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He has the surname that suggests
a contested kinship: Jefferson—
the name, too, of this dead-end street
cut in half by highway 49. Here,
at the corner where it crosses Alabama,
he’s perched on the stoop, early evening,
at my cousin Tammy’s house, empty
bottles at his feet. When he sees me
opening the gate, walking up smiling,
he reads me first as white woman, then—
he says—half-breed. It’s my hair, he tells me:
No black woman got hair like that,
and my car, a sedan he insists
the cops don’t let black people drive,
not here, not without pulling them over
again and again. He’s still wearing
his work uniform—grass stains and clippings
from the mower he pushed all day—
and his name-tag, a badge, still pinned
to his collar. He tells me he’d swap the badge
for one from another boss, switch jobs
if he could get more pay; says
his boss has plenty of money: cheese,
he calls it—Man’s tight with it, he squeak
when he walk. So Roy waits, biding
his time, he says, till the Lord bless me
with something else. When he goes quiet,
I ask him the easy question—one I know
he’s been asked a hundred times—
just to hear him talk: where were you
during the storm? That’s when he tells me