Notable Books by North Carolina Writers: August, 2005

M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, by A. Van Jordan

(New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004)

Text from the book's flyleaf: A true story lies behind this haunting collection. In 1936, MacNolia Cox won the Akron District Spelling Bee, and at the age of thirteen she became the first African American to reach the final round of the national competition. The Southern judges, it is thought, kept her from winning by presenting a word not on the official list. The word that tripped MacNolia, ironically, was nemesis. Though she had been an A student and had dreams of being a doctor, MacNolia left school, married, and worked as a domestic in the home of a physician. [Ms. Cox died in Akron in 1976.]

Dr. Wittenberg

In Service

Akron, Ohio, 1948

All of our neighbors are jealous:
MacNolia, with a mop
Or broom, a washboard or iron,
Is a magician.
Come over next week and bring
Some laundry—we'll show you
What she can do. She can spell
Any word you can pretty much
Think of; although—at least,
I'm not sure—I don't believe
She knows what they all mean.
They say she almost went to college.
Would you believe she wanted
To be a surgeon?
(She told us when she interviewed
To work here.) How could we say no?
But—lucky for us, I guess—she
Didn't get a scholarship.
Maybe she's saving up for her son
To go; I'll have to remember to ask.
She stays over on North St.
In a little home with her husband,
Who has some kind of off-and-on
Job, and they seem to do pretty well
For themselves with what she makes
Working in service here.
They say she
Spelled like a demon as a child.
They say she was almost
The national spelling champ, would've
Been the second one we had
From Akron in as little as three years. . . .
I don't know, really, but I'm telling you—
She's the best damn maid in town.
after Marilyn Nelson


MacNolia

Dust

Off the lamp shade
so we can see
each other
without/groping,
without
the mystery,
the fantasy,
of who we wish we were;
dust
off the piano so
we can dance
weightless
like grace
notes
under Art Tatum's
fingers, dust

till our minds
misplace
regrets,
till our tongues become extinct,
Lift the dust
Off your eyes,
girl;
lift the velvet haze
off your dreams; wipe
the surface
clean; tear
the rag off your head, and
peer
into your reflection
before
there's nothing left to see.

MacNolia

Scenes from My Scrapbook

Entry: Akron, Ohio, April 22, 1936

"I'm glad I won, and I hope I win in Washington."
MacNolia Cox, age 13,
after winning the Akron District Spelling Bee

With braces on his legs, FDR wins by a landslide, and split-
ting atoms is just a mad scientist's theory and although civil
rights is no more than a subplot in science fiction, I just won
the city-wide spelling bee, ten years after four Klansmen
were elected to the school board, and I'm going to the Palace
Theatre in Cleveland as the special guest of Fats Waller
and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. I can spell like they can
sing and dance. I've never seen so many white people
smile at me; I've never seen so many white people afraid.
I can spell every thing I can read. 100,000 words, baby,
right here in my head. I might be a doctor or a lawyer
or I might just spell for a living. I'm the first,
but all I can do is spell what I know.
I'm the first black to win, whatever that means.

Later, America no longer elects presidents with disabilities,
the atomic bomb has conquered mankind, and we've assassinated
all the fallen angels. All but me, I'm just not spelling,
I'm cleaning. It's hard to spell with a child straddled on your hip,
with the country at war, with food that's got to find its way
to the table. I've got a good man, but he can't do it on his own.
these are hard times for the white man, can you imagine
what it's like for mine? It's harder now for him than it was for me
when I went to Washington. I spelled those white kids into tears.
I could spell whatever they threw at me:felicitation—
f-e-l-i-c-i-t-a-t-i-o-n,
which is what I got . Apoplexy—A-p-o-p-l-e-x-y, which is what
they had
when I got into the final five. But they would have that no more
than they would have me to win. They pulled a word not on
the list, the goddess of vengeance:Nemesis—N-e-m-e-s-i-s—I couldn't
spell it, then.

But for now, say it's spring in Akron, Ohio; the smokestacks
smudge the skyline even at dusk when the sun paints pastels. I
read
the dictionary starting with the A's and keep on going.
I spell even when they tell me to sit in the colored section,
even when they don't give scholarships to colored girls for college.
I spell the names of the dead who came before my name.
Before me, what I do had only been a prayer on a black girl's
tongue.
What more can I ask for? There's a revolution wetting my lips.
I'm 13 years old, I can spell, and I'm black. All
odds are against me, but all my people are counting on me.
I've already done what had not been done before. What
complaint should I file? My spelling has cast a spell
on this country. All the signs glower White Only, but I keep
spelling
and I'm twice as good as a Negro girl has any right to claim.

MacNolia

This Life

"Say this life and let it be enough, for once."
Joe Bolton
American Variations

If you say obscenity, o-b-s-c-e-n-i-t-y
It doesn't sound like a bad word;
It sounds like the name of a child
On her mother's lips; it sounds like my name

When slid from my mother's tongue.
My pulse would shift into place
As her voice traveled through my veins.
Say MacNolia—M-a-c-n-o-l-i-a—

And let my name bless the one who named me.
I'd pronounce my name and people would
Mistake it for a flower. Can you imagine me
Correcting white adults? I said

MAC-nolia. . . . No, I mean it was 1936—
It wasn't safe to spell my own name.
If you whispered it, a thought cloud
Grew over your head with the name, a colon

and the definition: a Negro who spells
And reads as well as {if not better than} any white.
Say summer rain running over a brown girl's face,
And you cannot mistake it for tears;

The syllables are as gentle as summer
Rain running over a brown girl's face.
Even at 13, I knew right from wrong:
Adam bit the apple and we all could see.

Say truth and let it be true, for once.
Watch the mouth take a bite;
Let the juice run over the lips;
Let the tongue know the taste.

If I had one breath of advice to give
To myself at 13, some language
That would have helped me understand
The grammar of my life, I would have said

What I still know: Girl, savor what you learn
And spit it back as best you know how.

A. Van Jordan teaches English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Born in Akron, Ohio, he received his MFA from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, in Swannanoa. His first book, Rise (Chicago: Tia Chucha Press, 2001), won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was a selection of the Academy of American Poets book club. AboutM-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, the poet Edward Hirsch wrote in Book World, published by The Washington Post: "A. Van Jordan combines the tragic poignancy of the blues with the cinematic sweep of a documentary in his deeply humane and highly imaginative second book." Mr. Jordan will begin teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in January. The poems presented here are reprinted from M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, by A. Van Jordan, © 2004 by A. Van Jordan, with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.