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 with 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
in heat worse than the South’s,
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.

they came from the earth across the waters;
they were you; they were me;
some were adventurers looking for
wealth and glory, which are really the same;
some were running from affliction
by state, religion, or both.
they came to the land of plenty
on birds with many
white wings upon the water;
they possessed magic wands|
that spouted killing fire;
they were strange and much feared invaders|
to those who lived this land.

they are us; we are they;
we’ve yet to learn
to not be afraid
of folks unlike us
who come from a different place;
so, we take our fear and turn it to hate,
a most miserable state of being
for all in the human race.
do you think any living this land
or from the earth across the waters
considered their fear of the unknown
to numb and erase the budding hate?

Likely there were a few who shunned
the fear and budding hate
but were outliers
while the blustering cowards
moved the crowd with fear and hate
who adopted those who ruled the day
when they came from across the waters

there is no reliance on history here,
but i would like to see
birds with many white wings upon the water
just one time.

i have not written much lately, spent a lot of time thinking. It occurred to me that old men like me think too much. The thinking reduced my motivation to write here. Another demotivating factor was wrestling with writing my next sea story as it will cover a year of my life that was an escape from reality when some really good things happened and some really not-considered good things happened but were good for me (think Mae West). Good or bad, that one year probably had more impact on my life than any year since, except when i met Maureen, another life changer. So today, i have written a lengthy post. i was musing. Old men are good for musing.

As is my habit, i sat on our patio late Friday afternoon even though it was cloudy portending rain a bit later. It was quiet. I put Jackie Gleason’s music on the Bluetooth, a progress blessing for me while i find a great deal of the other progress annoying, intrusive, and fearful knowing how many algorithms think they know who i am and what i want. NOT!

I returned to my peace and contemplated. A hummingbird with white and yellow markings underneath his tail fed on the four-foot-high Mexican sage nearby, the blooms a deep purple. I thought of my more than friend, Jim Hicks, who enjoys yanking my chain about my engagement with hummingbirds. Maureen was cooking yet another delicious concoction of vegetables and rice – hmm, is rice a vegetable? – recognizing she would not include sausage or barbeque and accepting that it was good for me. She is always concerned about what’s good for me, and that is a lovely attribute to have in my love.

I considered the past week. It was good, always would have been better with my daughters or siblings, but that is my fate for living in this paradise i call the Southwest corner.

I started to write a post but decided to watch my Padres. When i turned on the television, or whatever they are calling it now, the game was delayed due to rain, can you imagine in Los Angeles even. Knowing i wasn’t going to start watching a ball game that would start after nine or later, i decided to read for the evening and turn in early. You see, this stubborn old man, watched these two baseball teams the previous evening. The Padres tied it in the seventh inning. Maureen, who doesn’t enjoy the tenseness of tight games in the late evenings, retired to the bedroom to read and fall asleep.

I have the long-standing edict of watching every game of every sport because as Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.” But i had violated my own edict the week before when i angrily snapped off the remote (that’s a hand-held gizmo that controls the television from afar, or at least as far from the television to the sofa, or in my case, my non-reclining club chair) when the Padres went down by eight runs in the fourth inning. When i awoke the next morning, the Padres had come back and won the game 9-8.

So, Friday night, i gritted my teeth, fairly sure the mighty Dodgers would prevail, and stuck with it. The Padres won in the eleventh inning, 8-7. My edict proved correct…again.

But when the game was delayed, the old man was tired, beat. i can no longer rebound like i used to do. I hit the rack. My thoughts about a post rested with me.

◆ ◆ ◆

This morning, i arose early, just after five. The insipid regulation of Daylight Savings Time for once worked for me. When i went out to get the Sunday newspaper, i saw it had rained a piddlin’ bit during the night. Crevasses had standing water; the was damp. What captured me though was the eastern sky. The precursors of day were creeping over the ridge of hills and Mount Miguel. Pink and white hues claimed the fringe of the horizon. Above that was what could be the deepest blue i have ever encountered, which is rather amazing considering how many daybreaks i saw on morning watches on the bridge of a ship. Toward the west, the sky’s color was what one would expect that time of morning. i thought of taking a photo, but i knew it could not capture what i saw.

That deep blue, though, held me in her arms, i walked further out, all the way into the middle of our street, captured, wondering many things.

I returned to the house, The New York Times in hand. I brewed Maureen’s coffee, setting out the frother, the 787 different liquids, syrups, condiments, and chocolates for Maureen to mix her special brew. I ground my whole beans, placing the grounds into the French press. I stowed the evening’s wash from the drying rack. I set the table just for Maureen. I had decided to skip breakfast, my altered version of the interrupted fasting diet, most likely another futile attempt to lose about twenty pounds as i love my steak, burgers, sausage, and of course, sweets.

And i sat down in my home office among my collection of memories and began this just under two hours ago, intermittently resting with a game of spider solitaire, the daily crossword, and a short poem of Robert Penn Warren.

◆ ◆ ◆

A week ago, a bunch of good folks from Maureen’s career in office interiors, met in Carlsbad – i admire the beach communities north of San Diego proper, but it’s a hard roundtrip with today’s traffic   not usually visited. It was lunch at a great pizza place. These people are vibrant and caring. Toward the end, i struck up a conversation with Mack Langstrom. I had earlier learned the two of us share a love of country music. We discussed it in depth. I told him about two of my favorites, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” The band had somehow talked many of the great Nashville country music stars to gather and collaborate on a three LP set of just flat great country music.

I also mentioned Tim O’Brien’s album “Fiddler’s Green.” I saw Tim at the Station Inn in Nashville back when it was an isolated Breeko block venue amongst small run-down businesses and gravel parking lots, long, long before it became the new Nashville high-rise condos and hoity-toity shops and dining one can find in any fashionable city nowadays. Tim

and his mandolin played country Irish influenced music. It blew me away.

Now i have a friend in the Southwest corner who also likes country music. I hope one day i can hook him up with Alan and Jim Hicks, Cy Fraser, Billy Parsons, and others from my college days who are also country music fans (mostly bluegrass, Amy Beth Hale).

◆ ◆ ◆

i am looking forward to tomorrow’s lunch. Maureen and i will meet Craig and Joan Augsberger in Point Loma. Craig is the guy who loaned me that book i wrote about earlier that Joshua Slocum wrote “Sailing Along Around the World” in the late 1890s.

i will be loaning him a book i value. It’s the first in a series of an American story of the sea, The Shores of Tripoli by James L. Haley. It is a companion to the British sea stories written by Patrick O’Brian, including Captain and Commander. I have read the second in Haley’s series, The Darker Sea, and intend to read the next after concluding Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon.

Just getting my sea story kicks, i guess.

◆ ◆ ◆

It is a Sunday mid-morning now. The Southwest corner is preening its April best. We plan for a nice lunch at Maureen’s go-to bread bakery downtown.

And a good day to ye all.

The photo below is of a Mexican fan palm. i am working on stuff i want to capture but it’s turning into a tome. So, let’s go with a thought i had when i found the photo.

These suckers can get upward of sixty feet tall. This one was dropped as a seed into our front side yard by some unknown bird. i thought it would add to the local aura of our landscape. It, along with another planted by another bird dropping a bit later looked like a permanent fixture.

Hey, i’m from Lebanon, Tennessee. i am not an agronomy expert for high desert vegetation. Those Mexican fan palms grew rapidly. i was pleased with the look…but then they grew. When the fronds died, they hung ugly off the top until they reached over 20 feet. i cleaned them up until my ladders wouldn’t let me reach the fronds. The tree trimming guy came out, trimmed the dead stuff off and charged me 200 bucks. i recognized the charges would increase exponentially as these things continued to reach for the sky.

i had the tree guy cut them down and removed the stump and roots. A good decision.

Of course, i had this beautiful Labrador, Cass, who knew long before me and showed his contempt for Mexican fan palms. He was right. If you look closely in the center of the fan palm, Cass showed his contempt:

Easter Sunday has passed. It was a wet one.

Southwest corner weather has returned to the Southwest corner today.

i have taken up my seat on our patio looking up on our slope and my flag. i will not include another photo as i am sure you have seen enough of those.

Those slope photos remind me of when i was carrying Korean troops to Vietnam and back to Pusan. i had purchased the finest quality and most expensive Nikon cameras and lenses with absolutely no sense of financial responsibility or in defiance of such responsibility to which i had been required to adhere while still living at home. Impressed with my newly found hobby, i took about three thousand photos of sunsets and sent them to my parents back in Tennessee, along with a few others of new friends and sights. When i returned to Lebanon, my father commented he didn’t know anyone could take that many photos of sunsets.

i will have to ascend and descend that slope tomorrow and put one of the chairs, which the storm winds blew over, back into its place. But tonight, i rest, waiting for another of Maureen’s gourmet meals and the Padres telecast.

One lone, large leaf blows slowly across the lawn and hardscape, pausing for a while and then moving on to the bushes by the stucco fence separating our side yard from our neighbors. The leaf’s trek was a stately retreat from the wind.

i recall when back home growing up, there were few fences between homes. We had an old one on the back of our property: a wire fence with wood posts and a strand of barbed wire running along the top. A hedge covered most of it and an opening about three feet wide was in the northeast corner where only the top wire, barbless, remained. Jimmy Nokes once told me when in his preteens, he had snuck out one night and was gamboling around town one his one-speed Schwinn bicycle (with a metal basket on the handlebars and likely with baseball cards in the spokes). He decided to cross the Loomis’ yard on Pennsylvania Annex behind our house and take a shortcut to Castle Heights Avenue through our yard. He saw the opening and hit it. His head caught that lone top wire, and he crashed with a scream. My father heard the commotion and went out to see what it was. Jimmy always thought the world of my father because he picked Jimmy up and checked on him, straightened up the bike sending Jimmy on his way and never told Big Jimmy Nokes.

i sit here with the sunlight sliding down behind the slope. It is a lovely time of Southwest corner day but cool enough for a long sleeve top.

Our Easter weekend with our daughter and her man was one of the best of the many wonderful ones i can remember. We didn’t do a lot, went to the botanical garden and museum, ate at some pretty cool places, sat around and watched sports, movies, and comedy serials.

But you see, i was in my daughter’s place. She was happy. She and Aaron (and Scooby, their puppy) have it worked out. They are happy.

And if there is anything that can make me happy, it’s knowing my family members are secure and happy.

Now that’s a good Easter.