The Legend of Vicey Shavers

This poem is a salute to my favorite poem ever, “The Ballad of Billie Potts” and its author, my favorite author, Robert Penn Warren. The roots of this poem come from a number of a stories from where i grew up. The integration of those stories make this work completely fictitious, veering off the path of any of those individual stories.

It is dedicated to the woman also named Vicey Shavers. She is not the character in the poem, even though the main character bears her name and resembles her. i chose her name to honor her memory.

Vicey was in the beginning of my conscious thought. My mother worked for several companies and individuals after i was born in 1944. She hired Vicey to clean house and take care of me and my siblings while she was at work. Vicey continued to clean our home until i was in my mid-teens. i can still see her washing the lunch dishes (her lunches, as i remember them, were perfect for a little boy). Washing those lunch dishes, she stood at the sink in the long narrow kitchen, looking out the kitchen window and occasionally down at me. As 12:30 p.m. approached, she turned on the small green radio on the kitchen counter. She would turn the dial until she found WSM radio (i remember it as WSM, the famous home of the Grand Ole Opry). That’s when the Sons of the Pioneers had a program where only their western songs were played. Vicey and i would listen to the entire program.

Vicey was kind and loving to me and no doubt impacted my lifelong belief in equality should exist for everyone. In case you haven’t figured it out yet. Vicey was what folks now call black. I am now called white. Neither term is correct. Neither should be viewed as above or below the other.

She was wiry thin, skin as dark as
the cast iron cooking pot she used
for making magic food;
her arms and hands were veined
from aging in hard labor;
her black hair was plaited,
curled tightly on her skull;
her smile revealed two missing teeth;
but
she loved and persevered,
that Vicey Shavers, she did.

Vicey’s mama’s mama Beulah was a slave
in Alabama where she was the cook plus
housemaid in the big house,
better than Vicey’s mama’s papa Alphonse
who worked the cotton fields,
only to be sold to a man in Louisiana
to be lost forever in the family annals;

Her mama Mabel met a man in Alabama
who married her and moved her to Tennessee
with the promise of making a lot of money
with a nightclub for their kind outside the small country town,
only to give her two sons and two daughters, one Vicey,
before heading to Chicago alone
to never be heard from again.

Time in the dark of prejudice moved on,
plodding through the sultry summer heat
with change only in Time
as fear and hate marched in step
and
the crawdads sang at night
and
the mockingbird trilled its song
and
the hound dogs howled at the moon.

The younger sister Ethel passed early
with one of the diseases that roamed
the South and the world in those moments;
the younger brother Leviticus went to Chicago
to look for his daddy with no luck,
no luck,
went to work in the slaughter houses,
never to come home again;

Vicey’s older brother Meshach stayed put
along with Vicey, even after Mabel
was laid to rest in Eubanks Garden Memorial Park
on a hill outside of town, a place for their kind
that had passed on:
the big war came and Mesach volunteered,
assigned to a Negro logisitics battalion
in the steaming, screaming heat of Luzon,
worse than the heat in the South,
loading and unloading the trucks`
until the war ended;
Mesach rode a troop ship back,
caught a train home from San Francisco
where he wanted to stay
but
yearned to be with his sister and her man
and
he got a job changing tires in a gas station
until one night in that night club
his papa had started and failed,
then was reborn under new owners,
a gang from the big city up the road;
Mesach got into an argument with this stranger
who pulled out a razor blade,
cutting Mesach’s throat:
they put him in the ground
beside Mama Mabel and sister Ethel
on that hill with a stone that noted
he served in the big war.

The skin and bones turn to dust
as Time keeps on marching to that drum
most can’t hear and no one can see;
the old pine boxes rot;
the graves sink a bit
to be filled with dirt until there are mounds again
only to repeat until the graves are abandoned
with weeds taking over
until the stones nor the mounds visible,
just a field untended in Time.

Vicey married a barber, Bocephus Shavers
who also worked part time digging graves
in Eubanks Garden Memorial Park
while Vicey began cleaning homes,
keeping children for the white folks
until one day Bocephus was hit with a pick
in an argument with another grave digger;
he was laid to rest alongside his in-laws
in the self-same cemetery where he dug.

Vicey kept working hard
while cooking magic in her cast iron pot
in the tar papered and slate tiled house
painted green with grass creeping
through the cracked and sagging concrete front porch,
cleaning houses, taking care of white folks’ children
until Vicey Shavers didn’t come around anymore;
they found her in the kitchen by her cast iron pot,
then buried her in Eubanks Garden Memorial Park
by Bocephus and her kin;
a bunch of folks showed up for her interment,
even many of the white folks of the small country town;
they all found it fitting
that the lone maple on the hill
cast shade on Vicey in her rest.