martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935
when your man comes home from prison,
when he comes back like the wound
and you are the stitch,
when he comes back with pennies in his pocket
and prayer fresh on his lips,
you got to wash him down first.
you got to have the wildweed and treebark boiled
and calmed, waiting for his skin like a shining baptism
back into what he was before gun barrels and bars
chewed their claim in his hide and spit him
stumbling backwards into screaming sunlight.
you got to scrub loose the jailtime fingersmears
from ashy skin, lather down the cuffmarks
from ankle and wrist, rinse solitary’s stench loose
from his hair, scrape curse and confession
from the welted and the smooth,
the hard and the soft,
the furrowed and the lax.
you got to hold tight that shadrach’s face
between your palms, take crease and lid
and lip and brow and rinse slow with river water,
and when he opens his eyes
you tell him calm and sure
how a woman birthed him
back whole again.
Tyahimba Jess
martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935
Tyehimba Jess
what it means
Leadbelly (1888-1949) was an African American blues musician who spent seven years in prison. Martha Promise was his wife. I found this rather amazing video of the two of them. This poem speaks from Martha’s voice about helping Leadbelly transition from prison to home by literally washing him.
why I like it
Tyehimba Jess is my new favorite poet. He’s published two books: Leadbelly, which tells Leadbelly’s life story through the various people in his life, including him; and Olio, which looks at the lives of African-American performers before and after the Civil War. Both books take a person or period of history that fascinates me and tell the story through poetry. It’s almost like reading a play with each character getting their chance to speak.
This poem makes me cry. I like the hope in it—that it is possible to wash away the pain of prison. And that extra layer that even if it isn’t possible, you just convince your love that it is; “you tell him calm and sure,” and your confidence will rescue him. I like that the speaker knows it is her job to care for him. I feel such great love, confidence, and responsibility in this poem. It makes me want to be a better person.
craft
Blues music sets the pattern for this poem. The Academy of American Poets says, “A blues poem typically takes on themes such as struggle, despair, and sex. It often (but not necessarily) follows a form, in which a statement is made in the first line, a variation is given in the second line, and an ironic alternative is declared in the third line.”
You can hear that rhythm underlying the repetitions in the first stanza and stretched out over the next three. Of course, Leadbelly was a blues musician, so this is a very clever convergence of form and meaning, but I also like how the blues, which can be so much about endurance, is here used to talk about recovery.
I’m also in love with the vocabulary in this poem. I like the specific healing herbs like wildweed and just the music of “the furrowed and the lax.” I particularly like all the connotations of calling Leadbelly “shadrach,” a Biblical man who walked through flames because he refused to bow down to the man.