“Mighty Pawns,” by Major Jackson
Major Jackson
Mighty Pawns
Major Jackson
If I told you Earl, the toughest kid
on my block in North Philadelphia,
bow-legged and ominous, could beat
any man or woman in ten moves playing white,
or that he traveled to Yugoslavia to frustrate the bearded
masters at the Belgrade Chess Association,
you'd think I was given to hyperbole,
and if, at dinnertime, I took you
into the faint light of his Section 8 home
reeking of onions, liver, and gravy,
his six little brothers fighting on a broken love-seat
for room in front of a cracked flat-screen,
one whose diaper sags it's a wonder
it hasn't fallen to his ankles,
the walls behind doors exposing the sheetrock
the perfect O of a handle, and the slats
of stairs missing where Baby-boy gets stuck
trying to ascend to a dominion foreign to you and me
with its loud timbales and drums blasting down
from the closed room of his cousin whose mother
stands on a corner on the other side of town
all times of day and night, except when her relief
check arrives at the beginning of the month,
you'd get a better picture of Earl's ferocity
after-school on the board in Mr. Sherman's class,
but not necessarily when he stands near you
at a downtown bus-stop in a jacket a size too
small, hunching his shoulders around his ears,
as you imagine the checkered squares of his poverty
and anger, and pray he does not turn his precise gaze
too long in your direction for fear he blames
you and proceeds to take your Queen.
One of the pleasures, and privileges, of teaching at the University of Vermont, which I did for many years, was having a colleague, Major Jackson, who is an extraordinary poet. He writes love poems, poems of personal exploration, poems of witness, poems of homage to his forebears. I deeply admire many of his poems, and I have greatly enjoyed talking about poetry with him. Unlike many who read literature, he is not hesitant to discuss it. He does not fear being judged by what he doesn’t know, although he knows a lot; nor does he cringe that he might be found wanting as a reader. I’ve learned more from him than he has from me, but I like to think our discussions have been lively and fruitful to both of us.
One of his poems in particular stays with me. It is from his fourth book, Roll Deep and speaks of a chess player he has known.
Chess?
Yes, chess. As you read the poem, you will notice how important chess is, or can be; and you will also notice that chess is a great leveler, ignoring race and economic condition and all sorts of other things. If you can think with great clarity and foresight, you can win at chess, regardless of all other circumstances.
There is an energy to this poem, “Mighty Pawns,” that in part derives from the fact that it is one sentence. One sentence. The entire poem. It explodes out of the poet’s mouth, this story he tells us. We should note at once, right at the start of the poem, that the poet is unbelieving that we can in fact hear the story, for the narrator commences, “If I told you.” That “if” word: Long ago I learned in a French language class that whatever follows an ‘if’ is in the subjunctive mood, a condition contrary to the facts of things as they are. This ‘contrariness’ in the poem will be, as we shall see, complex: what is in the subjunctive is in some sense real, and the condition contrary to fact is what is in our minds.
In this poem, the facts of things as they are in North Philadelphia is what the poet recounts to us, for he is deeply understanding that for many of his readers there is an assumption of how the world ‘is’ which is very much at odds with the reality of actual life. That is the subject of Jackson’s poem: the world that is does not appear to most of us, us readers, because we have preconceived notions of how the world is. The rush of language, that single sentence, batters us with various truths: the reality of Earl, the stark truths of poverty, the difficult truth that anger lies coiled within so many because they encounter racism, prejudice of all sorts (not only race, but physical presence and poverty: Earl is ‘small,’ poorly dressed). A putative sophistication refuses to recognize the worth and dignity of those we barely see. [I learned the word ‘putative’ when I worked for the Welfare Department in New York City. On site visits we were always required to ask women the whereabouts of their children’s “putative” fathers. Whew. I learned real quick that it was not only a useless but a demeaning question, meant not for information but for humiliation.]
The poem is structured around two of these ‘ifs’. The first says, “If I told you” about Earl and his prowess at chess, “you’d think I was given to hyperbole.” No Black child, even if he was the “toughest kind/on my block in North Philadelphia” should be able to excel at world-class chess. Surely the poet must be exaggerating!
Let’s examine this first “if” before proceeding to the second. We do not credit that a small boy, “bowlegged,” Black, “ominous” is such a master of chess that he can beat Eastern European grandmasters. (I should acknowledge that nowhere in this poem by a Black poet recalling someone from his past in North Philly is the “kid” Earl definitively identified as Black. But he is, and we readers know it. We read countless cultural clues…)
If I told you Earl, the toughest kid
on my block in North Philadelphia,
bow-legged and ominous, could beat
any man or woman in ten moves playing white,
or that he traveled to Yugoslavia to frustrate the bearded
masters at the Belgrade Chess Association,
you'd think I was given to hyperbole
Notice the opposition: a bowlegged kid from North Philly can totally dominate everyone on the chessboard. Playing white (which means moving first, but perhaps has a racial resonance in that on the chessboard Earl’s race is immaterial), he can beat anyone. He can even defeat the older, experienced (“bearded”) masters of Europe. An African-American “kid” can beat the “masters of the Belgrade Chess Association.” So much for European dominance in this most intellectual of pursuits. Yet the speaker recognizes (accurately I think) that if he were to make this claim, we would dismiss it as nothing but “hyperbole,” verbal exaggeration. We would regard his statements about Earl’s prowess as a claim that was not to be taken literally, mere rhetorical exaggeration.
The second ‘if’ in the poem is even stronger. “If, at dinnertime, I took you” into Earl’s impoverished home, “you’d get a better picture of Earl’s ferocity/ after-school on the board.” What Jackson does as the poem continues – this is one sentence, remember – is take the reader inside of Earl’s home, inside the ‘reality’ of impoverishment, inside the reality of Black lives that so many readers do not see. [I know I am writing as if the reader of the poem is white and middle class, as I myself am. For Black readers? Some of them would assent in recognition of a reality they know exists, but that seldom finds its way into poems. So for white readers this poem is, or can be, a shocking recognition; for Black readers it is a reflection of realities they are well aware of, of realities that counter the easy family portraits of American life, of the “Father Knows Best” or “Leave it to Beaver” sitcoms of an earlier day, sitcoms replicated in other ways in our own times.]
Let’s take a closer look at that second “if:”
and if, at dinnertime, I took you
into the faint light of his Section 8 home
reeking of onions, liver, and gravy,
his six little brothers fighting on a broken love-seat
for room in front of a cracked flat-screen,
one whose diaper sags it's a wonder
it hasn't fallen to his ankles,
the walls behind doors exposing the sheetrock
the perfect O of a handle, and the slats
of stairs missing where Baby-boy gets stuck
trying to ascend to a dominion foreign to you and me
with its loud timbales and drums blasting down
from the closed room of his cousin whose mother
stands on a corner on the other side of town
all times of day and night, except when her relief
check arrives at the beginning of the month
Where to begin? I suppose where Jackson does. A “section 8 home,” unknown to those of us who have mortgages on our own homes, is a home rented with a government subsidy given to low-income families. Here is how the Department of Housing and Urban Development defines it: Section 8 is “the housing choice voucher program, the federal government's major program for assisting very low-income families, the elderly, and the disabled to afford decent, safe, and sanitary housing in the private market.”
A section 8 house is where Earl lives. Entering it, one smells of the food of poverty, of the less choice cuts of meat (“liver”) accompanied by cheap vegetables (onion and cabbage smells permeate the apartments of the poor). The “gravy” is likely made of flour, water, meat-in-the-pan remainders: no white wine and herb reductions here.
Children. Ah yes, the poor have children. (I learned from working for the welfare that this is the only route of ‘creativity’ open to many of the poor, who are precluded from other routes to ‘make’ their world. I learned later from reading sociology that the more children one has in a world where survival is not assured, the more chance that some will live into adulthood; the more children one has, the greater the chance that some will live long enough to be able to provide income and care when one is aged.) There is a coded sign of the struggle to survive in the lines about “his six little brothers fighting on a broken love-seat/ for room in front of a cracked flat-screen”. Fighting for space. There are the signs of poverty: all is “broken” like the love seat (which should hold two?); the television “cracked.” Liver and onions, the fight for space, crowding, broken-ness all around. How quickly and efficiently Jackson has portrayed for us the world that Earl comes from, and goes back home to.
But he isn’t done. There are too many children to enable a child to have the ‘care’ that we expect will be extended to them. (It is not love that is absent, but attention and care. Poverty is grinding. The struggle to exist and persist is so all-consuming that even love cannot always make itself present.) The image is striking: a child with a diaper so full of excrement that it sags to the brink of falling to the floor.
Do you see what I just did? Prettify. ‘Excrement,’ is not what is in that full diaper: The diaper is full of piss and shit.
“Sheetrock.” The anger or force that pushed the door open leaves a mark – not smoothed over with spackle – on the wall where the handle has marred the white surface of the gypsum-board. Are the walls clad in paint, or still only unfinished sheetrock? We do not know. But the mark that remains, of the door opened forcefully, is an augury of what will come before us in the poem’s final lines. Force, violence.
Here, everything is broken, unfixed; only the mark of a violent pushing of the door is “perfect” in this world. In the next lines even the slats on the stairs are also broken, “missing,” which is a sign not only that everything is all, all over, brokenness, but that there are dangers everywhere for the children living in the house.
But Major Jackson is not done with the interior portrait of the physical world that Earl inhabits, for the poem continues with the house yet widens outward. Those broken stairs lead to an upper story, where we readers encounter “the closed room of a cousin.” Behind that door, in that private space that he walls off from the world and the household, he blasts music, the pounding rhythms of timbales – shallow drums – and other drums, noises loud enough to, desperately, hopefully, keep out another and even more painful reality of poverty. Not just liver and onions, sagging diapers, broken furniture. This is a world where money is in short supply (the “relief check” only lasts a short while) and the dollars necessary for survival are to this extended family only available through prostitution. The mother of the boy in the room sells her body. How sad are these lines, about what happens in the richest country the world has ever known:
from the closed room of his cousin whose mother
stands on a corner on the other side of town
all times of day and night, except when her relief
check arrives at the beginning of the month
What does one say about that? This is where Earl lives. This is where he comes from. This, apart from the chess board, is where he exists.
“If” one knew how talented Earl is at chess, “if” one could see his home life, “You’d get a better picture of Earl’s ferocity/after school on the board in Mr. Sherman’s class.” For Earl is ferocious. He is deeply motivated by anger and hunger to dominate in a world where too many forces (poverty, race, physical size) seek to reduce him to, well, almost nothing.
You (we, the reader) might know more about Earl if you saw what he could do and where he came from. But we only see what is before our eyes, and whatever ‘backstory’ there is does not appear to the sight. So, we would “not necessarily” have a “better picture” of Earl if we encountered him in the world of everyday North Philadelphia,
when he stands near you
at a downtown bus-stop in a jacket a size too
small, hunching his shoulders around his ears
I cannot emphasize strongly enough the “not necessarily,” which is the hinge where this kid, wearing clothes that are too small, clothes that are likely hand-me-downs in an impoverished family, is hunched up not only against the cold but the world which seems constantly to assault him. We might recognize him, but not necessarily. We might not. Here in these two words “not necessarily,” the “ifs’ of actuality give way to the unseeing manner of our ‘seeing’ what we encounter. At this juncture of the poem “if” gives way to everyday non-seeing. We, readers, see only the surface of things. Only the surface. Potential, poverty, ebb into the background. They belong to a world which we take to be subjunctive, contrary to the ‘facts’ that our eyes reveal. It is a strange reversal, where the condition contrary to fact is what we see, not the actual condition in which Earl lives and comes from.
Yes, we could, as we have just done in making our way through the poem, “imagine the checkered squares of his poverty/and anger.” We could imagine the “ferocity” which drives Earl. If we did that, if we imagined that poverty and anger could somehow be played out on a chess board, we still could not accept that this anger could be turned on us, the responsible agents of his poverty. Even if we knew what motivated Earl, we would “pray” that the power and precision he shows on the chess board will not be turned against us, the reader.
It is ‘structural racism’ we come upon here, not as an abstract but as a real thing. Poverty, with its cracked television screens and forced prostitution, has a cause. Society is structured so that some few have a lot of money, and millions have almost none. Society is also structured so that a disproportionate number of the impoverished are Black. Earl comes from this world.
Yet Earl has something that transcends this world, a talent for chess that is remarkable. But, again because of structural racism, that talent will not be recognized. There is a mote in the eye that predetermines that those who see Earl do not see a chess talent, a chess wizard, but a bowlegged kid wearing a jacket too small, “hunching his shoulders about his ears.”
There is an oft-cited poem by Langston Hughes, given even more prominence because Lorraine Hansberry used one of its lines for the title of the great play she wrote, A Raisin in the Sun:
Harlem
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
That is Earl, at the end of this poem. Ready to explode. Ready to “take your Queen,” dear reader. When his life, his emotions, his intellect, are confined to the chessboard, he is a champion of chess. But on the streets?
In what I think is the greatest American novel of the second half of the twentieth century, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a former colleague of the narrator, a former Marxist, Todd Clifton, reverts to the streets to (almost inexplicably) sell Sambo dolls. Clifton is gunned down by the police because, in his anger when they tell him what to do, he looks ‘just like another angry Black man.’ Earl, away from a chess board, is Todd Clifton. Unrecognizable, unrecognized, his anger is poised to blossom.
The poem tells us that if we cannot recognize one another, if we cannot see what is there and also see the unseen conditions from which it has sprung, we face destruction. “Taking a Queen” is tantamount to losing in chess. It is the prelude to the soon-to-follow defeat on the chess board; in life, we recognize it as a prelude to destruction.
Is that why a policeman knelt on George Floyd’s neck, why another policeman shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times? There is anger and threat out there, and those police officers while they understood the threat did not understand where it came from. They only perceived the threat. All they could do was destroy the Black man they saw as a possible emblem of their own destruction.
As I grow older I have fewer answers. But I do know this: Section 8 housing vouchers, liver and gravy, broken furniture, prostitution, all undermine everything we might want to build, undermine the world we want to live in.
We will not recognize the chess champions among us, blind to all that could make us whole.
Earl will not become Bobby Fischer or Garry Kasparov or Magnus Carlsen. No world championship of chess. He will be poor, like the family in which he grew up. There is no road ahead for him. Poverty and racism will grind him down. This poem reveals to us that there is great talent, great creativity, in places in which we do not think to look for its manifestation. But poverty erases, cages in, that creativity.
It seems to me that this is a poem of profound sadness. And, alas, it presages violence, since what is not acknowledged, in the words of Langston Hughes, cannot be contained indefinitely: It will “explode.”