Another persona that speaks through this book is the imaginary character Banjo Yes, a construct of an African-American actor, circa early twentieth century, who shows how short the distance is between then and now. The poems in which Banjo Yes speaks are caustic and illustrate how the language of the captor strips everything from the black man, down to his comings and goings and name, replacing him with another version of himself. One of the Banjo poems that leaves its historical context most explicitly for today’s headlines is “Banjo Yes Plucks an Apple from a Tree in a Park (for Tamir Rice).” The poem states the difference between pretense and reality (“I hold an apple in my hand on set/it is or ain’t an apple ain’t a real / Apple depending on am I in the shot / Or am I watching with the crew a real”). Banjo Yes, with Rice in mind, raises the question of what it means to have one’s reality played out on media for all to see, including “Who’s watching me and What / They gonna think they see”:
Trying to read white folks’ minds I’ll tell you what
An apple is it’s death it’s my child dead.
Poems in the voice of Jim Limber, an unlikely sort-of foster child of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, parallel the prose poems about McCrae’s childhood with his white suprema-cist grandparents. These two contents play off of the loneliness, abuse, and captivity of their respective speakers. In McCrae’s sonnet, “Jim Limber the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Da-vis was Another Child First,” here in full, Jim Limber remembers his transformation, the way he is an actor in everyone’s tragedy:
Except he wasn’t dead at first they put
Me in his clothes dead Joseph’s after Joseph
Died and I used to call him Joe they put
Me in Joe’s clothes at first before he died
Joe wasn’t five yet when I met him I
Was seven I was seven when he died
Still but a whole year bigger then but I
Wore his clothes still and the whole year I lives with
Momma Varina and with daddy Jeff
I never lived so good as when I lived with
Them and especially it was daddy Jeff
Who kept me fed and wearing those nice clothes
Until they fit as tight as bandages.
He continues life in “nice clothes,” with sinister undertones of mummification and dismemberment that ring clear in the near rhymes between “nice” and “tight,” and the gauzy, breathy rhyme of “clothes” and “bandages.” Similarly, the language of the captor and life in captivity becomes each child’s reality as McCrae learns that he was taken from his own father at age three, not eighteen months. In part of an untitled prose poem, he imagines a split version of himself—one as a baby in a diaper, happily playing—and the other:
separated by a white stripe about a half-inch thick—maroon above, gray below—and bell-bottom jeans, and riding a big wheel my father has just given me, when my grandmother lifts me from the big wheel to put me in the back seat of my grandparents’ big, white Dodge 4-door, and as she carries me to the car I cry out, and reach back for the big wheel. I’m afraid I will lose it forever, but then I lose it forever.
His loss is mitigated only in the next generation, when the language of the captor is used to free the past. In the reimagined sonnet, “Still When I Picture It the Face of God Is a White Man’s Face,” McCrae is haunted by the idea of the white master as he sits by the ocean with his daughter: “I ask her does she see it ask her does / The old man in the waves as the waves crest she see it does/she see the old man his / White his face crumbling face it looks.” His little daughter’s words appear in the couplet that ends the conversation: “She thinks it might he might be real she shouts Hello/And after there’s no answer answers No.”