Where We Go From Here
Looking back through decades of struggle, uncertainty, and hope
Dear Daniel
The spangled years we spent fighting
injustice—the striving, the songs,
the beatings, burned churches,
the back of the bus.
We got to know each other under fire—
Duke’s first year of accepting Black students,
five in a class of a thousand. We talked
late into the night after meetings,
your flock of NCC students,
my scraggly band of wild-eyed
radicals. You taught me how to deal
with the police and rednecks in the street,
calm an excited crowd.
Daniel, please write and tell me about your life,
how you are. Did you marry your homegirl
and become a minister? Do you still have dreams
about where we go from here?
Southern Belle
I
Floating on a table in the entrance hall,
her mother’s camellias in a glass bowl.
In the polished dark of the antebellum mansion
she seeks the quiet of the ballroom
to catch her pale reflection
dancing alone.
Third-floor bedroom, deep well
of the windowsill—
gray cat hunts below in the garden,
sandy paths crisscross the wide lawn.
~~~
Morning, hot breakfast in the small, upper kitchen.
Evening, two hundred guests, a grand reception
where President & Mrs. Lee shake hands
and say the names.
Floating on a table in the entrance hall,
camellias in a glass bowl.
II
At university, her first year
she joins the Congress of Racial Equality, is elected chair.
Check the spelling on the placards, no swearing or booze, no fooling around.
“Ain’t gonna let no-o-body, turn me round, turn me round.”
Streets quiet, sidewalks empty.
White thugs beat a black student in an alley.
In the church sanctuary, one of MLK’s lieutenants
says prepare for a sit-in and likely arrests.
They enter a restaurant together, black and white.
Seated, they get served: cockroaches on a plate.
~~~
Tired of the struggle and loneliness,
longing to be invisible, maybe a waitress in Kansas,
she catches the midnight Greyhound going west
gets a window seat in back by herself,
writes in her journal to the soft mumble
of overnight conversation as the wheels rumble
till dawn, when everyone has to get off,
change buses for destinations beyond.
After eggs with grits and broiled tomatoes, she
boards the next bus back from the nameless depot.
III
Forty years later she returns
with second husband, kids grown, to see with new eyes.
The old capital’s streets so well laid out.
Dogwood and azaleas blooming like a movie set.
Her home, The Old Governor’s Mansion, now a
museum, tour guide patter on authentic renovation.
The winding, servant staircase still intact
where she once played hide and seek
and the pool room on the first floor
returned to its authentic, slave-era decor.
There’s no going back,
walls too thick, scent too strong.
Mary Dean Lee’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2021, The Fiddlehead, Ploughshares, I-70 Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Dunes Review, as well as other journals. She grew up in Milledgeville, Georgia, studied theatre and literature at Duke University and Eckerd College, and received her Ph.D. in organizational behavior at Yale. She lives in Montreal, Canada.