The Autobiography of a Jukebox by Cornelius Eady

First published: 1996

Type of work: Poetry

The Poems

Cornelius Eady’s The Autobiography of a Jukebox consists of four parts: “Home Front,” “Rodney King Blues,” “The Bruise of the Lyric,” and “Small Moments.” While the poems could easily be read as autobiographical scenes, they may also be somewhat fictionalized. The poems are written in free verse and produce strongly focused images. They describe women coping with the tensions of economic concerns and emotionally unstable relationships; a cousin who is a “crackhead”; a woman who begs in a dangerous part of town for shopping money; and a father who loves the poet’s sister so much that he must beat her with a belt. This paternal ambivalence echoes when the father also fells a large tree that, the mother says, may have invaded the foundations of their house. The poems offer no answers and no analyses; they draw readers into reflection upon such ambivalence.

The rest of the poetry in “Home Front” deals with relationships. The father threatens to leave. The mother and sister leave indeed, and the narrator speculates about feelings that his father does not show when he sees the empty house. Two poems focus on men standing up for themselves. The speaker’s father responds to a racially charged incident, and his grandfather calmly stands on his own land with shotgun in hand while resisting the badgering of officials. Such actions also explain the hardness of the characters.

Several poems in “Rodney King Blues” reveal the narrator’s feelings of anger about the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers in 1991 and about the riots that broke out in 1992 after the officers were tried and found not guilty. The poems also deal with people who lost property to the riots, a truck driver who was assaulted by a mob during the riots, double-talk that sought to justify the officer’s actions, and the helpless feeling of being a victim in the inner city. Eady isolates from these events several sharply focused scenes whose verisimilitude pulls readers into the genuine turmoil of life without engaging in tedious moralizing.

“The Bruise of the Lyric” introduces pictures of musical artists, each one drawn in words. John Coltrane and Kenny Burrell’s jazz piece “Why Was I Born?” is redrawn in Eady’s words. Percussionist Max Roach is pictured in words. “Miles Davis at Lennies-on-the-Turnpike” contains the memorable words “Death is one hell/ Of a pickpocket.” Eady commemorates Dexter Gordon’s saxophone, Milt Jackson’s vibraphone, Eric Dolphy’s saxophone, and Chuck Berry’s “frenzy of the word go”—in the singer’s “Johnny B. Goode”—as well as his jukebox point of view in “Roll Over Beethoven.”

“Small Moments” builds details taken from everyday life into reflections about poetry. One poem focuses on the image of a young white woman in dreadlocks; the next follows the narrator’s evolving hairstyles, from “nappy,” to Afro, to “relaxed,” to “vengeful” dreadlocks, to a barber alienated by the confrontation with “urban steel wool” and “industrial-strength kink.” The other poems in this section reflect upon poetry. Like Eady’s work, Charles Simic’s poems focus on sharp images. In “Cornbread,” the narrator finds cornbread at a poetry reading by Charles Simic, a connection that may be self-reflective. Particularly interesting is Eady’s reference to Walt Whitman, who, Eady says, should have seen some of his posthumous success as a poet. Several poems in this section also reflect on the altered experience of self and others when poets extricate themselves from the American environment and see themselves in the context of Europe.

The first poem of “Home Front” focuses on mother and father, a focus that is generalized as the predicament of women seeking security from emotionally unstable men. The man the speaker’s mother turned down “made my father look good,/ That’s how bad it was.” The poem’s characters are forced to choose between bad alternatives. Vacant gaps of emotion are filled with the caulk of religion: “Jesus, the man my daddy once saw/ Lying next to her/ On her old army cot.” Enmity characterizes the relationship between the genders. The mother wins at a lottery; the father and a cousin pick up the winnings; the mother loses the money to the two, and she acquires a pervasive and lasting feeling of having been cheated. In “The Yankee Dollar,” the mother expects to receive royalties from a book she wrote. She distrusts all offers of temporary financial help to keep her afloat until the royalties arrive, even an offer from her son. She distrusts “male money,” because such money represents male control over her.

“The House,” a poem that represents the enmity between the sexes from the male perspective, comments:

By then he wasA pensioner,Who would spend his daysAsleep in a CadillacTo escape his wifeA woman who wouldGlower at him . . .Wondering when heWas going to giveHer life back

In another strong image, the narrator’s mother falls to her knees at the welfare office because something has gone wrong, a circumstance that the poem’s five-or six-year-old speaker is too young to understand. Patterns repeat themselves for the sister: “Old, and toothless, he’s the man who helps her to pay her bills.” The sister’s only alternative is to go back home to a father whose controlling behavior is equally undesirable.

“I Want to Fly Like Superman” is about a little girl who has been told that no one wants her, her mother having abandoned her for Florida. The little girl jumps off the garage. She survives the fall to tell how much she would have liked to have bled to death on the pavement. “She will learn that the main rule of this family is: there is no obligation to save a fool.” Eady creates an unbearable tension between the compassion one has for the girl and the hardness of circumstances.

“Rodney King Blues” begins with a dramatic monologue by a cab driver, praising the United States. Even Timothy Leary, the cabbie insists, returned after a short while living abroad. He says that beggars are simply lazy people who should be banished from the country, so they will understand how good their life in the United States actually is. The rant of prejudice and misinformation culminates in the lines: “I don’t hold nothin’/ Against no one./ Hey, I picked you up,” alluding to the African American identity of the hearer.

“I’ll Fly Away” is a poem included in “Small Moments.” In it, a young African American man in Venice, Italy, loses a coin. A white woman picks it up to hand back to him. The scene paralyzes the young man, as he interprets it through the cognitive dissonance of his memory. He recognizes that what is innocent in Venice is fraught with dangerous meaning back home in the United States.

Critical Context

Eady has created for himself a lasting place in African American literature, but his sharp imagery also reaches beyond that literature to the larger literary canon. Already noteworthy, his poetry will become increasingly important as it gains recognition and depth. The poems celebrate African American experience—in the family, in society, in culture, and in poetic practice and identity—thereby broadening the scope and understanding of that experience.

Bibliography

Eady, Cornelius. “Cornelius Eady.” Interview by Patricia Spears Jones. BOMB 79 (Spring, 2002): 48-54. Discusses the relationship between Eady’s poetry and classical Greek theater.

Eady, Cornelius. “Cornelius Eady: Lyric and Dramatic Imagination.” Interview by Reamy Jansen. The Bloomsbury Review 22, no. 1 (January/February, 2002): 3-11. Includes a useful discussion of Eady’s purpose in the “Small Moments” section of The Autobiography of a Jukebox.

Peters, Erskine. “Cornelius Eady’s You Don’t Miss Your Water: Its Womanist/Feminist Perspective.” Journal of African American Men 2, no. 1 (Summer, 1996): 15-31. Discusses Eady through the lens of African American feminism (a branch of feminism for which Alice Walker coined the phrase “womanist”).

Trethewey, Natasha. “A Profile of Cornelius Eady.” Ploughshares 28, no. 1 (Spring, 2002): 193-197. Includes a brief biography of Cornelius Eady, as well as a general discussion of his work by Trethewey, a fellow poet.