ninanevermore

I think I write poetry because I want to tell stories, but I'm too lazy to write a book.

This one, like the poem from last Saturday, is a true story. This time it is about my mother-in-law's first cousin, Janie. I heard the last part first, shortly before Janie died a few years ago. Then, last May my mother in law told us about the day her aunt brought Janie home as a baby. It occurred to me that this was too good of a story not to write down.

The people in this poem are Northwestern Louisiana people. My husband's aunt in the beginning of this poem went by both her first and middle name, in that fine Southern tradition. You will see her name, Exie Mae, and want to pronounce it as two words; that would be wrong. Her family pronounced it "Examay." I think the poem flows smoother when it is pronounced that way.

For the record, when I met her Janie was a fun-loving grandmother who loved riding Harleys and speaking her mind. The closing line of the poem is a direct quote from her. If you had gotten the chance to meet her yourself, you probably would have liked her.

Here is her story.

Homecomings

On an overcast day in Zwolle
Exie Mae stood on the porch
of her father's cabin
with her new-born, Janie, in her arms
shouting at the locked door,
"Daddy! Let me in!"

In 1932 you couldn't do
what Exie Mae had done;
you couldn't leave the home for wayward girls
and take your baby with you;
whether your family had money
or you were the child of a sharecropper
like Exie Mae,
these children were whispered about
but never seen,
so her father felt he had no choice
but to lock the door against his first-born child
and his first-born grandchild, as well.

But God has a sense of drama,
so it started to rain
as Exie Mae fell to her knees
with Janie in her arms,
and cried for her father
to please, please unlock the door.

Exie Mae's grandmother talked him into it,
"That's your daughter outside in the rain,"
she said,
"That's your grandbaby soaked to the skin.
For the love of God, if you don't open that door
for your own baby's sake,
at least open it for your grandchild."

Against his better judgment,
he finally relented.
Not every prodigal child
gets wide-open arms and a fatted calf;
through the ages most have had to settle
for a reluctantly opened door
and a dry place to sleep.

Some seventy years later,
after a lifetime of making do,
Janie took it upon herself
to visit the grave of the man
who got her mother in that bind
so many years before.

She brought a bouquet of flowers
that she laid on the ground
in front of her father's headstone.

"There," she said to the stranger in that earth,
whose face she had never seen,
whose voice she had never heard
and whose name she had never had,

"Now that's more than you ever gave me,
you son on a bitch."

-Nina Erickson
(c) 2005