Vox Populi
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Ellen Bryant Voigt | At the Movie: Virginia, 1956
This is how it was:
they had their own churches, their own schools,
schoolbuses, football teams, bands and majorettes,
separate restaurants, in all the public places
their own bathrooms, at the doctor’s
their own waiting room, in the Tribune
a column for their news, in the village
a neighborhood called Sugar Hill,
uneven rows of unresponsive houses
that took the maids back in each afternoon—
in our homes used the designated door,
on Trailways sat in the back, and at the movie
paid at a separate entrance, stayed upstairs.
Saturdays, a double feature drew the local kids
as the town bulged, families surfacing
for groceries, medicine and wine,
the black barber, white clerks in the stores—crowds
lined the sidewalks, swirled through the courthouse yard,
around the stone soldier and the flag,
and still I never saw them on the street.
It seemed a chivalric code
laced the milk: you’d try not to look
and they would try to be invisible.
Once, on my way to the creek,
I went without permission to the tenants’
log cabin near the barns, and when Aunt Susie
opened the door, a cave yawned, and beyond her square,
leonine, freckled face, in the hushed interior,
Joe White lumbered up from the table, six unfolding
feet of him, dark as a gun-barrel, his head bent
to clear the chinked rafters, and I caught
the terrifying smell of sweat and grease,
smell of the woodstove, nightjar, straw mattress—
This was rural Piedmont, upper south;
we lived on a farm but not in poverty.
When finally we got our own TV, the evening news
with its hooded figures of the Ku Klux Klan
seemed like another movie—King Solomon’s Mines,
the serial of Atlantis in the sea.
By then I was thirteen,
and no longer went to movies to see movies.
The downstairs forged its attentions forward,
toward the lit horizon, but leaning a little
to one side or the other, arranging the pairs
that would own the county, stores and farms, everything
but easy passage out of there—
and through my wing-tipped glasses the balcony
took on a sullen glamor: whenever the film
sputtered on the reel, when the music died
and the lights came on, I swiveled my face
up to where they whooped and swore,
to the smoky blue haze and that tribe
of black and brown, licorice, coffee,
taffy, red oak, sweet tea—
wanting to look, not knowing how to see,
I thought it was a special privilege
to enter the side door, climb the stairs
and scan the even rows below—trained bears
in a pit, herded by the stringent rule,
while they were free, lounging above us,
their laughter pelting down on us like trash.
~~~~
Copyright © 1987 by Ellen Bryant Voigt. From The Lotus Flowers (W.W. Norton, 1987). . Included in Vox Populi as a memorial to the poet for noncommercial educational purposes only.
Ellen Bryant Voigt (May 9, 1943-October 23, 2025) was born in Danville, Virginia. She grew up in Chatham, Virginia, graduated from Converse College and received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She taught at M.I.T. and Goddard College where in 1976 she developed and directed the nation’s first low-residency M.F.A. in Creative Writing program. Since 1981 she taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She published six collections of poetry and a collection of craft essays. She served as the Poet Laureate of Vermont for four years and in 2003 was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2015, Voigt was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She was married to Francis Voigt, an administrator at Goddard College, until his death in 2018. Their two children are Dudley and Will Voigt. She resided in Cabot, Vermont.
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What a brilliant take on the racial tensions around 1956, with the unexpected response of Ellen to the life-force in the balcony.
This brought back a moment in my own life from about 1955. I was six years old, in a Houston, TX grocery store with my mom, needing to use the restroom. So she took me back into a dark corner of the store, where in a little alcove were two water fountains. One was labeled WHITE the other COLORED. I immediately went to the colored one, but before I could turn on the bubbler, my mother screamed, No Jimmy, No. An African-American store employee appeared, and as I tried to get past my mom to the water, he said something like: But honey, that’s not for you. What I remember most vividly was the horror or fear on his face in that fraught moment. Then or soon later I said to my mom, who struggled to explain what had happened, how I just wanted to drink the water that made a rainbow. Thinking back now, I tear up for that man, who must have expected, with good reason, that my naivete would somehow come back to bite him hard.
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Thank you for this, Jim. You and I grew up in Houston about the same time. I remember the two sets of water fountains and restrooms, and sometimes only one door or one fountain clearly labeled “Whites only”.
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I am fascinated by this poem. I know about this time of segregation only from books and films, of course. What fascinates me about this very restrained poem is how things seem normal when nothing is being said and done to dispel this notion. When its even possible that the innocent, ingenue feels some envy for lack of understanding (and yet, in hindsight, could give it a name) : “wanting to look, not knowing how to see, / I thought it was a special privilege / to enter the side door, climb the stairs / and scan the even rows below—trained bears / in a pit, herded by the stringent rule, / while they were free, lounging above us, / their laughter pelting down on us like trash.“
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It was a time of terror for Black people and moral blindness by white people.
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I didn’t grow up in the south but I’ve lived here for 27 years, and I’ve never seen what Voight talks about but I’ve seen it’s whispers.
I remember a woman friend here in Virginia telling me that slavery wasn’t so bad, that slaves were always treated like family. She felt that the talk about the mistreatment of slaves was just liberal fake news.
she wasn’t the only one I heard this from.
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Growing up in east Texas, one of the first novels I read was Gone with the Wind in which slaves are portrayed as happy loyal servants. This is the myth that most white southerners held and some still do. The truth of course is that slaves were treated as animals, sometimes humanely but usually not. My hero is Harriet Tubman who escaped slavery then returned to the south a number of times to free others. On my street in Pittsburgh is a bronze plaque commemorating a house which was a station in the Underground Railroad.
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In the mid-2000s, the public library in Valdosta featured a display with photos and articles making similar arguments, including a profile of a Black confederate soldier and descriptions of the happy lives of enslaved people. I asked the librarian, a former graduate student at my university, how this could be. She was horrified too, and said every year, a local citizen insisted on presenting this display, and the library was bound to honoring his first amendment rights. These views stubbornly persist.
Rest in peace Ellen Bryant Voigt.
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like that here. I went to a display at a local museum about the civil war. There was not a word about slavery or even states rights. It was all about battles and the bravery of southern soldiers.
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Like the poet, I grew up in the segregated south. I admire the poem for the careful restraint of recording the facts, the actual way things were, without making judgements. Of course, segregation is less strict now than it was then, but it still exists in pernicious ways. This poem helps us gain our bearings in a world that is slowly changing though not fast enough…
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oh! “through a glass darkly…….” Isn’t it “nice” to see our horrors of American)and elsewhere(s’) prejudices as though it’s all just a bigger world we…whoever “we” is… did not know well enough, just kinda missed….But no. It is the history (histories) that America and elsewhere(s) try..are trying like hell… to erase and make more palatable..delicate..(?). than horror… back to Corinthians: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” !!
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I must continue in reflection of her childhood realizations of poverty, segregation, and how similarly I grew up in those disparities and fortunately we had much interface with black souls, they were completely integrated into our lives: Uncle Eddie drove into our yard every morning with the ranch truck, came into the kitchen and sat in the rocking chair with a coffee and they talked about what he was to do today on our ranch while my father pulled on his boots to go to work managing the ranch 2 miles up the road. They divided his paycheck and the only pair of spurs we owned. I bear his name, Edward as my middle name, and took over his life’s work and the ranch truck when I returned home from College in Gainesville in 1979. He’d died long before. Many of The old fat-lightered posts he put in still stand and there yet remain some of his knots in the fence.
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Thank you, Sean, for writing and sharing this post. The last sentence will stay with me — perhaps you will write a poem about those posts and knots, or perhaps you already have (if so, I would love to read it).
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For me, this is that learning of someone after they’re gone. The world is this big, my life this small. In a sense it’s the subject of the poem but her message is we ought never limit ourselves in what we don’t know, though its always just a little disheartening to realize what one has missed, even as its assuring to find once more, the universe has always been this full of incredible riches.
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