I Am No One You Know Read Online Free PDF Page B

forgotten him, except Johnston didn’t give up, and continued to write to her. I wish to live through you! I see so much through your eyes. It was a rainy spring, a heat-paralyzed summer. She went away, and Rick went to visit his father. She returned to Johnston’s letters, packets of new poems and prose pieces. She read his poems guiltily. Was he improving? Had the man any talent, really? (Butwhat did “talent” mean, wasn’t this a middle-class, possibly racist supposition?) Johnston asked her for honest criticism but she shrank from remarks more specific than “very good!”—“excellent!”—“original image!”—“inspired!” Once, when she wrote “Unclear?” in the margin of a poem, Johnston fired back a two-page handwritten letter of defense and she thought, Never again. She had no right to interfere with the man’s imagination, in any case. His use of black street talk, jazz and rap rhythms, obscenities, a zig-zag poetry she thought it, brash and childlike in its dramatic contrasts, innocent of poetic strategies.
    She wondered if she was, unknowingly, a racist? Is this how a racist thinks?
    She gathered Johnston’s poems, some fifty new and printed, into a collection, and sent the manuscript to her New York publisher. She told Johnston nothing of this, but mailed to him, as if in parting, a popular paperback anthology, These Voices: Black American Poetry & Prose. She departed for three weeks in South America on a USIA reading tour, and when she returned letters from Johnston awaited her. She forestalled opening them. She forestalled replying. Her publisher declined Johnston’s manuscript with regret—“No market for this, I’m afraid”—and she sent it out to another publisher, a small press specializing in quality poetry. Weeks passed, and months. There came an early autumn, a fierce, dry winter. At her desk, she observed the ravine filling up with storm debris and a thin crusting of snow. When she won a literary prize, Johnston wrote to congratulate her. When she lost another, he sent condolences. You are a beautiful woman. A beautiful poet-soul. She laughed, and felt her face burn. What kind of fool does he take me for? This letter of Johnston’s she tore into pieces and threw away. What a horror if Rick should discover it. He’d be shocked, worse yet he might tease her. Hey Mom—beau-ti-ful? Cool! She hadn’t been beautiful as a smooth-faced girl in her early twenties, she wasn’t beautiful as a mature, rather worn woman in her early forties. She thought I should break this off, with him. This isn’t a wise thing.
    She ceased answering his letters. He continued writing to her, but at increasing intervals. (Had he found another correspondent? Another sympathetic white-woman poet? She hoped so.) The small press declined Johnston’s manuscript with regret, explaining they were cutting back on poetry by unknown poets, however talented.She made inquiries with other presses, hoping to send the manuscript out again, but weeks passed, no one was much interested, she began to grow tired of her own effort. She placed Johnston’s papers in a closet in her study. That summer, she went to Ireland as a guest of the Aran Islands Literary Festival, taking Rick with her, and when she returned there was a letter from the American Innocence Defense Fund in Washington, D.C. A lawyer representing Woodson Johnston, Jr., was asking her, in what appeared to be a form letter, for a contribution to help in the man’s defense. She thought, Am I surprised? No. She did feel manipulated. But why, manipulated? After all, a man is fighting for his life. Of course, she was sympathetic. Possibly he was innocent. Mistaken identity? Police coercion? False testimony for the prosecution? She made out a check for $500 and sent it to the fund and received a form letter thanking her for her generosity; she felt a wave of shame, for she’d given so little, and impulsively she made out a second check, for $1,500, and sent