Everything We Need

While perusing the Winter 2007 issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report this past week, a song melody and the words, "number one in America" emerged from the recesses of a memory stored away sometime in the mid-1990s when I picked up a copy of singer-songwriter David Masengill's CD, Coming Up for Air. I knew of his work both from WFUV-FM in New York, and from having seen him perform at the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow.

The third song on the disc, "Number One in America," a wonderful almost-eight-minute perspective on race in America, provides some insight into the songwriter's roots in Bristol, Tennessee and among other things, ponders what it will be like when "a black is President." Three of the song's final four stanzas depict a poor white family in a K-Mart on Christmas Eve and what happens when the youngest of three children selects a "black-skinned doll" as her one toy. The first time I heard the song, among some other very powerful images this particular scene riveted my attention. After the fifth (or fifteenth) listening, I wanted to know more about that K-Mart family, and this poem emerged in December 1997:

Everything We Need
(for David Masengill)

Twenty-five windless degrees
allows each miraculous flake
a perpendicular freefall to a
starring role in a white Christmas
Eve, which lets Lawrence leave
his third job four hours early
and thirty-six before he has to
work again.

Uneven crunch of workboot sole on
snow recalls his childhood joy at
snowflakes only visible in amber
glow then fading past the streetlamp's
jurisdiction. He stops,
watches them fall within
the stilled boots' perfect silence,
then turns toward the bus stop.

Aboard, back seat seduction long
gone, he sits behind the driver,
imagines a car and just one job,
checks his pocket for the cash,
rests his hand where he feels it.

Eight familiar stops bring Lynn
aboard, the kids in tow, Larry bouncing,
Lisa glowing with the season: Daddy,
Daddy, Santa Claus is coming! He
smiles, hugs and kisses, feels the
tug of love, the slap of scarcity—
a full heart and thin wallet
competing for his consciousness.

K-Mart looms bright red as they
step down, wish the driver
Merry Christmas, follow the
store's beacon, its promise
of domestic perfection.

Inside, Larry and Lisa dash
toyward, Lynn's reminder lost
in the shopping sprawl: One
each—remember, only one each.
Lawrence marvels at her smile,
tries to return it through his
sense of deficit. It's okay,
she tells him. It's okay with
them; it's okay with me. We
have everything we need.

Larry grabs a basketball,
thirty-five dollars;
Lawrence finds one for
fifteen that Larry likes
as much; Lisa hugs a
twelve-dollar doll, its skin
much darker than her own.

They check both toys for
cracks and blemishes, find
none, pay $28.96; nearsighted
cashier glimpses doll-hugs and
ball-bounces celebrations. Smiles.
I'm sure we have some white dolls left.
Yes, Lynn replies, you do, but
Lisa wants this one. The cashier
shakes her head, says, Kids.
Will there be anything else?

Lawrence wishes he could say yes,
feels Lynn's hand, comfortable
on his arm; gazes at Lisa and Larry,
whose eyes envelop him in their
pure joy; mysterious tears
roll forth and he understands
now that it is okay.
No, he says, we have
everything we need.

From Who Lives Better Than We Do (From the Heart Press, 2001)
Copyright © 1997 by Reggie Marra