“My mother listens to her kitchen radio in Detroit in 1955” by Michelle Morouse

Photo Credit: Alessandro Cerino, obtained and licensed through Unsplash.

My mother listens to her kitchen radio in Detroit in 1955

    Golden shovel, after Gwendolyn Brooks*

She dried dishes, sang and twisted to Tutti Frutti, and perhaps
paused, getting newlywed moony over Secret Love, and upped the 
volume for Blue Suede Shoes, sung by a mannerly boy 
birthed in Tupelo, swept, and remembered those nights she had 
swung to Big Bands back in Ontario, skirts swishing, never

missing a beat, and how could she have ever guessed 
that they’d report that a fourteen-year-old was fished from that
river in the delta, the Tallahatchie, his body borne down by the 
weight of an industrial fan, his face bearing stigmata of unspeakable trouble,
a visitor who’d been taken at 2 a.m. by pale “Misters” with pistols, with
bloodshot eyes, brutal-by-birthright grownups,

a boy who wouldn’t pitch a ball in Chicago again, who was 
never to get more penny candy, that diploma, that job, or kiss that 
sassy girl down the street. My mother saw a mother crushed under
unbearable sorrow, but she couldn’t have predicted the breadth of the 
Chicago mother’s bravery. Were all the magnificent
claims of her adopted country but a shell?

The radio turned to the weather, then the swelling strains of
Bella Noche, which usually evoked visions of adulthood
delights, but she couldn’t picture wine and roses, just
imagined a stench, wafting across state lines, over and under 
railroad trestles, would learn that multitudes have waited 
while that stench spread over decades, and longed for the
truth to become self-evident, that every baby is our baby, 

and she’d know that our debts would never be paid in full, 
but sea to shining sea, in this land of shaded justice, of
disappeared people, there’d be no end to bloody tantrums.

      *A Bronzeville mother loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi mother burns bacon: “Perhaps the boy had never guessed / That the trouble with grownups was that under the magnificent shell of adulthood, just under, / Waited the baby full of tantrums.”

---

Michelle Morouse is a Detroit area pediatrician. Her flash fiction and poetry has appeared recently, or is forthcoming, in Best Microfiction 2022, Faultline Journal of Arts & Letters, Paterson Literary Review, Unbroken, Litro Online, The Citron Review, Ponder Review, Necessary Fiction, Wigleaf, Peregrine, Lullwater Review, The MacGuffin, Pembroke Magazine, and Cease, Cows. She serves on the board of Detroit Working Writers.