Volume 10 193
well, as if to indicate his profound disagreement
with his neighbors. The stanza concludes: “She was
someone.” That line does not end the sentence,
however, which continues in the tenth stanza:
and now is no one, buried or burned
or dissected; but gone. And I ask you
again, how would it be? To go on with your life,
putting gas in the tractor, keeping down thistles ...
Taylor’s speaker, unlike the men in the post
office, understands that this body was a woman and
that, despite her many connections and associa-
tions, the body has gone unclaimed. Whether her
body went to science, to a crematorium, or to a
grave the sad truth is that no one ever claimed her.
By asking his opening question again, Taylor trans-
forms the woman into a haunting presence that now
inhabits his speaker’s land. For better or worse this
woman is now part of his identity, his land, his
place, his heritage. Could you, he asks his readers,
go on with your life after seeing her? Even though,
weeks later, there is only “that spot” where she once
lay, her presence remains. The final lines of the fi-
nal stanza ask:
... To wonder,
from now on, what dope deal, betrayal,
or innocent refusal, brought her here,
and to know she will stay in the field till you die?
Because her presence is unresolved, unex-
plained, he conjures up three explanations. She was
involved in drugs, she was involved in some shady
deal where she betrayed someone and paid for it
with her life, or, perhaps, she was truly an innocent
victim whose refusal to do whatever she had been
asked to do got her killed. The fact that she is black
and that she has been shot immediately brings the
drug and betrayal connection to the speaker’s mind.
Would he have had the same thoughts if a well-
dressed white woman in her mid-thirties had been
discovered, or, for a white woman, would only the
last scenario present itself? This, too, is part of the
poem’s sub-text of guilt. It hides beneath the more
obvious social dimension of race. And it is that so-
cial dimension—the fact that this murdered woman
is black—that matters most. Her presence on this
white man’s farm, particularly in the southern con-
text of the poems of The Flying Change,resonates
symbolically. For in symbolic terms the black
woman who has come back, as if from no where,
to haunt him represents the black bodies of the
south. They will and must haunt the southern land-
scape in order to challenge its claim to honor, in-
tegrity, and truth. No pastoral ideal of the land can
dare deny or pretend that the black victims of the
south do not exist. Typical of his Quaker, non-con-
formist background, Taylor asserts the typical
themes of southern literature—community, history,
place—but he does so, at the end, by asking just
how much responsibility this seemingly innocent
white farmer owes to the tragic history of the land
he farms. Yes, the woman will stay with him until
he dies, as much a part of his farm as he.
The reaction to Taylor’s third book was in-
tense, so much so that it won the Pultizer Prize for
the best book of poetry published in 1985. Of all
the reactions to this collection, however, none is
more compelling than the poem by Toi Derricotte
that retells Taylor’s story. But Derricotte makes a
significant change. She asks her readers to sympa-
thize with the victim not the farmer:
Mowing his three acres with a tractor,
a man notices something ahead—a mannequin
—he thinks someone threw it from a car. Closer
he sees it is the body of a black woman.
Rather than ask how readers would feel had
they found her, she asks how it feels to be like her;
how it feels, to be, yourself, a black woman in a
majority white country. She asks what it says about
American culture that such events are so typical
anyway: “How many black women / have been
turned up to stare at us blankly” she asks. After
meditating on this grim reality, she admits, in her
concluding stanza, that “part of me wants to dis-
appear,” but rather than disappear she instead as-
serts her affiliation with her African American
community and heritage:
Then there is this part
that digs me up with this pen
and turns my sad black face to the light.
Facing the light of her identity, Derricotte un-
covers what too many readers will be likely to want
to ignore, or avoid, in Taylor’s poem. Her poem,
in effect, says that it matters fundamentally and ab-
solutely that the woman Taylor’s farmer discovers
is black. Both poets, beginning with Taylor, turn
their attention to the ongoing American dilemma
that is race relations. As fit a subject for poetry as
for prose.
Source:Jonathan N. Barron, in an essay for Poetry for Stu-
dents,Gale, 2001.Adrian Blevins
Adrian Blevins, a poet and essayist who has
taught at Hollins University, Sweet Briar College,
and in the Virginia Community College System, is
the author of The Man Who Went Out for Ciga-
rettes,a chapbook of poems, and has published po-
ems, stories, and essays in many magazines, jour-
nals, and anthologies. In this essay, BlevinsLandscape with Tractor