She Walks in Beauty_ A Woman's Journey Through Poems - Caroline Kennedy [25]
on a good meal. It was to her that I went
when I had to leave my hotel, and I am
as yet adjusting to my new life.
This first week I sat—as required—
each evening in the parlor, unnoticed,
the “professor” working the piano
into a frenzy, a single cockroach
scaling the flocked-velvet wallpaper.
The men who’ve come have called only
on the girls they know—their laughter
trailing off behind them, their gowns
floating past the balustrade. Though
she’s said nothing, Countess is indeed
sympathetic. Just the other night
she introduced me to a longtime client
in hopes that he’d take a liking to me.
I was too shy to speak and only pretended
to sip the wine he’d ordered. Of course,
he found me dull and soon excused himself
to find another girl. Part of me was
quite relieved, though I knew I could not
earn a living that way.
And so, last night
I was auctioned as a newcomer
to the house—as yet untouched, though
Countess knows well the thing from which
I’ve run. Many of the girls do too,
and some of them even speak of a child
they left behind. The auction was a near
quiet affair—much like the one Whitman
described, the men some wealthy “gentlemen”
from out of town. Countess announced
that I recite poetry, hinting at a more dignified
birth and thus a tragic occasion for my arrival
at her house. She calls me Violet now—
a common name here in Storyville—except
that I am the African Violet for the promise
of that wild continent hidden beneath
my white skin. At her cue, I walked slowly
across the room, paused in strange postures
until she called out, Tableau vivant, and
I could again move—all this to show
the musical undulation of my hips, my grace,
and my patience which was to mean
that it is my nature to please and that I could,
if so desired, pose still as a statue for hours,
a glass or a pair of boots propped upon my back.
And then, in my borrowed gown
I went upstairs with the highest bidder.
He did not know to call me
Ophelia
Lineage
MARGARET WALKER
My grandmothers were strong.
They followed plows and bent to toil.
They moved through fields sowing seed.
They touched earth and grain grew.
They were full of sturdiness and singing.
My grandmothers were strong.
My grandmothers are full of memories
Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay
With veins rolling roughly over quick hands
They have many clean words to say.
My grandmothers were strong.
Why am I not as they?
I Want You Women Up North to Know
TILLIE OLSEN
(Based on a Letter by Felipe Ibarro in New Masses, Jan. 9th, 1934)
i want you women up north to know
how those dainty children’s dresses you buy
at macy’s, wanamakers, gimbels, marshall fields,
are dyed in blood, are stitched in wasting flesh,
down in San Antonio, “where sunshine spends the winter.”
I want you women up north to see
the obsequious smile, the salesladies trill
“exquisite work, madame, exquisite pleats”
vanish into a bloated face, ordering more dresses,
gouging the wages down,
dissolve into maria, ambrosa, catalina,
stitching these dresses from dawn to night,
in blood, in wasting flesh.
Catalina Rodriguez, 24,
body shriveled to a child’s at twelve,
catalina rodriguez, last stages of consumption,
works for three dollars a week from dawn to midnight.
A fog of pain thickens over her skull, the parching heat
breaks over her body,
and the bright red blood embroiders the floor of her room.
White rain stitching the night, the bourgeois poet would say,
white gulls of hands, darting, veering,
white lightning, threading the clouds,
this is the exquisite dance of her hands over the cloth,
and her cough, gay, quick, staccato,
like skeleton’s bones clattering,
is appropriate accompaniment for the esthetic dance
of her fingers,
and the tremolo, tremolo when the hands tremble with pain.
Three dollars a week,
two fifty-five,
seventy cents a week,
no wonder two thousand eight hundred ladies of joy
are spending the winter with the sun after he goes down—
for five cents (who said this was a rich man’s world?)