Pigmeat and Catfish

Pigmeat Catfish and Good Old Girls

By Rudolph Lewis

It was a Sunday afternoon.

She bounced along on her toes

in all the fullness of self,

“I know how to stay out of trouble.

I know how to play the good girl,”

my niece said,

with her good girl smile.

It’s 20 years since I’ve seen that good girl.

She now smiles straddling enemy combatants

in my nightmare daydream.

A corner of relief is scarce as generosity

when a German shepherd grins at your throat.

Dreams painted on ghettos walls are for sale.

Who need bayonets when bombs are so cheap?

The Third Army 800s hurl tears into the mob.

Flames smoke sky, comics rain on men wrapped

in red & blue. War is noble & clean as your mom

in apron, or Mr. Obama, or Beetle Bailey

walking on sawdust, color of that other white meat.

They say we had fun when America was Exceptional

when the gap between rich & poor was a sheet of paper.

I ain’t Mr. Look Back. But I can't recall those times.

On the ground Hit Man Contractor fills his purse.

Good girls on steroids smile: Credit or Cash?

No canvas can make these scenes Humanitarian.

(Only the names have changed.)

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Responses

I love the title and the poem, so evocative of down home. I spent Saturday chasing Etheridge's shadows all over Memphis, taking photos of the rundown, boarded up, broken-windowed, and disappeared apartments, duplexes, and shacks where he lived. I ended up at the Cozy Corner buying ribs and running into two men that I have to interview for my Notable Black Memphians book—and irony of ironies, the Cozy Corner is two doors down from Bill's Twilight Lounge, where Eth used to hold his Free People's Poetry Workshops, but it, too, was vacant, boarded up, unoccupied for over five years they told me. I feel like I'm running after a ghost, but I can feel his bones, his belly, him looking through stone.—Miriam

Thanks for this one and for Me & First Woman. Good stuff—Kam

posted 23 February 2006; revised 30 November 2011

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