Southern Womb by Heidi Richardson
Heidi Richardson’s “Southern Womb” is one of three winners of the CRAFT 2023 Flash Prose Prize, guest judged by Kathy Fish.
This gorgeously written story, which begins simply with “Trula be gone…,” held me in its spell from beginning to end. It’s a deep, rich, immersive song of a story covering a span of just five days, and written in sections that flow like prose poems. The structure supports the sense of a lament spilling forth and the need to catch one’s breath and begin again. Masterful in its demonstration of prosody and voice, “Southern Womb” is a story of violence and loss, of tragedy and generational trauma. Readers will be haunted by Trula’s story even as they are swept away by the music of this writer’s prose. —Kathy Fish
Trula be gone, selfish-flown some say or eyeing a new man. I say, Tru chugged by her own factory steam—didn’t one of us help or remind her of the mold blooming up the sides of her curtainless house—that Judson was like his daddy again; like the same rat-run box, his anger at the world shocking us shushed beyond Tru’s plight to a comfortable hedge. He never did stop perplexing her head—Judson, and now home yet Tru wasn’t; she broke-armed once for shunning Jud’s gift of a stolen stove, so maybe now at a run by Chicago (or the likes) and all I want to beg her is: let’s beat your rugs—come home to settle the slams of doors, that a withered arm still has work—yes, we need to fix Jud’s payday but Tru, a mound of flesh ain’t nothin’ but a washboard, just another man’s chest
On the second day, there were beet sandwiches under the willows in Branch, day music at the juke and news of a deputy warned for intercourse of a prisoner with a scuffed boot to the floor. That day, didn’t any gossip Tru’s blue-slat absence; us just eating beet and churned butter sandwiches—five-hundred freed, winking toes, sunning not to speak and waiting on land rife-dotted by the dead who firstly disappeared—one second at stove-side or barn or abed—blood ones stolen, shot, lynched; others like whetstone ground piecemeal to dust or upon a time, sold weeping, screaming or numb—and us (years later) scaling the range of now free to remember, in a world rear-versed to assume we’d forget
By her third day un-found, some negroes of Branch figured Trula had flown the fields after all. One said Judson, gone too, might’a drowned himself if Tru took flight, but since most hands were busy gauging God’s rainfall or filling pints and flats in spades, no one could leave the fields again to search Tru out. The gossiping women, quilting pine straw up-under the strawberry rows, now whispered nothing but Tru’s broke-arm faith—truth told them shamed—because Tru hummed spirituals from up to sundown and even when she squatted at a row’s edge to piss. Finally, Tru’s news was a vine grown round barbed wire; word spread to starred men for post and that, I prayed, might tempt even a non-prodigal home
From corncribs to greased silos, even barn rats skittered for town when Trula’s body slithered up (smell of turpentine they lisped, smell of castor) a deacon with an eggy bible and a handful of burnt hair—a girl baby carried too high, it was all too damned much in my night-dreams—another acre fed by a hand-oiled box, why black folks pour to the middle of the bowl and our Tru dead, flown, and all her biscuit crumbs too
Momma says Tru’s man measured his manhood by the pale up-under his ring; that she’d spied Judson sunning it and scheming lust with his dead daddy’s yellowed nails. Everybody knows, Momma says, Jud’s line never healed from master to master, but which of us could have figured a sharp pipe for a weapon and that much hatred—as if there’s not enough—and never their pickings, not our darned socks, never enough laudanum, us needing to fly
Of the world, Daddy says Judson was but a shit excuse for his own people; joined to the tide of southern bodies, joined to what tastes best if you speak mean-man, joined to a good woman’s end—that the devil ain’t nothing if blunt and you can always tell a country girl by her soil-scarred knees and away flew Tru, stabbed Daddy says, by the end of a waiting pipe and even the swamp cottonwoods (never swaddled, hatched alone) began a dirge at such news, so Daddy wrote Tru’s name with pitch on the body wagon before it rolled by, seen bare by all eyes; not shamed but reverent, and still no one wanted to believe
Girl like a song dedicated to momma. Girl chased across a sleeping, laid-out field. Girl dead and an inked report: found bushed and of sad, thickened blood, head thrown back to marry red soil for a rubbery mile; Judson dragged what he chose not to carry—the girl of a lazy man’s load—easier to be the linchpin of a man’s eye than a lost and lonely chord, oh Tru, and hospital doctors down a far, pursed-lip road—but us eating beets and butter, toes in water anyway, and Tru stabbed like Black Jesus; to her side but at her own weary pace to rise
Repast:
Cornbread, stripped collards, fried chicken, sweet tea with slivered ice.
No sense in peeling potatoes too deep, I say—it’s the gravy folks pissy to judge.
Momma says, rainbows ain’t nothing but proof of God’s regret, that when you harm an angel, the killer walks like-as dead forever while the left-behind gotta find sight, take first steps, born again to mourn again—then rise like yeast to sustain each other again. We busy. Trula washed, dressed, hair hot-combed for her wake, I can’t stop puzzling that Jud had been the only person who wouldn’t love her—so sad; that a dog will warm her gravestone, two chairs can uphold a light coffin, guilt never more than what a man leaves willingly behind
By the fifth day, I see stoked and fed the southern ground in murmuring repose, flight then not flight and iced-soda, her favorite drink—Tru’s body in hidden state—woman in a box in a bag or maybe our too-limber womb; a woman Daddy says who’ll scratch at the back of my throat like cotton and who will forever wear her pretty death-dress too tight, who will nest with five-dozen stitches in the swell of her recently dead momma’s breasts—drinking ’til Jesus—who will live in constant, organza surprise; gathered bruised, picked
HEIDI RICHARDSON is a writer originally from San Francisco, but now residing in Southern California. She has work published in Ghost Town Literary Magazine, Glassworks, The Pacific Review, and Red Wheelbarrow. Her poetry collection, In Praise of the Black Narcissus, received an honorable mention in the Cave Canem Book Prize for African-American Writers in 2017. Heidi received a Pushcart Prize nomination for her civil rights era poem, “The Waiting Room,” and she is a two-time winner of the Edgar Valdez Literary Prize, for both poetry and prose. She is a graduate of California State University, San Bernardino, with a BA in creative writing. Find her on Instagram @hl_richardson.
Featured image by Annie Spratt, courtesy of Unsplash.
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