In the Language of My Captor Read online

  The cemetery looked like it hadn’t been visited or maintained in years. Most of the 20 or so stones were dark, almost black, almost illegible, and stood only a few feet tall—there were no monuments, and no statutes. But nearest to the gate, to the left of the gate if one were facing the gate, sweaty from pedaling, but chilly, also, already, shivering in the unusually strong wind that day, lay a large, flat stone, which at first I thought had fallen. I had walked in a counterclockwise circle around the perimeter of the cemetery, just inside the fence, and so I had seen this stone last, and when I stopped and stared down at it, I realized it hadn’t fallen—it seemed, instead, to be covering a grave. I can’t remember the inscription exactly, but I do remember I had to bend close to the stone to read it. The stone memorialized 18 children who had died when a nearby orphanage burned to the ground 70 years before. It didn’t seem possible to me even then, when I was a small child and most things seemed possible, that the stone marked a mass grave, that the children had all been buried in the same spot, but I couldn’t imagine they were anywhere else. What families would have claimed them? And I felt sure that if I moved the stone and peered into the hole, I would see the orphans in the fire still, motionless, some prone, some on all fours, some kneeling, hunched, and blackened, and the orphanage intact still, burning, and the whole world of wrecked, and burned, and abandoned things, each trapped in the moment of its destruction, each thing preserved, both dead and outside of death, not in Hell, but in the one fire everywhere, after which there is no suffering, and so from which there is no relief.

  3

  Banjo Yes Receives a Lifetime Achievement Award

  I ain’t no never had to never done

  No acting not like some of these white boys / Nothing

  you’ll find in books

  y’all listen close / Now and I’ll tell you how I got my name

  I worked on as a young man on a lot

  What do you think I did I cleaned I fetched

  Shit and more shit shit both ways shit and took

  And kept it too yes and whenever I thought

  A white boy might be calling me hell yes / I answered

  one morning and I’m just cross-

  ing from one thing to the next I hear a shout

  Banjo and so I lift my head but not

  Too high that ain’t my name and I say Yes

  Back loud but real polite and this white boy

  I never seen before and he’s away

  Over the other side of the lot but each

  Of the white boys there he had a different

  Important way of standing and no I

  Ain’t seen this boy before he had his fists

  Jammed in his hips like all of them but he

  Leaned heavy on his left leg like he was

  Limping standing still I run quick o-

  ver to him I say Yes sir tells me to

  Bend down and wipe this is the truth it was

  A spot of bird shit from his shoe

  this ain’t / No kind of story where the nigger says

  No I bent down and cleaned his shoe

  I can’t / From down there see the look on the man’s face

  From down there at his feet but just as I

  Get started and I think he must have been

  Smiling he says Is your name Banjo I

  Say No sir my name’s Bill and he says Ban-

  jo suits you better Banjo Yes and when

  I talk to you that’s who you’re gonna be

  And I say Yes sir sir your shoe is clean

  Now listen that boy he was nobody

  In fact I never saw that boy again

  But that name stuck to me

  and when you see / A white boy talking on the screen that’s him

  And when you see me smiling back that’s me

  Banjo Yes Recalls His First Movies

  Most of the time I spent

  In the beginning most of the time between

  Scenes I spent chasing after their

  filth in my mind / They had me playing

  Servants and when the cameras stopped I kept on cleaning

  What was it like

  The thing about white folks back then was / They was what was

  What it was what they white folks did was you was like

  A mind in something in a body but

  that body wasn’t yours

  I’ll tell you what it was like it was

  That body was

  A second mind / Talking

  your body was a voice like you was talking to yourself

  Telling you do like you supposed to do white

  folks the way they talk about

  Their cars their houses niggers they talk like

  Owning a thing a man is something they / Do with their hands

  and niggers we’re

  we got to be / Free if we ain’t in chains

  Well back when I was starting out

  the only talking I could do on screen was talking

  chains around myself / And who

  was it who / Paid me to talk

  White folks stay clean

  ’cause how they own you is they own your options

  You can be free

  Or you can live

  Banjo Yes Talks About His First White Wife

  Thing is she hated her

  Father her mother and her brothers loved

  Her cousin but he stopped

  Coming around / After she married me no letters said

  He didn’t have a phone

  So every Christmas every birthday every

  Goddamn / Armistice Day I sent that boy a phone

  She didn’t know I did that but I made sure he knew it was me

  I sent / The same note every time Don’t

  Worry I got a white boy here he answers our

  Calls see he wanted that and didn’t want it

  A nigger can surround himself with whiteness

  But it becomes a wall between him / And whiteness

  and he wants and doesn’t want it

  Banjo Yes Plucks an Apple from a Tree in a Park

  FOR TAMIR RICE

  I hold an apple in my hand on set

  It is or ain’t an apple ain’t a real

  Apple depending on am I in the shot

  Or am I watching with the crew a real

  Apple don’t taste no sweeter than a movie

  Apple it ain’t crisper but it’s some better

  A nigger eats an apple in a movie

  It ain’t no apple it’s a big fat water-

  melon man it’s fried chicken it’s all that

  Bullshit a nigger eats but he ain’t eating

  No nigger in no movie ever got

  Hungry and ate and it was just him eating

  No nigger tells the story of himself

  Man even if I hate a nigger what-

  ever he does I do I ask myself

  Before I do anything it don’t mat-

  ter what it is Who’s watching me and What

  They gonna think they see I waste my mind

  Trying to read white folks’ minds I’ll tell you what

  An apple is it’s death it’s my child dead

  Banjo Yes Talks About Motivation

  The difference was they had names like a name

  a boy / Might think a grown man wants / The white boys

  did the actors names like Rex and Duke / We niggers

  had names like a name a boy might get for

  Some stupid shit

  He did once when he wasn’t thinking when he did it

  Like they would call a nigger Hambone Jones

  Because a white boy spotted him sucking on a ham bone

  Probably thinking about his woman

  and he’s hungry and he’s poor

  They named you for a thing

  your hunger made
you do

  And what could you say back

  You’re not a man and you’re a poor man

  What won’t you do

  Banjo Yes Asks a Journalist

  I didn’t marry none of them white women

  Because I was a / What did you say a free black man

  Shit man if I had been a free black man

  I would have married a girl from back home

  That’s what you think it is

  Freedom you don’t you you think it’s

  Making decisions other folks won’t like

  Listen I do a thing to piss a white man off

  I’m bound to that man’s will hell

  I’m bound to that man’s pleasure

  He got me on a level where he doesn’t even have to think

  And all I do is think about him

  tell me when have I been free

  Boy write this down I’m asking

  when have you not had to say / Something about white folks to say

  Something about me

  4

  (hope)(lessness)

  And when your goal is nearest

  The end for others sought,

  Watch sloth and heathen Folly

  Bring all your hopes to nought.

  —RUDYARD KIPLING

  The keeper keeps me / He tells me

  Because he has no hope

  I have become an

  Expression of his hopelessness // My kind

  out-breeds his kind

  he says / And I have lived

  With the keeper long enough to know

  He thinks that means // Eventually

  my kind

  Will murder him and everyone he loves

  and live in / His house

  And eat his bread

  He fears he can’t defend

  His house his bread he

  Has put his faith in things

  That can’t be loyal in return

  And also all his hope is gone

  Because he tells me

  he has kept me for so long

  How could he / Free me

  And not fear I / Would seek revenge / He says

  he keeps me here

  because he would if he were

  Me seek revenge

  He is a strange

  Man he will not acknowledge

  my humanity in-

  sofar as it is mine / But will

  Ascribe his traits to me

  in all / Their human / Complexity

  it even

  pleases him to do so

  I tell him // He is hopeful / He doesn’t fear me

  Because I’m different from him

  but because he hopes

  I will become him

  Sunlight

  I’ve been in a white man’s

  Skin in my body

  and I have returned to tell you

  Never in my life I

  Ever felt more afraid

  Nor ever in my life

  So capable so strong

  Until I wasn’t I had been a colored

  woman all my life

  as pale

  As any colored woman

  Born from a white man’s property

  And I felt pale inside

  But never white inside or / Inside

  I felt / Colored inside but colored white

  Like I was truly white

  The color white and

  The master and his family

  Were clear as glass / The clear

  bright white not white of

  Sunlight on glass

  That’s what they meant when they said white

  I / Didn’t feel white like that

  Inside

  I worked in the house the mistress

  wasn’t bad or good to me

  I spent my childhood with her children

  but / About when I turned thirteen

  Her sons one

  thirteen and the other ten

  Began to look too long at me

  The older for himself the younger for the older

  The mistress noticed

  and soon I was sent

  into the fields / Not I don’t think

  To keep us separate

  but to keep the boys from doing

  In the house what they wanted

  To do to me in the house

  I think it’s white folks what they want

  It isn’t really or it isn’t just

  to / Not see the wrong

  They want to not see

  It and they want to know

  It’s happening where it belongs

  I spent four years in the fields

  It was worse than you might care to think it was

  But then one day it was a / Hot day I saw the strangest

  thing I caught a glimpse of my / Face

  in still water in a bowl I saw the

  Older boy’s face I almost jumped

  Right then I knew / I could be free

  Three weeks / Later I took some of the older boy’s

  clothes and some money from the house and

  I walked away

  In the night I walked away and in the morning

  I bought a ticket north

  and / Nobody looked at me except to nod

  I rode the train with slaves and their

  Masters the slaves looked

  Down at their feet

  I caught myself

  Looking down once or twice their masters I

  Don’t know what they were looking at

  Except I think I saw

  It in a sunbeam as the sunbeam

  lit the window by my head

  The dust in the air

  the lint

  I know it was lint

  but it looked like worms

  flying in the light

  Jim Limber the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Davis Visits His Adoptive Parents After the War

  The man said I could see them if I wanted

  He said America would never be

  A place where we could love each other not at

  Least in my lifetime but the dead don’t see

  No important differences between the Ne-

  gro and the White the dead don’t see no bad

  In folks if what bad they done they ain’t free-

  ly chose to do the dead don’t see no good

  In folks if what good they done they ain’t hoped

  To do and the man he said part of momma

  Varina part of daddy Jeff alread-

  y was burning in Hell I ought to join them

  He said we might see good from seeing each other

  Tortured we might finally see each other

  Asked About The Banjo Man and Its Sequels Banjo Yes Tells a Journalist Something About Himself

  My aunt my momma’s sister

  She had a real good

  piano had it right

  in her front room there

  She lived just up the street I

  used to when I was a boy / I used to

  hide in her

  Bushes when she was giving lessons just

  To hear her play

  I don’t know why I hid

  She loved Chopin and all of them

  She and my momma had some differences between them

  well / One afternoon I walk

  over to her house

  Because I know she has a lesson coming

  But when I get there her front door it’s wide

  Open and I don’t hear no music just a few

  Bad notes but not

  like how a child plays bad

  I sit in the bushes anyway just wait-

  ing for a while but / After a while

  the house gets quiet so

  I peek through the window

  And then I see it her front room it’s all tore up / Some

  fool I guess

>   Robbed her busted her / Things up busted her

  piano too / Just to be mean I guess my

  Aunt she’s just sitting on the bench just

  staring

  but she must have heard me / Because she

  turns and smiles and she

  starts to stand up she

  leans forward she takes her / Hands they was resting

  on the keyboard from the keyboard

  And grips the front edge of the bench

  I watch her hands but at the same time I see

  every part of her and every part of her

  Looks bigger like I’m focused on it

  Like if you made a picture of a woman / From cut up pictures

  from a magazine

  And nothing fits together

  but it’s her but I don’t recognize her

  And shit man I don’t know

  what it was but I never will forget it shit my heart

  Starts pounding and

  I / All of a sudden I can’t breathe and I