What I Know about the Last Lynching in Jeff Davis County
        For Ross Gay

How it happened more than fifty years before I was born. How nobody in our family talks about it. How I learned in history class that white people strung up black people. How my cousin Mary Lou has dark skin because my uncle's brown as hemlock bark. How some still don't take kindly to my mom's sister marrying the way she did. How Mary Lou and me listen for the sound of water on the mountain and follow it under rhododendron. How our history teacher was suspended by the school board for saying blacks still get lynched when police choke them. How we catch and split speckled trout. How my uncle taught us this. How when we go to Dollar General for worms, a clerk trails Mary Lou up and down each row while I steal gum and two jawbreakers. How the orange wound of the fish's skin reveals the sweet pink we fry in butter and salt. How the dad of our best friend has a confederate flag on his truck's back window. How when we suck on the jawbreakers, our tongues and teeth turn blue and red. How my uncle won't go into the bar on Main Street. How some say that black man had to die on the tree because he whistled at a white woman. How me and Mary Lou made a book about it. How my uncle still says Yes sir to every white man he speaks to. How Mary Lou can draw near anything. How once she made a picture of a black and white warbler that's taped to the back of my bedroom door. How we never showed anyone that book. How I wrote the story so the man could come back to life like Jesus. How my uncle taught us to whistle like that bird. How we buried the book in a tin box in the woods. How we still use that whistle to warn if someone's coming. How I worry about my uncle when I think of our best friend's dad. How Mary Lou drew other black men cutting the man down from the tree. How the tree understood the man would miss the soft skin on the back of his daughter's arms. How Mary Lou says the bird is striped like prison bars. How the oak is rotting from a fungus now. How the branches keep breaking off.

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Copyright © 2022 Todd Davis All rights reserved
from Coffin Honey
Michigan State University Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission