and full of a hundred unfulfilled dreams of
today;
our blood eats through our veins with the
terrible destruction
of radium in our bones and rebellion in our
brains
and we wish no longer to rest.
The third part of the poem describes the
results of this wakefulness as ‘‘a dawning under-
standing / in the valleys of our spirits.’’ It is a
revolutionary state because, by questioning the
material causes of a life that is alienated from its
labor and environment, it elicits a consciousness
ofreflectivepossession; that is, a possession (and
identity) that is thoroughlymediatedby the expe-
rience of alienation, the non-identity between
oneself and the material conditions of one’s life:
Then with a longing dearer than breathing
love for the valley arises within us
love to possess and thrive in this valley
love to possess our vineyards and pastures
our orchards and cattle
our harvest of cotton, tobacco, and cane.
Love overwhelms our living with longing
strengthening flesh and blood within us
banding the iron of our muscles with anger
making us men in the fields we have tended
standing defending the land we have
rendered
rich and abiding and heavy with plenty.
We with our blood have watered these fields
and they belong to us.
Valleys and dust of our bodies are blood
brothers
and they belong to us...
What makes this form of possession unique
is that it is founded upon the very experience of
its absence: the lands have been ‘‘rent’’ by a labor
that initially could not claim them as its own, just
as the fields were watered with the blood of those
bodies that had been legally rent from them. This
might account for the ‘‘overwhelming’’ sense of
longing that Walker associates with the new-
found love for the materials of one’s labor.
Another of its aspects, however, is the explicit
masculinization of this moment of appropria-
tion, for she adds that it is ‘‘making usmenin the
fields we have tended.’’ The musculature of the
male body is identified with the material environ-
ment such that the ‘‘Valleys and dust of our bodies
are bloodbrothers.’’
If appropriation, identity, and love for that
which ‘‘belongs’’ to one are all equated here with
the world of men, Walker suggests that this implies
another form of sleep—one with ‘‘the hills beyond
for peace / and the grass beneath for rest’’ (23)—
requiring, therefore, another interruption to induce
a state of wakefulness. That is to say, a reflective
consciousness must once again intervene to disturb
this historical ‘‘possession’’ the moment the latter
begins to circumscribe and fix its sense into/as an
idealization. History, in this particular instance, is
rent or disrupted by the figure of the feminine just
as it comes into possession of its masculine ‘‘self’’:
We are like the sensitive Spring
walking valleys like a slim young girl
full breasted and precious limbed
and carrying on our lips the kiss of the
world.
What this amounts to, though, is not so much
a translation of historical meaning-as-possession
into the figure of woman, but a signal of critical
consciousness in the insistence of the trace, the
presence-as-absence, of the irreducible ‘‘other’’ of
historical meaning itself. If the poem ‘‘Dark
Blood’’ concluded with a ‘‘struggle... to reconcile’’
two conflicting, apparently exclusive senses of his-
torical inquiry, ‘‘Delta’’ clearly relocates this con-
flict in order to critically examine the gendered
and engendering structure of historical know-
ledge. What emerges from this disjunction—
between reappropriated masculine labor and a
newfound community metonymically associated
with feminine bodies (‘‘like a slim young girl’’)—
is an awareness of history’s radical opening. That
is, an awareness not of history’s complete lack of
meaning, but of the interruption entailed by any
attempt to contain its meaning within the defini-
tion of some timeless ideal—in this case, as implic-
itly either ‘‘masculine’’ or ‘‘feminine’’:
Only the naked arm of Time
can measure the ground we know
and thresh the air we breathe.
Neither earth nor star nor water’s host
can sever us from our life to be
for we are beyond your reach O mighty
winnowing flail!
infinite and free!
Also noteworthy here is that Time, like the
South in ‘‘Southern Song’’ and ‘‘Sorrow Home,’’
has become personified, given a proper name,
and thus figured as a historical agent in its own
right. In this poem, Time is what brings into
relief and desediments the gendered implications
of a revolutionary narrative coded as the story ofLineage