My name is Patricia Spears Jones.
The poem is “Lave.”
Where is the lavender,
the purple scent
that says the world is fresh and ready to receive
the woman who walks into whatever room
she walks into.
What room will she enter?
How will the female worker smell?
Lemon, mint,
roses crushed for homemade soap.
No place here for the boiling recipe.
There is no room.
And her extra money, how will she make it?
Who will she do for?
How will she get there? Will she find her old friends, her lovers?
She is lonely.
The artist says in Panel 57
that the female worker (not Negro,
not migrant)
is the last group to leave the South.
One woman is her own group?
Was she ready to leave or was she left behind?
Caring for: baby, grandfather
brother, sister, cousin,
an elderly aunt?
Was her garden where the family sought nurture?
Were her skills at picking cotton so great
the bosses did all they could to keep her?
Was there a fourth child,
not wished for?
Much about the South is unseen or not shown—
the painter understands the usefulness of obscenity
lynching, hunger, the crops failing
(boll weevil, boll weevil).
And so we see the cotton ball
but not the bleeding hands that pick.
We see the rope dangling.
We see the meager rations of meat and bread.
And the table set—no plenty.
Is this the start of a woman’s true blues?
The men go ahead.
The women stay behind
and everyone is lonely?
In many of the painting’s planes, she is not seen
preparing the meals, cleaning, sewing, packing clothes
to last for as long as they can last
in the distant cities of Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit.
She is not seen crying at the preacher’s table
or burying her head into the broad chest
of the man who gets up before sunrise
to make it to the station ticket in hand.
The men knew the hardships ahead,
others were ignorant enough to believe the stories of plenty:
WORK FOOD SHELTER.
Women put no truck in these White men’s promises.
They wanted out of Dixie
on a very bad day. Wanted out of stuck.
She will leave for the north
and go to the cities. She will find
the church where her bible meets the preacher’s Holy hollering
and the music sounds as sweet as in the back-woods.
She will see the kind of dresses she wanted to make
from the Butterick patterns at the notions counter,
the same counter where she finds the yellow ribbons
that tie the braids of the young girl in Painting 21
who arrived early to get on that North bound train.
Is this the start of another woman’s blues
to journey north and find the men mired?
To journey north and find her skills unknown?
To journey north and discover an even greater loneliness?
The female worker gets that ticket and joins that motion forward—
the many shoulders, legs,
hands stretched across the paintings’ frames
counting the rails away,
away, away from Dixie Land.
Head bowed, holding an orange dolly,
the laundress is charged with purgation,
removing the dust and dirt and stains of city living
the marks of many sins: sex, drink,
the opium den.
These swirling oblongs
colors rest beneath her gaze
as if she has the power
to make this job seem better than
picking cotton or hog butchering
or taking in washing for the old gentleman
who pinches her breasts for that extra nickel.
Last to arrive north.
But first to see the way home,
to make a home.
Put her skillets on the hot plate;
shelves her mason jars
full of peach preserves, pickles, tastes of home.
Chenille spreads on the lumpy mattresses
the Chicago Defender on a kitchen table.
Biscuits rising before sunrise.
Greens found in an Italian market.
She stands in this painting
a cruciform of desire in a center of beauty
dressed in white,
the orange stick, her cudgel,
her sword,
the laundry her step on that ladder to the future.
A migrant from the back of the bottom
or a town just big enough for the railroad to notice
gone to the city and its bitter possibilities
so that church is a hearthstone
and eau de cologne— lavender, roses,
vanilla, hints of —
a necessity.