QUESTION FOR HELEN by LaVon B. Carroll Helen, did you pensive chin in number-cold hand, staring out across the bloody, pitted land feel great weariness with men who, borrowing your beauty for excuse, rent each other gory limb from limb leaving you staring out upon their shattered helmets, their dented shields alone? Did you hurl your mirror your vials, your pots of unguents out among the bloodied armor, crying, "Fools, fools and traitors to leave me for so treacherous a love!" Then, did you, Helen, with a deep sigh, wash your face and braid your hair put on a long, comfortable gown and go to bed? What did you dream, Helen? Frank Cook I AM A WOMAN by Julie LaVine I am a woman without child or lover saddest species of all creeping about in my bungalow of bad weather ROGUE by Julie LaVine A time when cats go mad and weary walls lay down upon my bed to sleep and little girls in photographs step out to have some tea the world goes strange ways when you have up and gone it grows new sad seasons and rogue you are to take my sun and leave me only shadows 4 "THE BLACKER THE BERRY." by Betty S. Moore The day my father died began quite brightly crisp and orange, but by that evening the winds of fall forewarning winter had blown the leaves away. And Mama, a most precious person, followed him five years later, which would have been, let's see, last March. Neither of my parents were born in the West as I was. But they rest here now beneath the towering Wasatch mountain peaks in this little valley where I feel they are as comfortable in death as they were comfortable with the valleys of their lives. Mama who was with me longer, influenced my thinking the most. She used to say, "Folks is their own worst enemy!" I have always assumed that she included black folks in that sweeping general statement, because that's what we are. Another saying of her's was, "The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice." This one I knew referred to black people or as she called us, "Nig-grows!" But still, there was an element of inconsistency in her believing her own "berry" saying. If it had not been for Mama, God rest her soul, I would not have returned to Ogden from Washington D.C., to be teaching here after 1 had finished the university. And there is some probability that I would not have married Pres, who teaches also. Pres had not been my mother's ideal of how a man should look. I had rebelled there. But I wouldn't have come back. Not that Ogden isn't a nice little city, but compared to Washington D.C., Pres's home, it seems desolate and arid of the varied and textured cultures I'd like for the children we don't have yet. It's a part of a problem Pres and I are having. Some of our friends say that we both are overreacting, and maybe we are. Even last Sunday at church it would have been so easy to run to Loran and Maggie and spill out my concerns. They are old schoolmates and fitted what Mama must have had in mind when she said, "You can go along with this 'black is beautiful' thing, but I'm here to tell you, I'M NOT BLACK like the black on a patent leather shoe?!! No-o-oh! not me!" She paused a long time and looked directly at me in her stern little way. "Well, if I have to have a label, I 'spose we all do, 'cause it seems everybody's got one or two, then, I want to be called a Nig-grow!" Well, I knew deep inside of me that Loran and Maggie felt and thought about being called Negroes a lot like Mama, even though they were my age. The good thing about them both is that they seem down to earth now, Loran and Maggie do, even if they are a little critical of others. Never openly critical of me, except once in elementary school, when in my best starched pinafore, I had to scrape a slug of mud from its white front, flung from their hands. And to consummate their frenzy, they hurled a snotty, "Guess you think you better'n us? just because you so light!!" As I started to say, last Sunday, when Loran and Maggie had been standing outside our little white clapboard church, called Thurman African Methodist Episcopal Church, or Thurman A.M.E., where in my childhood the gospel singing had seemed to rock the rafters, they appeared as much a part of the landscape at that moment as I could imagine their mothers and grandmothers had appeared standing there many years before. As a child, I remember Loran's grandmother, Mrs. Bletson. She had been the Sunday School Superintendent. It was this tall, bespectacled woman who fascinated my insatiably curious mind, because the freckles on the nose of her tan skin moved around when she talked. "Mama?" I remember asking, "Mrs. Bletson has freckles on her nose, is she white? My mother, as she often did when confronted with a tough question, took a deep breath inward, pulled herself up in her shoulders, then sighed the long breath out before speaking. "Lord have mercy Marci, Mrs. Bletson's no more white than you or I what little white she's got in her, just shows more, I guess." She had hesitated before adding, "We all Nig-grows! someday you'll understand why our folks are all these different colors someday!" But I learned a lot from Loran's grandmother, (who, by the way, looked nothing like Loran); I learned how our church came to be called the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Wide-eyed, I had sat on the edge of the slick, wooden, mahogany colored theatre seats that my father, one of the main Trustees of that church, had helped purchase from a local show-house some years before. I was listening to Mrs. Bletson read right from the A.M.E. Discipline that in April 1816, the Negro Church was founded in Philadelphia and the Negroes there "Resolved that people of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and all other places who should unite with them, should become one body, under the name and style of the 'African Methodist Episcopal Church.'" That was our beginning. I remember Mrs. Bletson was adamant, and almost angry in Sunday School, no less, when she told our class that the Negroes of that day formed their own church "because of the unduly mean and cruel treatment by the whites in the Methodist Society of Philadelphia." At that instant, while I was wondering where Philadelphia was, a small speck of spit flew from her mouth and landed on my hand. I believe I lost interest in the rest of her explanation about how Negroes broke away from the white church in Philadelphia. I was transfixed with the horror of her speck's wetness on my hand and how 1 was going to remove it without hurting Mrs. Bletson's feelings. I know now she didn't know about that speck of spit, nor care. All of Loran's family, though, were critical. They felt there were a little better than most of us because most of the black fathers in our community at that time had manual labor jobs. 1 suppose it was because Ogden was a railroad center, "The Gateway to the West," as Loran's Dad would say when he was bragging about his job as a cook on the dining car. Her father made more money than mine. Cooking for people was more profitable than cleaning up behind them. My father had his own point to make with me. "Marci, you can tell a lot about a person's character, if they don't care how much mess they leave for someone else to clean up." It's because of him that I pick up what I leave in public places today. He always insisted that there was enough dirt to clean up that merely accumulated without picking up a mess that a person could have otherwise not made. 5