Ode to a Southern Summer
My daddy's big Black hands scooping up striped watermelons. Perspiration soaked cotton shirts and skin tight jeans. Brown boys shirtless at the Farmer's Market, helping fathers, broken by exhaustion, raise profit. Grandmother's frilly pink dresses and baby powdered skin. Barbecue pits with smoked sausage, ribs, and chicken on top of layers of charcoal. Red Soda on Juneteenth and sweet mustard potato salad with coleslaw on July Fourth. Dark faces of kids playing in streets, holding melted ice-cream bars. Methodist Sermons. Homeless man eating up Daddy's watermelons for the past seventeen years for free. Jehovah's witnesses preaching about God on street corners. Sweet lemon pound cake. ABC's soap operas. Maternal Paw Paw's runny eggs with pancakes and sausage. Basketball practice with paternal Paw Paw at Booker T. Mama's stack of lesson plans for students. Daddy's technology tool kits for ancillary scattered across table. Brother's video games and early Saturday morning TV shows. Horses passing by alongside cars on streets. Sweat mixing with dirt. Tongue craving for iced lemonade or sweet tea. Kids running around the Houston Museum of Natural Science's classrooms. Conversations with Jesus. Cool water spilling down body. Longings for ice-cubes tucked away in ice-chests. Boy Scout gatherings with hot dogs and hamburgers. Facebook Statuses about water park plans. Pretty Little Liars on repeat. Crinkly Houston Chronicle newspaper beneath fingers. Starbucks indulgences. Long-winded phone conversations with friends in Baton Rouge. Beauty Parlor creamy crack burning head. Scars, deep and shallow, from being a tom-boy. Joel Osteen waking me up every Sunday morning. Creflo Dollar, Paula White, Jesse Duplantis, and the 700 Club bidding me farewell at night. Creamy vanilla Blue Bell Ice-cream. Daddy and Henry peeling mustard greensand boiling them with pork and spices. Porch conversations. Admiring rows of watermelons in Spring, Texas. Air-conditioned nights and hot mornings. Stars foggy with pollution. Crickets chirping. Mother duck making a nest by our tree with baby ducklings. Driving down dusty roads seeking pathways that always lead back to my history.
posted by Kamaria Monmouth @ 4:15 PM
7 Comments:
is this supposed to reflect all of the southern summers you've ever had or just one? I really liked the majority of it, your writing is wonderful and speaks to the senses. However, I didn't like it as much later in the piece when you started talking about more modern things like Pretty Little Liars and facebook just because it's less pleasing on a literary sense. Those words don't evoke the same kinds of images as your other language.
This is so strong and vivid—until I read the bit about Facebook statuses and new TV shows—but then regains strength at the end with "daddy and henry peeling mustard greens and boiling them". I think for this you should stick to the obviously eternal memories that you have of summer, and not the immediate memories. Not to say that your favorite summer TV shows are not important, but this piece has a particularly beautiful tone to it and the facebook and TV references take away from that here.
Maybe a better way for me to say what I just said was: Stick to the imagery directly correlating with a SOUTHERN summer, since that's where this all starts and ends. Starbucks, Facebook, 700 club, and Pretty Little Liars are very general things that could occur in anyone's summer, but yours is special because of it's southern-ness, so just write about those specific details.
PS. I really enjoy reading this.
I see what Alyssa and Ryan are saying. Those images are sort of disappointing, "oh... facebook..."
However, it would be dishonest to pretend those things don't infiltrate our summers, even southern summers. What I noticed is that the food, outdoors, heat, etc. are toward the top and seem more centered around community or an older generation. Which makes sense, so I think there is a lot to say about the difference between a southern summer for you father and a southern summer for you. It may not be as beautiful, or as "literary" as Professor Chambers put it, but so what?, that's a convention that is going to change and it's going to change with our generation. Why escape it? To me it is a story (critique?) that probably needs to be told.
I think the Facebook and TV references are interesting; I may not live in the South during the summer, but I do use Facebook, all seasons. Perhaps you could talk about that more in the piece...?
But I think that this piece would benefit from having a bit more of reflection.
Both of the odes we read, even the one about the food, had some sort of insight to them, a "one thing" that you took out of them, even though it was inexpressible. But the thing was that in the encounter between the writer and the thing/person that the ode was written to, a third something happened, a connection.
That connection is here, but it's a bit diffused. You get close to it at the last line, though.
It's hard for me personally to accept bringing something as trivial as Facebook into literature, but I didn't find it distracting in the midst of your piece. It is, after all, what you remember.
However, something I feel is lacking in this piece is connectedness. I almost could see this being interpreted as a 'prose-poem' (if I didn't know better, that's what I would have thought it was) being that it relies only on images and not story. However, for a memoir, it seems a little disjointed. You use "my" in it, yet I don't really see any trace of you in this summer, and really I wouldn't know it was your summer at all. I'd really like to see something special emerge from your summer memories; there's a lot of lonely images in here behind which I'd like to see the story.
I love the images you conjure up here. They take me to that time and place immediately " My daddy's big Black hands scooping up striped watermelons." But halfway through I think you got too specific about different media - I think it would be stronger if you took that out - pretty little liars, abc soap operas, 700 club, starbucks. I feel like these things are the same across the entire country(and even many parts of the world), not just in the south and I want to hear about what makes the southern summers so great.
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