"4951 Walnut Street" by Yvonne

4951 Walnut Street

Black-listed, his passport revoked, civil rights icon Paul Robeson spent his final years (1966-1976) in a house built in 1911 and purchased in 1959 by his older sister, Marian Robeson Forsythe, and her husband, once a physician, in demolished Eastwick.

I.

Did he drink his breakfast coffee with cream
Or black? Or was it green tea with lemon,
Not milk? Did he linger in his bedroom,
On his tray another bloody headline?
Or gentle hunger dared him stumble down
To where Sister blurred with Salvation?
Left him dirty dishes, her cooking done?
Within liberty’s forced decline,
Laughter returns — What old childhood fun!
Himself, a tired two-step, out of time.
That was 1966. I had just blown
Up my family, scholarship in hand, no plan
But get-away sane. Thus, missed fortune
Aligned our paths. I never met the great man.

II.

Further back in ’59, my folks tied down their youth
To a simpler house arrest five blocks south
From the great man’s last resort. As a teen
I had crisscrossed for years that urban
Avenue begging for my great church dome
In the distance in the sunset like him —
A monument sublime.
We each return wounded to the womb.
Not his mother, but female, all the same,
To one spartan and poor Sister offered her home
With wallpaper and lace, that special perfume
Rising sickly-sweet. Not with innocence,
I, too, return, buying back my inheritance.
But all is well. Each heart, a museum.

Yvonne

First poetry editor of two pioneer feminist magazines, Aphra and Ms., Yvonne has received several awards, including NEAs for poetry (1974, 1984) and a Leeway for fiction (2003, as Yvonne Chism-Peace). Recent print publications include Home: An Anthology (Flexible Press), Bryant Literary Review, Pinyon, Nassau Review, Bosque Press #8, Foreign Literary Journal #1, Quiet Diamonds (Orchard Street Press, 2018, 2019), and 161 One-Minute Monologues from Literature (Smith and Kraus). Verse memoir excerpts are online at American Journal of Poetry, AMP, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Poets Reading the News, Headway Quarterly, Rigorous, Collateral, WAIF Project, Brain Mill Press’s Voices, Cahoodaloodaling, and Edify Fiction. Poems are forthcoming in Colere, Stonecrop Review, Not Very Quiet, Beautiful Cadaver Project, Burning Word Literary Journal, Deracine, Event, and Horror USA: California.

Headshot: T. Peace

Photo Credit: Ekem (CC BY-SA 3.0)