, she is ill
and desperate. This is no homecoming for her.
It is midwinter in North Texas, blue norther. Since
they've been gone, Dr. King has been assassinated,
and Bobby Kennedy. There is a new TV show that
everybody but them thinks is hysterical, called Laugh-In.
No monkeys, no beaches, only stretches of trim dead lawns;
all the streets are smooth and clean. At least she can drink
milk now, right from the bottle. And there are cherries,
the one fruit she missed. But she hates her family,
hates America, hates the cold, and they are one
and the same.

Her grandmother is visibly older. Her mother says she
should stay with her a few months, follow her father at
the start of summer. She enrolls them in the hick school
where she once was valedictorian. This is the final blow.
Her father leaves after repacking, trying to conceal his
arm-swinging room now that he is unencumbered by
family. It is her mother who drives her to the junior-senior
high, walks her in like a warden transferring a prisoner.
Everyone is friendly, because she has her mother's
passport, five generations of family lived here before
she was born. She hates them all, too. She refuses to
speak unless called on. She is miles ahead of the grade
she is placed in. She goes to the library at lunch, pulls
out an atlas and looks at the map of Brazil, then traces
a line from Texas to Greenwich Village.

At the end of the first day, she is in the hall picking out
a locker. A sophomore walks up, stands arms-crossed
in front of her. This girl has hazel hair cut like a boy's,
hazel eyes half-closed. She is wearing a dress straight
as a trenchcoat and flat hushpuppies, no stockings.
After silence long enough to knock at her chest,
this girl offers her a ride home. In the way of
rural children, at 15 she is already driving. She tells
this girl her mother is coming to pick her up.
The girl rolls her eyes, turns away. She says to her back,
"But, you can bring me in the morning." The girl holds
onto her elder status by managing to not smile, and nods
okay. So it begins.


© Maggie Jochild, 27 November 2002, 4:20 a.m.

(Maggie as freshman class president in 1969, year after returning from Brazil; also shown are Clay Lawson and Dale Mills. Dale was Maggie's best friend in high school, a distant cousin and eventually out gay male whose mother Margie had been Maggie's mother's best friend throughout school, and whose grandfather Tobe had been Maggie's grandfather Bill's best friend all their lives. Dale and Clay were secretly lovers at the time of this photo.)

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SARA!

(Sara in 1987, Oakland)

My lez-in-law Sara has her 51st birthday this week. In 1985, I became partners with her sister, and not long after we were lovers, Sara traveled down from Oregon to the Bay Area so she could check out the dyke who had become her little sister's first woman lover. The three daughters of their family were then all lesbians. Sara and I hit it off right away.

Not long afterward, my partner and I decided to take a long car trip back to Texas, showing her my home state and meeting my family. We invited Sara to go with us, and she accepted, along with my best friend at the time. We got to know each other on that long and difficult journey. We continued learning about each other on my visits up to Oregon with my partner, and when we decided to take another long trip, this time through the South (including Texas) looking for a place where we might relocate from California, Sara joined us for that voyage as well.

When my partner left me and renounced her lesbian past several years later, Sara told me I was still her lez-in-law. It meant the world to me.

Eventually, after several lovers who were not able to assume the responsibility of coparenting, Sara gave up waiting on a second mother and at 41 gave birth to her son, Jesse. She raises him alone, as well as teaching special education and ReadWrite, growing most of what they eat, helping with the family farm in the Willamette Valley, taking excellent care of herself physically and emotionally, and acting as a serious ally to immigrants in her town. She has strong Quaker roots, a lyrical gift for music and language, and a passion for dogs. Her son is delirious about her.

A few years ago, my ex was living with Sara and persuaded me to come to Oregon for a visit. I was not able to fly but rode the train three days there and back, in the disabled coach. It was a far more arduous trip than it should have been, for various reasons. And once I got there, my ex freaked out about all the crap she'd never dealt with -- she'd convinced herself she didn't need to work on it because (a) she wasn't a lesbian any more and (b) it had all been my fault, her having to leave me. Or so the story went. It was Christmas, and she was ready to abandon me in my wheelchair in Portland one evening, out of sheer desperation at her own overwhelm. I didn't let her walk on me (again) but, obviously, I was in a tough spot.

Sara stepped in, took over being the host, and made it one of the best holidays I've ever had despite the shut-down of my ex. We had a blast, me, her and Jesse. We established a new, independent friendship from that time, and she's one of my two "farm gals". She's been the source of a great deal of great poetry, much of it published.

To honor her, and the ongoing goodness of her life (she just became lovers with a great woman), I'm copying in here all my "Sara poems". Thanks for remaining my family, Sara. Love you always.




GOLDEN AGE


Do cattle have a golden age?
Do goats or horses? Those who grazed
in that first season on a field
when all the grass was verdant lush
Each blade a morsel, salty-sweet
And more (it looked to be) than lips
Could ever fold between flat teeth
An age that lasted only til
the day they reached the barbwire fence
And after that they knew, must know
The ground they'd cover was to be
Increasingly familiar
What little grama that could grow
since they had trimmed it just weeks past
Reluctant croppers of a share
Sometimes standing blank and large
Along a rusted strand, to stare
at meadows which in dreams lead on
to open range


© Maggie Jochild, 19 Dec 2003, 4:40 p.m., on the train near San Luis Obispo, CA



CROP ROTATION


She says last winter's storm brought down
her incense cedar in the back
Not onto any roof or fence,
thank god, but clean and parallel
It lay a while, just long enough
to grow a skirt of blackberries
until she bucked it into logs
and cleared it, tree and bramble both
Along its sawdust-outlined ghost
she plans a march of blueberries
where now sunlight can reach the ground

It isn't that she yearns to tinker
Her love flows strong through any chink
and uses alteration as
a race to ride her heart among
Nor does she hold the common berry
somehow less desirable
than cultivated, trellised fruit
She has a recipe for each
cobbled into syruped rounds
to set before her son the king

But now that she has reached a time
when she is done (or nearly so)
with self-regret --- Her tools are sharp
and oiled, her dreams
are in full spate --- Her line of sight
is good enough for any choice
And in that stretch of her back yard
she wants to harvest blueberries.


© Maggie Jochild, 26 December 2003, 10:53 a.m., on a train in the Santa Clara Valley, CA


VESPERS


I've driven up for winter break
Rogue River pass was ice and skid
But in a sheltered woods my friend
Has built a cabin, single room
Her lover lives across the field
And that house, bigger, with a tub
That runs hot water and a john
Within its walls, is where she now
Spends all her time. Once I see
The cabin, dusty, dinky, dark
It calls me like a magic fort
Me, who lives in urban bray
She says Of course you can bunk there
The Franklin makes it warm as toast
So after dinner I retire
Stuff the stove and climb into
The sleeping loft, book in hand

An hour later, I look up because
A wasp has landed on my blanket
Its body, black and goldenrod
Is vivid on the pale blue wool
I turn and gaze into the room
Below me where the flicker from
The stove's front vent now dances
Off the wings of dozens more
I damp with fear
Doubt my senses Close my mouth
Then slide with indirection
From the bed, down the ladder
Into my boots and out the door
I am breathless from the cold
In just the short walk down the path

But my hosts are still awake
And gape at me a breath, until
My friend recalls I've been in this
Place since the fall. They must have found
A way inside to hibernate.
The warmth -- oh god, they think it's spring
Her lover says, a little cross
It's simple, then, just leave the door
And windows open. They'll go out
Into what? -- My friend and I
Ask each other silently
With a brief but laced-up gaze
After a bit, she makes a bed
For me in their living room
The next day, I go back to face
A room returned to bone-felt chill
On every sill
Are clusters of the crispy dead
I wonder if they lasted til
The sun's first light

Evil is the missionary

Our sins against the smallest grieve
Us most because we can conceive
Of penance for this much within
The time we have remaining
Or think we have


© Maggie Jochild, 3 March 2004, 4 a.m.



LAST LULLABYE


Now I lay me down to sleep
Release my soul to sweep the stars
If I return, then kiss me sweet
If I do not, it's not because
I wanted to leave you behind
Whatever sparked my alpha wind
Was not a blaze I could control
And neither can I stop the cold
Which waits to creep into my mouth
So when I sail off to the south
And you cannot, if there's a way
To love you past the break of day
Then know I will. I always will.


© Maggie Jochild, 2 April 2004, 9:40 p.m.



OVER AND THROUGH


That girl who, when I was four
taught me how to tie my shoes
Sitting on a carport's edge
in a subdivision new with
backyards not yet fenced apart
so all the kids on our long block
played from one end to the other
ignoring boundary lines and adults
until we were called once, then twice
home for dinner -- That girl, age eight
who put my sneaker in her lap
held her fingers over mine
and coaxed from them a big kid skill
I never thought I'd call my own
She was in no kind of hurry

I think of her as she may be now
fiftyish, maybe with silvering hair
piled up loose behind her head, in a
navy turtleneck, thick ring around her
thumb because those fingers, agile once,
are clotted and knotted closed

The way I loved her is one of the
ways I love you. Sometimes it will
be me who sits shiva with you, some-
times it is you who listens to the shame
I cannot even take to god. As if poling
up an uncharted river, the meander not just
slowly marching across plains, but calling
on us, two figures standing in the prow,
to take our turn leaning on a staff planted
through mud onto bedrock, muscling the
all-we-carry around the bend on our side
I will love you every way I can


© Maggie Jochild, 1 June 2004, 8:20 p.m.



SUSTENANCE


She says she planted raspberries so she could
watch the children eat them, sneaking
garnet nubbins to their lips while she
worked just out of view, they hope
They feed themselves as she weeds down
the row of carrots in a squat
Food untouched by grownup hands
A six-year-old's idea of god

Sun and rain and magic seeds
that lodge between their baby teeth
and one new molar, pushing through
to start a voice she's never heard
She feeds them what she can until
they leave to eat another's


© Maggie Jochild, 5:41 a.m., 7 July 2005

(Johnny Knox's Great Grandpa 1994, by Lindee Climo)

SUMMER AT SWEETWELL


She's picking it up: Not just the bags
of organic chick starter and pig corn
she's to grind for slop, using the mill
belted to the old Farmall tractor

Or how to skid behemoths of Doug fir
and Western Red Cedar with a team
of sister Belgian drafthorses who
follow into ferny bottoms, stand in
earned trust and then haw with bunched
muscle all the way uphill, logs
to be skinned and bladed into cants

She's learning stack art, the ziggurats
of musty hay sandwiched with chicken dung
ready for tomorrow's spread onto market fields
lying fallow this rotation; skimming cream
from shiny cans of warm milk, or coming
home from an afternoon at the U-pick
with eighteen pounds of blueberries

She's finding how to live with both
hands full, not born into it but a turn
she made to take in her palm the braided links
which lead back into her unlit family memory
Ten thousand years of uneasy dominion
Meals which must be worked off, harvest
she must share to believe she deserves


© Maggie Jochild, 10 July 2005, 6:27 p.m.


CARROT THIEF


The nutria slunk in last night
from the canal that runs nearby
and one of them, rat engineer
shorted out the twelve-volt fence

They ate all of the carrots I was
hoarding for our snow-bound stews
They left behind the worm-shot kale
Carrots alone were what they mined, sweet
and delicate this year

The dog we've brought home from the pound
slept peacefully beside our bed
He is so desperate to please, I guess
he didn't want to question who
we choose to feed in our back yard

I know I shouldn't care so much
but for tonight don't talk to me
about God's will as if you know
what on earth that means



© Maggie Jochild, 2:41 p.m., 29 October 2005

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JE REGRETTE PLUS QUE JE PEUX DIRE

(Joan of Arc by Janeen Banko)

Regret and longing
can draw and quarter me
I wish I could take it back
I wish you had loved me more
I didn't notice, or I noticed but
I didn't know what to say
I ran through my chances like
M and Ms in a bowl while I
watched TV too much

It's amazing how little people
can get by on

I read that Jeanne wrote letters
in prearranged code: Any sentence
followed by a carefully inked cross
was a lie, her friends knew.

She recanted, then
found a second wind. I can only
imagine the Cardinals' fury.

I saw an old man who had been young
in the Battle of the Bulge, saying
in one pocket was an extra pair of socks
In the other some K-rations
He rolled his blanket with string and
hung it over his back; all else was
bullets. He didn't change clothes
for six months.
What kind of a father did he become?
When his child wept because the
mashed potatoes had lumps, was he
understanding?


© Maggie Jochild, 20 October 2007, 11:20 p.m.

UPDATE: There's now a reaction to this post by Jesse Wendel over at Group News Blog.

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UMAI AND THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WATER

In 1959, Theodora Kroeber published The Inland Whale (University of California Press), a collection of foundation myths and stories from the Yurok and other Northern California Native Americans. I was given this book within months of moving to San Francisco in 1978, and I found these stories essential in understanding Northern California as a geographic region. I was particularly struck by how well these people, who had lived in this area for tens of thousands of years, understood plate tectonics and the mechanism of earthquakes. My favorite story of them all is about Umai, and I'm retelling it below as best I remember it.

(Photo of Theodora Kroeber 1970 © by Paul Bishop)

Theodora Kroeber is better known for her book Ishi In Two Worlds, about Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi tribe whose people were wiped out by white invasion and genocide. Ishi was close to Theodora and her husband, Alfred Kroeber. Into this anthropological family was eventually born a daughter, Ursula, now known best as Ursula K. LeGuin.

(Photo of Ursula K. Leguin © by Dan Tufts)

Several years ago, I wrote a poem about Umai and much of what I had absorbed from California Indian culture. I sent it to Ursula LeGuin, along with a letter. To my surprise and pleasure, she replied personally, saying she liked the poem very much and she thought her mother would have, too.

(Photo of green flash at sunset © by George Howard)

UMAI AND THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WATER

In Yurok cosmology, the World Within The World was our physical earth, a flat plate floating on a sea which was the Ocean Within The World, also known as Downriver Ocean. Bisecting this world was a river that led to an inland sea, Upriver Ocean. Yurok lived along this river, now called the Klamath River.

Above the world was a bowl of sky, and beyond the lip of the bowl was another ocean, the Ocean Beyond the Ocean, which lapped at the shores of the World Beyond The World. Waves traveling through the oceans bobbed the bowl of sky up and down, creating a brief gap through which the two worlds could catch glimpses of one another. Thus, Yurok standing on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific occasionally saw a bright flash of light near sunset on the horizon. Sometimes this had a green cast to it, which to the Yurok meant there was vegetation in that world. What follows is an explanation of that flash. A flash I have seen myself.

Umai was a young woman who lived by Upriver Ocean along the river. She lived in a collection of friends and family, and was busy, but often she was restless. She liked to watch for the flash of light at sunset, and wondered what it was like in that World Beyond The World.

One day, her restlessness overcame her. She went into her family's house and took a small toy canoe that belonged to a younger sibling. She carried it to the edge of the river and set it in the water, placing her hands inside the canoe. She began singing a magic song, the words of which we no longer remember. As she sang, she pressed at the sides of the canoe with her hands, and it slowly expanded, until finally she had a canoe big enough for her to ride in. She sat down in the canoe and pushed herself away from the bank.
(Photo of Yurok canoe)

She had no paddles, but she did not need them because this was a magic canoe. She could direct it by means of song. She traveled downriver to Downriver Ocean, into the surf, and began crossing the Ocean Within The World. It was a long journey, and night began approaching, but as she got closer to the edge of sky, the light from the World Beyond The World grew brighter.

Umai knew, as all Yurok did, that after every eleven waves on the ocean was a twelfth, larger wave. This larger wave would create a bigger gap between the bowl of sky and the surface of the sea. She counted waves until the twelfth one came along, and as the sky went up higher than usual, she sang her way through the gap and found herself in the Ocean Beyond The Ocean.

She could now see that the light was coming from a huge fire on the banks of the World Beyond The World. She sang her canoe toward this light. As she entered the surf, she could see a figure standing near the fire, watching her come in. When she landed, this figure came to meet her. It was Laksis, a young woman whose name means Shining Light. Laksis lived all alone in the World Beyond The World. Her loneliness was intense, so every night she came to the water's edge, gathering driftwood and built a huge fire, hoping someone would see her light and come to investigate.

Umai and Laksis fell deeply in love and remained together for a year. However, Umai's restlessness returned, and she became very homesick for her family, her friends, and her home by the river. She longed to see them again, and began talking of going back for a visit. She begged Laksis to come with her, but Laksis was afraid. She decided to remain in the World Beyond The World and wait for Umai to return. She promised to light a fire every night, as a signal beacon for Umai, and Umai promised to follow it back to Laksis.

When Umai got home, however, she was greeted with overwhelming joy. They had not known where she had gone, and they had missed her terribly. She got caught up in the celebrating, and right after that it was time for the annual salmon harvest, and after that it was time to gather acorns. She became re-absorbed in the work and life of her people, and she kept putting off her return to Laksis. She sang her canoe back to toy size and put it away for safekeeping. Eventually, she married and had children, and she never returned to Laksis.

(Photo of Yurok acorn basket -- Northern California Indian baskets are often considered to be the finest in the world, water-tight and capable of boiling stews within them, as well as with extraordinary designs and artistry)

But Laksis still waits for her, and every night she builds a fire on the shores of the World Beyond the World. Watch for it, and think of Laksis.

LAKSIS

The Ocean Beyond The Ocean
Is full of drifting wood --
Not shipwrecks or logjams escaped
Downriver into open sea
Because there are no sailors, no one
To tender logs -- Not jetsam, then,
But the debris of unseen storms
The offcast of unpeopled forests
Flotsam lush on empty shores.

On one such strand, the solo tenant
Of the World Beyond The World
Nightly piles a lean of wood
And blows her spark into its base.
Before it coals she makes her supper
Stews of hake and cherry clams
Dulse and scallops, cattail roots
While pelicans fly in a line
To sleep (someplace she's never found
But, without a doubt,) together.

She'll tend her flames until the dawn.



The sunset here on the other side
Of cloud-bowl sky -- whose rhythmic thump
Up and down onto the depths
Gives birth to waves, the dozenth wave
A little stronger than the rest --
The sunset here is green entire
With wash of lime and celery
Spread low along marining sky.
In such a dusk, her scarlet flames
Are irresistible -- She hopes.
She does not know that now and then
The twelfth wave uplifts lip of sky
To flash a ray of verdure light
Into the sunset of our world
Where all of us go home at night
To share our stew and sleep entwined.



During the month before hard frost she walks two days to red-oak hills
Treading acorns ankle deep, she grinds the nuts into strong meal
In boulder mortars with rounded rocks, then carries skins of raw red bran
To sandbank creeks with fuel nearby. The meal is rinsed in streamside holes
With water boiled in basket pots until the tannin tox is gone.

While she waits for boil to come, she takes the acorn mast, the hulls
And strings them nested onto strands of sinew from a tule deer
Spirals this lace around her calves from knee to instep, leggings strong
Against the nettle's rip and grab, but also rattles to warn off bears
And make her own particular clatter in a world where creatures speak
To one another, yet never with the language of her kind.



It takes three pours to leach meal clean.
Think if you will about how long
She must have tried her brain's fine seine
To solve that riddle: Meal to food --
Rinsed not just once or twice but thrice
Before the poison is leached out.

Patience is the grain of love.
If we do not find the way
To parboil love out of our flesh
And skim away the loneliness,
Our blood will stop inside our nest
Of arteries. Then our hearts,
Beating in an air-starved lope,
Will burst. From lack of love
Expressed.


© 2003 Maggie Jochild, 21 November 2003, 11:30 a.m.

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READERS' LINKS

Readers of this blog tend to share their sources and links, as they are a well-read and curious bunch. To their frustration, links don't always come out correctly in the comments box. Therefore, I've gone back, checked them all out, and turned them into HTML to be shared here. Keep 'em coming in, folks. I'll do this regularly as need arises.

Regarding Class and Classism, Kat shares an article by Michael Young, the man who coined the term "meritocracy", first used in his book The Rise of the Meritocracy in 1958. The article, Down With Meritocracy, appears in the 29 June 2001 issue of The Guardian with a tagline "The man who coined the word four decades ago wishes Tony Blair would stop using it".

Surrounded by an exhibition of her life's work, and greeted by three hundred guests and old friends, the photographer enjoys Alice Austen Day in Richmondtown, October 9, 1951. (Photo by Yale Joel, Time-Life Picture Agency, © Time Inc.)
Regarding Alice Austen, the ground-breaking woman-identifed photographer of a century ago, Liza links us to the website maintained by those who run the Alice Austen House, Clear Comfort, a National Historical Landmark on Staten Island, NY, including herstory of Alice Austen, the photographer, her life and work

(Untitled, 1979, by JEB -- a clue as to what African-American dykes actually looked like in the late 70s, instead of Clarice)
Regarding another photography pioneer, JEB (Joan E. Biren) whose slideshow in 1978 also paid tribute to Alice Austen, there's a great interview with her by Carol Ann Douglas in Off Our Backs, January 1998. In this interview, JEB says "The reason that I became a photographer was to make lesbians visible. I became a photographer to photograph lesbians and make those images accessible to other lesbians. At the time that I became a photographer, in 1971, there weren't images that were authentic, that reflected who I was, that I had ever seen. I had never seen a picture of a lesbian like myself.

"There was nothing. Nothing is not an exaggeration in this.

"Part of my work was to go back into history and uncover those earlier images, which existed but were not accessible.

"I've done a lot of photohistory as well. One of the ways that I supported myself early on was to travel around the country with slide shows that talked about the history of lesbian photography and to share those images with communities of lesbians in way that was accessible and affordable. It didn't require a lot of money, like publishing a book. That was wonderful work, to be able to travel around and feed this available hunger that people had to see themselves. It was nice to be the bearer of those pictures.

"It was my life's work to make more and varied and true images of who we are and how we live our lives. To me, the words "lesbian" and photographer go together very easily."

(Furies office in basement of 219 llth St. SE, Washington, DC circa 1972, mailing out the newspaper, l. to rt. Ginny Berson, Susan Baker, Coletta Reid [standing], Rita Mae Brown, and Lee Schwing. Photo taken by JEB, copyright hers.)

JEB co-founded (along with others, including Rita Mae Brown and Charlotte Bunch) The Furies, a shortlived but extremely influential lesbian separatist collective that flourished in 1971 and 1972. She published many of her early images in the collective's newspaper, The Furies. She is the author of two groundbreaking volumes of photography: Eye To Eye: Portraits of Lesbians (1979), the pioneering photographic book that made lesbian existence visible as never before, Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front (1987), a vigorous affirmation of lesbian lives that portrays 125 women. You can also check out her page at the American Lesbian Photography website.

Regarding Captain Oates of the Scott South Pole Expedition and Antarctic exploration in general, little gator shares several sources. The first is Scott of the Antarctic - 1868 to 1912, a website with extensive background, history, photos and links. Within this is found the information that Oates' famous last comment, "I am just going outside and I may be some time", is a remark they generally used to excuse themselves from the tent for toileting purposes.

(Scott's Expedition at the South Pole, January 18, 1912 L to R: Edward Wilson, Henry Bowers, Edgar Evans, Robert Scott, Lawrence Oates)

Finding the Bodies at the website Antarctic Heroes entry for 12 November 1912, I'm going to copy in this entry in full because of an extremely interesting line that is all but tossed away at the end:

"Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his men had been expected back at their base camp in March 1912. When they failed to return for the winter, his men knew they must be dead. On 29 October, Dr Edward Atkinson, the expedition leader in Scott's absence, headed south with a twelve-man search party.
On 12 November, barely ten miles from One Ton Depot, they found a tent, partially covered with snow. They set up camp and dug out the tent. Then each of the men went inside to view the bodies, so there would be no dispute over what they had found.
The only Norwegian on the Terra Nova expedition, Tryggve Gran, later recalled what they saw:
‘I stayed outside... as a Norwegian it was not my place. The others undid the tent flaps and went inside. Wilson was lying quite peacefully, his feet towards the entrance... Bowers, the other direction. Wilson had died peacefully... Scott was between them, half sitting up, one hand reached out to Wilson. Then I heard a noise... like a pistol shot... I was told this was Scott's arm breaking as they raised it to take away the journals strapped under his arm. Scott had died dreadfully... his face contorted with frostbite.'

"After recovering the party's papers and geological samples, and some small personal items, Atkinson collapsed the tent on the bodies and built a cairn over the spot. Further south, they found Oates' sleeping bag, but not his body. "

Emphasis on the above line is mine. If he was "just going outside" as reported by Scott, either to take a dump or inobtrusively leaving to give them permission to leave him behind, what's with his taking his sleeping bag along? My suspicions are now raised, and I immediately think of Roland Huntsford's controversial theory that Scott hounded Oates out of the tent.

The third recommended link is more traditional Scott hero-worship by Dr. Donald Stevens in British Heroism They Would Rather We Forgot.

(Machu Picchu -- Incas gave potatoes to the world)

I myself researched a few links for those of you interested in why buy brown eggs, why eat different colored potatoes, and the question of monoculture in our agricultural base. First is a good New York Times article about potatoes from 1995 by Florence Fabricant, So You Thought a Potato Must Be From Idaho or L. I..

Another source is Which Came First - Brown Eggs or the White by Tammy Dobbs. Through her I found the exhaustive chart The ICYouSee
Handy-Dandy Chicken Chart, "An Alphabetical List of More than 60 Chicken Breeds With Comparative Information".


A Q&A about egg color elsewhere states: "Here in the United States, almost all the eggs sold are white. You've probably seen brown eggs now and again, perhaps at your local grocery store or more likely at the food co-op or the farmer's market, but mostly you've seen white. You may have even wondered why this is and what the differences are. I have an answer or two.

What are the differences?
The color of the shell. That's it. Nutritionally, there is no difference between chicken eggs from different colored shells. Once they shell is cracked and the egg is in the mixing bowl or the frying pan there is no difference.
Argument from me about this statement: White chickens are easier to raise in cages and therefore are more cost effective and convenient for the commercial chicken farmer. The chickens that lay brown eggs are larger and eat more, and thus are more likely to be free-range rather than raised in cages. The chicken-raisers I know, as well as my own palate, tells me there is a big difference in taste between the two, and if there is a noticeable difference in taste, I have trouble believing there is no difference in nutrition.

What determines the shell color?
The color of the shell is determined by the breed of the chicken. Rhode Island Reds and Buff Orpingtons lay brown eggs. Blue Andalusian eggs are white, and Araucanas lay eggs that are green.

Why does my local supermarket only have white eggs?
Most eggs that make their way to market come from corporate agriculture. And the corporations have found that the most efficient egg-laying breed is the White Leghorn. And the White Leghorn lays, you guessed it, a white egg. That's why you'll sometimes see folks who are backers of biodiversity tell you to buy brown eggs. A brown egg did not come from a White Leghorn, but from some other breed. And often eggs from free range chickens or organic eggs are brown because the farmers who raise animals this way often are also interested in breed diversity.


Lastly, if you want a GREAT weekly read wherever you live by a right-on organic farmer, sign up to receive the free e-mail of Carol Ann Sayle's "News of the Farm" from Austin's own award-winning Boggy Creek Farm. Tell her Maggie sent ya.

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HAROLD DERWIN BARNETT, 22 May 1925 - 16 October 2006

(H.D. Barnett, Army Air Corps, 1945)

Today is my Daddy's yartzeit. He died alone, sitting in his armchair in front of the TV, at about 8 in the morning. My older brother found him an hour later when he got up.

Cause of death was a series of cardiac problems, all of them fairly easily treatable, for which he had been refusing care for a few years -- we found out from his doctor after his death.

He left a huge mess behind, which is still weighing on me.

I wrote a eulogy for him which was read by my older brother at his funeral. I didn't attend his funeral. After I wrote the eulogy, I wrote an anti-eulogy. Both are below.

Over the years, I've written many poems about my family. The ones that most pertinently include my father at the end of this post.

I'll say the kaddish, light a candle, and keep sorting his mess.


EULOGY -- by Maggie Jochild/Meg Barnett, 19 October 2006

My father was a farmer's son, from an endless generation of farmer's sons, born into a nation that was still 80% farm-based. He and his generation would lead America's shift away from a farm economy and all the cultural changes that would entail. He would spend his work life in the new petroleum industry, carrying with him a farmkid ingenuity and absolute conviction in hard work. He wasn't just a member of what Tom Brokaw has called The Greatest Generation, he was, within that generation, one of those who rode a wave from one kind of dominant national economy to another and made it look easy.

Daddy was first attracted to seismic work because while in the Air Corps during World War II he had worked with an alidade and a transit -- in other words, it was the tools that drew him into what he would do for the rest of his life. He heard through some kind of grapevine -- how casually life-changing decisions can arrive -- that there was a seismic crew in Bowie, Texas and he caught the bus to this town without knowing a single soul there. He got a job with GSI and began a never-ending learning curve.

At the tail end of September 1946, he told me "Some of the guys said there were a couple of real pretty girls who worked as soda jerks in the drug store." He wandered down there, and met one of the soda jerks, Mary Jo Atkins. He said "When I saw her, my heart just fell." The woman who would become my mother rented a room not far from the drugstore, and he began walking her home at night after work, then would have to walk all the way across town back to his rented room -- he didn't have a car and there were no buses. Less than five weeks after they met, Daddy asked Mama to marry him as they sat on the porch swing on the front porch of her rooming house. On October 25, they were married by a Justice of the Peace. Two months later, they moved to follow Daddy's job and didn't stop until their children were grown.

In this last year, I found out that Daddy's great-great-grandfather, Isaac Stafford of Moore County, North Carolina had produced a family of sons all of whom became mechanical tinkerers and self-styled inventors. From that time until the present, every single generation of these descendants has been filled with boys and men who were irresistably drawn to figuring out how things worked and coming up with ways to make them work better. When the oil industry began, these far-flung Stafford descendants were all compelled to its work as if by genetic imperative. Daddy's great-grandfather George Stafford was an inventor of the Stafford and Robinson Straw Binder Harvester. When he lost his left arm to this machine at 65 years of age, it didn't stop him -- he invented a combination knife and fork he could use to eat his meals one-handed. Daddy and I marveled at this mechanical predisposition that has spanned six generations so far.

One of my best memories of my parents is when I was in my late teens and early 20s and they lived in Denton. They subscribed to two different Dallas newspapers because they couldn't agree which one was better. In the mornings they got up extremely early -- farm children's habits die hard -- and, after making coffee, would sit down at the kitchen table with their respective papers, taking turns reading articles and editorials aloud to each other, often about the same news item. This was competition, but intensely affectionate and making them laugh non-stop. I would wake up listening to this exchange, evidence of a long friendship between active minds. The day after we buried Mama, Daddy stood on the back porch of this same house at sunset, then came in suddenly, his eyes filled with tears. When I asked him what was wrong, he said "Jo just came to me, I felt her real as anything, and told me she was all right." He cried, and I didn't know how to comfort him. I don't think he ever stopped missing her.

One time when I was visiting from California, I was helping Mama straighten up their garage and on a shelf I found a long row of Western paperbacks hidden behind a stack of canned goods. They were all Louis L'Amour novels, which were what Daddy read, and I suggested we give them to him. Mama shushed me and explained that the plots in all these books were so identical, Daddy couldn't remember which ones he had already read -- he just liked to read himself to sleep by them at night. So she kept this stash, and when he finished one book, she'd put it at the end of the row and give him the first book in the row as if she'd just bought it at the used book store. She had gone through the entire set several times so far. I kept her secret.

Daddy cried in front of us, was not ashamed to show his hurt, which was a blessing for us children. He cried when he was happy, too. And if I needed physical comforting and he was available, he was my first choice. Mama was practical and usually busy -- she could open any jar with her phenomenally strong hands, but her approach to treating bobos was just as efficient. Daddy was tender and empathetic, would blow as long as you needed after applying iodine, would wait if you asked him to wait before pulling off a Band-Aid. When I was ten, I got impetigo from infected mosquito bites on my legs that I would not stop scratching. The daily iodine treatment made me cry so hard, and removing the encrusted gauze bandages was so painful, that after the first time, he didn't push me about it again. Instead, he waited until I was sound asleep at night, then he would slowly soak the bandages from my legs with warm washcloths, clean the infected areas and reapply medicine and covering -- he did it all so gently I never woke up.

When we moved from one Texas or Louisiana town to another during my childhood, we often set out at nightfall because it was cooler and our 1958 Chevy had no air conditioning. Bill and I would be made pallets in the deep back floorboards of that old car, the middle hump acting as a pillow, with the rush and vibration over asphalt inches below our bodies. I would stay awake while everybody else slept, sitting up behind Daddy, watching the road from his vantage point and asking him occasional questions. He told me I helped keep him awake.

Another strong memory I have is, on one such night journey, asking him about the tall communication towers with a blinking red light that dotted the West Texas landscape, often the only sign of human existence for fifty miles at a stretch. He told me they were towers with elevators which ran all the way to the top, a dazzling height, and at the very top was a Coke machine -- that's why the lights blinked red. If you went to those towers and were brave enough to ride the elevator up, you could get a Coke from the machine without having to put in a coin. He described it as a kind of modern oasis for desert travelers. I of course asked for us to go to the next tower -- soft drinks were an extremely rare treat in our family, not just because of the expense but also because they were considered not suitable for children to drink. He answered, regretfully, that we didn't have time to spare on this trip -- maybe another time. After that, I asked for a visit to the Coke towers on every trip, and we never could quite make it to one, but I held out hope. I could just taste the Coke, how sweet they were in those days in the little bottles, with a cluster of slurry ice at the neck. I was disappointed years later when I found out this story wasn't true, but not disappointed in Daddy -- it was an awfully good story.

Another beloved memory is his fondness for both ingenious practical jokes and for deft magic tricks. He could do a number of sleight-of-hand dazzlers, but one trick always eluded him. It involved balancing a raw egg on a pie plate over a glass of water and using a broom to strike the pie plate in such a manner as to shunt it to the side and drop the egg, intact, into the water. Every so often, he'd tell us he had figured out what he was doing wrong and he was sure he could pull off the trick this time. Mama would begin protesting, announcing she was not cleaning up any messes, but laughing all the while. I for one believed him every time -- this time it was going to work. And every time, it wound up with the egg slammed against the wall, dripping yolk, while an overturned glass of water dripped off the table onto the floor. And all of us laughing our heads off.

When I was in high school, we had a family tradition of solving the Sunday puzzles all together, Daddy reading out the clues and us competing to come up with the answer. He was particularly fond of the jumble puzzle, and he and I were ferocious in our bid to be the first to rearrange the letters in our heads and yell out the right word. But at age 15, adolescence caught up with me, and I began insisting on sleeping in on Sunday mornings -- I preferred my own teenage thoughts to the embarrassing hokum of my family.

Daddy couldn't bear this, neither the distancing nor the sleeping in. After a couple of weeks of doing the puzzle without me, one Sunday he carried a kitchen chair to just outside my bedroom door, sat down and began reading the jumble puzzle aloud in a particularly loud voice. I woke up to letters being shouted through my bedroom door and the distant sound of Mama laughing. I would put the pillow over my head, trying to shut out the sound, but my brain would not cooperate and instead seized on the riddle, solving it in spite of myself. And in spite of myself, I would roll over and shout out the answer. I would hear his low chuckle through the door, and then the next set of letters would be spelled out.

A year later, I got into the habit of going out with my friends and drinking while driving around back dirt roads in the very rural area where we lived. I would come home drunk and go to my bedroom, right beside the front door, with only a cursory hello to my parents. But one night, instead of the usual beer or wine, one of my friends had stolen a pint of whiskey and we drank that. I was monumentally sloshed, and when I got home I didn't have the sense to try to conceal it.

Daddy was asleep on the couch, waiting up for me, lying there in just his khakis, no shirt, no shoes. I staggered in the door and walked right over to him, leaning over him and telling him about these two puppies someone we knew had just gotten. The local funeral home was called Owens and Brumley, and these puppies had been named Owens and Brumley. I went on and on about how clever I thought this was, and then I began gushing about how cute they were, until I worked myself into crying about it. He lay there, blinking up at me, no doubt wondering if he was dreaming. I cried so hard about the puppies that suddenly my stomach revolted and I threw up the results of my night's drinking, right onto Daddy's bare chest.

The poor man leaped to his feet and bolted for the back bathroom, gagging. I knew my goose was cooked, then. I went into my room and the small half-bath off it, and sit down on the floor in front of my toilet, weeping and resting my head on the toilet seat. After taking a shower, Daddy came back looking for me with a wet washcloth in his hand. He sat down in the floor beside me and held my head as I puked, then wiped my face for me. He told me story after story of his drinking days in the Air Corps, the excesses and stupidities he had pulled as a young man. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Then, once I was puked out, he said "If you're going to drink, you have to do it at home. No driving around, no getting drunk like this. Let me know what kind of liquor you want and I'll get it for you. But you have to be here at home." He kissed me and went off to bed.

I stopped drinking. It just didn't have a thrill to it any more. And he didn't tell Mama about my vomiting on his bare chest until years later, when we could all laugh about it.

He sure made me laugh, my Daddy. He didn't grow up with kindness but he made a conscious decision to be kind to me. His parents didn't tell him they loved him but I heard it from him every day. He never met a puzzle he didn't like. He liked being married, and he liked working hard. He taught me how to play poker when I was six, how to shoot a gun when I was eight, and how to hold my liquor when I was sixteen. He came to visit me in San Francisco during Lesbian/Gay Pride week, and when I took him out to breakfast at a place where every other man in the restaurant was gay, he chatted with the flirty waiters and acted like it was something an Okie farmboy could easily take in his stride. He gave me the chance to live in India and Brazil, and expanded my world view forever as a result. He loved my mother from the moment he set eyes on her, and I have no doubt she was waiting for him when he died. If there's something else to be learned or sorted out wherever he is, I've no doubt he's caught a quick nap and then started right on it, with that eager look in his big brown eyes. May his line go on forever.

(Mary Jo, Craig and Harold Barnett circa 1949, Bowie, Texas bus station)

THE ANTI-EULOGY, 20 OCTOBER 2006

I don't like the eulogy. It lies -- lies of omission, but still lies. I think it's what I have to do. I got to tell the truth at Bill's funeral, I pulled out all the stops and I used my true voice and the family still hasn't recovered from it. But Bill died alone and in agony and because of betrayal, and I had a score to settle. Settling it gave peace to him and to his friends there, who refused to speak or shake hands with Craig and Daddy, only with me, afterward. And I had k. running shotgun for me, and Bill's loudmouth cracker ex-wife on the other side of me, urging me on. This is a different situation, and I do think the right thing is to let him go without telling the whole truth. I tell the truth elsewhere.

But I still feel like shit about it. I haven't written on the novel since he died, and I miss them all, those five friends who love each other and have a life together. I especially miss the character who died the weekend before Daddy did, and I had to write her death and funeral, was still in that emotional/psychological space when I got the call about Daddy. I miss her in a way I don't miss Daddy, how weird is that. I love her more than I loved my father.

I'm not sleeping to rest, either. Would make a big difference if I could. I have to work tonight. I have to call Craig and Glenda both today, and right at this moment, I don't feel up to it. but I will, because "taking space" is a middle class luxury. Mama always said "use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without." Applies equally to bodies and emotions, and thank g*d for all the middle class women who've encouraged me to question that application. (Sara, you stand out in this regard.) Still, today I have to do what is on my list.

Barnett comes either from Old French, where it means youth like a bear, or Old German, where it means a place cleared by fire.

Here's what I left out: [The next two paragraphs are better expressed in a post I wrote about my mother last June at Maoist Orange Cake called Heritage and Interpretation Should Be In Constant Flux.]

I made different decisions, took a different path. I have not ever bound myself emotionally to a man, which is a luxury of my era, I think.

Daddy lied to Mama about the nature of his work when he married her. She didn't know the work he wanted to do meant moving all the time. When she finally found out it was never going to change, when I was five, she left him, announced she was getting a divorce. but Craig, who was almost thirteen then, begged her to stay with Daddy because he was ashamed about the idea of divorce, and she relented. She tried again to leave him when I was thirteen, because I asked her to not make me move from the town where I wanted to go through high school. The only way to give me what I wanted was to leave Daddy, and she set about doing it. He was in Singapore at the time, waiting for us to join him. but before she could start divorce proceedings or tell him what she was planning, she had her first major heart attack. He had to fly back, change positions, take care of us, and he never stopped bitching about it, not until she died.

When I found out what she'd done, again, I never told him. I felt responsible for her heart attack. but, the thing is -- she let me feel responsible.

When we lived in India, from the time was I six months old until age four years, there was plenty of money -- overseas contracts. Enough money for Mama to stop being a housewife, hire a cook and a full-time ayah (nanny) for me. I spent all but two hours of each day with Nilmoni, whom I thought was my mother. Our time was usually out on the streets of Calcutta among Nilmoni's close girl friends from high school who had joined the Missionaries of Charity and worked among the poorest of the poor. As a baby and toddler, I was right there with them and Mother Teresa, watching what they did and learning who I was meant to be in the world.

Craig, on the other hand, was put into a private English boy's school, came home only on weekends. He was beaten and raped and trained to be owning class. When we both came back to Southern Louisiana in 1958, two months before Bill was born, I realized Craig was out to get me. I represented that which must be conquered and humiliated to him. Our sudden poverty further enraged him. Class warfare within a poor family. And Daddy just never noticed a thing.

So I am a Jochild now, not a Barnett. I love women because Adrienne Rich taught me the complicated truth is the only one worth having. I have a voice, I have the voice of generations of silenced women, and most of the time, I let myself use it without restraint. Thanks for hearing me. -- Maggie

(Davis Mountains, Texas, home of McDonald Observatory; photo by madplanter)

OBSERVATORY

Cotton cloth in what Mama called Crater Lake blue
sprayed with canary stars, on sale, dirt cheap
She bought yards and yards, made sundresses
for me and her, sport shirts for Daddy,
toddler Bill and Craig the sullen teenager.
All matching.
I tried mine on as soon as she clicked up the feeddog,
snipped the last thread. It smelled of sizing
and Mama's Winstons. But it was not for everyday.

Who knows now what came first,
the family uniform or the outing?

We lived in the Davis Mountains, a dying
railroad village 70 miles from other towns.
But within reach of our '58 Chevy was
McDonald Observatory, Texas claim to the cosmos.
And they said ordinary people even white trash
could drive up the peak-girdling road to
frosted glass doors and be let in, talked to
by diffident men with unimaginable degrees,
trailing their gobbledegook explanations into
a hushed rotunda overhung with
It, the telescope. Maybe even get to look through It.

Mama used all the natural forces available to housewives.
Daddy worked Saturdays, sometimes all weekend.
If he wasn't gone in the field, there was always something
to be fixed, kept running, cleaned or disassembled for parts.
Maybe he'd have a nap after Sunday dinner,
kids outside, yard apes; him stretched
the length of our plastic couch, no shirt, no shoes,
snoring toward the black and white TV.
Which is more than Mama ever got.

We moved every few months.
Mama would empty cupboards into soup cartons,
crumpling in the newspaper of a town we were leaving,
stacking boxes, heaviest on bottom, along our narrow trailer hall.
She'd lay our hangered clothes across beds
on top of mirrors and photographs, capped with pillows,
a moving day lasagna.

She taped an X on each pane of glass,
put plants in the bathtub, stacked chairs
into sideways cubes. Puzzles to be undone the next day.
Daddy checked tire pressures, swore at the engine, rattled maps.
We kids boxed up cats, picked out one book or toy for the car,
laid low. We never traveled for fun.

But somehow she talked him into it, into three hours
there and back, a clear October Sunday
with enough money for gas and one soda apiece
on the way back. Mama packed egg salad, saltines, bread and butter pickles, and one of her cherry pies.
Daddy filled his field Igloo with ice water.

We dressed in what was handed us.
Except Craig who, bewilderingly, didn't want to match.
Threw his shirt on the floor. Told Mama to get off his back.
Daddy heard it from under the hood, boiled into the house.
I pulled Bill to the side yard.
Craig came out wearing the shirt.

Bill and I sat all the way over
to the other side of the back seat.

We stop for lunch at a concrete table near a solo
cottonwood. The noon desert sun, even in autumn,
throws our faces all into light and shadow.
Mama tugs me and Bill into sweaters, promises
we can take them off at the top, before we go in,
so we can all match again.

Around one long bend we catch sight of where we're heading,
gleaming cathedral with a dark slice cut out the top.
As close to heaven as we can get.
Daddy points as if we don't see.
It's easy to keep Bill quiet. Craig sits up, pulls his
bluejeaned leg back onto his half.
Mama turns around and once again explains about space,
about looking up from the bottom of a well even in daytime.
She asks me, "What did Einstein say?" and, face on fire
with being her girl, I pipe "E equal M C squared!"
Bill crawls over into the front seat, standing
with one hand on Daddy's shoulder.

The rest is fragments.
Locked frosted doors, a small sign
with hours Mama didn't know to call about.

Craig taking off his shirt, wearing just
his white Fruit of the Loom all the way home.
And not a word from Daddy.
Not a single word.


© Maggie Jochild, 5-7 p.m. (during a tornado storm), 15 November 2001; was one of 25 finalists in a PEN poetry contest judged by Adrienne Rich


GIRL OF THE PURPLE SAGE

When we moved, packed in the Chevy
From yards backed by bayou
To squares of hardpan covered with sand
Then back again, never twice the same
All on two-lane blacktops
MACK-uh-DAM as Daddy called it

There were no interstates. Roads
Went through the middle of each small town
No chain restaurants, no 7-11s
Every place looked different
Even the stretches of desert, each ring
Of creosote bush or line of salt cedar
Was singular to my traveled eye
In afternoons, as Mama dozed
And my older brother picked on my younger

I sat hunched over the middle of the front
Admiring how Daddy could drive with one
Hand casually on the steering wheel
Or not even that when he lit a Camel
It took two hands to tump down the
Unfiltered tube on his hard pack, then
Light it with a red-hot coil plucked
Out of the dash, so at those times
He let the road have us
Just his knees nudging us straight ahead

I'd stare at the lake on the pavement
In front of us, a shimmer of wet
That traveled exactly as fast as we did
A mirage I never quite disbelieved
As the radio played Keep a-movin', Dan
He's a devil, not a man, and he spreads
The burning sands with water

And the hot inrush of air through the
Open car windows scoured my face
With rippled-glass augury of
A new start, just on ahead


© Maggie Jochild,, 10 March 2004, 2:30 a.m.


STILLBORN

Mama made my Halloween costume
using a free pattern from Redbook
black crepe dress and pointed hat
with orange yarn hair hanging down
inside the brim. In November
everything changed. She cried for
John-John saluting his Daddy, knowing
she was pregnant again, the fourth of us

She didn't tell anybody until Christmas Day
after I opened my Tom Terrific Colorforms
which I played with until they stopped sticking
I asked if we could name the baby Tom
or second choice Timmy, but she refused
to discuss it. From this I spun the wild
hope it would be a sister

She stopped
dressing, wore her housecoat all day

Right after New Year, a rare snowfall
arrived during school hours. She called
Daddy to pick me up, I was not supposed
be outside in cold air but when
the janitor locked the front door, I
gave up and trudged off into slurry dusk
I really didn't mind it, I never got to be
outside in the wet. She swore when
I came in the front door, stripped me
put me in flannels, heating pad at my feet
I got pneumonia anyhow

I have so many questions. Was she in labor
that morning when made our school lunches?
How long did she wait before calling
our neighbor to please drive her to the ER?
Did they put my youngest brother in her arms
or just take him straight to the funeral director?
And did she call Daddy at all? I don't
think she did. Something got lost
that February, ran away into the dark
of that shortest month. I would
have looked for it if I had known
where to go

© Maggie Jochild,11 May 2004, 7:33 p.m.


DADDY’S RETIREMENT

My father calls me to say
he now has a scooter
He says this will get him out
of the house. Not from Medicaid
Though I’ve been pestering him
for years to let me help
get more services. No,
this is second-hand. He says
it runs okay but the headlight
is broken and he will have
to get it fixed so he can go
squirrel hunting Saturday
night. He is joking, though
a lot of people might not
get it, though he will be
packing heat when he goes
out, either his Glock or the
.457

He says he is building
a ramp and this worries me
This means cinder blocks and
used plywood at an angle
not for the faint of heart
Like all the steps he pounded
together over the years
for our single-wide
Mama demanding a porch
Nothing trailer trash -- But
Daddy knowing it would have
to be taken apart and
stored in the truck bed
the next time we moved

I don’t think the scooter is
going to get Daddy away
from his TV and chairside
commode. When he retired
that was it. No more having
to kiss ass to all the
yahoos who treated him like
shit for forty years. They
are right outside his front door
Ready to laugh at his scooter


© Maggie Jochild,23 June 2004, 12:15 p.m.

(Aracaju, Brasil)

BRAZIL AS A GIRL

Some Saturday nights, after the BBC radio news
we would all get in Daddy’s Rover and drive out
the river road to Praia Atalaia. South of the harbor
was an open air cantina right on the sand itself.
A brick barbecue blew flame and sparks up
into the surf-smelling night sky, with a menu
that was whatever had been caught that day
plus stringy chicken and skinny pork
served on rough boards with loaves and cold, cold
beer. Soft drinks for us kids, in rusted-cap bottles
with ice clustered in the narrow necks. This place
was famous for having half a dozen pet animals -
Goat, duck, a couple of hens, three sheep – which
all had been dyed a different color. The sheep were
pink, blue and pale green. The duck was blue, too.
They wandered around under the tables, begging
For handouts. After eating, the men who worked
wth my father and only the American women
would turn from beer to cachaça, in big clear bottles,
drink that smelled like nail polish and drained
their eyes of all intelligence. They would pour
skinny glasses full and pretend they liked each other
pretend at conversation and sloppy meaning
until the drive back into town was suicidal, all
that dark stretch drawn narrow between river and
jungle. I liked the grilled snapper and the blue duck
but not this promise of what it meant to be grown.
I sat on the bench nearest the ocean, letting it
glaze my skin with pungent crust, phosphorus
running in the breakers like magic beings come
to take me back to my real people, somewhere
else


© Maggie Jochild, 23 June 2004, 7:45 p.m.


RIVERVIEW

Nine sites strung along the Rio Frio
on the bank or in the trees, alternating
like Christmas lights: Camp Riverview
Each site with a gravel pull-in

10 x 10 concrete slab, picnic table
and fire pit. One-holers were up
the slope, along with cold showers
and outdoor sinks for dishes

Use of showers and sink cost $1
more per night, making our total
eight bucks for the weekend
Daddy would have turned us around

Driven back home, mouth streaming
with shamed fury, because that s.o.b.
he called had not mentioned the extra
dollar. But instead he paid it. Once

again, he had to eat his pride because
Mama said, because of us kids in the
back seat. We always queered his chances
His choices, and at least we were not

allowed to forget it. Until we were at last
in the river, wide, waist deep, cold, green
Each site with its own territory, and
our patch had a small limestone ledge

with a doily ruff of rapids. Safe enough
for kids with water wings to play alone
Mama in a lawn chair on the bank, soon
finding another woman from a site nearby

to talk away the afternoon. The sun
slowed down, snared by the slow current
We ate dinner, hot dogs and beans, single
Shasta apiece, played checkers for sixty

minutes, then gloriously still in our suits
got to go back in until it was truly dark
Mama and Daddy had cots borrowed
set on either side of the picnic table

We were put in the pickup, on a single
quilt so the rucks of the truckbed found
our skinny bones. Mosquitos ravaged
our sunseared flat flesh, but my hair

smelled like river and I slept solid
until dew and bacon. Back into my
clammy suit, all of us ignoring Daddy
Sullen dangerous on his cot. Nothing

to do here, nothing at all, except be with
his family. We left early, never having
used the showers, but we spent two days
in the same place, our only vacation

As I mention to him forty years later
He says "No, that can't be right" but
he has no other example. Then he adds
"I don't remember that place, honey"


© Maggie Jochild, 12 November 2004, 2 p.m.


SHILOH IN JULY

When we went to Shiloh, the day was very hot
We got up early but the sun was way ahead
We drove from Purdy, short and silent road --
Purdy where my Daddy's line had lived
for more than ninety years before they
gave up worn-out farms and Reconstruction
to have a run at the Strip. During Shiloh
they were either in butternut there
dying in the orchard, dying without water
or thin-lipped still in Purdy, where
cannon boom and rifle shot came clear
even on a breezeless day, sliding through
the clapboard walls, clotting milk and
setting loose that first wall-eyed notion
of leaving the South behind. Leave it all
They thought it possible. But I, who came
back to see the hollows where had lived
the women who gave me my hair and eyes
I who drove the markered trail of Shiloh
Eager for the finale. the cemetery where
I might read names most familiar, great-
great-uncle boys who never left the South
I myself was taken in, unready to find what
lay at one tour marker -- left my car and
walked a short trail into torpid woods
into a clearing, just a sprawl of dirt
curbed by rough concrete, fifty feet
by eight, nothing else. Fishing out
my tour brochure, wiping eyelids with
the back of a hand, I read this is one of
three mass graves for all my kin
Stacked on one another by Grant's men
Denied even a look by Purdy sisters and
mothers -- this trench held 1500. No
headstone because no names were gathered
The National Cemetery at the end was saved
for Union only. The heat of shame closed in
and knocked me down


© Maggie Jochild, 17 January 2005, 8:40 p.m.

(Shiloh, Tennessee Civil War Park)

COTTON MOUTH

We like our rivers green or brown, slow
Full of cats, overlaced with serpenty branches,
Rivers resonating horror to the red-haired roots
Of my people who disembarked in Charlestown
Looking for a place not beneath the English
Rivers most definitely not Anglo-Saxon

When my daddy, skinny and auburn
First began doodlebugging
As the greenhorn it was his job
To sit in the prow of that pirogue
As it hesitated into 'Chafalaya
Looking for a legendary salt dome full
Of crude -- Daddy, new guy in the prow
Carried a double-aught to shoot off
Into the trees ahead and above
Dropping hidden cottonmouths into
The water -- If the snakes plopped, pissed
As only moccasins can be, into the boat
It was daddy had to get them out
Not to lose his head and fire away
At the hull or other thighs that
Happened to be near the slithering
Don't tread on me syllabary
How unwelcome we were here
But Europe hadn't wanted us either
Being wanted isn't necessary for
Survival


© Maggie Jochild, 20 January 2005, 12:35 p.m.


DADDY CALLED US SPORTSFANS

Daddy called us sportsfans
buddy sister skeezix you
Mama used our names
strung two or three
or shortened to one syllable
or sung as tunes we knew
from tempera-colored plastic records
played on the turntable with
a lid that lifted off after
clicking hasps like suitcase locks

Mama's love turned me inside out
like her blue gardening gloves
her smell and whorls at the end
of each finger-shaped tube
Her organs had pressed my
nose and cheeks into their angles
like piecrust rims the scallop
of her thumb over and over

Something in her pushed me out
Her daily joy but also a lament
because now I could be claimed
by others, imperfect claims not
chosen well or perhaps not chosen
at all, as she did not believe she would
ever have begun the unravel
of our braided heartbeat cord


© Maggie Jochild, 9 June 2005, 6:15 a.m.


TRAINING WHEELS

I don't remember why the trainers had to come off
but I would bet money it was not because
you asked. My guess is that Daddy was as
always in a hurry to grow you up, you the
afterthought son. While working on the car
he beckoned you over,
selected a snap-on from his box
and with a few wrist turns
there was a bicycle you had to hold up
because the kickstand was long gone.

He carefully put away the wrench,
finished his Camel with a drag, and told you to hop on.
He promised, as he had with me, that he would not let go.
But of course two spaces down the trailer park road
he pulled his hands away from your fender and you were
on your own. Within two strides -- if he had been striding beside you --
a wobble and down you went, crash of metal and dust.

But before Mama could call out from the porch
or Daddy could stop laughing, you were seated again
pumping away. Pump, pump, crash.
Pump, pump, crash. Your hands and knees were bleeding
but your mouth was glued grim
and you did not look back.

After a while it was clear
you were not going to loop our way.
Daddy told me to get my bike
and go after you.

I don't remember what I said to persuade you back.
I do remember blowing on your palms
after mama doused them with monkeyblood
holding them gently between my own hands


© Maggie Jochild, 15 June 2005, 6:09 a.m.

(Bill Barnett in 1964, age six, with Chico)

FORT STOCKTON SECOND GRADE

Bluelipped skinny from asthma, she was
always cold Her dresses were mostly
percale plaid Peter Pan collars
with bodices starched stiff that morning
by her mother with Niagara spray
at the creaking ironing board

She was given cardigans and tights
on days of bitter High Plains cold
The brand new school playground
was concrete, divided into
sharp-eyed clutches of girls, with boys
rowdy and loud at the far edge
They had all been in one class together
since kindergarten

She had no friend except Nan Bobbsey
At recess she pleaded to stay in
Work ahead with the Cusenaire rods
After the room was hers, she pulled out
jacks and played with open-mouthed
determination up to her twelvsies
eggs in the basket, pigs in the pen

Everybody got gaga in December
over the Nutcracker, even the boys
seemed to know what it meant
But she guessed her father would move
them again by the New Year, so she
waited it out


© Maggie Jochild, 6 July 2005, 4:45 p.m.


NURTURE VS. NATURE

When Daddy went from diapers to short pants and simple chores
His hair was golden, hanging from his nape in sausage curls
Long and sumptuous, all around his brown-eyed farmboy face
His mama brushed them till they bounced. Held him close
Until the day his Uncle Allie picked him up
Took him to the wagon barn
Rubbed axle grease into each lock, down to scalp
Then set him loose to squall into the house
The only thing his mom could do was cut it off and scrub his burr
It grew in dirty blonde and straight
As Allie climbed into his truck, he said out to the yard
He's a boy. And he ain't yours.


© Maggie Jochild, 16 November 2005, 5:41 p.m.


HOUMA

One Sunday afternoon my daddy
had to fetch a tool from work
I got to ride out with him

The pickup cab smelled like
WD40 and Camels, even with
the windows down to catch
some breeze

We drove a one-lane gravel road
lined up next to bayou to a shed
which was open walled with
a corrugated roof. Daddy parked
at one side in buttery sand
that sucked at our tires

I was told to wait, so I stood up
in the seat and leaned out the window
Where sand met oily gravel was
the carapace of a big box turtle
bleached white as china but
mounds of breast place still distinct
The sun made it shine

When daddy came back, I pointed
Look, a turtle died

Sit down he said, shifting gears
Turtles die all the time


© Maggie Jochild, 28 January 2006, 7:33 a.m.


AFTER THE TORNADOS

After the tornados, Daddy finally
found us, took us to a motor court
We had dinner at the drive-in
Burger with mayo only for me
I shared fries with my little brother
The air smelled like it was brand new
I didn't know the boy who was killed
Running home from school in the hail
Daddy said he could get our trailer
back on its blocks in the morning
The loudspeaker at the drive-in
played "Never On A Sunday"
My paper straw had red stripes in it
Mama said we could collect insurance
for the cracked windshield, then
use it for new shoes. Daddy said
okay


© Maggie Jochild, 3 July 2007, 10:19 a.m.

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