Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Book Reviews
The title of the collection, Blue-Tail Fly, comes from an old slave
song of the same name, or “Jimmy Crack Corn”:
The pony run, he jump, he pitch.
He threw my master in a ditch.
He died and the jury wondered why.
The verdict was the blue-tail fly.
The metaphor of the blue-tail fly who ultimately killed the master
represents a David and Goliath scenario, the overtaking of the strong
and powerful by the weak and the small. Section III is devoted to these
images in the form of poems of soldiers in the Colored Infantry. One
of the most powerful works is “Drummer Boy”:
The other boy being dead, they let me drum—
the sticks
were the stakes
I struck straight
into my master’s
heart, I
drummed
to free him
from his
taut skin,
I drummed
myself free
of his cottonstuffed
head,…
Francis reaches beyond stereotype and folklore to pluck honesty
of emotion from each of her speakers, allowing the reader an intimate
look into the secret pain and fear that dwells within each one, as in
these lines from “A Singular Dispersion over Franklin, Tennessee”:
She has been convinced
the cannibals are on their way
south. She has seen signs of disaster:
bulls mating out of season, bloody
cream in the churn, a congregation
of buzzards in the tall stick-needles.
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