August 15, 2003
Miss Lizzie's Kitchen
Turnip greens, green beans, green tomatoes,
Grown in the garden just outside her kitchen door,
Mason jars of yellow-orange peaches, dense purple-red beets,
Sweet potato pies on the windowsill, their odor a siren call.
Chicken dripping off the bone after hours slow cooking,
She had raised the chicken, wrung its neck, watched it flap and flop all over the yard
soaking the ground with its blood.
An aroma of warmth filled Miss Lizzie’s winter kitchen,
The sticky southern summer caused beads of sweat to line her magnificent brow,
One-eighth Cherokee, she never mentioned it, and we were told never to as well,
She was taught it was dirty…Indian blood.
Her father had taken her out of school at ten, put her to work in the Georgia fields,
“Girls don’t need to learn to read.”
She remained angry seventy-five years later: “I could have been something!”
Miss Lizzie and my mother always went together to vote
once Miss Lizzie was allowed to register.
Their ages the same, their skin colors and stations different,
They named one another “sister,” sharing confidences across decades;
She stood once between my grandparents to prevent a blow.
Occasionally she’d come to “borrow a little change.” We knew for someone else,
but never asked…bail, brakes, a funeral, perhaps a back alley abortion, or to repair one.
A photograph of Miss Lizzie at eighty-five hangs on my wall,
She dressed especially for the occasion, some of her radiance camouflaged
by a purple dress and costume jewelry; loosed her crown of braids, her profile diffused.
Frail at ninety, she listened intently as one by one the stories found their way
To her kitchen, a sanctuary as beautiful as her newly churned butter rounds,
Marked in geometric pattern with the blunt end of a dinner knife,
As secure as her seasoned black iron skillet filled with hot corn bread.
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