“Hateful words survive in sticky clumps”: Forms of Whiteness in C. D. Wright’s One With Others

You could count on her to tell you who she was. Take it from her four decades of author's and contributor's notes, those dozens of third-person self-introductions. In her first full-length collection, Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues (1981), she reels off a nomadic CV: "She attended college in Tennessee and Arkansas. She has earned a living in Arkansas, Atlanta, New York, and San Francisco as a teacher of writing, as a publisher, and at various less gratifying employment."1 In The Lost Roads Project: A Walk-in Book of Arkansas (1994), a literary guidebook to her native state, she retraces her roots: "Her mother, a retired court reporter, comes from Cotter on the White River. Her mother's family have mostly been railroad people. Her father, the judge, grew up on a small farm near Cisco in Carroll County."2 And in Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (2005), a prosimetric miscellany wadding together criticism, anecdotes, aphorisms, obituaries, love letters, and shit-talk, she populates a household: "She is married to poet Forrest Gander. Both are on the faculty at Brown University. They have a son, Brecht. And a greyhound, Jackie."3

At last, in One With Others [a little book of her days] (2010), the late C. D. Wright described her birthplace, the town she was originally from if not wholly of, and she tells you just how white it is. (Editorial insertions in [square brackets], from the book's subtitle to these final pages, are Wright's own.)

There's no author's note like it, like any sentence of it: the mapping of her region's racial demographics, the citation of two white race riots over a century past, the acknowledgment of the racist history since. Where Wright leaves blanks, it doesn't take much expertise in American history to fill them in. There's a thin glimpse of repair — of a belated, bureaucratic sort — in what Wright narrates next: the 2003 creation of "a recognition and reconciliation task force focused on opposing all forms, signs, and traces of racism," whose efforts included a delegation to, and in-kind support for, "an African Methodist Episcopal church routed from Harrison a hundred years earlier that had reestablished itself in the Arkansas Delta." Whatever hope that "task force" inspires takes two sentences to undercut. First comes some testimony attributed to a reliable, anonymized source: "AN OLD CLASSMATE OF WRIGHT'S: 'It's mostly outsiders, the task force.'" Then there's the reminder that local white supremacy is so established, you can write it a letter: "Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, P.O. Box 2222, is currently headquartered in Zinc, near Harrison."5 Those headquarters have since moved; they're not near Harrison now, they're in it.

These are not the book's very last words — following Wright, we'll end with those — but they are the last words Wright contributes to One With Others, the fourth and final book-length poem of her sadly foreshortened career. It is the book of hers I think about most, even though I can't think about it and not also think about the book-length poem before it, its alphabetically adjacent counterpart One Big Self (2003, rev. ed. 2007).6 Their two titles weigh two varieties of American oneness: oneness as in e pluribus unum, a unified body politic, an inclusive bigness assembled in disregard or defiance of difference, and oneness as in idiosyncrasy, a contrarian streak, an individual in solidarity with (or solitude amid) dissimilar others. One With Others rapidly became Wright's most widely reviewed and decorated book: it was a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. It is also, I believe, a book whose strange and daring candor we have yet to appreciate fully. Not a misunderstood book: a book understood incompletely.

One With Others is routinely described as the crossroads of two genres, where the venerable traditions of the elegy intersects with narrative histories of the American Civil Rights Movement. That's how one of Wright's last author's notes (from a 2016 collection) described the book: "a tribute to a radically iconoclastic friend," a white woman Wright knew as V, and a multiform investigation that "revolves around a particular series of events in the Arkansas Delta in 1969," primarily, a "walk against fear" from West Memphis to Little Rock, led by Lance "Sweet Willie Wine" Watson and his Black Power group the Invaders; no white people joined other than V.7 One With Others does fall under both genres, but it's also something rarer: one of a handful of books by a contemporary white American poet to document whiteness, as it ruthlessly corners and defines itself against its others. "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background," Zora Neale Hurston admitted in "How It Feels To Be Colored Me," the 1928 essay from which Wright takes one of the book's epigraphs.8 One With Others is a cartography of that sharp white background, mapping American whiteness in a diversity of forms — not only the social and political structures that govern her narrative, but the linguistic forms of silence, omissions, doublespeak, racist jokes, and noxious slurs. When rendered in language, whiteness attains transmissibility and tenacity: "Hateful words survive in sticky clumps," Wright warns twice in One With Others.9 Sticky clumps: as in humid ecosystems, sticky situation, and the rural regions Wright claimed as her own: "I like the sticks; I am, if you will, of the sticks."10 This unsparing and recriminating book is about more than one dear friend or a climactic local event — it is a book about the suffocating dominance of whiteness, including in the very places Wright called home.

Hateful words pose a special threat for Wright, who repeatedly reminded her readers of her love of the word, in quasi-preacherly tones. "I believe words are golden as goodness is golden," she testified in a 1987 "Op-Ed"; "I love them all," she swore in 2011's "In a Word, a World."11 Incidentally, the individual word — that readable, repeatable, suppressible, monumental thing — is where any consideration of race in her art has to begin. As she recalls in the prose poem "Scratch Music," Black literature was not a readily available influence for the young Wright. All her local libraries held was pernicious racial caricature, made more menacing by its avid readership: "I asked the librarian in Banks, the state's tomato capital, if she had any black literature and she said they used to have Lil Black Sambo but the white children tore out pages and wrote ugly words inside."12 Where the early Wright could appreciate Black culture was through popular music, one of her originary influences; she called her first collection both "a lamentation for the late Frank Stanford, poet from Arkansas" and "a tribute to the great American experience of jazz," an uncommon influence for a white woman of her generation to name-check.13 From the start, Black music was not only a soundtrack but a subject, the centerpiece of portraits ("The Substitute Bassist") and narrative vignettes ("The Secret Life of Musical Instruments"); it was also a linguistic reservoir for Wright, who named poems after musical terms ("Bent Tones") and the cool, crisp poetry of album titles ("More Blues and the Abstract Truth," after Oliver Nelson's 1965 LP). When she anthologized Arkansas's writers in The Lost Roads Project, she included the blues musician Frank "Son" Seals, whose song "Going Back Home" she transcribed in one of her distinctive 1990s styles — disjointed, punctuation-light, hiccoughing with caesurae: "I didn't think a city      Boy could be so doggone mean // Ah but this is the meanest place     hahaha / Lord I've ever seen[.]"14

The shiftiness of the early Wright — alternately blunt and withholding, making impressions while offering little more than that, impressions — could make identity hard to pinpoint in her poetry. The relentlessly quotable speaker of "Personals" divulges seemingly revealing details ("Some nights I sleep with my dress on"), but there's little in the way of character-building or scene-setting, the whats and wheres and whens we expect from narrative fiction or journalism. We know she knows her way around Memphis, and we know her age in loose, non-numerical terms: "Stranger, to tell the truth, in dog years I am up there." But if we suppose she's white — which I suspect many readers would, if pressed, though nothing in the poem forces that interpretation — it's likely because we associate the vividly present speaker of these "Personals" with Wright herself.15

One way the early Wright could identify herself unmistakably — and a main way she established herself as a Southern poet — was in the pinpointable way she speaks. "If I have any particular affinity for poetry associated with the South, it is with idiom," she explained in a 1994 essay, "Provisional Remarks On Being/ A Poet/ Of Arkansas." Then she specified which Southerners:

With Davis's cryptic quips, Wright is not simply showing off some favorite snippets of unassimilated English. She's roundaboutly citing her sources: Black vernaculars generally, and one artist's improvised aphorisms in particular. The first Davisism she quotes appears (alongside other Davisisms) in Wright's list-poem "Remarks on Colour," from String Light (1991); she adapts the second in a signature poem, her disarticulated ars poetica "Key Episodes from an Earthly Life," from Tremble (1996): "Those dark arkansas roads     that is the sound / I am after     the choiring of crickets[.]"17

In their grafting of Black speech — which Wright neither deracializes nor deracinates, but doesn't openly identify either — these lines epitomize the early Wright's relation to linguistic and social otherness. The soundscape of her South, from its colloquial idioms to its academic-press poetry, was something distinctly other than the symphonically monotonous music of standard American English. Her South, and specifically her Arkansas, owed its linguistic heterogeneity to its social diversity, to the differences of place, class, and race of "hill people and African-Americans," and even to stylists as singular as Davis, who appears in Wright's 1994 essay as a motivational speaker in the fight against assimilation: "He had his own sound. He recommended we get ours." A peculiar logic permits Wright to "get" her own sound by appropriating wholesale a sentence of Davis's ("Those dark Arkansas roads, that is the sound I am after") and, as her contribution, wielding the poetic tools of line break and caesura, erasure and juxtaposition ("Those dark arkansas roads      that is the sound / I am after     the choiring of crickets"). The logic seems to run: Davis, his personality and his artistry, make up one part of the South; Wright is a poet of the South; therefore, Davis's words, unattributed, are freely at Wright's disposal.

We are a long way yet from One with Others, a book that refuses to present Black speech unmoored from Black lives, and that concludes with three pages of MLA-style bibliography and ten pages of acknowledgements. One apparent turning point between these two extremes is One Big Self, first published in 2003 with portraits of incarcerated people by the photographer Deborah Luster, and reissued in 2007 without photographs, the text minorly revised. In an inset list-poem, Wright takes stock of what meanings the word "Black" holds in Louisiana's prison system. "Black Is the Color," the spilling-over title begins,

"Black" is the color of the cruel deprivations of solitary confinement (informally, the "hole"); of the racial demographics of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola and the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women at St. Gabriel; and of the poem's namesake, "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair," a folk song transplanted from its Scottish or Irish origins to the Appalachian Mountains, perhaps best remembered today from Nina Simone's recording on Wild Is the Wind (1965).

And black is the funereal color of the prison system's regime of death, which infiltrates the home as a worker's uniform, "the executioner's corduroy hood." Capital punishment works well for a racist hierarchy (it earns a hook "in the tool shed") even as it emanates shame, stowed "away from the kids," kept out of sight. These stark lines take on deeper dimension in One Big Self's original art-book publication, which interleaves Wright's words with 180 of Luster's gelatin silver portraits. Their subjects, true to Wright's statistics, are primarily Black people, posing alone and with friends, holding prized possessions and sometimes flaunting self-made Mardi Gras and Halloween costumes. One Big Self dignifies them with the details Wright's earlier poems tended to obscure: a name, a personality, and a hand in one's self-presentation, despite all the ways American society (or even a well-meaning white gaze) works to box them in.

There's an earlier, obscurer turning point: a 1997 essay with a cackle of a title, "By Jude Jean McCramack Goddamnit to Hell Dog's Foot: the unappeasable Mrs. Vittitow." It's Wright's first prose tribute to V, and the first and last place where she writes out V's married name: Margaret Kaelin Vittitow. Neither an elegy for V (who died in 2004) nor a documentary assemblage (Wright dotes on V in odic, enamored prose), the essay nevertheless previews major facets of One With Others. The opening makes no mistake about the singular significance of this bookish, chatty, incandescent woman: "I was seventeen when I met her. She is the one who made me want to be a writer more than any other living one. There were of course The Great Dead. They made me want to write, but failed to persuade that I could be one among writers." Wright parades V's linguistic verve as early as her title, which reproduces one of V's grandfather's curses. (V prefers an even longer one: "May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten and may the high king of glory promise her to get the mange.") In a passage later mined for One With Others, Wright retells V's "first memory," "a racial incident": the three-year-old V, mid-bath, gets soap in her eyes, calls the family servant the n-word, and has her mouth washed out with the very same soap; "She does not know where she learned the slur but it would not issue from her again."19 Skipping to an altogether different "racial incident" thirty years later, Wright devotes a paragraph to V's participation "in a campaign against white oppression in Forrest City, Arkansas," which V could join thanks to "the freedom afforded by a car of one's own." Cataloguing both the heroic highs of V's drive and the calamitous lows (such as "the torching of her car in the police headquarter's lot" and "a government escort out of state"), Wright casts V as "an embroiled participant" and not a "tragic player," even as she can't discount the terrible costs V's actions incurred: "I can say there is something she risked her life for once, and some would conclude that she lost."20

Already, thirteen years before One With Others, Wright is toying with variables of her book's algebraic, adaptable title. The Others could be white or Black or both, past or present, crowds bound together by any number of ties — racial kinship, political solidarity, local pride, personal chemistry: the book is about all the above. And the exceptional One is V: the white pariah marching with Black activists, whom she could join only due to her relative privilege, that "car of one's own" (the souped-up, Americanized descendant of Woolf's "room of one's own"). Associating and associated with white America's racial Others — "The word spread that Mrs. Vittitow was 'one of them,'" read a front-page article in the Arkansas Democrat — she was ostracized by white society, though she told reporters that the decision was hers to make: "I dissociated myself from the white community, so to speak, and I ostracized them . . . I'm not a member anymore."21 But the One is also Wright, emboldened into poetry by V, simultaneously finding her people and singling herself out as "one among writers." ("be with," Wright enjoined in a late dedication — the preposition "with" connoting equality but not equivalence, commonality that admits distinction.)22 Wright earns that title anew in One With Others, in which she plays the roles of outsider, elegist, and investigative journalist, interviewing locals who knew V or attended the walk firsthand.

When Wright travels to V's former town of Forrest City, Arkansas, she trains her attention on whiteness, which is both the subject and the papery medium of One With Others. The book's first and most literal form of whiteness is something every reader immediately apprehends and no reviewer has made much of: its unconventionally sized and printed 9"x7" pages, at once wider and more aerated than many a standard-issue poetry collection (including most of Wright's own). Following an advisory preface — "Some names were changed or omitted in light of the interpretive nature of this account" — every page of the poem proper, up until the bibliography 150 pages later, is at least double-spaced.23 Many pages are quadruple-spaced; some are even roomier, accommodating eight lines per page. (Eight lines at most: Wright commonly stops short after a couple of lines, a dozen-odd words. One late page reads, in full: "Back then, the hotdog wagon doubled as a brothel. / Come again.")24 One With Others, Wright's only book-length poem that doesn't credit Deborah Luster as a collaborator, is seldom discussed as a particularly visual work. But the book's spacious layout gives its pages their uniquely counterintuitive feel: dense with detail but shot through with blankness, freighted with history but oddly speedy reading. Thinly or thickly banded with white space, redacted with silences, those pages are the visual evocations of Wright's description of the book and its genre: "This is not a work of history. It is a report full of holes."25 Wherever there are holes, gaps between the black ink on the page, the blankness of white space rushes in.

That visible whiteness would be unexceptional, even beneath notice, if not for the book's insistent contrasts between the everywhere-applicable words, white and black. The two words first appear in a verse-topography of Forrest City's lowlands, which slips into some frightening axioms, matter-of-factly recited: "There is black blood / and white blood. There is black air / and white air[.]"26 Racist pseudoscience and segregation's legacy maintain their handholds on the landscape, where even the air is "rent with racism, and / it percolates up from the soil itself[.]"27 Ten pages later, when the sentences "There is black blood and white blood" and "There is black air and white air" reappear, Wright identifies them as the "selfsame lie," taking aim at both "the stifled lives of those inflicting the harm" and "those who must live among the stiflers, as if one of them[.]"28 This linguistic reprise is a crucial tactic of One With Others: a fragmented phrase, enigmatic at first, accumulates fuller contexts and new definitions with every recurrence. The next and last time "white blood" and "black blood" appear, they're spoken by one of the book's countless interviewees:

"White blood/black blood," this startling interview reveals, nearly went from being a racist fiction to a legal reality.

This is one way One With Others builds its cyclonic force, tracing the same color-coded words and motifs through linguistic and social registers, connecting them in what Wright calls "a welter of associations."30 At either end of the book, there are pages-long lists of Capitalized Officialese, one cataloguing exclusions strewn across the built environment — "Correction Facility Area // No Stopping // Stay Away // Stay Away"31 — the other scraping off the euphemistic coating on appeals to civility and calls for policing: "Take Whatever Steps // Necessary // Bring It // Immediately // Under Control // Protect Property // Rights Of Those // Desiring // Deserving[.]"32 In between, there are in medias res narrations of the 1969 walk, collaging from television-news broadcasts and headlines plucked from mainstream (read: white) newspapers: "THE NEGROES FAIL TO MOVE," "WHITE WOMAN BACKS NEGROES, LOSES FRIENDS."33 (As comic foils, Wright includes five "DEAR ABBY" letters; with their inflexible advice on pregnancy, parenting, and domestic labor, these, too, are ways of publicizing the codes of a patriarchal order.) And there are unnervingly impersonal utterances that give voice to nobody in particular but seethe with communal malice:

Who's speaking here? Not just the letter of Jim Crow's law but its buffoonish binaries, reserving certain seats for the pristine "white buttock"; the rage that must be continually stoked and readdressed ("not for you," "not for you"); and the verbal violence of the bracketed slur [N-word], the one word Wright's documentary refuses to spell out.

And yet there's no telling V's story without running into that slur, no revisiting her old haunts without the fearful reminder that "Hateful words survive in sticky clumps." Prize committees honored One With Others, not wrongly, as a "praise poem," a "tribute," an "eloquent continuance" of V's "ringing, irreverent example."35 It is also a concordance of hateful words, a Civil Rights-era chronicle that includes one lamenting sentence for Martin Luther King Jr. for every page of racist jokes about his murder, which the Black students who integrated Forrest City's "ALL-WHITE HIGH SCHOOL" can still recite four decades later.36 The aesthetic and ethical quandary of One With Others — a book wherein artwork and fieldwork make contrary demands — is how to make something sing out of an archive of slurs, taunts, and outright threats, how to document the language of hate without sharpening its harmful edge.

Wright's most explicit solution, apparent on page after page of One With Others, is to set off a second linguistic and graphic register in square brackets, a subterranean space to play the intrusive editor, emend quotations, and squirrel away language from the "Hateful words" clumping on the surface. Wright introduces those square brackets on her book's title page, countering the mathematical abstraction of One With Others with a subtitle emphasizing the personal and pocket-sized, [a little book of her days]. We have seen how Wright's square-bracketed editorializing can disarm (as in her deletions of the [N-word]) and elaborate (as in the demographic survey of her author's note). Elsewhere, she's a one-woman peanut gallery, answering overinflated rhetorics with sarcasm and a righteous deadpan. An early bulletin on the walk against fear warns that "The threat they say is coming from the east"; that so-called threat, Wright promptly clarifies, is "[of the six Negroes walking to Little Rock and the white woman driving a station wagon]," nothing more.37 With those same bracketed comments Wright concedes limitations, names her own book's others. One With Others is not a comprehensive recreation: "[I heard just a fraction of the terrible things that happened back then. A fraction.]"38 Nor is it an Oscar-bait historical drama of racial progress, let alone a white-savior narrative. "I would have followed Sweet Willie Wine into hell," V repeatedly swore — but their relationship was staticky with miscommunication from their very first meeting: "THE MAN IMPORTED FROM MEMPHIS had never laid eyes on her before [this is not exactly a love story][.]"39

At the book's narrative and historical climax, a succession of Black demonstrations — the walk against fear, the local junior high erupting in protest after a teacher's firing, the senior high staging a walkout — Wright devotes page-long montages of One With Others to Black voices. Uniquely among Wright's books and American long poems generally, One With Others never spells out the race of its speakers, but there's never any mistaking the race of who's speaking: Wright counts on her readers to identify who's white and who's Black by which opportunities are afforded or denied, which language is slipped into or skirted around, what everyone talks about when they talk about race, which they're never not talking about: "A race-free conversation hard to have back then."40 Wright accompanies these interviews with her career's most overt homages to Black poets and thinkers. Her narration of the junior-high protest all but alludes to the Gwendolyn Brooks of In the Mecca (1968) and the chapbook Riot (1969) — a poet never mentioned in Wright's criticism or interviews, but the closest precedent for Wright's exhilarated run-on odes to youthful rebellion and its creative potential: "It was a riot, a rampage. An outbreak. A disturbance. The students called it a boycott, a walkout. Gentle Reader, it was an uprising."41 (Compare this to the descriptive litany that closes Brooks's "Boy Breaking Glass," from In the Mecca: "A sloppy amalgamation. / A mistake. / A cliff. / A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.")42 Pages later, the homages become unambiguous:

Does "a dream deferred" fester, asked Langston Hughes in his poem "Harlem" (1951); thingification and nobodiness are King's pitch-perfectly callous terms for the dehumanization loosed upon Black Americans.44 Festina lente, Latin for "make haste slowly," is V's motto, a slogan befitting her personal cocktail of impulse and deliberation. Holding up V next to Hughes and King, Wright may be paying her bookish mentor the ultimate tribute — or is she taking the opportunity of those two soundalikes, fester and festina, to question V's classical wisdom? After all, can we afford to move on "glacial time," when the dream deferred is already festering like a sore, ready to run?

It's in these late pages, the final movement of One With Others, that Wright disentangles V's singular life-story from the course of Black American history. V may be Wright's hero, "an original," an iconoclast "congenitally incapable of conforming."45 But she is not the protagonist of the walk against fear, nor of the most consequential incidents surrounding it. That would be Sweet Willie Wine, the Invaders, strangers marching in solidarity, others standing and waiting. It is the region's Black majority, struggling under strangulating systems only to be omitted from the whitewashed record: "It was hotter then. It was darker. No sir, it was whiter. Just pick up a paper. You would never suspect 66% of the population was invisible."46 Even at the book's elegiac crest, Wright does not deny the discrepancies in scale between "the lists of long long suffered degradations" faced by Black Americans and her white friend's tragedies: "Kids arrested en masse and put in a swimming pool // V died during Operation Enduring Freedom" — the first stage of the War on Terror, over three decades later.47

And now, a decade and a half on from One With Others, it's worth wondering: if a poet working now, white or Black or otherwise, wrote a book on the walk against fear, would V play a starring role? If it's obvious to us in 2025 that V should not be the main character of a chronicle of Black activism, why did V's story and Wright's telling of it strike One With Others's first readers as something unprecedented in American poetry (and strike Wright herself, until 2010, as a subject fit for essays, not poems)? How should white poets write about themselves, white families and neighborhoods, and white mentors like V as participants in American history without making whiteness either the figure or the ground of that history? Ultimately, is there some risk of cross purposes about One With Others and the two genres that meet within it, the elegy (with its drive to mourn the individual) and the Civil Rights Movement history (with its examination of the widening scales of the locality, the state, the region, the nation)? Put differently: would One With Others be a stronger account of the walk against fear if V wasn't in it?

I suspect the answer Wright would give to that last question — an answer we could call inclusive, Whitmanian, "utopian" in the word's most wishful and not yet realized senses — is that all of us deserve the recognition of being heard and the dignity of being spoken with, person to person, face to face. V was the rare white person of her time and place to agree publicly, and rarer still to prove it by joining the walk against fear. But there is nothing superhuman about her or Wright or the many who look to them as examples, no reason we can't all walk and talk beside them. That's the hope Wright holds out in the first epigraph of One With Others, which excerpts three lines from Frank Stanford's long, unpunctuated poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (1977).48 Those same lines also get the book's last word, as Wright reprints them, without attribution, after her author's note. It's the right passage to bookend One With Others, a poem built from frank, neighborly, unassimilated talk, dissatisfied with any path to a better world without remembering the road it took to get there:

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Christpher Spaide (Bluesky: @cspaide.bsky.social‬) is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, focusing on twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry. He has received fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University.

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