Free One With Others: [A Little Book of Her Days] by C. D. Wright Page A

was reading Pynchon while our heads were still rooting among the novels she swallowed whole as a solitary child. Everyone should be favored to know one person of courage [at a critical moment] and genius [of accident and design], though that person arrives with all the flaws and fiends that vex the rest of us, sometimes in disproportionate abundance.
I would like to dedicate this to Mary Pat, her oldest child, for whom V bought a perpetual lottery ticket using the dates of MP’s birth, the anticipated winnings from which have long been earmarked by MP to buy a certain Victorian hotel in Coronado, Colorado.
And to the Man Imported from Memphis, Lance Watson, aka Sweet Willie Wine, aka Suhkara Yahweh, a miscreant turned lifelong activist in the wake of the assassination of MLK. Raised by an uncle and aunt. Suhkara’s aunt worked as a domestic for Judge Bailey Brown, who less than an hour before King’s “sojourn on earth went blank” [Taylor Branch], lifted the restraining order against the scheduled march of the sanitation workers. Suhkara’s great-grandfather was Benjamin F. Booth, who practiced law in Memphis for 50-plus years and in 1905 challenged Tennessee’s law authorizing the segregation of blacks and whites on streetcars. [Ever forward, never backwards, Suhkara.]
I would also like to thank V’s other children: Hoagie, Freddie, Jessie, Sam, Katie, and Robert David, who bore the stigma of being the offspring of one unflinchingly unappeasable woman.
And Stephen.
Also:
Jane Pfeiffer and Beverly Craddock, friends of V’s from St. Francis of Assisi primary school through the Sacred Heart years, who vividly recalled: V smoking in the playhouse, writing anonymous letters [with gloves on] to the principal, and V always taking the fall for any mischief they committed together. How she was always at the library, always on the list for books she shouldn’t have. One friend recalled how thrilled V was when her German grandfather took her to see The Picture of Dorian Gray. Both women spoke of the emotional coldness and strictness of the family home in which the answer to most petitions and desires was a foregone N-O. BC said, ask her to go anywhere, and the answer was, No, I can’t I have to listen to the opera today. No, I have to memorize poetry. She would give you the shirt off her back, BC said of her friend. So brilliant that her friends often claimed she educated them.
Her ex-husband, Joe, who though a nonparticipant in its conflicts, suffered the cruel will of his adopted Delta town. He too endured the bind of their incongruous marriage. He remained dispiritingly marked by the compromising challenge of his wife’s actions.
Marilyn Hohmann, their mothers being sisters, their fathers being brothers, making them, bilateral parallel cousins? [Something like that.] Who expressed her deep love and admiration for her cousin. Among her many memories, she and V would be sitting on the stairs, making too much noise, her father would call her up whereupon her punishment would be to read Elizabeth Barrett Browning to him.
The late Wordan Miller, the McHugh family hired hand, who lived with them on the farm, kept a pet alligator in a cement pool he built for it. V’s closest [in truth, her sole] companion on the farm.
Freddie Lou McDaniel, a neighbor and beloved friend of V’s for many years, the years when they laughed like people were meant to laugh, and with whom she played bridge when they were too pregnant to reach the table. Monica Mitchell, also hugely pregnant at the bridge table [though I was never able to make contact with her].
My friends, former residents and, in varying degrees, natural-born aliens of their town: Cecelia Grobmyer, a neighbor child during those years, who said of V, “She was my show-and-tell,” the inimitable Nan Montgomery Signorelli, and the irrepressible Barbara Barg, who said so movingly of our much-missed friend, “She taught me how to live; now she has taught me how to die.”
Chris