The Older American

By Cheryl Clarke

Lettie Walker was 71

when she was struck unconscious in the street by a hit and run driver

who seemed not to have obeyed the stop sign or perhaps became impatient with her halt gait.

Mrs. Walker, a widow

long past the empty-nest syndrome living alone

prone to speak symbolically metaphorically

biblically

content in having only to do for self, did not die.

She lay at the curb unbloody for nearly an hour before anyone noticed her body.

At the hospital she regained her sense of things.

A youngish, white coated, white man asked Mrs. Walker how she felt.

Laughing, Mrs. Walker said: ‘Like a leaf.’

‘What happened?’ the man continued, chagrined. ‘They crucified Jesus. They only hit me with a car.’

Considering her color her age, her seeming disorientation, and that no pocketbook had been recovered,

the man presumed Mrs. Walker to be a cast off thing and probably a little demented.

After applying several pokes and squeezes to her rather vulnerable body the man ordered x-rays

and the next thing she knew

Mrs. Walker was going under in the o.r. for something called ‘exploratory.’

Since that time

Lettie Walker has been depressed agoraphobic

nearly anorexic

taken to walking with a cane given up her home in the South

to stay with her daughter in the North and ambivalent about wanting to live

From Narratives: Poems In The Tradition Of Black Women, Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1982.