Frank X Walker’s newest book of poetry, Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers is an exploration into the people and events surrounding the murder of Medgar Evers.
Michelle Hite notes in her introduction that “Walker’s poems paint a vivid picture of Mississippi macabre but also of the elegance that black people make of their life there.”
So much of Medgar Evers’ contribution to the Civil Rights Movement, not only in Mississippi but in the country, has been overlooked. Walker puts us right in the middle of the people surrounding his life and death–Myrlie and Charles Evers, Willie and Byron de le Beckwith.
Medgar doesn’t have a voice on the pages; his presence is in the voices of the people survived by him. His life was cut short on the pages as in life.
One Third of 180 Grams of Lead
Both of them were history, even before one
pulled the trigger, before I rocketed through
the smoking barrel hidden in the honeysuckle
before I tore through a man’s back, shatteredhis family, a window, and tore through an inner wall
before I bounced off a refrigerator and a coffeepot
before I landed at my destined point in history
–next to a watermelon. What was cruel was the ironynot the melon, not he man falling in slow motion,
but the man squinting through the crosshairs
reducing the justice system to a small circle, praying
that he not miss, then sending me to deliver a messageas if the woman screaming in the dark
or the children crying at her feet
could ever believe
a bullet was small enough to hate.
Turn Me Lose is a unique collection of poems, in the spirit of Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah. Residing for a couple of verses in someone else’s skin reminds us of how similar we all really are.
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