In the Language of My Captor - Hardcover

McCrae, Shane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0819577111 ISBN 13: 9780819577115

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae’s latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book’s three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love. A reader’s companion is available at XXXX.site.wesleyan.edu.

About this title

About the Author

SHANE MCCRAE is the author of four other books of poetry, including The Animal Too Big to Kill, Mule, Forgiveness Forgiveness, and Blood.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In the Language of My Captor

By Shane McCrae

Wesleyan University Press

Copyright © 2017 Shane McCrae
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8195-7711-5

Contents

1, 
His God, 3, 
Panopticon, 5, 
Privacy, 6, 
What Do You Know About Shame, 8, 
Privacy 2, 11, 
In the Language, 13, 
2, 
Purgatory: A Memoir / A Son and a Father of Sons, 17, 
3, 
Banjo Yes Receives a Lifetime Achievement Award, 55, 
Banjo Yes Recalls His First Movies, 58, 
Banjo Yes Talks About His First White Wife, 60, 
Banjo Yes Plucks an Apple from a Tree in a Park, 61, 
Banjo Yes Talks About Motivation, 63, 
Banjo Yes Asks a Journalist, 65, 
4, 
(hope)(lessness), 69, 
Sunlight, 72, 
Jim Limber the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Davis Visits His Adoptive Parents After the War, 77, 
Asked About The Banjo Man and Its Sequels Banjo Yes Tells a Journalist Something About Himself, 78, 
Still When I Picture It the Face of God Is a White Man's Face, 82, 
Acknowledgments, 85, 

CHAPTER 1

His God

I am the keeper tells
Me the most popular exhibit
You might not think this cheers me but it does
I'm given many opportunities

I like especially to ask the groups
I am careful to Led by fat white men
Never address the fat man but the group
How has it come // To pass

that I'm on this side of the bars
And you're on that side
And Who stands in your shoes
You or the people you resemble

they don't give me shoes // I say
Gesturing toward a zoo employee
and I smile
Often the people do not answer me

and says Often the fat man squints It real- // ly makes you think
or Something like that There
but for the grace of God / I tell the keeper they must be
The daughters and the sons of nearer gods

I tell him my gods had to stay behind
To watch my people / He likes it when I talk like that
the truth is I don't know
when he's drunk The keeper

Sometimes he says I'm lucky
To have been rescued from my gods
And I should thank the man who bought me
but now I grieve I used to laugh at him

I think // His god is not a god like mine / His god
not a father Is not a mother
not a farmer not a hunter
his / God is a stranger

from no country he has seen


Panopticon

The keeper put me in the cage with the monkeys
Because I asked to be
Put in the cage with the monkeys
Most of the papers say the monkeys

must // Remind me of my family
The liberal papers say the monkeys must
Remind me of my home
The papers don't ask me

some days // I tuck notes explanations
Into soft monkey shits
and call white children to the bars
I warn the parents / But still they let their children come

And that's my explanation / I am
their honest mirror
I say Whether you're here
to see me or to see the monkeys

You're here to see yourselves


Privacy

I tell the keeper I don't know
What he or any white man means
When he says privacy
Especially

In the phrase In the privacy
Of one's own home / I understand
he thinks he means a kind of
Militarized aloneness

If he would listen I would tell him
Privacy is impossible
If one's community is
Not bound by love

Instead I tell him where I'm from we
Have no such concept
If he thinks I am / Too wise
he won't speak honestly

And so I make an / Effort to make
my language fit his
Idea of what I am
and with his guests I find with him

Because I'm on display in
A cage with monkeys
I / Must speak and act
carefully to maintain / His privacy

and // If he would listen I would tell him
Where privacy
Must be defended
There is no privacy

I have become an // Expert on the subject
But I have also learned
The keeper will not trust me / To understand
even what he has taught me


What Do You Know About Shame

Late very late long after
The many families and the lone white man
Who stayed long after
The families had gone had gone

Last night the keeper staggered to my cage / Weeping
he said his wife
Was leaving him
And he would never see his son

Again I said I did not understand
Why he would never see his son again
he was ashamed He said
And his // Wife was ashamed

and she was going back to
Her people was his word
and / Taking the child
I said I did not understand

Why he would never see his son again
Again I said there would be no
Ocean between his son and him
No bars

Between / Him and the ocean
if there were an ocean
And I said Surely I am making you
A wealthy man

you can // Afford to travel
can you not
The keeper stepped close to my cage
and snarled / Your women / Tramp through the jungle

with their tits out // What do you know about
shameand I shouted You are drunk
Go home and be / Drunk with your family
While you still can

He growled
and struck the bar between us
And stumbled back and fell
How do you know a white man's really hurt I laughed

He / Stops crying


Privacy 2

I tell the keeper I don't know
What he or any white man means
When he says privacy
Especially

In the phrase In the privacy
Of one's own home / I understand
he thinks he means a kind of
Militarized aloneness

If he would listen I would ask him whether
The power / To enforce aloneness
and aloneness
can exist together

Instead I tell him where I'm from we
Have no such con-
cept if he thinks I am / Too wise
he won't speak honestly

And so I talk the way the men
He says are men like me
Talk in the books he reads to me
I understand

Those books are not supposed to make me wise
And yet I think perhaps
They show me what he means
By privacy // Perhaps

by privacy he means / This
certainty he has that
The weapons he has made
Will not be used against him


In the Language

I cannot talk about the place I came from
I do not want it to exist
The way I knew it
In the language of my captor

The keeper asks me why I
Refuse him this
I think to anyone who came from / The place I came from
It would be obvious

but // I did not think my people
before Superior to other people
The keeper's language has infected me
I knew of // Few people

Beyond the people / I knew
before and when I met new people
The first thing I assumed was
they were just like me

Perhaps even relatives
Who had before my birth been lost
In the jungle or on the plain
Or on the other side of the mountain

And so at first I thought the white men / Were ghosts
one spoke my language
And said that he had spoken to my father
I did not fear them

I thought they had been
whitened by the sun / Like bones wandering
I thought I could / Help them
I thought they didn't

Know they were dead

CHAPTER 2

Purgatory: A Memoir / A Son and a Father of Sons

I myself prefer to be left face up in a ditch and for someone to go to jail because of what he's done to me.

— PRISCILLA BECKER

Ajax (within) Boy! Where is my child?

— SOPHOCLES (TRANSLATED BY JOHN MOORE)

1

Most mornings, on my way to school, I would stop on the bridge over the branch of the creek that separated the school from my house and peer through the railing down at the minnows twisting in the pale current.

Some afternoons, and sometimes on the weekends, I would climb through the thick bushes behind the school — I would push, violently, sometimes knocking whole trees down, sometimes stomping on them, imagining myself hacking through a faraway jungle, and once I brought one of my grandfather's machetes with me, his only souvenirs from the army, although he hadn't fought in a war, two machetes and a pair of boots, and hacked so desperately, so gleefully then that I didn't get anywhere, but stood in one spot, hacking — and through the bamboo trees beyond the bushes, to the village of abandoned and rotting houses in the placeless clearing.

Two houses, both wooden, and both painted brown, although most of the paint had peeled away, stood in the center of the village if one were facing the village, having just emerged from the bamboo forest. To the left of the houses a narrow dirt road led away from the village. To the right of the houses stood a building that looked like a cross between a barn and a warehouse. It, too, was brown, and brown also where the paint had peeled away, exposing the wood underneath.

The village was the emptiest place I had ever seen. But the warehouse and the houses were full. The houses were full of furniture nobody had used in years, and old kitchen appliances, and shoes — I remember several pairs of shoes — and stained jeans. In the first house I walked through, the first couch I saw had been tilted on its back. It lay in a small living room, and next to it was a pair of cracked brown wingtip oxfords, and a few feet in front of it were two empty, beatenup suitcases; otherwise, it was surrounded by old sheets of plywood and fragments of the walls. The houses stood even though they looked as if more material had been torn from the walls than could have been in the walls in the first place.

The houses and the warehouse were separated by about 100 feet of dirt, and patches of broken concrete, and thorny, low bushes, and grass. I call it a village, but there wasn't more to it than what I've just described. I call it a village because it was abandoned — the words seem to go together — and filled with trash and also things I thought people wouldn't have left behind, things that looked important to me, toys, mostly, some whole and some broken, all filthy, mostly in the warehouse. I remember the ivory-colored stuffed bear I saw near the bottom left corner of the mouth of the warehouse — the first thing I saw in the warehouse, the thing that drew me to the warehouse — best. But toys were scattered all over the floor of the warehouse, and at the back of the warehouse — I only visited the warehouse once, after I had visited the houses several times, and didn't return to the village for months afterward — I saw a door, like the front door of a house, but deep and far in darkness.

Back then — I was six or seven years old — as now, fear compelled me toward the things I feared, and so I made my way slowly — and I lost my balance a few times, slipping on stuffed animals or dolls or fire trucks or doll parts — to the door, and turned the handle, and pushed. On the other side was a small workroom with a desk — a board about the size of a door, but smaller, laid across two saw horses — a dirty chair with metal legs and brown vinyl padding on the seat and the back, and a few shelves full of paint cans. A dusty toolbox, a small lamp with a flexible neck and a metal, cup-shaped head, and a Phillips screwdriver sat on the desk. The room's single window was intact, and sunlight fell through it and across the desk, striking the head of the lamp, which glowed. I stared at the glowing lamp, terrified, feeling suddenly near, as children sometimes for imaginary reasons do, death, hoping the lamp was on.

JIM LIMBER THE ADOPTED MULATTO SON OF JEFFERSON DAVIS
MET HIS ADOPTIVE MOTHER VARINA DAVIS AT A CROSSROADS

Up north it's midnight in America
Here in America it's midnight too
Daddy Jeff says he says it was always two
Americas and he just keeps it law
I don't know anything about the law
Except I know what's true and isn't true
But sometimes I'll see Negroes running through
A field in the dark and not say what I saw

When white folks ask I tell them I was happy
With momma and she didn't beat me of-
ten till the war got bad but we was going
North and I didn't want to go the morning
she whups me Momma Varina rescued me
Different like what she wants from it is love

2

Later, months after or before, when I wake in the sharp grass, and the large, older boy, who a moment, a minute, how long was it ago had been crushing my chest against the brick pillar at the edge of my porch, and every inch of my body except for my chest had felt like it was disappearing, and alongside that feeling, the other feeling, the feeling I had been looking for, the feeling I had asked him to give me, please, after he had offered it, guessing I must want it, the feeling that my body was no longer mine, is now standing above me, and my skin burns where each blade of grass touches it, and I feel the world more particularly than I've ever felt it before, and so I hurt in a way I've never hurt before, when I wake, the first question I ask, thinking it would be like this, to return to my body, burning, is, "Am I dead?" And the large, older boy doesn't answer me. The large, older boy doesn't help me up. It's the first time the large, older boy has visited my house during the day, and after he leaves, the large, older boy will never come back — not during the day, and not at night. I lie in the grass, not sure whether I'm supposed to stand. The corners of the large, older boy's disproportionately large mouth turn down. Then he calls me a faggot and walks away.

I was passed around the neighborhood as a child — never from adult to adult, mostly from child to child, and sometimes from child to teenager to child — not me in my body, but the rumor of me and my body, according to which I took my place in the world more surely than if I stood where the rumor went. I must have met the large, older boy who, the day we met, told me to leave my bedroom window unlocked for him later, on that circuit, but I don't remember where, or when. He was much bigger than me — a child, also, but old enough and big enough that I couldn't form a clear idea of his age, and he seemed, as all older, much bigger children seemed, somehow bigger than my father, who was, anyway, my grandfather, the man raising me who was married to the woman raising me. He might have been a teenager.

I was afraid of the large, older boy from the moment I met him — I don't remember much about the moment itself, but I remember the fear, and I remember he threatened to beat me up if I didn't leave my bedroom window unlocked for him. But I would have left it unlocked even if he hadn't threatened me. When I was a child, I was willing, even eager, to let anybody do anything they wanted to me, so long as they didn't hurt me, and so long as what they were doing looked like the things I saw people doing in my grandfather's magazines, which seemed, especially among the boys I met, common — not my grandfather's magazines in particular, but most of the neighborhood boys found similar magazines in their own homes — and in which we discovered, not images corresponding to any overwhelming desires we might have felt, but guides to the overwhelming desires encompassing us. What I remember most distinctly is not any single act, but the sensation I felt, both empty and vast, as I watched what people did to me, and what I did to them, reluctantly, but I would if they asked me to, checking to make sure it looked right, familiar. I was comfortable in that vastness, and afraid of it, and I hated it, and yearned toward it, but not toward it, exactly, but toward people I thought might be familiar with it, as my grandfather was, and willing to inflict it.

JEFFERSON DAVIS THE ADOPTIVE FATHER OF THE MULATTO JIM
LIMBER DREAMS OF AN UNKNOWING LOVE

She is a slim young Negress but I know
she is my Varina she is a girl
I saw only once a few weeks ago
in town on an errand with her master

whom she resembled and his wife who did
not look at her but commanded the air
immediately before her own face
and the Negress three steps behind obeyed

she was nobody she is Varina
I recognize her as she was and is
two women in a single body I
stand hidden in a shadow in the dream

watching but I stood in the sun when I
saw her but things are not as they were and
I stand hidden in a shadow and as
she passes three steps behind her master

who had passed half a step behind his wife
I reach for her and in the way of dreams
touching her who was the moment before
a stranger I know her and have known her

from the moment of her birth and in the
way of dreams also she is new to me
as the moon is she is both known and strange
I pull her into the darkness that hides

me from her master and his wife and hid
me from her before and there I desire
her as a white man desires a Negress
as two women in a single body

I draw her close to me and as I reach
for her face her master's wife calls her name
Varina she calls where are you and she
calls with my Varina's voice she calls her

Jefferson and mixes it with mine name
where are you I have fallen asleep in
my study my Varina calls for me
as the moon calls for the light of the sun

from across an unknowable blackness


JIM LIMBER THE ADOPTED MULATTO SON OF JEFFERSON DAVIS
INHERITS THE KINGDOM OF THE NEGRO IN AMERICA

I lived with momma for a nigger's age
For seven years since I was seven I
Ain't seen her once and now I'm almost eight
I think she must be free momma Vari-
na she says it don't matter who your mom-
ma was if you're a man she says Are you
A man Jim look at Joe I look at him
But I don't see me in his eyes but two

Blue shadows that ain't black like shadows should be
I look at him and I don't see no way
For me to be a man but I see daddy
Jeff and my face is shadows in his eyes
I look at Joe daddy Jeff's face he got
My daddy's white so I don't get his face

3

My grandfather — although I don't know whether he would have described himself in this way — was a white supremacist. He wouldn't have been ashamed to admit that he believed white people were superior to black people — especially superior to black people in particular — indeed, he happily — or, really, "gleefully" would probably be a better word, since white supremacists don't ever seem happy so much as gleeful — admitted to this belief many times when I was a child. But I suspect he might have thought the phrase "white supremacist" was too fancy for him. He had been, as a child, the younger brother of a much larger boy, and, along with his older brother Thomas, and his younger brother, Raymond — who grew up to become a landlord, who would eventually be shot through the neck by a tenant he had evicted a few days before, and would die in a soft-top convertible, blood spraying from his neck, his head rolling slightly from side to side on his shoulder as he pointed toward a narrow gap between two dumpsters, wordlessly urging his wife, who was already crawling away from the car, to safety — as a child, had lived in poverty, in the wake of the Dust Bowl, in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Because of and despite this, he hated "white trash" almost as much — although the hate was a different kind of hate, a sad duty — as he hated blacks, my father especially.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae. Copyright © 2017 Shane McCrae. Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0819577111
• ISBN 13: 9780819577115
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 88