At Mr. Evers’ Home

A reflection on how racial violence in the South feels inevitable—woven into the landscape—even as the humanity of victims like Medgar Evers becomes vividly, painfully real.

By Zachary Suri

The summer is here too
At Mr. Evers’ home
The cicadas bringing it in
On their tapping feet
The soft sun shattering on the asphalt
And the blue sky
Almost making his blue house
Disappear

I wonder in that half beat of a moment
When he turned his back on the magnolia
If he could see the same faint outlines
In the driveway: of dark shadows and
A blood soil taking one last gasp
Of his shoes
And if he perhaps might have seen
The gleam of the barrel
As it glared at him through the iron grating
That winds its way like wisteria
Or like the inner workings of a human heart
Blown half open in a June breeze

Or if I too (had I seen that glint in the guns
of prejudice flickering at me so young) if I
too would still have stood in line at the 
county building with my back turned
Or posed for that photograph with the 
Oxford pioneer, smiling with my back to the world
If I too would still have turned my back 
And held the door handle unflinchingly
As Mercury flew down from the Mississippi sun
To swing me up on the wings of his shoes

Zachary Suri is a rising junior at Yale University. He is the city editor for the Yale Daily News, a published poet, and a podcaster. Zachary also serves as Gabbai for the traditional egalitarian minyan at Yale Hillel and associate editor of Shibboleth, Yale’s Jewish studies journal.