Valerie Nieman. Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse. Winston-Salem, NC: Press 53, 2018.
I may have mentioned once or twice in the course of the past several years’ blogging: I don’t read a whole lot of poetry. Not that I have anything against poetry or poets. It’s just that my attention normally turns in other directions, and I follow where it leads.
But I’ve just finished a book of poems–or is it one poem in many chapters?–by North Carolina writer Valerie Nieman, that’s an amazing page-turner of a story, with a pair of the most intriguing and appealing characters I’ve come across in any work of fiction, prose or verse. I admit it: Val and I are old friends. But I would love Leopard Lady just as much even if we weren’t.
“This leopard-skin come onto me / when I lost love,” this Lady begins her tale. She adds in parentheses, “this is not for the marks to know,” these being the “rubes,” the hicks come to see her circus act, who gawp at her as she lets the enshrouding red silk fall away from her leopard-spotted body.
” … the letting-go of that man–
him of me then me of him–
left me streaked, specked, and spotted
like the flocks of Jacob,
and I opened my mouth to say
the true things that underprop the world.”
You already can feel her voice: earthy, uneducated yet eloquent, drenched in the language of the Bible, which (we later learn) was the essential book on which she grew up. She alludes to the story of Jacob and his flocks in the 30th chapter of Genesis, but more tellingly to Jesus’s quotation of Psalm 78: “I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 13:35).
And so she does, like those ancient seeresses called Sibyls, whose name at one point she takes for herself. She sees what others can’t, understands what they only see.
Her real name is Dinah. She was born in 1935 to a vanished black father and a red-haired Irishwoman who died bearing her. She was raised by an older couple who abused her in multiple ways and set her to the hard labor that’s made her strong body. As a teenage runaway, she easily attracts lovers who just as easily abandon her. In a sleazy traveling circus, taken in through the pity of the faux-gypsy fortune-teller, she finds the kindest home she’s ever known.
At first her job is to dance for the yokels in “naught but a grass skirt and some beads”; it’s “easy work,” she says, as long “as I did not look into the eyes / of the rubes, round and wet / as river stones.” But then the fortune-teller dies, both she and Dinah knowing that Dinah has the truer gift of “sight.” Dinah, now calling herself “Sibyl,” steps into her place.
Only later, when the white spots that she believes to manifest her long-dead mother erupt in her brown skin, does Dinah find her place among the circus freaks: the Leopard Lady.
Meanwhile there’s a newcomer to the circus. A second voice joins the Leopard Lady’s as the poem unfolds, very different from hers but just as resonant, just as Biblical. He’s Jonathan–a “young fella,” she describes him, “slender, his face / white as a book-page, and togged / from a High Street shop not a feed store”–an ex-seminary student. He’s lost his faith but not his craving for it, his longing to hear God speak his name as he once heard it when he was eight.
He needs a job. He wants to work in the circus. Challenged as to what he can do in this place where book-learning doesn’t count for much, he answers, “I know how to talk about things.”
“Okay, gimme a sample. Tell me how
Alfredo the Amazing Frog Boy came to be.”
After a moment’s panic, Jonathan launches into a madcap sermon on Alfredo the Amazing Frog Boy, its text the Biblical plagues of Egypt. No less than Dinah but in an educated key, he breathes, thinks, speaks the Bible. Alfredo, he’ll tell the “marks,” is the last of the line of frog-children, born of God’s ancient decree and Pharaoh’s refusal to obey.
“For he has sworn there’ll be no more
like him, twisted limbs and damp green skin
no more to terrify the land. So if
you’re primed to set your eyes on a memorial
to God’s great potency, then come inside.
Creatures beyond belief await your eyes!”
He’s hired.
Naturally he and Dinah fall together, disputing, Bible verse matched against Bible verse, she at last winning with a quote from the prophet Micah. “And by that speaking I silenced him,” she triumphs. Unlike his faith, hers remains unshattered by the bitterness of her life, the squalor of her profession.
Just as naturally, love blossoms. But what kind of love? Agape–the selfless, sexless caring for one another of brothers and sisters in Christ? Or the erotic variety–“a love,” Jonathan reflects, “I thought would kill me dead”? Or neither agape nor eros, but something deeper than both?
I don’t think I will tell you that, or how the story of this odd, winsome duo comes to its end. You’ll need to read Leopard Lady for yourself. No hardship there.
It’s poems that even a non-poetry-lover can love.
by David Halperin
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