I been called a prodigy, but the people what call me that teach in a middle school in South Carolina, the state of the union what comes up bottom in S.A.T. scores. They ain’t used to no 640 verbal SAT scores from no twelve-year-old. They ain’t used to twelve-year-old stylists as slick as EB White, as peppery as a Wendy’s Hot Creole Chicken Sandwich. Not only can I write standard English with flair, I can speak it, too, and I mean fluent. But biologicalwise, I’m immature:
pubic hairs creeping
on we unripe cracker balls
like blonde kiwi fuzz
Shocked?
Don’t be: it ain’t nothing but the truth dressed up in art. My current state of the biological done up like a haiku. And in my art I mean to tell the truth. And I ain’t gone to avoid the biological, which oftimes is vomitsome. I’m gone to try to take writing to a new level by making it as popular as TV.
I know to do anything first class you got to work hard, prepare yourself, like Mighty John Milton who read everything ancient and modern, memorized the Bible from Genesis 1.1 to Revelation 22.21 with every gotdam begoted polyslab Semite name in between, It made him go blind, yes sir, but then again, I bet his dreams was something, the whole Bible saga flashing on the silverscreens of his curvy brain passages: rivers of blood, idolatry, harlots galore, battleslaughter.
Then go multiple that by Greek mythology.
All that geography.
Ancient geography.
Colorful Bible maps stored in his mind like slides in a filmstrip.
He warmed up for Paradise Lost doing his touching-toes sonnet and elegy exercises before springing off and nailing that Mount Olympus epic dive, the tens flashing down the row of critics stretching out through the centuries. Milton’s my personal hero, I’m following his path. Learning geography and learning every work in the Cliff Notes and beyond set forth by my mentor, Mr. Winfred Parsley, who teaches up at the Marlboro Day School. He’s also supplementing my education by making me learn how to dive, which he calls pay-ee; read short poems and fiction in the anthologies; watch movies, old timey movies; and listen to music, old timey music he plays on record machines.
He’s got me reading James Joyce’s Ulysses right now, so I done read the Odyssey, Paradise Lost, and part of the Ulysses under his tutelage but tons more on my own before. The movies is them jumpy silent ones, boresome, German monster flicks like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I like the records, though, hollering Bukka White afra-moans and jazz that bubbles up like a stew. Also this here journal he’s got me writing. He says write it like I’m talking to an “idealized self” who ain’t really me but a me like when I’m grown up and likely embarrassed by podunk pup sentiments. He says to make it “conversational,” make it sound like it’s me yapping, not to worry about the spelling or making it standard English but also to record images and memories and poems and writing exercises and that he ain’t never gone to read it, so I can be upfront honest. He says that good imaginations scare booje-wahs and you got to write for yourself and not worry bout what booje-wahs might think about you, and the only way to do that is to keep a personal journal onliest for your eyes and then after you is dead, the critics can decide if you was crazy or avant garde.
This Mr. Parsley is just as high on me as my own teachers at McColl Middle, one of the most ineptest schools in the domains of the United States. I can’t imagine schools in Guam being more inepter. That’s my only doubt about myself, that these not necessarily setting the world on fire teachers’ confidence in me is based on them spending their lives trying to teach hundreds, maybe thousands, of Homer Jo Mizells and LaShanna Browns, crackhahs and afras, respectfully. That’s all there is at my school, so my language arts teacher Ms Hays was trying to get Marlboro Day to give me a scholarship, but it ain’t nothing but a lowrent white flight pretend prep school maybe bout to go belly up with bacca being our number one crop, so they couldn’t afford to, but Mr. Parsley taken me on and become my mentor and give me his own typewriter to keep forever that I got right here on my pallet upon which I am typing at this very moment in time – yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo!
But this mumbo-jumbo Ulysses ain’t no confidence builder neither. Mr. Parsley takes me sometimes to Mexicano restaurants started by migrants that ain’t nothing but a shack. But he speaks espanol fluent, and they treat him like a hermano, and he takes me there so I can hear espanol in a real life setting spoke by real Mexicanos instead of “drawling rednecks with suspect B.A.s” as he calls Mr. Postell, who roams from school to school teaching both English as a second language and Espanol. And he says that’s the way I ought to read Ulysses, like I’m listening to jazz, listening to the migrants’ riffs of rolled rrrrrrrrrrrs, and he claims that though I don’t know what Mr. Joyce or them Mexicanos is saying, that unbeknownst to me I’m picking it up. This is gone to take me beyond my poor white trash prejudgings, like me calling afras neegrahs and Mexicanos wetbacks.
Mr. Parsley thinks one reason I got so much going for me is that me and Daddy never had no TV. My Mama taught me how to read when I was three cause she was dying of cancer and was afraid I’d never learn otherwise, Daddy married mobile upward, married him an Old Bennettsville girl in the Beta Club. My daddy was a dashing Croytan who could play the mandolin and sing heartbreaking songs in a high lonesome voice that got recorded by the son of Mr. Alan Lomax though they never gave him no money. By high school, Mama’d got all romanticized up on books and irrationalized so much she became a rebel, so went out and married a troubadour what drank Mabel’s Black Label and ended up joining the army. All book sense, no commonsense, my mama married him. That’s how my mama got to end up dying in s VA hospital in Charleston instead of a county one. Her dying wish was that he’d never have no TV to stunt my growth.
My Daddy is a man of his word. He’s a loner what lives with me out in this cabin way past the bacca fields next to nowhere. And my mama’s people didn’t want nothing to do with us, cause not only because was we poor but we is what people call Croytan injuns, above the afras, but lower than crackhahs, and her class being the vanilla topping on top of crackhah culture, as far as poordunk hierarchies go; that is, they is boje-wah. Episcopalians ain’t enarmored of no mixed breeds.
Alas?
Un-uh. The truth of the matter is that I don’t hardly remember my mama. My daddy and me bonded early. He’d rock me to sleep every night singing out on the porch singing. Mostly cowboy songs. Songs about getting buried on the lone prairie, little doggies, doomed women drownded and falling off horses with their light brown hair floating like a vapor in the soft summer air, and he made up his own songs, too, with my name in them sometimes. He home school me till last year when the govment made me go the McColl Middle. He keep his mandolin under his bed but can’t teach me to learn it worth nothing. All my musical talent gone into the verbmaking machine. Yippi-eye-yo-tie-yay!
But wait a minute. What’s all this commotion outside? A UFO? I’m right now looking out the window of our cabin and there’s this – you ain’t gone to believe this – an old man coming down from the sky on a swing.
“Yessah?”
“Open up that window, boy!
“Yessah.”
“I AM I AM come to demand that thou give up thy writing and take my mild yoke of becoming a Pentecostal preacher.”
He’s sitting on that swing looking like a Santy Claus in a choir robe.
I’m awestruck, but the biological’s tugging at me like a rivercurrent. “Sorry, sir, but I can’t be no Pentecostal Preacher. I’m gone to make writing more popular than TV and save the world from the govement.
“You dare defy me?”
“Yes sir-ree-bob tai. The mind is it’s own place. Can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell.”
2003, Folly Beach
You Do Hoodoo 