This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
Welcome to Poetry Moment. I’m Marjorie Maddox.
In Cameron Barnett’s “Emmett Till Haunts the Library in Money, MS,” the narrator is the ghost of fourteen-year-old Emmett, brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi in 1955 for “allegedly” whistling at a white woman. In the poem, the specter speaks like the young teenager he was—the lady at the front desk is “a gasbag” and “death, too, is a snore.” Don’t let the humorous slang fool you. This Ghost of America’s Past is as necessary and unnerving as Charles Dickens’ spirit. Both call us to act in the present to better the future.
Cameron Barnett is a Pittsburgh poet and teacher. He’s the author of "The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water" and "Murmur," both from Autumn House Press. His work explores the complexity of race, place, and relationships for Black people in America.
As we come to the close of Black History Month, we head towards Read Across America Day on March 2. Listen closely to Barnett’s poem, which reminds us to read, remember, and learn. Beneath the humor is a horror. Between the words is an urgency. Emmett’s ghost tells us, “I …feel the blood in my head / drip into the young adult fiction….[R]eading the periodicals. . . / [I put] names to the [other black boys] I’ll welcome through the gates soon.”
Here’s “Emmett Till Haunts the Library in Money, MS” by Cameron Barnett.
Emmett Till Haunts the Library in Money, MS
What I can’t let you know is that death, too, is a snore,
a sooty shelf of unmoving paper with some gasbag
lady at the front desk. If you knew, there’d be too many
questions how I sneak past heaven’s gates some days
to nap against the silent stacks, feel the blood in my head
drip into the young adult fiction. Mamie always preached
good posture, so I sit straight at least. When I was black
I grew used to the shuffle of visibility, to the Move boy! and
the thousand yard stare over my head. Being ghost
isn’t all new or scary—no one to ask me what came out
of my lips sixty years ago. I might as well be ink
on closed pages, lost somewhere in the archives. You can’t judge
a book by its facts or flaps or back cover, but a black boy
is the title and the illustration staring you in the face, asking
to be seen or sampled but not smothered between the other
black boys, forgotten, dog-eared and ditched. I don’t love death
but I don’t mind reading the periodicals for faces like mine,
putting names to the ones I’ll welcome through the gates soon.
That was“Emmett Till Haunts the Library in Money, MS” by Cameron Barnett from "The Drowning Boy‘s Guide to Water," copyright © 2017 by Cameron Barnett. Thanks for listening.
Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox, Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can view more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
