In the Language of My Captor Read online

  In the Language of My Captor

  IN THE LANGUAGE OF MY CAPTOR

  SHANE McCRAE

  Wesleyan University Press

  MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT

  Wesleyan Poetry

  Wesleyan University Press

  Middletown CT 06459

  www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

  © 2017 Shane McCrae

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Designed by Quemadura

  Typeset in DIN and Scala

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McCrae, Shane, 1975– author.

  Title: In the language of my captor / Shane McCrae.

  Description: Middletown, Connecticut : Wesleyan University Press, [2017] | Series: Wesleyan poetry

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016035696 (print) | LCCN 2016041724 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819577115 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780819577139 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3613.C385747 A6 2017 (print) | LCC PS3613.C385747 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016035696

  5 4 3 2 1

  Cover photo: Bradley Theodore, Young President 2015.

  For my families

  You will feed yourself five thousand times. —THYLIAS MOSS

  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

  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

  Led by fat white men I am careful to

  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

  Often the fat man squints and says It real- // ly makes you think

  Something like that or 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

  The keeper when he’s drunk

  Sometimes he says I’m lucky

  To have been rescued from my gods

  And I should thank the man who bought me

  I used to laugh at him but now I grieve

  I think // His god is not a god like mine / His god

  Is not a mother not a father

  not a hunter not a farmer

  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

  I find with him and with his guests

  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 said he was ashamed

  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

  shame and 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 alone-

  ness 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

  Superior to other people before

  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

  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

  Momma Varina rescued me she whups 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 ha
d 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.