Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2010

“Don’t you let on”: two books that charged my tongue  
Metta Sáma

When I take the time to listen to my adult self reading aloud, it’s hard for me to imagine that this same voice once, decades ago, pronounced my mother’s vehicle [plahy mouth]: ply as in “to work at diligently”. After my mother laughed uncontrollably, yelping between the rolls of a high-pitched heeeee, she called my father down so I could say [plahy mouth] to him. I’m sure I complied; I would have supplied my parents with anything, even if it implied I was not as smart as I wanted to be. I was a good girl, I suppose, but more than anything, I wanted materials to read: cereal boxes, laundry detergent boxes, road signs, the polyphonic brilliance of cosmetic ingredients. Anything.

There weren’t many books in my home, but at some point, there was a purchase and at some point not too far from point 1, my father bought a tape recorder and taped my sister and I reading from said book. I don’t remember what this book was titled or what it was about, but I do recall hearing my recorded voice saying “Don’t you let on”, but more like “Don’t. Yewwwwww. LetOn.”

& after that, I don’t think I ever did. I practiced pronunciation in my head; I listened to NPR; I opened the dictionary every time I was in a library. This (unmemorable) book was my favorite book of all time. It was the only “children’s book” in the house. I’m sure it was a small book with colored illustrations, softened by other children’s hands, frayed and smudged.

Likely the same year or thereabouts of singing (in a surprising contralto voice) “Don’t you let on”, I sat at the kitchen counter, listening to my mother busy herself with cooking, and read to her from “Genesis”. I’m not a religious sort, but I enjoy a wacky story, and a woman made from a rib (“And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man He made into a woman. . .” (what!?!) was about as wacky a story as I’d heard. I was supposed to be, I’m sure, learning the titles of the first ten books, chronologically, for a Sunday school lesson that I was likely to be tested on later that morning. But I was captivated by these quick summaries, the talking snake, the god-figure of all-doing, yet never described (who was God? what kind of fashion sense did God have? did God wear bellbottoms, a fly collar, supafly stack shoes? gold chains? did God sport a ponytail?), this tree of forbidden knowledge; mostly, I was captivated by forbidden knowledge. What was this sizable book that had people speaking in tongues; that had old women climbing over pews, stockinged foot on my shoulder, to get closes to the preacher who seemed to have the power of interpreting every single word in a very particular way; this book that had mothers pushing their children to the alter to testify or worse, dress their children in white so the church could watch them get baptized in an indoor pond made to resemble a lake; this book that had choirs singing glorious songs about its chapters and verses; this book that had named many of us. What was this book with its silly temptations and intense images, its symbols that were so stark they stuck to my mind and dreamt my dreams? Who was this King James?

My mother, in response to my many questions about the bible, would say, “ask your teacher” or “it’s not supposed to be taken that way” or “chile, you’re gonna have to learn the difference between story and real life”. And back to Genesis I’d go, every Sunday morning, at the kitchen counter, listening to my mother beat cheese into eggs or stir butter into grits, and I’d read verses to her, all the while building companion stories to the dangerous dull world that could have been Eden if Eve hadn’t bitten that fruit.

Metta Sáma is the author of South of Here (New Issues Press, 2005), which was a finalist in the Yale Younger Series Award, the Paris Review Prize, the Stan and Tom Wick First Book Prize, and a finalist for the Kenyon Review Book Prize. She is a former recipient of the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at University of Wisconsin’s Center for Creative Learning, a Cave Canem Fellow, and is the fiction editor for ragazine journal and a book reviewer for hercircle. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Blackbird, The Drunken Boat, among others.