Chattahoochee
Because I am a child of the South, well before I reach the reference mid-poem, I hear in Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s “Chattahoochee” the echo of that other southern river, the Tallahatchie, where Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam discarded the body of 14-year-old Emmett Till after they tortured and murdered him. The all-white jury swiftly acquitted the killers—all but one later admitting they believed the men had lynched the boy, but felt the punishment unfit for taking a life they disdained—and so Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobly, published the photographs of her son’s mutilated body in Jet. There is, she insisted, a law outside the state’s contrived regime of anti-Blackness, and it was to this law that she appealed.
“The river / is a courtroom,” Van Clief-Stefanon writes, echoing this call to a different order. But even as “Chattahoochee” affirms the knowledge that exceeds human brutality, it refuses easy recourse to some primal, eternal wisdom. “I changed the river,” the poem opens, immediately unsettling any facile sense of enduring, untouched nature that might simply deliver us answers. After all, Van Clief-Stefanon reminds us, a river is no more natural than a mother—and what is the inheritance of a motherhood fraught with the threat of having to bury your killed child? But neither the riverbed nor the stories we tell about it are fixed; we can revise the terms of our passage. As Van Clief-Stefanon writes, “She’s taken the law into // her own hands.”
– Claire Schwartz
Chattahoochee
I changed the river, changed
my gender, curved
my mama’s very specific
warning around the bend
my ear heard but didn’t
hear her careful you don’t end
up in—the gin, another
mother’s public
grief, the general’s
in the open
casket, a lynch pin
I mistook. Unrolled,
the silk bolt is
a silty asylum in Florida.
I am sitting bolt upright in
my bed, coming to in time,
to see my mama slowly
backing out. The river
is a courtroom. I, a woman
in my 50s drenched
in sweat, the desecrated child
horror my body shapes
into a tumor
the size of a grapefruit
to keep a child
from growing in the dead
water careful
womb. The Tallahatchie
is not—the Chattahoochee.
A woman is on trial.
(Somewhere in the gallery,
Zora takes notes for
an article. Somewhere
in another time and place
Zora throws back
her head and laughs and
laughs and loves
the sight of herself. Somewhere,
in the library I reach for
the word of God in me, coming to
a river.) She’s taken the law into
her own hands, the narrative’s
taken a turn. She steps across
into what the state calls madness.
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Black Swan, winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize; Open Interval, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Purchase, forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press. She has been awarded fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, the Lannan Foundation, and NYSCA/NYFA.
