~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Silver

I

We were a family that ate together,
spooning black-eyed peas and rice
with sterling silver onto hand-me-down plates
from a relative who liked pink flowers.
At the picnic table that was our dining table,
life was always a beach with sun and sand
where all four of us were happy children
and our parents were ordinary adults
who watched us and made certain
the undertow would never capture us.

II

There was a day I opened a drawer
and the silver was gone, or most of it,
this silver I had cleaned over the years
I had also ironed my father’s shirt for work.
That was the year my father cried
when I came home, no oil in the furnace,
and my mother gave me a frog magnet
because every Christmas needs a gift
and my mother knew I loved frogs
more than I would ever love sterling silver.

III

One day my mother gave me what was left,
the silver she passed on fitting into a small box.
Some of it was hers, remnants of place settings,
and some of it was as old as South Carolina—
one piece, I learned later, brought from Ireland
and other pieces crafted from coin silver.
I loved the elegance of a punch ladle most of all
and sometimes fingered the monogram
of a great-grandmother who died in childbirth.
How could my mother have kept this silver?
How could her mother have hung onto it for her
even as she moved from one room to another
to find a cheaper boarding house?
Later my mother called me on the phone
to tell me somebody had stolen all her silver.
She thought it was one of my brothers.
That was just before she came to live with me.

IV

When it was time to make my will,
I gave the old silver to a museum
along with a sampler from 1812
and a friendship quilt stitched in 1840—
the same quilt my mother had wrapped her babies in
more than a hundred years later.
I told my friends I did not want anything
that had been polished by enslaved people—
as some of it had been tended by women
who were not allowed to eat with it, I knew.
White guilt is complicated enough
without carrying it into the grave.
And if it had been special enough to keep safe
through the Great Depression
and the loss of my father’s job,
the silver deserved to serve history instead.

V

The English Gadroon pattern was introduced in 1939,
the year my mother’s mother died in an asylum.
Somebody gave a set of this silverware to my parents
when they married simply in 1954.
That was the great aunt who married money
and liked porcelain dishes with pink flowers.
I have a fork, spoon, knife, and soup spoon—
even a gravy spoon and a butter knife—
that I keep on my table at all times,
using these pieces of silver and only these
to eat my simple meals.
A childhood grounded in black-eyed peas
is always going to lead to an old age
where beans and rice or simple foods
like cornbread and molasses feel like going home.
Sometimes I think of buying more pieces
to extend my collection of silverware,
but it would be hard to have silver
I did not grow up polishing for my mother
in my kitchen drawer unless I could convince myself
that any used spoons or forks I could buy—
now when I am old and have money to buy them—
were ones my parents had to sell, no monograms,
the year my mother sold her mother’s wedding band,
the year I had no money either and my father cried.