Marrow
In her debut poetry collection, Marrow, darlene anita scott focuses on the Black and African American victims who made up more than 75% of the Peoples Temple congregation, most of whom perished in the infamous 1978 mass murder-suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, that claimed the lives of more than 900 members, about a third of them children. “Composting” describes congregants’ difficulty in getting the Guyanese soil to yield fruit:
The soil did not swaddle;
would not entertain
in careless adoration
demands we made of it
While capturing members’ initial exuberance, the poem also foreshadows their tragic end:
So we saturated it
with accelerants like wonder
& hunger. Warmed it with
our hopeful & certain bodies
Challenging the prevailing narrative according to which congregants simply followed the church blindly to their deaths, scott bears witness to the ongoing abuses members endured. “When Shanda Said No” imagines the paralyzing moment when 19-year-old Shanda James Oliver was drugged and rendered catatonic as punishment for refusing the advances of the church’s leader, Jim Jones:
Some music might have happened Someone
was probably peeing Yeast & salt sweetened the air A napping baby
might have sneezed A cornrow was unraveling
Many of the poems include explanatory notes, which can sometimes make the work itself feel incomplete. But in keeping the backstory separate from the poems, scott allows the voices of those her work commemorates room to breathe.
scott’s poems are each dated, part of an attempt to document the everyday lives and experiences of church members. “Split Shine” (dated “20 March 1966”) includes a series of reflective statements that open with “Think,” as in “Think the heel of Mama’s hands / kneading Vaseline & lotion down your cheeks.” The poem “Water” (“7 April 1975”) begins: “We end each night as it shrinks from night / by making love; charm each day like a snake.”
In “For Just Pennies a Glass,” the poet catalogs the flavors of the infamous, cyanide-spiked beverage used in the massacre. We learn that “Cherry. / Dregs memories of sidewalks,” while “In lemonade / we are all children / night before first day of school.” And “Grape / is the sweetest betrayal / […] / […] / even if kids choose it last.”
