When Great Trees Fall…

I wasn’t in school yet when I used to ride with my mama to deliver my daddy to work, and then pick him up again, every day. We were a one car – one phone – one television – one bathroom family back in 1962. We were one family – Mommy, Daddy, child, child, child. Easy, breezy. So I guess I was pretty sheltered from the ugliness of the world. And, well, I was five. There was a great deal I didn’t understand.

Once on that daily trip through town I saw a man sitting on the curb, shoes and socks off…he was swaying side-to-side, and his eyes weren’t exactly focused on anything. He looked very strange so I asked my daddy what was wrong with him. “He’s under the weather,” he answered.

My five-year-old self couldn’t wrap any meaning around being “under” weather…but for years anyone I saw intoxicated – in person or on television – was “under the weather” to me.

Almost every day on the ride home we would stop at the intersection of Geer Street and Roxboro Road at a light there. It was a one-way street heading north to my neighborhood, and there was a little girl who always played in the yard to the left of the intersection. I saw her so many times, I thought of her as my friend, and I asked my mother if I could play with her sometime. She was older, though, about twelve, I guess, and she probably didn’t want to play with a five-year-old.

But I saw her dancing inside her hula hoop day in and day out, and I thought she was awesome.

One day I rolled down my window and worked up the nerve to wave at her. I smiled my big gap-toothed smile (I had lost a tooth!) and waved like she was my long lost friend. And then it happened.

She flipped me off.

Flipped me the bird. The gig. The middle finger. Whatever you want to call it…she gave it to me as the light turned green, and we sped off.

Of course, I didn’t know what the finger meant. But I knew the look on her face. My friend hated me, and I didn’t know why.

Later, I asked my mother about it. She delicately explained the “finger” gesture and tried to tell me, in a way a five-year-old could understand, that these were hard times in the South. That Black people had been treated unfairly so the little Black girl may be mad at me about that.

It made no sense to me, of course, but I never waved at my friend again.

I was in junior high school when I checked out I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings from the public library. I read it shaking my head in disbelief. Surely people did NOT treat each other this way in my South. But yet I had seen the protests over desegregation, I had sat in an all-white elementary school, made the move to the integrated junior high, and felt the unease on the school bus; police escorted us to school during those days. But to read the words, to feel the pain that transcended from the page to me, well, it was life-changing:

“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.” Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Somewhere in the middle of that book, somewhere in the dreadful description of life in Stamps, Arkansas, I got it. I thought of that pretty little Black girl, hula hooping in the yard at the corner of Geer Street and Roxboro Road, and I literally said out loud: “I get it. I get it. I do.”

It sounds melodramatic to say a book has changed your life. It’s sounds crazier when a reading teacher says it…there are SO MANY books that have shaped me. But this one, named after Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, taught me about the world around me while also providing this future English major with her first experience with metaphor:

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,
When he beats his bars and would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings –
I know why the caged bird sings.           From “Sympathy” by Paul Laurence Dunbar

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I’ve spent almost thirty years trying to teach metaphor to middle school students. They like to say, “A simile is a comparison using ‘like’ or ‘as.’ A metaphor is a comparison that doesn’t use ‘like’ or ‘as.'” And for almost thirty years, I have told middle school students that, while not exactly incorrect, that definition doesn’t even come close to identifying the power of a metaphor….the power I learned when I was twelve and realized what “caged bird” means.

Later, at a funeral for a friend, I heard Maya Angelou’s poem “When Great Trees Fall.” Nine years after my father’s death, I sat in that church pew and felt I had finally come to an understanding of the journey of loss when I heard the line “And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms.”

I drove home repeating, “peace blooms…peace blooms…peace blooms…” My daddy, on his deathbed, had asked the doctors to stop treating him. He said, “I can’t even get up from this bed and go look out the window. I just want some peace.”

So the word “peace” was meaningful to me already when I heard the promise, in a Maya Angelou poem, that I would someday come to accept his death.

If I ever get the nerve to get a tattoo, “peace blooms” will find itself on my wrist.

Maya Angelou died today, and the world seems different. She lived only an hour away from me, and I always dreamed I’d bump into her someday and tell her about the little girl giving me the finger…and how I understand…and about my daddy dying…and how I understand…and about metaphors and peacefulness…and how I understand…

I understand.

 

When Great Trees Fall

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.

Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.

Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.

We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly.  Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.

Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed.  They existed.
We can be.  Be and be
better.  For they existed.