[Catherine Tufariello]

At Memphis Library
….. "Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by H.L. Mencken?"
…………~ Note forged by Richard Wright

Underneath her pince-nez stare, he’s shaking;
cap in hand, he strains to reproduce
the guileless grin of former undertakings—
fetching books for white men. It’s no use:
now he’s a willful criminal. The note,
forged with a fellow worker’s grudging yes,
sings in her hands, while at the back of his throat
Jim Crow bile and choked excuses press.

Then, everything is possible. Kindly sun;
books in his belt, safe under newspaper wrap.
He strokes their tooled spines like the grip of a gun,
buoyed by unseen words until the snap
of fingers. Those books yours, boy?—some white stranger.
No Sir! All he’s meant to read is danger.

[Catherine Tufariello]

Like “Food,” this is a powerful narrative sonnet, with race as a theme. Set during the Jim Crow era in Tennessee, the poem presents a confrontation between a middle-aged or elderly white librarian and (as the epigraph reveals) a young Richard Wright, who has just nervously handed her a note asking her to let him borrow books. Her “pince-nez stare”—we’re encouraged to picture the sternest librarian who shushed us in our youth—suggests that she is instinctively suspicious. A white co-worker has allowed Wright to use his library card, it seems, and Wright has forged a note from the co-worker—referring to himself as a “boy” and using the racial slur that the white man would be expected to use. “Cap in hand,” he must further abase himself with a “guileless grin” while shaking with anxiety and choking on bitterness and shame. The outcome of this routine moment in the life of the white woman scrutinizing the note is a matter of life and death to him.

This poem feels almost cinematic to me, in the way that some of Frost’s dramatic and narrative poems do. The suspense of the first eight lines is resolved off-screen, as the camera cuts to the street outside a few minutes later. I particularly admire the economy of lines 9-10, those terse declarative sentences letting us feel Wright’s overwhelming sense of relief and triumph as he finds himself safely in the sun’s kindly gaze with his prize. He has wrapped the books in newspaper and cinched them in his belt to protect them for the trip home. Then there is a startling simile: “He stroked their tooled spines like the grip of a gun.” Though it seems a little odd to equate “spines,” plural, with the singular “grip,” I can see a connection between the tooled spines—on which he can feel the stamped printing even through the newspaper wrapping—and a tooled gun grip. Still, why a gun, which seems to make a stereotypical association of a young black man with violence? But the final lines of the poem make sense of the simile. Wright is indeed potentially dangerous to the “white stranger” who confronts him at the end, demanding to know whether the books are his. To possess the books, and to be educated enough to read and understand them (as he hastily reassures the white man he is not), is to wield subversive power. The poem’s final words, “All he’s meant to read is danger,” can be interpreted at least two ways: 1) All the books he’s intended to read, in going into the white library, are dangerous; and 2) and all that the Jim Crow South intends for a black man to be able to “read” are signs of danger everywhere he goes. A worthy ending to a very fine poem.

[Maryann Corbett]

I'm all admiration for this. It's a great illustration of what can be done with material that arises from, or through, our reading rather than directly from our own lives. That's not to discount any experiences this poet may have had that contribute, but the content here, I'm guessing, is from Wright's autobiography. I admire the physical, visceral quality of the word choices and the pacing, the way the tension grips right away, lets up, then grabs again.

[Catherine Chandler]

I like poems that address social injustice, and this one does it powerfully, by showing, rather than telling.

All those anapests, dactyls and spondees make for an interesting, natural sound when read aloud.

The only nit (and it is considered a BIG no-no) is the one plural rhyme ("undertakings") which could be overcome by changing it to the singular and adding an indefinite article before the word "former".

[David Rosenthal]

I love this. I don't even care about the plural/singular rhyme. It is plain yet poetic, taut yet expansive, sad yet exhilirating. It does an awful ot without looking like it's trying to do too much. Did I say I love this?

David R.

[Michael Cantor]

Extremely well done, all the way through, and the last line is a killer. It has the same power and impact as reading Richard Wright - and that is its strength and its weakness - because, just like reading Richard Wright today, the sense I get is that it's very good - and very dated - stylistically as well as thematically.

[Rick Mullin]

It is very well done, but it lacks, for me, the kind of emotional impact of, say, Marine. The social injustice addressed is the most enormous and glaring in American history. The characters and characterizations are, in fact, fairly pat. There is emotional tension and interesting drama and I admire the writer's creativity in developing the drama from the epigraph (that epigraph itself is an almost impossible act to follow!). But the sympathies are assigned by our understanding of the history. It is a powerful vignette, but still quite familiar. This could use some of the element that makes us ponder Marine after reading it.

...And this line is tremendous: He strokes their tooled spines like the grip of a gun

[Janice D. Soderling]

Good political poems are hard to come by, and this is an excellent political poem.

[John Hutchcraft]

Precisely as Rick said, even down to the shout-out of the excellent "gun" line.

Not to fuss with other commenters, but I wonder how old a political battle needs to be before poems about it stop being political and start being historical. I realize that I may have the luxury of failing to register this poem's political zing because I grew up a Westerner (western U.S., that is), white, and a generation after Bull Connor polluted the nightly news. That being said, this poem comes across to me as a time capsule, not "political" in any live sense. As a time capsule, it's interesting enough, though it feels fairly crammed into 14 lines. I'm suspicious of the monosyllabic dialogue at the end - it reads like the poet was trying to cram story into the few remaining iamb-slots. Why not write a sixteen-line poem?

[Quincy Lehr]

This sort of thing becomes "dated" when black people aren't twice as likely to be unemployed as white people, when the "justice" system is no longer characterized by racial injustice ad nauseam.

I found the assumption of a white author interesting (though, if I may say so, a safe one in these parts). And there, I think, lies one of the poem's triumphs. It's about race, the constant awareness of it, at bottom, the not knowing how a given white person will react to a black person, and, albeit in a historical context, pulls it off convincingly. (I once noted to a predominantly black class that being white meant that one doesn't have to constantly think about one's race, and a student sighed, "That would be nice.")

I say this not to accuse anyone of anything, but if this poem seems to lack the charge that "Marine" has, could that possibly reflect the demographics of the average participant on the Sphere? (This is, to be utterly clear, NOT a charge of bigotry against anyone, but rather a musing on the continued racial bifurcation of the United States.)

Quincy