James's Reviews > Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers

A poetry book composed of “dueling” sides in the murder of Medgar Evers was something I did not think I would ever see, but then, Frank X. Walker does not gives us what we think we need to see, he seems best at giving us what we should not ignore. My exposure to Mr. Walker predated this as, when a student, I was advised of a play he was involved in writing - Affrilachia, which was a performance he was involved in that, if memory serves, evolved out of another one of his books. The play featured music, dance, and more - but for me, as a white male from a rural area of Kentucky, it did more - it echoed, literally and figuratively, a message that “some of the Bluegrass was black.” This message resounded with me and, years later as I worked on my dissertation, it became shaped in large part by uncovering the tales, stories, and histories of students (women, African Americans, religious minorities, etc) that the campus had ignored.

Eighteen months after finishing my PhD, I chance upon this book and pick it up with interest. Walker twists another key and starts another engine of thought with this one. In more than sixty poems and writings, Walker speaks for both sides, assuming the voice of figures such as Ever’s widow and with equal talent, Byron De La Beckwith, his assassin. Other voices channel seemingly through Walker and are heard, but Walker’s talent shows with these two extremes. From the opening salvo of the first poem, done in the identity of Ever’s widow, Myrlie, the die is cast with a simple argument:
“When people talk about the movement
As if it started in ‘64, it erases every
body who vanished on the way home...”

The book shows the humanity in all the people, but as they were real, Walker does not let them become characters. Beckwith could be made a caricature of heinous evil, but Walker presents him and his wife. They sing their side with the same zeal as Myrlie.

If Walker meant to just “unghost” Evers from disappearing from history, he overshot. Through poetry, he has unghosted an entire event, time, conflict, and many, many others.