Adam David Miller

Believers

Sometimes on gray mornings
it is necessary to believe.
I miss the nights.
I'll make a Believer out of you,
said the Christian as he smashed the the face
of the infidel.

I'll make a Believer out of you,
said the Muslim as he smashed the infidel's
face.

All this infidel face smashing
has got to stop. We can't all be
going round with bent noses, crossed eyes
and missing teeth.

I miss the nights, where we could evade
the thought police.
Let's hear it for infidels!

Sometimes on gray mornings,
especially on gray mornings,
I find it necessary to believe
in myself,
despite the raging and
the ravages
of the face smashers outside.

An African Moment

“Amazing Grace” we sang.
They were ready for something
like this, these Bay Area Methodist
men ending their retreat
on a Sunday morning.

We poets, used to singing with
silences, listened: “Amazing grace,
how sweet the sound.”
One began, then another, “That
saved a wretch like me.” By
the third line they had all joined in.
We joined in, Africa singing

We all became Africa singing.

Walker Ranch at breakfast
in the cafeteria. Everybody
in a joy-filled circle, throats
full open. Those Methodist men,
deep, strong voices. Our voices
in harmony.

Riding the Range of Thought

to j. waller, m. d., & a.d. miller

Will have to smash all thoughts before I can sleep.
One near coherent one will make my mind try
endlessly to tighten its meander.
Come back here. Can't be shootin no chittlins
at no moon, leaping over razor wire chasms,
climbing no squash yellow sky.
Let's bargain. Wait. If you will permit me to grab
a few winks now, yes, just a few, I'll play scrabble
with you tomorrow, or solitaire. Name your game.
Smash you to smithereens? No, no, nothing
like that. Here, take this dark chocolate-coated
lollipop. Sweet, sweet thought, just come
a little closer, just a little closer.

Good News

Note: The following is an excerpt from TICKET TO EXILE, A memoir of my first 19 years in Orangeburg , South Carolina during The Great Depression. I was eight years old, my sisters eleven and twelve.

My sisters played with me but also liked to tease me. When it rained while the sun was shining, they told me that if I took a smoked glass and looked between a crack in the door, I could see the devil beating his wife. I dutifully did as I was told. Something must have been wrong with my eyes, said my laughing sisters, when I told them I didn't see anything. And they would shut me out the back door at night, telling me that the ghosts out back would get me. I would have to bang on the door loud enough to attract adult attention before they would let me in.

Leola was my favorite. She was funny and generous with whatever she had. She always shared with me. I could talk with her. She was the one person in the family who took the time to try to understand me. When they teased me Leola was first to stop. “That's ‘nuff now,” when Edith persisted. “Why are you such a silly boy?” she would sometimes ask me, her eyes twinkling. “Why are you such a slly girl?” I would ask her. This was always a signal for a race around the house. When she caught me, as she always did, she would grab me and whirl me around, laughing as I squealed with pleasure.

Ten times smarter than I was, or so I thought, Leola would plop herself on the floor and drag me down to show me things in whatever she was studying. She would point out places in her geography book, make me name countries and rivers, and products various places were known for. All in different colors.. There were pictures of people standing on their countries, sometimes holding fruit.

Indirectly she got me realizing that the five races whites taught us in their books were a lot of hokum, a failure of the white men's eyes to see what was before them. “Miss Jenkins got Indian in her and she not red, she almost black as me.” Leola was middle chocolate brown. “Mr. Lee (who owned the laundry) he brown, n his wife whiter then them white folk. They red-faced.” I remembered the pink people in the bible stories, “white” people with wings. I had not worked for the white woman over on Amelia Street yet, but I had seen a white-faced old woman next door. They were a “colored” family. That fact threw me a curve that I struck out on, but it started me looking at people around me more closely.

Leola got sick with rheumatic fever when she was eleven years old.

My mother worked over her several days into the night, trying what she knew of herbs and roots, making broths and poultice, sponging her feverish face and chest; praying when it seemed other remedies were failing her.

As she had run out of remedies, Mama sent me for Dr. Crawford. He was one of four colored doctors: he, Drs. Green and Rowe, medical doctors; Dr. McTeer being a dentist. Four doctors for more than four thousand town people, plus those country folk who were able to get into town. If you were in the countryside needing medical care you couldn't get from a mid-wife or traditional doctor, you cured yourself or you died.

Colored people could go to white doctors, of which there were many more; but those who went had to wait for hours, sometimes days, while the white doctors served their white patients. And they had to wait in a separate waiting room, entered by a separate door, with a sign saying “Colored Waiting Room in the Rear.” The waiting rooms for whites were furnished with stuffed sofas, coffee tables with magazines and newspapers, those for blacks with a few plain straight-backed chairs. Despite the inconvenience and the indignity suffered, some colored people still went to them, even preferring them to the black doctors, whom they felt didn't know what they were doing. Some even thought the black doctors to be “stuck up.” Mama was not one of those.

Dr. Crawford came once, at the end of a long day of work. A young, rotund bespectacled, light skinned man, Dr. Crawford was the most recent of our doctors to set up practice. He was newly out of medical college and, with his family, a welcome addition to our medical corps. He was cheery despite his hard day.

He poked at Leola, listened to her chest with his stethoscope; and after asking my mother how long she had been suffering, diagnosed her illness as rheumatic fever.

“Will she die, doctor?”

Dr. Crawford took off his spectacles, wiped them with a handkerchief he took out of his trousers pocket, and looked at Mama,

“With the help of the Good Lord, Miz Maggie, we'll pull her through.”

With that bit of optimism, he wrote out a prescription, laughed a little laugh, then he left. As Mama had no money with which to fill the prescription, it laid on the fireplace mantle piece.

And Leola lay there, small and frail, looking with trusting eyes for Mama to save her, to make her well.

“Leola s-s-neep, Mama?” I stuttered from my pallet, as she sat with head bowed, holding my sister's hands.

“Yes, baby, Leola sleep.”

Death was not a subject poor people talked about. Perhaps the reason was that there were so many deaths, often of children. People cried at funeral services and at gravesides. Maybe they felt that was enough emotion to show. Not even Edith, and the two sisters had been inseparable, ever said to me, “Do you ever miss Leola? I know I do.” I missed Leola dearly.

I could not fathom the permanent absence death brought, and for a long time I expected Leola to appear from wherever she had gone. Sleeping in the same room with her during her illness, I was intimately involved in her passing.

I was devastated. Not so much by her death, which I still did not fully understand, but her absence, which I did.

Deaths were becoming a frequent occurrence. In short order, there had been Aunt Cather Lee's stillbirth, Mrs. Bell's dropsy, Authorene's tuberculosis, now Leola's rheumatic fever. Deaths due to the diseases of poverty and ignorance. She was only eleven years old when she died. I was eight. Little was known then about a disease that today is hardly more serious than bronchitis. Few people die of it now, but this fact did not save my sister.

Mama was alone with us four children, Aunt Cather Lee having gone back to the farm, our stepfather on one of his times away. We moved to Treadwell Street soon after.

Back top

Cover Design: Joseph McNair