Elton Glaser
March 2004

Black Baptist Funeral

                            in memory of Lelia Green

We've come early, in late morning,
To Doyle's Funeral Home on Fourth Street in Slidell,
No preacher yet behind the chapel podium,
No hands trembling over the piano keys, only a box
Flanked with flowers, the lid open, and her face
Still freckled under the undertaker's dust,
A sleepy smile played out in the calm of the casket.

Soon the bare pews buzz with babies, small boys
In the aisles, restless as the dresses of women
Bright with big blooms, and big hats
Crisp and beribboned, in cool colors,
Straw brims slanting down the brow, more like
A cakewalk than a Wake and Dismissal.
The programs, laid out with their order of events
And verses and supporting cast, we all use
To push the air around, the air that hangs
From the heavy Processional of family loss
To the Viewing of Remains when her service ends.

Blood runnin' home in the veins,
The reverend says, in a rustle of linen and amens,
And now Sister Green been called home.

And it's a long way from Amite, Louisiana,
To death, a trail winding through the pine woods
And the cottonmouth waters of the swamp,
Through two days a week of sweeping and mopping,
One eye on the steam iron, the other on the soaps,
Wisp of a cigarette drifting over
The aroma of red beans seasoning on the stove,
Salt meat and sausage, a hot loaf of po-boy bread,
And Lelia laughing at all our jokes, her lips
Held tight around the secrets we tell her, those petty sins
We've learned to keep back from our parents . . .

And after the prayers and eulogies, a solo hymn
I've never heard before, having been raised
On Latin sacraments and the chanting of monks,
Though I know the holy waxwork of Professor Longhair,
His left hand the mallet of the Caribes, his right
A tipsy tightrope over an alley of broken bottles,
Every note falling somewhere between
The fishfries of Friday night and the funerals of Monday morning.

Out under the sun, we're with her in our Dodge Spirit
That tails the slow cortege, a shining line of
Cousins and nephews, aunts and a lone daughter,
The Cleveland sisters she rode a dog night and day to see,
Squeezed in a narrow bus seat; and for once
The cops hold back the world to let her pass--
Red lights mean nothing to the dead.

When my mother died, in a spring already past
The last blush of azaleas, the wind blowing
Through shanks of cemetery grass cut down
Within an inch of their lives, we brought Lelia up
To sit beside us in the shade of the canopy, hers
The one black face among the mourners there,
For the blessing and the mute baffles of goodbye.

Just off the Dixie Ranch Road, where her house
Stood framed forty years under the oaks, we turn
Down a dirt track so cramped the cars must park
Halfway in the ditch, wet ruts of a lane
Winding deep in the country where no one goes
Except to dump their trash or bury the dead
In the homemade graveyard of the Greens,
The mud scooped out with a backhoe, and everyone
Swabbing the sweat of early August, waiting
On those pallbearers built like linemen for the Saints,
Suits bunched up over muscle, dark stains under the arms
As they slide her body from the hearse, the crowd
Closing in to hear the preacher's brief about
What lies here, and what lies ahead, and what lies . . .

Words of heaven float over the broken stones,
The crosses leaning in the weeds, and mean
No more than a promise of clouds that might
Bring a moment's peace to this raw plot, before
The long parade of the living steps back
From the grief and the heat and the hollow ground.