the partyâs host picked up a small bell and rang it, and if, theoretically, at the sound of this bell a servant came into the room dressed in a humiliating outfit, then retreated, then reappeared producing whatever it was that the host required, perhaps a sugar spoon, the once-poor person would most likely have to excuse herself from the table on the pretense of needing air, would most likely walk back through the kitchen and sit for a long time, an unreasonably long time, on the plastic bucket being used to prop open the kitchen door, because the once-poor personâmyself, yesâwould have just then realized how absurd it was, the party she was at, the life she was trying to live, how miserably out of place she was there. To be poor, it marked a person, it cast its shadow across the whole of her life.
No, there was no getting away from that place, one always returned and returned always. How strange it was to realize that everyone I had known, everything I had seen and done, was still with me. How closely, after all, we were bound together. Years later, when visiting the graves of my family, I remembered that you had been buried in the same cemetery, and went looking for you. I tried to remember which plot was yours. In poor cemeteries there are no large markers by which to orient oneselfâno statues rising up to testify to the greatness of a single lost lifeâand it took me a long time to find it. I walked up and down the rows, reading the names, Santangelo, Cosentino, Stephanopoulos, and the biblical scraps beneath them (Come unto me, I will give you restâ¦I will fear no evilâ¦The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want), all of the headstones more or less the same, many of them leaning and seemingly forgotten. Only the occasional grave showed any evidence of pilgrimage, a tiny flag, a plastic bouquet speared in the soil. The ground was soaked from the morningâs rain, little puddles everywhere. My shoes were so waterlogged that I had to take them off. I walked barefoot through the green grass.
When I finally found your grave, along with a few of your relations, clustered together near the cemeteryâs back fence, I saw that I had circled back almost exactly to the place where I had started, that your family had been laid to rest very close to mine. Soon enough, I thought, there would be almost no difference between us. I stood for a long time before your headstone, inscribed with your full name, Elwood Eugene LePoer, and beneath it something your mother must have chosen, the last, false hope of the long-suffering: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Elegy for
Carson Washington
(1972â1993)
F at and black, fat and black, did I have any goddamn idea, you asked, what it meant to be fat, to be black, any goddamn idea what a drag it was sometimes, what a lack, everyone else going around getting pats on the back and what you got, right in the face, was a slap, all your life alone dancing with a hat rack, what a kick in the ass it was, what a rip in the slacks, to be fat and black indeed.
This was 1990, your first and only year of college. You were eighteen. You had come to the state university (that fine, fine place conceived and built and haunted by a president, with its green lawns, its flower beds and cherry trees, its magnificent brick buildings, the money so thick there you could smell it in the air like a blossoming crop) on scholarship from your dusty hometown, population nine hundred, where you lived with your mother and father and sister and her infant son in a four-room cinderblock house. Your father worked in the fieldsâtobacco, hayâyour mother and sister part-time at the county nursing home, and the same sort of life was expected for you. Until youâd gone and shown a talent for school, until the teachers had made a fuss over you and sent you off to that place where we met, roommates, and lived together for a time.
The first
No, there was no getting away from that place, one always returned and returned always. How strange it was to realize that everyone I had known, everything I had seen and done, was still with me. How closely, after all, we were bound together. Years later, when visiting the graves of my family, I remembered that you had been buried in the same cemetery, and went looking for you. I tried to remember which plot was yours. In poor cemeteries there are no large markers by which to orient oneselfâno statues rising up to testify to the greatness of a single lost lifeâand it took me a long time to find it. I walked up and down the rows, reading the names, Santangelo, Cosentino, Stephanopoulos, and the biblical scraps beneath them (Come unto me, I will give you restâ¦I will fear no evilâ¦The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want), all of the headstones more or less the same, many of them leaning and seemingly forgotten. Only the occasional grave showed any evidence of pilgrimage, a tiny flag, a plastic bouquet speared in the soil. The ground was soaked from the morningâs rain, little puddles everywhere. My shoes were so waterlogged that I had to take them off. I walked barefoot through the green grass.
When I finally found your grave, along with a few of your relations, clustered together near the cemeteryâs back fence, I saw that I had circled back almost exactly to the place where I had started, that your family had been laid to rest very close to mine. Soon enough, I thought, there would be almost no difference between us. I stood for a long time before your headstone, inscribed with your full name, Elwood Eugene LePoer, and beneath it something your mother must have chosen, the last, false hope of the long-suffering: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Elegy for
Carson Washington
(1972â1993)
F at and black, fat and black, did I have any goddamn idea, you asked, what it meant to be fat, to be black, any goddamn idea what a drag it was sometimes, what a lack, everyone else going around getting pats on the back and what you got, right in the face, was a slap, all your life alone dancing with a hat rack, what a kick in the ass it was, what a rip in the slacks, to be fat and black indeed.
This was 1990, your first and only year of college. You were eighteen. You had come to the state university (that fine, fine place conceived and built and haunted by a president, with its green lawns, its flower beds and cherry trees, its magnificent brick buildings, the money so thick there you could smell it in the air like a blossoming crop) on scholarship from your dusty hometown, population nine hundred, where you lived with your mother and father and sister and her infant son in a four-room cinderblock house. Your father worked in the fieldsâtobacco, hayâyour mother and sister part-time at the county nursing home, and the same sort of life was expected for you. Until youâd gone and shown a talent for school, until the teachers had made a fuss over you and sent you off to that place where we met, roommates, and lived together for a time.
The first
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