An All-American Girl — for Gwendolyn Brooks
By Beth Brown Preston
Topeka, Kansas, June 7th, 1917
Keziah:
Our baby girl's birth was not an easy one.
She lingered low inside my womb for days and nights. Stubborn. Defiant even.
Willfully against a world she someday would come to know.
The midwife and her sister arrived singing to comfort me
sweet gospel hymns I recalled from those church Sundays.
“Push. Push.” My baby girl loosened her grip upon my womb
and entered this world squalling up a storm, telling us of her own pain.
David and I, we named our baby Gwendolyn Elizabeth—the tigress, the fierce.
David:
I hear Gwendolyn's voice at birth coming on strong.
We wanted her to own her mother's gift for music,
hoped for the songs already to live inside her, to imitate the sound
of Kezzie playing Mozart or Haydn on our old upright piano
while she floated in the waters of her belly.
My poppa never lived to greet his grandbaby, my father,
a brave man who fled his destiny of chains and slavery
to join the Union Army and fight in the Civil War. Poppa would have been so proud of our infant girl.
Keziah:
Washed clean of my blood, she nursed at my swollen breast,
lapped the milk of our songs. Baptized in holy and sanctifying grace,
at home, sleeping in my arms, she seemed to know all wisdom.
Gifted of a thought deep and wide as the waters of the Kaw
or the watershed of Shunganunga Creek, she was moistened
with our kisses as we celebrated her born day, already knowing
whom she might become—so beauteous of regard, so righteous of language.
Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College, she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bread Loaf Scholar. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in many literary and scholarly journals and magazines.
