Exodus

Woman:
the title is only luggage I carry
when I am two steps
from the Mississippi border.
I bake my mother’s accent into cornbread
and chew, so no one will know who I am
until crumbs slip from the corners of my lips.

My grandmother could play the piano by ear.
She wanted to write poems like her father
but never did, so when I write stories about her tall,
bleached hair and how when you look into her eyes
you can see her hope for deliverance, she applauds.
When you look into her eyes, she is proud
and sad and will tell you stories about dead cousins
and jumping from the backs of pickup trucks
in Pelahatchie.

My mother laughs when I call myself woman
as if womanhood is something you must earn
by signing your dreams into a will for the son or daughter
you promise you will bear. I tell my mother
that if I earn a doctorate and marry, I will hyphenate
my last name, and she prays that I don’t forget
where I come from.

When you are a woman in the South,
you are only who you come from,
where you come from.
You play in the marching band at the school
your mother went to and live in the house
where she grew up.
You say you will marry a tall man with broad shoulders
who will break his back to feed as many children
as you can have and all the unborn children
you will grieve.

I am two steps from crossing the Red Sea,
and I don’t plan to forget Egypt,
but how many women will sink
before the waters part?

Shelby Tisdale is an incoming freshman at Duke University. She has been nationally recognized for her work as a semifinalist for the National Student Poets Program, the nation’s highest honor for young poets, and a Scholastic Writing Awards Silver Medal recipient. She has been previously published in Polyphony Lit Magazine and the Eudora Welty Ephemera Prize for High School Creative Writing Anthology. She serves as editor-in-chief of Southern Voices Literary Magazine and her work focuses greatly on family relationships in the American South.