Dear Mr. Bill
2014; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cal.2014.0168
ISSN1080-6512
Autores Tópico(s)American Jewish Fiction Analysis
ResumoDear Mr. Bill Yusef Komunyakaa (bio) When you left Church Hill at 82 where you were born & raised & came to Montgomery, took a job in a shoe factory & slept nights in the back room of a funeral home, was it hard for your fingers to learn to stud leather, & did the syncopation of a latching machine settle into you ‘til rain fell through your bones, ‘til you stopped & set up a studio on a crate near a blacksmith shop & began drawing reveries on scraps of yellow cardboard? You’d been a slave & a sharecropper, & overnight figures grew out of straight-edged rectangles. As you penciled a row of tools you said, “My white folks died & my children scattered.” A big fat crow appeared. Your hands were strong as a fighter’s, but your eyes only craved balance ‘til contours filled up with signifying. When the shape of discarded paper first worked an image in your head down through your thick fingertips, did you already know how to add curvature to the human & animal after years of carpentering in clay & wood? You didn’t have to look to capture dance in hue or an ogee, to slant a figure on a hill or rooftop [End Page 852] balanced by a tilted whiskey bottle or smoking pipe, with one eye always opened, always in profile. I’m drawn to the Blue Rabbit Running, to the Hunter on Horseback, The Man in Red Pants Pointing, almost pulled into another time. But it’s the Red Dog walking into cotton hemmed in by pines that stops me, the Black Jesus still stunned on dogwood. You would bring to life each story as it stepped into a broken frame. When you said, “I wanted to be plowing so bad today, I draw’d me a man plowing,” I felt myself casting a will over two horses with rope & chain— hitched to a plow, like a guide post. Mr. Bill, did your Brown Lizardwith Blue Eye & the Ferocious Cat lope out of a third mind? No wonder Charles Shannon, with a trained eye, saw your genius & aimed his camera as you worked beside the Coca-Cola & Dr. Pepper signs, the black boys grown around you, before he curated your drawings for the New South & painted your image beside the door: your bowed head, your strong hands. He called you “the people’s painter,” & we know it’s all tangled up in blood thick as a vine knotted around a fencepost. When you went up north to kinfolk, away from the soil, & then returned south with an amputated left foot, was the strength of your constructions almost gone, their balance half lost? The surveyor’s level no longer cut [End Page 853] through, but without you, Mr. Bill, the name Traylor would only be two syllables of red Alabama dust. [End Page 854] Yusef Komunyakaa Yusef Komunyakaa, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Ruth Lily Prize, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, teaches at New York University. He is author of more than fifteen volumes of poems, including Talking Dirty to the Gods, Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999, Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1, Warhorses, and The Chameleon Couch. Copyright © 2014 The Johns Hopkins University Press
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