The Grass Crown: A Coronation Evan J. Massey

The Grass Crown: A Coronation

Evan J. Massey

A few days ago, I was suddenly overcome with the urge to mow grass. And being that I had just moved into a 6th-floor apartment, and therefore had no grass to mow, I downloaded a mowing simulator on my work iPad. It was then that I was also overcome with laughter at the thought of me virtually cutting grass while my students pulled their hair out like weeds during an exam essay. “I’ll help you after I finish this client’s lawn,” I’d say in my head. Before I hit the road in my riding lawnmower, I chose my avatar and, in keeping with my own identity, selected the Black man with a beard and a yellow hat—the latter sadly missing the John Deere logo. He was a blacksmith, you know, John Deere. My homie Deere created the first commercially successful scouring plow, which took Flyover Country by storm. Though, maybe I shouldn’t play around with that word “storm.” At the tender age of four, John Deere lost his father, William Deere, who boarded a boat for England in hopes to provide a better life for his family. He was never heard from again. He’s presumed to have died at sea. RIP “Dub D.” That’s something I could never imagine, losing my Pop. It was my Pop who taught me how to mow grass; how to adjust the blade height, to press the fuel primer bulb after gassing up, and how to admire your work afterwards with a glistening glass of lemonade as the sun sprayed strokes of light across your landscaped masterpiece. I read somewhere that you can actually paint your lawn. Lawn paint seems, at least to me, like it’s specifically for the inept curators of yards, the non-landscapers. From the long metal hose, a shower of emerald extract spritzes onto the earth. Looks inauthentic, fake as hell. Like something out of a video game. I had just cut my first

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lawn in the simulator and when I shaped up the edges of a flower bed, the plants bloomed with herbal brilliance. It was on to the next house, and I started to remember that, when I was younger, it wasn’t smart to go from house to house in my neighborhood. Especially across the street and two houses down where a man named Cornbread lived. Once, Cornbread asked my Pop to borrow our lawnmower and I remember him smiling at me behind our screen door and how the gold grill in his mouth lacked luster. We didn’t know it then, but weeks later he’d kill a kid who was close to my age. For posing as a gang member. To this day, I still think about how that could have been me. A pristine lawn never conveys the full story of its owner. What if every spike of grass could speak? I can’t help but consider the centuries-old tales seeded in the soil. Native American tribes made baskets, beds, and houses from grass. The Cheyenne burned grass and mixed it with ashes, blood, and tallow to make paint. My cousin once burned a bush in front of his house, and a small flame soon grew into a scorching inferno, incinerating every one of the leaves. And when I informed my Pops, who was inside the house, that the bush was burning, he commenced to whipping me. I looked for meaning, but there was nothing biblical about any of this. My Pop’s copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass sits on my Ikea bookshelf. And looking over at the thick tome reminds me of the Billie Holiday lyric from “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynchings. “The blood on the leaves and blood at the root,” is the blood of my ancestors circulating beneath our feet, coursing through the auricles, sheaths, and crowns. Blood that fertilized every stem on plantations. My people have a complicated relationship with the soil. For centuries our lives were centered around the land and removing every resource born from

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it without a penny in compensation. That’s why, unfortunately, I can’t even look at freshly-tilled farmland or flourishing crops. They are reminders that I, in another time sown in the past, labored from dusk till dawn in those fields. My grandfather told me that a Black farmer named John Boyd Jr., from my home state of Virginia, drove a mule and wagon, and then a tractor to the Capitol as efforts to shed light on the discrimination that Black farmers face across the country. It is because of this discrimination that Boyd thinks, one day, Black farmers will soon, sadly “go extinct.” In a smaller effort, I once drove lawn mowers to the front of Lowes, during a summer when my car had broken down and had to walk 3 miles to work in the Lawn & Garden section, selling plants and bags of mulch and pea gravel to rich white folks. Where I also once witnessed two Black kids running out of Lowes to their car, being chased by the Loss Prevention guy for stealing something of which I do not remember. I tried to memorize the car’s license plate, but forgot it by the time I reached the front door. I was afraid that I’d mistakenly be associated with those kids; the Loss Prevention dude kept his eye on me for the duration of my shift. I’d disclosed this to my coworker from Philly, whose only job, it seemed, was to recover all the carts around the parking lot and taxi them back inside. He said he hadn’t seen the thieves. He cleaned a large canal of sweat from his forehead and hobbled back into the heat. But the dude in the Domonic’s sausage food truck had seen them. “And then I saw you,” he said. Once, I told him that I had eaten at a certain Indian restaurant in town to which he dismissed. “They buy their food pre-cooked,” he said. “They only heat it up and serve it. Don’t go there,” he said. It sounded like a command. Much like how the Drill Sergeants in the Army ordered us not to walk on the grass,

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screaming, “Get off my grass!” Like it was their grass. Like they had birthed, along with Mother Earth, every loving ligule and leaf. I know that a well-landscaped lawn can make you feel regal, like Stanley in the movie Friday when he yelled at Craig and Smokey for stepping on his property. Like you’re the king of the block, of the neighborhood, like you should be fitted for some kind of grass crown. In Rome, a corona graminea, a grass crown, was presented to a general who saved a legion of soldiers or an entire army in battle. Though the OG Augustus Caesar was awarded that joint out of political respect and achievement. I swiped away from the mowing simulator and cued up Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp. I’ve been looking for ways to plant my man Tru in the curriculum. I’d like my students to recognize his mastery of descriptive language. The way he describes a scene makes me feel like I’m wandering in a plush carpeted plain where the leaves of grass whisper and waft in unison as the sun audibly hums above me. In Tru’s title story The Grass Harp, Dolly asks, “Do you hear? that is the grass harp, always telling a story—it knows the stories of all the people on the hill, of all the people who ever lived.” She continued, and it hit me when she said, “when we are dead it will tell ours, too.”

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