covering a Confederate parade. The handyman’s

insistence that there were brigades of black

Confederates is as oxymoronic as terms like

“civil war,” “free slave.” It is the opposite of history.

Good-bye, plantations doused in Sherman’s fire

and homely lonesome women weeping

over blue and gray bodies. Good-bye, colored ghosts.

You could have headed north if there was a south

to flee. In Louisiana north still begins with Mississippi,

as far as I know. East is Alabama, west is Texas,

and here is this fool telling me there were blacks

who fought to preserve slavery. Good-bye, slavery.

Hello, black accomplices and accomplished blacks.

Hello, Robert E. Lee bobblehead doll

on the handyman’s dashboard whistling Dixie

across our postracial country. Last night

I watched several hours of television and saw

no blacks. NASDAQ. NASCAR. Nadda black.

I wish there were more ghost stories

about lynched Negroes haunting the mobs

that lynched them. Do I believe no one among us

was alive between 1861 and 1865?

I do and I don’t. We all have to go somewhere

and we are probably already there.

I know only one ghost story featuring a brother

in Carrollton, Alabama, dragged to the center of town

in a storm for some crime he didn’t commit.

As he was hung lightning struck a window

on the courthouse he’s been haunting ever since.

Attention, apparitions: this is a solicitation

very much like a prayer. Your presence is requested

tonight when this man is polishing his civil war relics

and singing “Good Ol’ Rebel Soldier”2 to himself.

Hello, sliding chairs. Hello, vicious whispering shadows.

I’m a reasonable man, but I want to be as inexplicable

as something hanging a dozen feet in the air.

HOW TO DRAW AN INVISIBLE MAN

And then when Ralph Ellison’s corpse burst

open, I discovered his body had been hoarding

all these years a luscious slush, a sludge

of arterial words, the raw and unsaid pages

with their plots and propositions, with their arcs

of intention and babbling, with their mumbling

streams and false starts and their love

and misanthropic thrusts, tendons of syntax

unraveled from his bones and intestinal cavities,

the froth of singing, stinging, stinking ink,

reams of script fraught with the demons,

demagogues, and demigods of democracy,

demographies of vague landscapes,

passages describing muddy river bottoms

and elaborate protagonists crawling

through a foliage greener than money in America

before America thought to release anyone

from its dream, the waterlogged monologues

one who is unseen speaks burst suddenly

from Ralph Ellison’s body and because I mean to live

transparently, I am here, bear with me,

describing the contents: the fictions envisioned

by Emerson and immigrants, the dogmas,

aboriginal progeny, scholastic recriminations,

dementia, jubilee, hubris in Ralph Ellison,

Duke Ellington’s shadow, a paragraph

on the feathered headdress of Marcus Garvey,

some of it was pornography, some of it alluded

to Negroes who believe educating black kids

means teaching them to help white people feel

comfortable, some of it outlined the perks

of invisibility, how we are obliged to eschew