1960 Mrs.
Carroll was 83,
With bowed
back,
Wearing a
dress sown together from flour sacks
Tarted up
with blue flowers
She
embroidered to resemble
Those growing
in the west pasture,
Where her
Holsteins fed during the day
Before
wandering through the bottom
To the creek to
escape August’s heat.
She displayed
a tintype of her grandfather,
On the mantel
of the old house,
Where she was
born, raised, married and widowed.
In it an old
man wore a confederate uniform
With
sergeant’s bars and he was blond, too,
With a wispy
beard and clear blue eyes, a son of the South,
Mrs. Carroll
said with a tear in her eye:
“He went
north and never came back.”
1960 I was
eight, living in a ranch-style home,
Built on a
piece of Mrs. Carroll’s land,
Sold to my
father
For a couple
of hundred dollars,
Because she
liked his blue eyes
And blond
hair and was fooled
By his
Eisenhower jacket and khaki shirt,
Sergeant bars
on his shoulder,
And ribbons,
announcing where he had been since 1942,
Overseas, in
the Pacific, in Japan, in Korea
Before coming
home to Texas,
Where there
was no sea, no islands,
No foreign girls with brown skin and almond eyes.
Mrs. Carroll
had a woman,
A young black
woman in her 20s,
With chocolate skin and almond eyes,
Who poured me
milk and handed me cookies
That I ate on
the porch watching the sun set
On the gray land,
where sergeants lived
And bats flew
at dusk.
