PAUL
JONES did the first part of his growing up in Charlotte. A
graduate of N.C. State and of Warren Wilson College -- where he studied
computer science and literature, respectively -- Jones is the director
of ibiblio.org (The Public's Library) and a member of the faculties of
the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the School of
Information and Library Science at UNC. Jones is a contributing editor
to the Health Anthology of American Literature and the author of the
chapbook "What the Welsh and Chinese Have In Common." Jones is blessed
to live with the lovely and talented Sally Greene and Tucker Jones, a
future cell biologist and Lego master.
By PAUL JONES
Memory,
which may not hold so tightly to history, is often still true in the
larger sense. The Park Road Shopping Center, the remembered location of
this poem, was the first modern mall -- although we would now call it a
strip mall -- in Charlotte in 1956. Brown vs. Board of Education was
decided on May 17, 1954. To my young, and now older mind, the opening
of the shopping center and the Supreme Court decision were concurrent.
This poem is based on the
number 7. Seven syllables per line, seven lines per stanza and seven
stanzas for the poem.
Signs divided the waters
when all the creeks were rerouted
around the evangelist's
father's field and crops withered
as the shopping center sprouted
and red hills of clay mounted
in red dust and oily mists.
Even their hair was
crimson:
men at break -- the setting sun --
their hard work clinging to them
made them all seem one red race
but too soon they were replaced
-- as if by some magic whim --
by clean careful concrete men.
What was to come next was
grand:
a new J.C. Penney's store
with tiles that set departments
apart like pools of rain
that captured only one tint:
the boy's section was lime green,
the toys brown, sports blue and more.
My grandmother took me in
-- I think I was about four --
and the grand old man himself
held the door as in we poured
to gawk at the full shelves,
wonderfully uniform bins,
and the tall tight-lipped women.
Thirsty in all this
outpour,
I looked for water fountains
and found two flanking a door
one shiny metal marked "White"
and a white one called "Colored"
new but with a dripping drain
still the colored one seemed right.
I stepped up for a cool
sip;
one hand bravely on the knob
thinking I had made the slip.
With a rough yank, I was robbed
of my try for those colors
and shoved over to the other
by my silent grandmother.
But there the water ran
red.
My lips looked like they had bled
a blood common to all kids;
the drips draining on the tiles
ran into the Young New Styles
section like Biblical curses.
I drank deep and almost burst.
