Call It Horses by Jessie Eerden (the reading list .TXT) 📕

only from a paper in a kitchen drawer. I could still see her in boots upon porch steps, and I missed her very much. I had so often climbed the stepstool she’d put by her sink just for me, and I had accepted wet mugs and plates into a dishtowel from her strong hands, sometimes extra aware of my own hands moving and holding as if they were someone else’s.

So I wrote a letter to Mave. I asked if she was both man and woman and told her about the boy and the things I felt and how I did not think Mother would understand. Then, when I finished all that, I continued onto another page writing about everything and feeling freedom in it. A long letter about basketball games, Dillon, Clarissa and Liza, the sad colors of fall that came so quickly and how the winter would soon look like slate. And she wrote back to me, a brief letter, in her all-caps print and incomplete sentences that made me fill in the gaps myself, writing the same way she spoke. Inside, maybe we are multiple—I remember she wrote that. After three exchanges, she enclosed a letter from you.

Your letters came on soft blue paper, written with care in blue ink, not quick and choppy like Mave’s handwriting. You did not write to me as a stranger addressing a child, asking what grade I was in and did I play any instruments and what was my favorite season. You wrote about books and sometimes music, always news of the world though never news of yourself, not what happened during the day or how old you were, or why you were writing me. Instead, you wrote about the painter Jacob Lawrence—his newest Dream painting of a Black woman sitting in a room dreaming, in one window a wedding and, in the other, someone holding a vase of flowers, always a vase of flowers, you said—and you wrote about the Civil Rights struggle, which was not much spoken of in Caudell. You suggested I study the words tribe, nation, race, words to be peeled open: where were the words born and how did we come to wield them like weapons, one nation of people over another? Nation in the Latin and the Old French peeled back to expose birth, to be born, to be uttered into the world, a spectrum of Black, White, Male, Female, each of us simply uttered like a particle of human light.

I found you peculiar. My hands shook when I read your letters.

Often you wrote of the desert, how in the Sinai you heard the original language inside of language. How in Persia there could be no larger sense of night, of scope. Mostly you wrote about words themselves, and about my own letters to Mave, which you had been reading all along. Words without limits, blurred at the edges like bog land; words as rooms one walks into, words holding million-year-old species like amber—see the trilobite and the ancient fern, the spinal column of something extinct still preserved in a word’s withered curve.

Then, when I wrote back, though I didn’t understand who you were, I wrote Dear Mave and Ruth, as if to the same person. The blue letters answered me, enclosed in Mave’s at first, and eventually only the blue letters in envelopes with Mave’s name, so Mother never knew about this woman who wrote to me something like (I don’t have it now to read exactly)—What is beautiful is you don’t write words to be remembered. You are a tiny leaf miner carving tracks in tunnels of chlorophyll on ephemeral leaves, writing out only its desire for food, like someone making tracks in snow to disappear. Because of that, the letters bring me joy here in Northampton.

You called it a second waking. We wake to words in our mouth—think of that word Mouth, lips wide and back for the O, then rounded, narrowed for the U, the diphthong. We speak what we hear, we name what is named for us: this is your mouth, these your toes, your sheaf of paper and flower seed packs, and they pet our heads and say Good as if we’re puppies pissing in the right spot. Good, you can survive. What is this? They check us, pointing: Dog. Chair. Dress. From speaking to writing, when we start to write, it’s in shadow of the spoken, an echo or repetition, the voice saying, Repeat after me with lines and shapes, and the hand in its proud flourish matches the names with the correct marks, dots, and sticks.

But some have a second waking, you said. It comes when a word does not chase after a thing, but engenders it. You write the word Light and there is light, a dim glow maybe, almost secret, but there. You write the word Bird and a new species of warbler sings. You write the story of the Tree and the tree thus grows. It all felt like myths or poems to me—bits and pieces of Egyptology and hieroglyph, these first words that wrote the real trees, the flooded river banks, the freedom of all people and nations among stars rising, and all people’s beauty, a person’s beauty as something to name and to call forth. A vase of two cut lilacs with ants furious and alive in them. Have you ever seen them so furious? you asked.

I understood to some degree what you meant about that electric current in words. I understood that when I sat down to write Dear Mave and Ruth—and eventually, during the three years, simply Dear Ruth—the air shifted, and I had a feeling of starting over from the beginning. Of being changed into myself. You sent me the collected letters of van Gogh, in which I mainly looked at the plates of paintings. I told no one, not even Clarissa, about the strange letters on blue paper, but I showed Dillon the van Gogh paintings, and he loved