Myron Stokes is a 9-year Air Force veteran, and a clinical psychotherapist who counsels combat veterans. He has been writing poetry and short stories for 15 years. His poem, “For My Ancestors,” won first prize in the 2012 Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse. A member of the Illinois State Poetry Society and Oak Park Writers Group, he has work published in Margie, International Journal of American Poetry 2005, and the Ellen LaForge Poetry Prize 2007.
History Lesson
When grandpa LeAndrew was kicked by the foreman
then called an uppity, no-account, stupid nigger,
he uppercutted the foreman’s chin,
booted him in the ribs five times
and watched the man writhe and groan
in Mississippi’s red-clay dirt.
My father said, “Poppa didn’t shit off nobody.
Lord help you if you pissed him off.”
That night my father heard cornered prayers,
fierce whisperings between his mother, Elvinia
uncles, Napoleon, Theophilus,
aunts, Cassietta, Johnnie Mae, and Izora.
Grandma Elvinia, passed seven months with Aunt Kalliope,
paced the planked kitchen floor,
sobbed over and over,
“Lord Jesus, they’re gonna kill’im tonight.”
A mob of car lights blasted the windows,
ravenous as snow wolves.
A riot of drunk curses and vile threats
maimed the magnolias and peonies.
An empty gallon jug of bootleg
shattered the window above the sofa.
Bricks and Coca Cola bottles followed,
destroying Grandma Elvinia’s angel figurines.
My father hid under the bed
with Aunt Senovia and Uncle Jefferson.
“Bring your black ass out, LeAndrew,”
the hooded foreman yelled over and over.
“We got something for your nigger ass!”
Slurred double dares took root in night soil,
splattered the clapboard porch,
slammed against the rocking chairs
Grandma Elvinia and my great aunts
sat on when they gossiped, shelled peas,
stitched quilt fragments.
Minutes before the invasion,
two hulking silhouettes
slipped out of the house,
snaked silently through the oaks and pines
under the blonde moonlight.
An owl’s soliloquy urged them to hurry.
Grandpa LeAndrew’s and Great Uncle Napoleon’s
calloused fingers caressed their shotguns
on their laps in the pickup,
Grandpa LeAndrew unblinking in his stillness,
wearing Grandma Elvinia’s lemon-yellow
Sunday dress and veiled hat.
Buster Browns
Hated, hated, hated my Buster Brown shoes.
Thick heeled, horseshoe-toed and the color of a Hershey Bar.
Buster Browns on my first day of kindergarten,
for church, birthday parties, field trips, funerals, school pictures,
anytime I wore my brown, clip-on tie and brown corduroys.
I wore my Buster Browns stuffed with pages
of the Milwaukee Journal for a year.
“You’ll grow into them,” my parsimonious mother said.
“Stop complaining. Good shoes are expensive these days.”
A soupy coating of brown Kiwi Shoe Polish
every Saturday night kept my Buster Browns
looking like they did when in the Boy’s Shoe Department at Gimbels.
And did I mention that my father put taps on the heels?
After forty years, the house that put its loving, wooden arms
around a family of six, succumbed to ruin and decay.
Down the fifteen rachitic stairs to the wrecked basement,
dusty cobwebs hung in eerie strands, somber furniture relics,
naked, dismembered dolls with matted hair,
my rusted Radio Flyer, abandoned bikes
and outdated, mildewed clothes in boxes scattered here and there.
On the chipped, buckled tiles
behind the water-damaged encyclopedias,
between the forgotten wringer washer
that nearly crushed my right arm when I was six
and the hulking boiler that banged and hissed
during wintry, Milwaukee nights,
mangled, withered, laceless but still whole,
my size-eight Buster Brown shoes.