The sun rose, red as a welt
over the charred brick
facade of a ruined mill,
its windows gaping like eye sockets
above a business district
that would be rebuilt to take in
my great-grandfather from Bavaria
who was swept up, black hat in hands,
at the unveiling of Robert E. Lee’s statue.
He put a Rebel flag in his lapel
to trade with the wounded and the proud
until the Depression spit out his business,
sent him off the third-story balcony,
and my grandfather, shame-faced,
to the tobacco factory, suffocating humidity,
his breath an ember in his throat.
My mother stirred rationed sugar
into her tea – the bag always re-used –
with monogrammed silver spoons.
At my school, Afros bloomed
like strange mushrooms around me –
get lost, white girl,
in the asphalt heat on the playground;
keep going past the camellia bushes
in my mother’s yard overgrown,
at supper every night, her face like concrete;
across the Huguenot Bridge, the metal railing where I fell
in love with the roar and vertigo of the James River;
the dance hall where I skulked in the raucousness
after my boyfriend left, wandered Broad Street,
chicken and ribs joints, vacant
lots where I wove through cones in driver’s ed
until I learned enough to speed
away, camshaft churning everything
slammed inside
my car heading north.

- Published in Blackbird, on-line literary journal 2002

Clara Silverstein has published poems in literary journals including the Comstock Review, the Hiram Poetry Review, and Blackbird on-line literary journal. Her memoir, "White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation" will be published by University of Georgia Press in September, 2004. She also writes for the Boston Herald and is the Program Director of the Writers' Center at Chautauqua (N.Y.)