This’ll hurt me more by Camille T. Dungy

This’ll hurt me more

 

Don’t make me send you outside to find a switch,

my grandmother used to say. It was years before

I had the nerve to ask her why switch was the word

her anger reached for when she needed me to act

a different way. Still, when I see some branches—

wispy ones, like willows, like lilacs, like the tan-yellow

forsythia before the brighter yellow buds— I think,

these would make perfect switches for a whipping.

America, there is not a place I can wander inside you

and not feel a little afraid. Did I ever tell you about that

time I was seven, buckled into the backseat of the Volvo,

before buckles were a thing America required.

My parents tried, despite everything, to keep us

safe. It’s funny. I remember the brown hills sloping

toward the valley. A soft brown welcome I looked for

other places but found only there and in my grandmother’s

skin. Yes, I have just compared my grandmother’s body

to my childhood’s hills, America. I loved them both,

and they taught me, each, things I needed to learn.

You have witnessed, America, how pleasant hillsides

can quickly catch fire. My grandmother could be like that.

But she protected me, too. There were strawberry fields,

wind guarded in that valley, tarped against the cold.

America, you are good at taking care of what you value.

Those silver-gray tarps made the fields look like a pond

I could skate on. As the policeman questioned my dad,

I concentrated on the view outside the back window.

America, have you ever noticed how well you stretch

the imagination? This was Southern California. I’d lived

there all my life and never even seen a frozen pond.

But there I was, in 70 degree weather, imagining

my skates carving figure eights on a strawberry field.

Of course my father fit the description. The imagination

can accommodate whoever might happen along.

America, if you’ve seen a hillside quickly catch fire

you have also seen a river freeze over, the surface

looking placid though you know the water deep down,

dark as my father, is pushing and pushing, still trying

to get ahead. We were driving home, my father said.

My wife and my daughters, we were just on our way

home. I know you want to know what happened next,

America. Did my dad make it safely home or not?

Outside this window, lilac blooms show up like a rash

decision the bush makes each spring. I haven’t lived

in Southern California for decades. A pond here

killed a child we all knew. For years after that accident,

as spring bloomed and ice thinned, my daughter

remembered the child from her preschool. And now,

it’s not so much that she’s forgotten. It’s more that

it seems she’s never known that child as anything other

than drowned. My grandmother didn’t have an answer.

A switch is what her mother called it and her grandmother

before her. She’d been gone from that part of America

for over half a century, but still that southern soil

sprang up along the contours of her tongue. America,

I’ll tell you this much, I cannot understand this mind,

where it reaches. Even when she was threatening

to beat me, I liked to imagine the swishing sound

a branch would make as it whipped toward my body

through the resisting air. She’d say, this is hurting me

more than it’s hurting you. I didn’t understand her then,

but now I think I do. America, go find me a switch.