The Crying Book

by Heather Christle

I heard a story of a young guy who used to go for walks with an older poet, a dispenser of lyrical wisdom. Leave the moon alone, he advised. Paige insists this kind of advice must be ignored: “Don’t trust anyone who says ‘Poetry has had enough of these things.’ Because what they’re actually saying is ‘I have had enough of these things.’ & how could anyone who’s ‘had enough of the moon’ be right about poetry?”

When Ronald Ritchie—the white man whose white wife prompted him to call 911 on John Crawford—described the scene at Walmart to the operator, he lied that Crawford had pointed the toy gun at a couple of children. In the surveillance video, you can see the children and their mother—a white woman named Angela Williams—shopping unconcernedly near Crawford. When the police arrived and shot Crawford, Williams ran in fear with her children, suffered a heart attack, and died. In the name of the protection of mythic white femininity, police killed a black man and the white woman they imagined he would make weep.

One day I call her and say that if I start to cry I want her to squawk like a chicken. When my voice starts to shake she panics and quacks like a duck. Then I am laughing and crying all at once—

My despair is stupid and greedy. It wants my life but I will not give it my life, so it bargains. Give me a finger, it says. My despair wants me to cut off my little finger, and it wants me to use the small knife with the red handle, made by Tupperware. That is how stupid my despair is.

All the crying baby dolls are white.

Writing a poem is not so very different from digging a hole. It is work. You try to learn what you can from other holes and the people who dug before you. The difficulty comes from people who do not dig or spend time in holes thinking that the holes ought not to be so wet, or dark, or full of worms. “Why is your hole not lined with light?” Sir, it is a hole.

On television, a journalist asks the demagogue if he ever cries. His reply: “No, I’m not a big crier. I like to get things done. I’m not a big crier. I’m not someone who goes around crying a lot. But I know people like that. I know plenty of people that cry. They’re very good people. But I have not been a big crier.”

in 1966, the year Dimitri Tsafendas assassinated Hendrik Verwoerd, the “architect of Apartheid.”170 Verwoerd was largely responsible for laws that forced black South Africans to live in government-designated “homelands,” and which forbade black students from attending “white universities.” Before his career as a politician, Verwoerd had worked as a psychologist. In 1926 he published an article, “A Method for the Experimental Production of Emotions.” His method did not produce tears, but it did produce satisfaction, disappointment, compassion, regret, exaltation, delight, fear, relief, shame, embarrassment, relief, malicious joy, anger (and vexation).171 Tsafendas—a multiracial, schizophrenic man who was not allowed to live with his girlfriend because of the country’s bewilderingly complicated system of racist classifications—stabbed Verwoerd in the throat and chest. Tsafendas is buried in an unmarked grave in Krugersdorp. Verwoerd is buried in Pretoria, in the “Heroes’ Acre.”