We Are Each Other's Harvest by Natalie Baszile

Author:Natalie Baszile
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

19.

Frame

By Robin Coste Lewis

There’d been a field, a farm, hobos asleep in the chicken coop,

white people whose dogs chased us every day on our way to the pool.

I never knew what, if anything, they grew. Never knew of a harvest.

Never saw a thing begin as seed, or sow its way to plant, flower, fruit

There was a shack, I remember that, and an old house with an old lady.

She wore a dingy eyelet dress, and paced her porch dry

carrying a shotgun or a broom. Flip-flops, Blow-Pops, Click-Clacks,

Cracker Jacks, we barked Dog Talk with teeth still muddy and black

from Eat the Peg. Soft lime salamanders, fingers a vivid tangerine;

cow hooves grafted to arid grime; date palms with roots so determined

they sucked up all the water from the other things with leaves. We tore

through her property, a whole band of us, day after day, unaware of

the endings

our bright forms would bring. There wasn’t just one, but two

farms, across from each other, and another one, long down

the street, past the pool, next to the Victoria Park Golf Course,

where we never saw one colored man walk into.

Farther out, surrounding us, there were other farms too,

which had been worked, but were not working. There was the pool

a liquor store, an old house, the golf course, a koi

farm, our new neighborhood, the bakery from Hawaii,

then the landing field for the Goodyear

blimp. You could live here for years and never

understand: Were you rural, industrial, or suburban?

We thought we were home, but our cardboard

was just slender venture on Negro sprawl.

Before that it was law: we could not own property

except in certain codes: South Central, Compton, Watts,

where the construction companies were under contract

with the LAPD to tile or tar our addresses onto our roofs,

so when their helicopters needed to shoot,

they’d know—and we’d know too—

who was what and what was who.

Throughout the whole state, every third person

Was from Lousy Anna: New Orleans,

Algiers, the West Bank, La Place, Plaquemines

Parish, Slidell, Baton

Rouge. We took pies and cakes to anyone new, but never heard

a sound from the farms. They never brought us nothing either.

No milk, eggs, no butter. It was just clear in the dirt

road we took. Somebody somewhere

was striding in time, but not any of us.

The farmers were lost

and hating it. We were lost

and couldn’t care less.

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