Iowa Journal of Literary Studies

Back matter, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 11.1

Boyd, Todd E.

DEEP IN THE SHED: THE DISCOURSE OF 
AFRICAN-AMERICAN CINEMA
Todd E. Boyd
ELVIS, H e W as  a h e r o  to  m ost,  b u t  h e  n e v e r  m e a n t  sh it to  m e , y ou  see, 
s t r a ig h to u t  racist, th e  su c k e r  was s im p le  a n d  p la in , m o th e r fu c k  h im  
a n d  J o h n  W ayne .
— Public Enemy
The polemical poets, Public Enemy, have in the above sentence 
conducted a most rigorous critique of American culture and society 
within the twentieth century. Having deconstructed two of the most 
prolific icons of white male supremacy, Public Enemy demonstrates 
what I see as the primary task of African-American intellectual 
activity, the rewriting of American history, society, and culture with a 
black pen. Whereas traditional definitions of intellectual activity re­
volve around a specifically logocentric white male definition, which 
primarily argues that intellectuals somehow come from various aca­
demic institutions, African-American intellectuals, because of an 
obvious denial to the academic means of production, have emerged 
from certain circumscribed places within the society and exist as 
products of an oral culture, which functions in direct opposition to 
white Western literate culture. According to Cornel West:
[T]here are two organic intellectual traditions in Afro-American life: The Black 
Christian Tradition of Preaching and The Black Musical Tradition of Performance. Both 
traditions, though undoubtedly linked to the life o f  the mind, are oral, improvisa- 
tional, and histrionic. (114)
West seems to totalize the intellectual tradition by reducing it down to 
these two poles, denying the inclusion of Paul Robeson or Malcolm X, 
for instance. Yet, what seems interesting in this assertion regards the 
thrust of an American hegemonic exclusionary practice, which has 
only allowed for articulation in the realm of Eurocentric Christianity 
and black musician performing for a primarily white-owned music 
industry.
How do we then begin to theorize about those instances of black
99
intellectual expression which exist outside of the two dominant 
traditions mentioned by West? My concerns in this paper involve 
exploring the cinema as an act of black intellectual activity. Black 
cinema, within American society, especially recent examples, such as 
the films of Spike Lee or Robert Townsend, utilizes the combination 
of a technologized visual medium, with tenets specific to black oral 
tradition, to create a cinema that articulates and rearticulates, estab­
lishing an Afrocentric discourse that challenges the dominant white 
discourse on blacks in American society:
Any film whose signifying practices or whose making of symbolic images emanates
from an essential cultural matrix deriving from a collective black socio-cultural and
historical experience and uses black expressive traditions as a means through which
artist languages are mediated. (Yearwood 70-71)
Two of the most important eras of black intellectual activity have been 
the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Aesthetic Move­
ment of the late 60s and early 70s. In both time periods, the 
ideological function of artist products stood at the forefront of most 
discussions. Yet the cinema remains visibly absent from both eras. In 
the two most recognized anthologies chronicling the respective move­
ments, The New Negro and The Black Aesthetic, the cinema does not 
exist.
In the case of the 1920s, film as an art form existed in its infancy. 
This is only thirty some odd years since the exhibition of the first film 
and only twenty-two years after the exhibition of The Great Train 
Robbery, the film considered to be the first narrative film. Black film 
production during the 1920s was either sporadic or involved the 
production of films that used entirely black casts and were directed at 
primarily black audiences, but were produced by white-owned inde­
pendent companies. Therefore, not only did film exists as a relatively 
new artist form as far as the society at large was concerned, but the 
relative dearth of black films by black directors and producers, 
authorial identity being a component of both eras, inhibited the 
inclusion of film as viable political weapon in the expression of the 
New Negro. Not only that, but Oscar Micheaux, the most prolific 
black director/producer of the 20s, and any subsequent period for that 
matter, worked in the Midwest, while the Harlem Renaissance took 
place in the East, creating a financial and geographical obstacle for the 
unity of these two practices.
The arguments presented about the Harlem Renaissance seem 
incompatible with the time period for the Black Aesthetic movement. 
By the 1960s film had certainly etched an indelible mark on American 
cultural history. Even though black cinematic production had not 
achieved the commercial success of its larger white counterpart, it did
100
by this time exist. One wonders why a film like Sweetsweetback’s Baddass 
Song did not make the pages of the Gayle edited text. The insertion of 
film into this period of black intellectual activity, or better yet, the 
exclusion of film, stands as a concern of historical inquiry which 
should be discussed further, but exists beyond the scope of this paper.
I would like to postulate a theory of black cinematic discourse in the 
absence of a culturally generated one from the time periods already 
discussed. Black cinema can be described as a syncretic process. Paul 
Gilroy states:
Black expressive cultures affirm while they protest. The assimilation of blacks is not 
a process of acculturation, but of cultural syncretism. Accordingly, their self­
definitions and cultural expressions draw on a plurality of black histories and 
politics. (155)
Black cinema combines the technological medium of film, rooted in 
Western technology, with certain components of black oral tradition. 
The use of the technology affirms, while the reliance on the oral 
expressivity protests against.
This process of cultural syncretism can be seen as best exemplified 
through the idiom of jazz. Early attempts at producing jazz, for 
example, Buddy Bolden playing the cornet in a New Orleans march­
ing band in the late 1800s, combine Western literate music, with 
various rhythmic stylizations directly from African tradition. The use 
of the African musical style, based on the culture of orality, rearticu- 
lates the manner in which music had been played up until that time. 
The oral segment of the music provides the protestation against 
Western literate music:
It could be said with a certain amount o f accuracy that oral culture was, by nature, 
an underground culture, in the context of literate America; that simply being a 
Negro in America was grounds for nonconformity. (Sidran 80)
Similar incidents of jazz as protest emerge in the context of Be-bop 
jazz, where black musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and 
Kenny Clarke alter what had been foregrounded as mainstream jazz, 
Swing, embodied by white musicians like Benny Goodman. When the 
dominant culture attempted to define, black oral culture redefined.
Following the Be-bop revolution, a series of white jazz musicians 
attempted to, once again, move the definition of jazz to a position 
outside of the black idiom. West Coast, or “cool” jazz, emerged. 
Initially, Miles Davis made an album entitled The Birth of the Cool in 
1949. Adapting the “cool” label from Davis a series of white jazz 
musicians began to perform this “cool” jazz, yet this music sounded 
totally different from the music performed on the Davis album. Also, 
the move to the West Coast becomes significant because of its 
geographical distance from Harlem, the place where Be-bop and the
101
black musicians existed. So not only does the music become saccharin- 
ized, but the actual move away from Harlem signals another attempt at 
taking the music outside of oral culture.
Once again, black musicians redefined the idiom by inventing a 
style of music that reverted back to a specifically blues or “soul” 
idiomatic style. The pianist, Horace Silver, and the group he was at 
one time associated with, the Jazz Messengers featuring drummer Art 
Blakely, personify the blues/soul approach. This foregrounding of an 
earlier form of black oral tradition mediated through the Western 
technological instruments demonstrates the syncretic qualities of jazz 
at its best:
The Jazz Messengers, above all, stressed the ability to play the blues. They thus 
further stressed the advancement of  techniques valid only in terms of an oral 
approach. The blues techniques developed by black jazz musicians often appeared 
unschooled, yet they were, in terms of good blues playing, superior techniques. As 
the black culture began to accept the validity o f uniquely black solutions to 
problems of structure and content and as these solutions gained greater exposure, 
a combination of confidence and outrage ̂ unparalleled in black American 
history—developed. It was on the basis of this new aggressiveness—as represented 
by the “soul” phenom enon—that many politically active Negroes gained the 
confidence to claim that integrationist trends in America, for example, were 
potentially misdirected. (Sidran 132)
This same trend can be seen in black cinema, that of definition/ 
redefinition. For instance, the attempt to define the question of blacks 
in American society through film by The Birth of a Nation (1915) was 
championed by then president Woodrow Wilson as “history written in 
lightning.” After the release of this film, Emmet J. Scott, secretary for 
Booker T. Washington, set out to redefine this question by producing 
The Birth of a Race. Though this film in its final release was totally 
different than its initial intention, the act itself constitutes a rejection 
of the white definition of blackness.
Another example of this syncretic process can be seen in the Spike 
Lee film She’s Gotta Have It. This film foregrounds the oral nature of 
black cinema. The first scene of the film is a quote from the Zora 
Neale Hurston novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Immediately 
following this scene we see a series of black images in still photograph. 
Then the film’s main character, Nola Darling, shot straight on, much 
like a “talking head” in a television news segment, directly addresses 
the spectators. Their dialogue can be summed up as an attempt to 
“clear her name.” She closes out the conversation with a phrase from 
black vernacular, “This was the deal.” We have heard “Nola’s story” in 
a specifically oral manner. In traditional Hollywood cinema, charac­
ters are introduced through the context of the film, their actions serve 
to define them. Whereas, in this film characters introduce themselves 
through oral discourse. Thus, the orality of African-American story­
102
telling has been combined with the visuals of cinema.
This cinematic practice demonstrated by Spike Lee helps to create 
a vernacular cinema, in the sense that it deviates from the standard 
cinematic language of Hollywood. Houston Baker states:
The vernacular in relation to human beings signals “a slave born on his master’s 
estate.” In expressive terms, vernacular indicates “arts native or peculiar to country 
or locale.” The material conditions of slavery in the United States and the rhythms 
of Afro-American blues combined and emerged from my revised materialistic 
perspective as an ancestral matrix that has produced a forceful and indigenous 
American creativity. (2)
Black cinema, as it combines the technology of Western society with 
aspects of black oral culture, must also develop a critical apparatus 
that looks to explicate these oral tendencies, or as Henry Louis Gates, 
Jr. has stated in another context, the signifying black difference. At­
tempts to critique black cinema on “white” terms place the cinematic 
text on a critical “Procrustean bed,” eliminating that which exists as 
specific to black culture and focusing on simply the film as text, 
instead of as an instance of black cultural expressivity.
An example of a new critical approach to black cinema can be seen 
in an episode from Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle. Instead of At 
the Movies, the Siskell and Ebert movie review program, we get Sneakin 
in the Movies, movies critiqued by some “real brothers.” The content of 
this entire scene revolves around a criticism of “white” films from a 
black vernacular perspective. For instance, one movie, entitled 
Amadaeus Meets Salarious, is given “the finger,” because, in the words 
of the critic, “I’m sick of movies that I can’t pronounce the title. A 
muthafucker got to be able to tell his woman where he gonna take 
her.” Though comical, the scene demonstrates the need for criticism 
of black films which pays attention to the intricacies of black cultural 
and cinematic discourses.
This paper can only be seen as a preliminary attempt at a theori­
zation of the question of race in American cinema and culture. What 
seems most interesting about this project revolves around the combi­
nation of a Western technological phenomenon, the cinema, and 
black oral discourse. Because of the means of production in cinema 
being at times unattainable, the production of black cinematic texts 
appears sporadically. When these texts do appear, they are often 
denied distribution on a massive scale, thus limiting the exhibition of 
these films to art house and film festival circuits, and limiting their 
audience to a select few black and white bourgeois. This, I argue, 
makes these films less useful for a theorization of black cinema, 
because inherent in this theorization is an impulse to theorize black 
spectatorship as well. If only a few people see the films, what happens 
to a collective black struggle? This paper only scratches the surface of
103
what I see as a larger project, that of relating black intellectual output, 
cultural discourse, and cinematic production and reception in a larger 
social and political context.
WORKS CITED
Baker, Houston. Blues, Ideology, and African-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Talking That Talk.” “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Ed.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U o f Chicago P, 1984.
Gayle, Addison, Jr., ed. The Black Aesthetic. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971.
Gilroy, Paul. There A in’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and 
Nation. London: Hutchinson P, 1987.
Gladstone, Yearwood. “Towards a Theory of Black Cinema Aesthetics,” Black 
Cinema Aesthetics. Athens, OH: Ohio U Center for Afro-American Studies, 1982. 
Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro. New York: Atheneum P, 1986.
Sidran, Ben. Black Talk. New York: Decapo P, 1983.
West, Cornel. “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual.” Cultural Critique Spring 1986.
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105


English

Deep in the Shed: The Discourse of African-American Cinema

Herrera, Juan Felipe

THIS WAS IOWA
Juan Felipe Herrera
A feverish air seemed to wave from the flowers.
They opened their charred blossoms; light 
curled, uncurled; inside the gold eyes, pollen, sand, 
a lifting cane of thin bone.
I was looking at an art book on Georgia O’Keeffe 
across from the First National Bank in Iowa City
I didn’t want to get lost in there, so I stared away 
getting familiar in a small town.
But, I wanted to ignore everything, even
if every thing, now, finally wanted to flush and fly
inside the thick pink lines in my chest.
My mother painted remembrances, absences 
on the east side of our tent in Fowler, California.
She always told me farmworkers had the kindest lips. 
But, how could they if they always suffered fevers, 
tilling row after row, bowing to the sickle-shape 
darkness beneath the vines?
We would rise up early,
gazing at the hazel canvas stretching above us; 
a frayed wool chasm in clouds. We would spin
golden shafts for a ranch house and
carefully picture the haystacks surveying our land
with their arms crossed, waiting for us.
A few feet away, outside the bookstore, a woman’s face 
softened into olive oil. You could have seen
65
the quiet glass of years pouring down the eyes.
She was not crying
or even talking, yet, her hands were shaking, a little.
It could have been a brush of shredded clouds or 
the curve of a waterfall, shredded too, colliding 
somewhere,
echoing here, across our eyes, in this air.
I mean her face was turning this way, 
unknowingly, as if answering to a distant surrender 
still smoldering in me, unexpectedly, my mother’s 
last breath still resounding.
Now it seems everything is alive and burning.
It seems there are resurrections after all, but how 
can they all speak at the same hour?
I was asking questions;
a tall man from San Francisco; a worn leather jacket 
leaning into the baroque table of the shore.
My coat was indigo with sadness.
You couldn’t see my forehead, my hands or my feet. 
They were still turning to themselves; 
cooing stones in a sand of silence.
I wanted a sparkling fleece 
draped around my darkness.
A Chicano boy came up to me
and pointed at the foam biting my legs.
He saw it a while ago, he said.
I remembered him when we played in my backyard, 
carving dirt trails for our favorite marble shooters
and later,
carrying perfect eggs from Mr. Raya’s falling barn.
And at sixteen, I remembered
how he embraced his small mother when his father died, 
holding her heart with the left hand
66
and in his right hand nothing but a limp hat of air 
in the rented room on 11th street, San Diego.
My shirt was open, guiding the cutting breeze, 
the salt, the ocean. We wanted to talk all evening.
Then, with his bashful chin he motioned to the 
Mid-West,
away from everyone.
This was the upside down night covered
with a powdery sea-green robe. Go there, he said.
Pure phosphor.
There, even the moon was pure phosphor, 
a fresh slice inside a black throat. Go there 
and you will find me.
I turned away and
began paging through the bibliography 
on the back of O’Keeffe’s cover.
I wanted to find Steve Biko, or Winnie or Mandela 
and ask them about art and walk into their studios and 
for once see twenty-five million people painting 
one country at the same time.
I never saw that happen in the United States. I couldn’t 
explain
the odd lights singeing, everywhere. And the mad 
turpentine,
spilling from every corner.
And this young man walking so close to me 
and now lost?
He was probably out there now. Who knows?
Maybe, walking up Highway 6, hitching to West Liberty,
ready to strike
the translucent shank bone on a conveyor at the I.B.P. 
factory.
He had warned me:
67
this is the Mexican masterpiece of the heartland; 
all these lost sinews, hushed stumps of speckled clay; 
the crazy brass spines stripped of their common gold 
and the furious blood churning from the stone plate.
Look at me!
No one paints this.
But, how to paint it?
Who shall paint it, who?
My belly was full of magnets.
I was being pulled somewhere away from the shade. 
Suddenly, I tossed what I had and slammed my fist 
on a store front wall.
I didn’t care. I wanted to ride the red rings inside the 
plywood.
I really wanted to find a rock and then an eagle 
devouring a serpent. It was time for the birth of a 
nation.
Maybe, it would be full of squirrels 
bouncing across the roads never dying 
beneath the soft blades of the tire.
I was outside, hanging
in the brightness, the last brightness of the day.
It was never as hot. I was thirsty, 
but I didn’t want to slow down.
I couldn’t drink anyway. It was impossible. What was it? 
Was it about infinite brush strokes and singing brushes 
and having glowing arms and long sable fingers?
Then, could I create something, 
like a watery blue for this thirst?
Or fountain flared arms
for the workers of this hammering world?
Could I make an elegant neck
full of courage and laughter
with the friendly voice of my father?
68
I was shaking the hair on my head 
full of black and white turning 
up the long, humid, radiant streets.
Maybe, I was coming home, at last, a farm boy from the 
California North,
a tumbling branch of Mexican wind from the Mission 
District, maybe
I was finally painting that Matisse-colored storm buried 
in my notebooks,
so long ago; green burning against yellow-red with my 
bare hands
boiling up from the shore; the lunar eyes of my lover in 
my mirrors.
All my spirits, searching for a tender altar of bleached 
sea-stones,
the amber crown of fire for my mother’s ashes, almost 
brilliant, in here
in this oil, this sweat of gnarled stems and shredded 
scepters guarded
by the barbed wing of the warrior cricket, going fast 
underneath wild corn
without the necessary waters, in the drought of ’88. This 
was Iowa.
I was standing up kissing the cardinal’s scarlet heart.
I didn’t want the art anymore; the style, the form.
I was asking questions: can you lead me to the night 
dance
of the Holy Cricket and the Empress Cicada?
That is all, I was asking. This is all I need.
I want to meet them: the accomplished poets of rage.
You who rebuke the gods in the galleries,
you who cast away the Pig Masters from the gates of our
hamlets, you
who avenge the Brown families of the desert with the 
electric whip
of your wise lightning canes.
Then, somehow,
Mandela’s spirit flickered above the hills
for a second, or was it my mother, Lucha Quintana?
69
I saw an opal wind funnel near the corn fields, I heard a 
call
for a covenant between the clouds and their lost rainbow 
children.
Then, someone murmured, only insects and birds know 
true unity.
I was walking with the cadence of my father, Felipe 
Emelio, now.
It wasn’t O’Keeffe anymore, or the fettered flames 
against
the opaque skin of pages.
I just wanted the eye of the sky, the compassionate iris of 
sea-pollen
to greet me with a fanned stairway, a grandmother’s 
docile bouquet.
Give me back, I sang, this immortal canvas where I have 
lived.
Give me back the bundled fires of all our cargos, 
the abstract embers blazing beneath me; I want them 
unwrapped
from the merciless coals, I want them blurring into wing, 
into wetness; they who are the rain for this land, 
so parched with thirst and blood and wandering 
darkness.
70
71


This Was Iowa

Hausman, Bernice

Anti-Semitism in Feminism: Rethinking Identity Politics

Reckling, Ann

Fagioli

VonMilla, Hans

RUST BELT
Hans VonMilla
Rusting in your orchard sits an old Dodge milk truck 
With exuberant wartime fenders like Betty Grable’s 
thighs
You whiz by the hulk daily 
Not noticing, never thinking 
It’s a crying shame
Your dad rescued it from land barons
Who bulldozed the stonerows
And hauled away the past
Nine cubic yards at a time
We named the old truck and loved it
The way you’d love a three-legged hound
Cousin Chris and I drove it a thousand miles
Never moving an inch
For a dozen years it hauled the stuff to build your 
dreams
But after Viet Nam you parked it
Between an apple tree and forever
Near the family homestead, which like the old truck
Sits rotting, windows falling out, unpainted
Returning to the earth it came from
Now you have your own bulldozers 
And large new trucks with 
Seven point three liter Navistar diesels 
Shiny reminders that in our family 
We can’t be bothered with the old things 
We’re like our grandparents 
Who burned the Edison phonograph 
The day they bought a new Victrola
81


Rust Belt

Mandelbaum, Paul

TURNPIKE
Paul Mandelbaum
Tom Horty has been living in my house since September. During a 
moment of weakness I took him in. He’s filled the space left by my 
ex-husband. Tom Horty and I are lovers, without love.
I’m frying chicken for Tom. It’s one of his favorite things, and we 
have it every Friday night. After I serve him, I pare the apples for 
tonight’s pie, another ritual. Cherry will not do. Tom hates surprises. 
That’s why, he occasionally reminds me, he’s always been a stockbro­
ker and never an investor. Carefully, I carve around a bruise. Behind 
me I can hear Tom licking his fingers.
“Pie’s in the oven,” I tell him as I grab my purse. “I’m going over to 
check on Doris.”
“She’s all right. You’ve gone the last two nights in a row, Lois. Why 
can’t you just call her?”
“She is not all right!” And then, quietly, “You could come.”
“I don’t need to get depressed.”
I’m at the door by now. I find my key ring and hold it moment, 
noticing its weight. It’s been a long day, and I’m tired. My arms are 
filling with fatigue. No, they’re emptying of their strength. And the 
space that the strength has left behind is being taken up by guilt. 
Glaring at Tom ’s back, I stab the seven digits of my sister’s phone 
number.
“Lo-ie!” she cheers. “How are you? Coming by? You can meet B.B.” 
“Not tonight, Doris. It’s been a hard day. I’m beat.”
“That’s too bad,” Doris says, through the joyous crunching of some 
kind of chip. “B.B. says that if I’m feeling up to it, we’ll go to see his 
property this Sunday. Want to come?”
“B.B.”
“The guy I met in the hospital. Big guy. Gallstones. Nice man. Want 
to come?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t.” I say this as softly as possible.
43
“Can’t that bum take care of himself for one crummy day?”
“Please don’t say that.”
“Excuse me. Mr. Horty. He’s taken over your whole life.”
“He just likes us to spend the weekends together,” I say, even 
though my sister has a point.
“Suit yourself. Hey Loie, guess what? I lost another ten pounds.” 
Doris laughs heartily. “This is the best diet I’ve ever been on.”
“Lois,” Tom Horty calls, rattling the dice cup from the backgam­
mon set, and I wonder why he’s here, in my house.
“It was like being on a superspeed train and walking up the aisle. 
Everything was so smooth and effortless,” he once explained, telling 
me why, years before, he’d walked out on his wife and children. “And 
I’d look out the windows as I strolled by them, and I’d think I was 
running at a hundred miles an hour. It scared the hell out of me.” 
Maybe this is why I took him in: to learn why a man leaves his wife.
Four years ago, somewhere on the turnpike, our air conditioning 
broke. This wouldn’t have been so bad had my husband, Herb, not 
insisted it still worked. He made us keep the windows rolled tight. 
Controlled them with a master switch as he drove our rental car at 55 
miles per hour.
The vacation was Herb’s idea, a desperate attempt to pretend we 
were normal. You’d rather be doing this with someone else, I wanted 
to say. Who is she, I wanted to ask.
Farther south, the highway was dark and full of insects.
“Can we change this station?” I asked my husband. We were 
listening to an evangelical forum called “What Does It Mean to Be 
Happy?” The car windows were still rolled up, and I was getting 
woozy for air.
“No,” Herb said, “We’ve been up and down the band. There are no 
good radio stations in this state. I happen to be enjoying these 
ministers, or whatever they’re called.”
“I’m not.”
“Well, I’m the driver.”
“Pull over and I’ll drive.”
“Don’t give me a hard time right now,” he said, tugging at his ear 
lobe, a nervous habit he’d enlist when he didn’t want to listen. “I have 
a headache.”
“You’d rather be on this vacation with someone else.”
“Yes.”
“Who?” I asked, bracing myself for the names of my friends, or the 
youthful and exotic name of a stranger.
“Anybody,” he said.
44
“Pull over and let me drive!” I whispered so fiercely that I scared 
both of us.
As he slowed the car on the emergency shoulder, Herb began to 
unfasten his seat belt. It left a dark stripe of moisture across his shirt. 
“I’m taking a walk,” he said. He ambled along the road’s shoulder for 
a few yards. Grinding my teeth, I said nothing.
Saturday afternoons I mow the lawn, which is mostly weeds, but 
they need cutting, too. The exercise relaxes me. I wish I had a 
destination instead of walking in circles. With one-tenth of the lawn to 
go, Tom offers to “take a turn.” I go inside and, from the kitchen 
window, I watch him do leg stretches. Painstakingly, he combs the 
patch of unmowed lawn for small twigs and other potential shrapnel. 
The actual mowing takes three minutes.
Pressing a handkerchief to his forehead, he enters the kitchen. 
“Ruined,” he says and points to his new sneakers, now green with 
grass blood. “I’ve got to take a shower.”
He spends the rest of the afternoon recovering, and I amuse myself 
preparing a leg of lamb.
Dinner, as usual, is a quiet time. It’s the sounds of chewing and 
swallowing, of knives drawn against plates and ice cubes rattling inside 
their glasses, and the rumble of Tom ’s stomach. The stove clock hums, 
reminding me of the mouse that once lived inside my oven, and I feel 
a shiver of revulsion. The trap I’d set snapped across the mouse’s leg, 
merely injuring him. Filled with guilt, I tossed its still breathing body 
into the trash.
Dinner’s over. Tom ’s in the living room, lost in his spy thriller, and 
I’m staring at my kitchen counter, which is a mess. The juices on the 
chopping block ought to congeal in an hour or so. I resolve to leave it 
for tomorrow.
Standing in the doorway, I ask, “Would you like to go somewhere 
tonight?”
“It’s too late,” he says. He lifts his Rolex in my direction.
“It’s only eight o’clock.”
He continues to read and ignores me. When Herb used to do that 
it would really get under my skin. I look at the top of Tom Horty’s 
frizzy, gray head and am surprised by its ugliness.
As I start to walk out of the room, he calls to me: “Your subscription 
to Forbes has almost run out.”
“I know. I’m thinking of letting it go.” I close my eyes and listen to 
the long silence.
Finally, he says, “I read it.”
45
That night I dream about the highway. I dream about my husband, 
Herb, standing outside the stopped car, relieving himself in the 
weeds. The radio is still tuned to the forum, “What Does It Mean To 
Be Happy?” I shut it off. That makes me a little happy.
I undo my seat belt, slide behind the steering wheel and lower all 
the windows at once with the master switch. Herb looks at the car, 
quizzically. I turn the ignition key, shift into gear, and wave to him.
To my credit, I do actually hope that another car will stop soon and 
pick him up. But it will have to be another car. I am driving this one.
I wake to the sound of persistent honking. Looking out my window, 
I see a bright red pickup truck parked out front.
“Lo-ie!” calls Doris, leaning out the truck window. “Come out and 
play!”
I throw on shorts and a shirt and run outside.
“Come on, Loie. Come with us. We’re going to see B.B.’s property. 
Just for a few hours.” She’s beaming at me. I’m very glad to see her.
“You know I can’t just go off without—”
“That bum,” she says.
“Say,” says the large man behind the steering wheel, “why don’t you 
bring this bum fellow along. We’ve room.” His accent’s British.
“Oh, Loie, this is B.B. B.B., Loie.” Doris leans back so that B.B. and 
I can get a good look at each other. He’s got one of those big bellies 
that people find jolly in older men. He seems familiar.
“Hello.” He smiles at me.
“Hello,” I say. “Doris, Tom ’s not going to want to go. He won’t be 
back from his Sunday morning walk for another twenty minutes, and 
then he’s going to want his eggs.”
“Come without him,” B.B. laughs. “Even more room then.”
“Come,” Doris says. Her hand wraps easily around my wrist. I’m 
surprised at the strength she still has. “Come come come come come.” 
Doris, always the nicer one, now cancer-ridden and still sweeter. 
Imagine, then, what must be growing rampantly inside of me.
I back away from the truck slowly, then sprint into the house. I take 
several minutes to compose a note for Tom, tearing up two versions 
before I finally say, “Doris needed me for the day. Burritos and 
guacamole in fridge.”
Doris scoots next to B.B. and I slide in beside her.
“B.B. owns a car dealership,” she says cheerily as we drive off.
“Truly barbaric,” he adds, laughing. “But the money is fantastic.”
“I’ve seen your ads on TV,” I say. “You wear a chicken suit, don’t 
you?”
“C’est moi, le chicken,” he says, turning down his cb radio. “Some
46
grown men would find it degrading to climb into such a suit.”
“It’s B.B.’s favorite part,” Doris says.
“Absolutely.”
“That’s amazing,” I say, and he smiles at me.
My sister opens a box of chocolate truffles and eats one. She picks 
out another, holds it up to my mouth. I open wide, and she gently 
places it on my tongue. The bitter cinnamon dust dissolves into a dark, 
rich sweetness. I remember the taste from our childhood. Doris offers 
to feed me another, and I let her. How cowardly of me to blame her 
in my note to Tom.
She plucks the cb microphone out of its holder. “Breaker, breaker,” 
she says. “I, Doris Carden, being of sound mind and let’s leave it at 
that, want to make my last wishes known here.”
I flush with embarrassment and shake my head no.
“It’s OK, Loie. All the particulars are written down. I just want to 
say it over the air for show. I, Doris Carden, leave everything to my 
dear sister, Loie, to use however she wants. Except for one item, any 
one item, to be selected by my friend, B.B., who has more money than 
he knows what to do with.”
“Any one thing?” B.B. asks.
“Any one thing.”
“Your bath soaps, that their sweet scent will remind me of you.”
Doris turns to me and, looking a little misty-eyed, says, “Do you hear 
that? God, sometimes this man gets to me.”
I smile and lean my head out the window and let my hair blow 
across my face. I’m thinking about my dream the night before, in 
which I’ve driven off, leaving Herb behind. In real life, of course, it 
didn’t happen quite that way. Herb zipped up his pants, and after 
returning to the car, he remained married to me a while longer.
B.B. helps Doris out of the truck cab. We’re standing on a grassy 
hill, two hours or so from home, overlooking a field of wild flowers. 
Beyond it, squares of farmland, the crisscross of country roads. Far 
away I can make out the steeple of a small church.
“What a gorgeous spot,” I tell him. “Are you planning to build a 
house?”
“No,” B.B. says. “I don’t think so. I just plan to come here when I 
need to walk around.” We stroll along the sloping meadow, through 
the sweet-scented air. To come here whenever I wanted, walk for 
hours, sustain myself with berries and walk some more . . .
We spread our blanket and sit. B.B. sprawls across half of it, and 
Doris leans her head against his chest. I unpack the picnic my sister 
has prepared: grape leaves, goat cheese, a wheel of dark bread,
47
roasted chicken stuffed with new potatoes and dill, two bottles of 
Zinfandel. We eat leisurely and then nap in the late afternoon sun.
When I awake, B.B. is cradling a ukulele in his large hands, 
strumming the chords to “My Blue Heaven.” “Just Doris and me,” he 
croons in his British baritone, “and Loie makes three. . . .”
By twilight we still haven’t moved and soon the first fireflies blink. 
Doris and I wait for them to float near, cup them in our hands, and let 
them go.
I’m barely through the door before Tom says, “Lois, it’s after ten. 
What kind of a stunt is this?”
He stands in the middle of the hallway. I brush past him and say, “If 
you were worried—”
“Not worried, angry. Four o’clock, four-thirty, five, dinner time 
rolls around, and the kitchen is a mess . . .” Tom gets a St. Pauli Girl 
out of the fridge, opens the right hand drawer, finds the bottle 
opener, and leaves it out when he’s done.
The kitchen is still dirty from last night’s dinner. I gaze at the pots 
in the sink and the soiled counter top. My eye rests on the cutting 
board, on the chefs knife, with its walnut handle and ten-inch, 
carbon-steel blade. An anniversary present from Herb.
“What are you thinking?” Tom asks, his voice suddenly dry and 
crusty. He’s scared, I think, because it’s never occurred to him, until 
now, just whose kitchen he’s in.
48
49


Turnpike

Haddock, John

Cutout Man in Suit on Board

McCracken, Elizabeth

TH E WOMANLESS WEDDING. 
CAST OF 80 LOCAL BUSINESSMEN, 
VALLEY JU N CTIO N , IOWA, 
MARCH 24-26, 1926
Elizabeth McCracken
I think Harry J.
married Babe Who Runs the Tavern 
and Babe made an ugly girl, 
a big heap in cerise.
Under less cloth and more paint, 
they halved up and married up 
at the Oddfellow’s over Keller’s Deli. 
Small men wore big false beards; 
big men turned lantern-jawed ladies; 
some blacked their faces.
They all looked like cartoons— 
except Keller, who was sweet enough 
to be his own wife, and said so, 
till the real missus showed up.
Only his knees gave him away, 
big headlights, poking through 
the pink fringe of his dress.
No knees like that on any girl.
Except maybe his daughter, 
who was seen later 
at the party, prying the crown caps 
off bottles of homemade beer 
with her teeth.
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The Womanless Wedding. Cast of 80 Local Businessmen, Valley Junction, Iowa, March 24-26, 1926

Front matter, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 11.1

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