By Therese Gleason

Featured Art by Claire Bateman

The Ohio River runs through James Wright’s oeuvre, a throughline leading back to the hardscrabble community of his youth. It’s a region ravaged by strip mining, extractive industry and labor practices, and dead-end factory jobs resulting in generational poverty. Yet despite his professed hatred of and determination to escape his native Martins Ferry in the Appalachian foothills, Wright returns again and again in his poems to the banks of the river he grew up exploring. This boundary between Ohio and West Virginia, between water and land, is haunted by the ghosts of drowned childhood friends, miners “dead with us” in the gorges, and memories of violence witnessed—and perpetrated—in his youth. But the sacred and profane river—with its “bare-ass beach” that is “supposed to be some holiness”—is also his “Muse of black sand.” “How can I live without you?” he writes. “Come up to me, love, / Out of the river, or I will / Come down to you.”

A close reading and comparison of two of Wright’s poems, “Ohio Valley Swains” (Two Citizens, 1973) and “On a Phrase from Southern Ohio” (To a Blossoming Pear Tree, 1977), reveal structural similarities and overlapping imagery and subject matter that show us how he relates to this muse. Both poems include violence, past and present, done to the Ohio River and its surrounding land, and we see that those violations impact the communities that live along the river, its inhabitants both victims of their environment and abusers of it. In Wright, these characters can seem innocent, corrupt(ed), and complicit at once.

Both poems involve a boundary transgressed: an act of violence to the body of a young (white) woman in “Ohio Valley Swains” and to the body of a Black boy in “On a Phrase from Southern Ohio.” These acts occur in the vicinity of the Ohio River and are narrated from a perspective that shifts fluidly between the (young) speaker’s point of view at the time of the events and that of a man looking back. While both poems bear witness to sexual and racial violence in a degraded landscape, the assault of Lilly in “Ohio Valley Swains” is addressed more plainly than whatever incident triggers the speaker and his friends to attack the two “black boys” atop the cliff in West Virginia. Even so, the poem demurs, never coming out and using the word “rape,” revealing only that “They’re hurting a girl down there.” The speaker’s admission that “It took me many years to understand / Just what happened to her that evening” lets us know there has been a sexual assault but also shows us the fog that often surrounds trauma.

The events remembered and relayed in “On a Phrase from Southern Ohio” are even more obfuscated: there is nothing directly stated about why the speaker and his friends attack the two Black boys, but the poem’s imagery and diction suggest the possibility of the boys stumbling upon some taboo sexual energy or act that is further charged by the racial and gender identity of the Black boys on the cliff. Wright’s preoccupation with elaborate coded language could be read as an almost compulsive need to expose and expiate his complicity in having witnessed—or taken part in—events that were unspeakable in that time and place. In this way, both poems represent a process of excavation and discovery for Wright, with an impulse toward telling the truth—yet both poems still tell it slant, perhaps because of the blurred lines between whose truth is being told, and by whom.

In “On a Phrase from Southern Ohio,” the speaker begins the poem with a feint, a sidestep, a half-negation: “A long time’s gone. / Now all I recall for sure / Is a long shattering of jackhammers that stripped / Away the whole side of one foothill of one / Appalachian mountain.” Again, we don’t know for sure what happens to precipitate the violence in “On a Phrase,” just that the speaker and his friends row across the Ohio River to West Virginia and climb up a “scarred mountain” to find “two black boys” and “beat the hell out of one.” Is this just a racist incident? Wright’s imagery suggests mystery and shock: “It is summer chilblain, it is blowtorch, it is not / Maiden and morning on the way up that cliff.” Such sensory details and metaphors—a rash, the industrial heat—speak to the violation of nature, and “not / Maiden” may echo the assault of the girl, Lilly, in “Ohio Valley Swains.”

In that poem, the speaker encounters Johnny Gumball and his crew in the process of sexually assaulting a local girl, Lilly deVecchis. Swain is an archaic term for country youths or young suitors overly preoccupied with their virility, and when the speaker tries, unsuccessfully, to thwart these not-so-gentlemanly swains, the older boys knock him down. Later, the speaker tries to report the attack to “the railroad dick” (railroad security officer) patrolling the area: “They’re hurting a girl down there, I said. / Well, he said, you go on home, / And get out of this.”

Meanwhile, in the background, almost like a Greek chorus, we hear “insane Jesus Jumpers” singing from inside their revival tent: “Oh God our help in ages past, / Our hope for years to come.” Yet no heavenly succor arrives. The end of the poem suggests that the young boy’s appeal (and the girl’s implied cries) have fallen on proverbial “deaf ears” (hinted at by the image of the “Jesus Jumpers’” “blind tongues”). At the end of “Swains,” the speaker, whose impotence at the time is contrasted with Johnny Gumball and his “cocksmen,” tries to take back power, issuing a toothless threat from the future to the older boys who “laughed and laughed”:

You thought that was funny, didn’t you, to mock a girl? I loved her only in my dreams,

But my dreams meant something

And so did she,

You son of a bitch,

And if I ever see you again, so help me in the sight of God, I’ll kill you.

The speaker’s identification with the girl’s violated body reflects his own feelings of powerlessness, and his sense that the land “up on my side of the river”—ravaged by strip mining and pollution—is literally god-forsaken. Neither the churchgoers nor the authorities act to protect the girl (or the boy, who is also traumatized by the event). And while the speaker’s confrontational words “so help me in the sight of God” make this poem a vehicle for Wright to testify and call out the violence, we’ve already learned from the “Jesus Jumper” section that the higher power watching over the Ohio River doesn’t mete out punishment and justice as He should.

The speaker of “Ohio Valley Swains” is portrayed as an innocent (albeit guilt-ridden) victim whose blustery and recriminatory rhetoric at the end of the poem centers his own attempt at heroism. Differently, Wright complicates—and implicates—the speaker in “On a Phrase from Southern Ohio.” In this later version of a strikingly similar scenario, an adolescent speaker engages in an act of racist violence as part of a group of trouble-making boys, himself a swain. While the assault/rape in “Swains” occurs in Martins Ferry, the violence in “On a Phrase” takes place just across from Wright’s hometown—in Wheeling, West Virginia. After the speaker and his friends row across the Ohio (their “skiff” perhaps alluding to Charon’s vessel and the treacherous crossing of the River Styx) and climb up the “scarred mountain,” they find “two black boys” in a “wild cliff garden.”

The boys in the speaker’s group are an intriguingly named gang. One of them is “Beanie,” which is slang for an attractive girl. Another boy is “Crum,” which is slang for male genitalia. Two other boys are named “Apie,” a possible echo of a racist slur, and “Shamba,” which is distinctly similar to “Sambo.” Shamba boy traditionally refers to a person who tends a garden in Africa. Given that the main violence of the poem takes place in a wild cliff garden, this name seems particularly meaningful and troubling. Wright also describes this group, presumably white, as “lazy and thieving,” another uncomfortable use of racially loaded language that creates a mixed-up and terrifying American scene. It’s this group that crosses the river, scales the mountain, and winds up stumbling on something memorable, and incomprehensible, in a garden in West Virginia.

Wright’s diction and imagery suggest various possible taboo scenarios, but he leaves us with more questions than answers. First, we see the halting, one-to-two-word lines that depict the boys’ harrowing climb up the “Smooth dead / Face / We / Climbed / Straight up / And white.” This evokes fear and dread (it’s a long way down), and the line breaks prolong the poem’s building suspense. Wright’s enjambment of the lines describing the scene at the top of the cliff renders what the boys actually find similarly disorienting. After cresting the cliff, they come:

To a garden of bloodroots, tangled there, a vicious secret

Of trilliums, the dark purple silk sliding its hands deep down

In the gorges of those savage flowers, the only

Beauty we found, outraged in that naked hell.

This description of the garden growing between the rocks atop the denuded mountain—a sort of reverse-Eden—with its “vicious secret” and (toxic) trillium’s hands sliding “deep down” in the crevices, its “savage flowers” and “naked hell” evokes the rape of Lilly in “Swains.” Trillium, a wildflower native to the area, is also known as “Wood Lily” and can be used to induce labor. Trillium blossoms start out white but gradually deepen to pink and then purple—suggesting the staining of purity and/or bleeding and bruising. The plant’s name and properties, then, call to mind Lilly’s assault. In a poem this mysterious, and in the riverworld of James Wright, a flower isn’t just a flower.

Similarly, the “bloodroots, tangled there” suggest a kind of enmeshment: not only a shared lineage between these two related poems but also the intertwined relationship between people living along the river. The “bloodroot” plant bears white flowers and exudes an orange-red juice from its stem and roots that was used by Indigenous people to make dyes for artwork as well as war paint. Thus, the (white)-petaled bloodroot evokes other atrocities committed along the river, notably the bloodshed of Native Americans (perhaps alluded to by the coded, racist language in “savage flowers”) whose lands were stolen. We might also think of the pursuit of slaves attempting to escape across the Ohio River, or the slave market in Wheeling. Wright’s use of trillium and bloodroot—white petals, red or purple stains—seems to suggest that the land itself is wounded, cursed, outraged.

The victims here, though, are two specific “black boys,” one chased and one “we beat the hell out of.” But what exactly happens in this poem? In the key scene, which is part of a dream that the speaker relates directly after the plainspo- ken confession of violence, Wright seems to blend his description of the purple flowers with his speaker’s memory of the Black boys. He writes, “What were those purple shadows doing / Under the ear / Of the woman who was weeping along the Ohio / River the woman?”

Did the speaker’s gang find two Black kids near the Ohio River, which is described as a woman, and simply hassle them for no reason? Did the speaker’s gang come upon two boys engaged in a (consensual) sexual act with a (white) woman and react to that? Is the use of “boys” itself racist? Given that we might be seeing an allegorical woman in these lines, is there actually same-sex desire alluded to here? Or, are the speaker’s memories of the assault of Lilly in “Ohio Valley Swains” mixing with his memories of this similar scene? Does Wright, from his perch decades later, equate the violence against her with the violence being done against the Black boys? The poem’s perseverating tone (“A long time’s gone. / Now all I recall for sure . . . ”) persists throughout and Wright employs phrases such as “for all I know,” which undermine the trustworthiness of the narrator and can be read as his inability, or unwillingness, to come out and truthfully say what occurred “toward the dark” of that afternoon “Above the river.” Or perhaps he is confounded by river-crossings and taboo-breakings that he cannot understand. The speaker doesn’t seem to be able to wade through all of the implications of what happened that day, and Wright concludes the poem, “Damned if you know; / I don’t.”

The title of “On a Phrase from Southern Ohio” (emphasis mine) and the poem’s dedication to Etheridge Knight, also allude to a stain on not just south-eastern Ohio but the country as a whole. According to Jonathan Blunk’s James Wright: A Life in Poetry, Wright dedicated the poem to Knight, a contemporary and friend, because Knight had also heard the idiomatic phrase at the end of the poem—“Damned if you know; / I don’t”—spoken during his childhood. But the fact that Wright directed this poem, with its incident of racial violence and blurred undertones of taboo sexuality and/or gender fluidity (“the Ohio / River the woman”), to a Black poet whose poems explicitly depict and decry examples of racist and sexual violence perpetrated by individuals and the state doesn’t seem coincidental. (For examples of Knight’s work that guide my thinking about “On a Phrase from Southern Ohio,” see “The Idea of Ancestry,” “For Freckle-Faced Gerald,” “The Violent Space,” and “On Seeing the Black Male as #1 Sex Object in America”.)

Regardless of all the possible readings of the end of Wright’s poem, the weeping woman suggests grief and remorse on the part of the speaker who hurt the Black boy, as well as collective grief for all the wounds wrought along the river’s banks. And this, again, is the strongest link between this poem and “Ohio Valley Swains.” To see that link, let’s revisit the beginnings and endings of these complementary pieces.

In “Ohio Valley Swains,” we begin with the image of a spider: “The gran- daddy longlegs did twilight / And light,” and we end with the speaker declaring his love (“only in my dreams”) for the victimized girl, Lilly. Similarly, “On a Phrase from Southern Ohio” also ends with a spidery dream. Here, Wright’s speaker shows us how much the violence from his youth still resonates and confuses: “And still in my dreams I sway like one fainting strand / Of spider- web, glittering and vanishing and frail / Above the river.”

Further linking the two poems is that ghostly, weeping woman who appears at the end of “On a Phrase from Southern Ohio”—almost like a revenant of the bruised and brutalized Lilly (and the Black boy who the speaker and his friends beat up). The speaker’s question “What were those purple shadows doing / Under the ear / Of the woman who was weeping along the Ohio / River the woman?” calls to mind the purple spots that appear around the center of some varieties of white lilies, as well as the deepening shade of the Trillium (wood lily) from earlier in the poem. Even though the name Lilly does not appear, the memory of Lilly seems to be a part of this poem. There was once a girl weeping by the Ohio River, and on another day, she still seems to be; cries of personal and historical pain echo off the cliffside as Wright conflates environmental and physical violation.

We can’t say whether the speaker and his friends witnessed something to trigger their attack on the Black boys in “On a Phrase from Southern Ohio,” or whether they simply engaged in senseless racist violence. What we can say is that Wright conjures a physical and psychic scene that drowns us in the sorrow of America’s history of false accusation, violence against women, environmental degradation, and even, possibly, of homophobic and transphobic violence. The poem’s ending lines, the confounding phrase “Damned if you know; / I don’t”—a peculiar ad- mixture recalling “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” and “Damned if I know”—reflects the trajectory of Wright’s speakers in “Ohio Valley Swains” and “On a Phrase from Southern Ohio.” They move from reliance on binaries such as self/other, victim/victimizer, right/wrong(ed), to a greater awareness of the complex interplay of personal and collective history and memory and trauma. And we can almost hear Wright saying “Damned if you know; / I don’t” to answer the question of why he returns to the Ohio River in his work. Maybe it’s a kind of compulsive love for a ravaged place, a complicity in that outrage, or an inability to renounce his (terrible and beautiful) “bloodroots.”

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Therese Gleason is author of three chapbooks: Hemicrania (forthcoming, Chestnut Review, 2024); Matrilineal (Honorable Mention, 2022 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize); and Libation (co-winner, 2006 South Carolina Poetry Initiative Competition). Her poems appear in 32 Poems, Indiana Review, Notre Dame Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. Originally from Louisville, she is an adjunct creative writing instructor at Clark University and an ESL teacher in the Worcester Public Schools.