fairly middling

By far my favorite of my grandma’s phrases
was: fairly middlin’.
We’d ask her how you be?
and she’d respond: fairly middlin’
with a waddle in her step.
Feet that had seen the dust of Jim Crow
conjur up unholy smoke.
Her momma, a freed slave,
bought a home, raised
them on a farm in Mississippi.
She moved to Chicago
not knowing what the future
held, but she trusted it would take her
past the pastures and to the land
of skyscrapers and opportunity.

As a child, I took it to mean
she was always ‘hanging in there.’
Getting by. Just fine, sugah.

Once,
on a whim,
I called into an NPR podcast
to ask the phrase’s origin.

They said:
fair—acceptable.
middling—average.
A rate of scale farmers used
to assess their crops.

Fair to middling was how they knew
whether the next season
would be fruitful.

I wonder if she knew
the last days would be her last.

& I thought about
the state of things,
how I am whatever
the word is
for not horrible
but less than fine.

A pot of grits that won’t boil
even with salt,
even with the flame
turned high.

I am fairly—
(sounds like barely),
middling—
(sounds like making it).

They say farmers used to say it:
fine.
good.
fair.
middling.
poor.

Measured crops like we measure
ourselves.
bushels of breath.
dried-out hope.

Maybe we’re all in the in-between.
Not quite locusts,
but getting close.

& still—
my grandmother,
born to red dirt
and silent mornings,
kept sowing
when the fields came up empty.

No rain?
She turned the soil anyway.

What does that look like now—
when the harvest is grief,
when we plant in cracked concrete?

Maybe it’s this:
wake up.
drink water.
text someone back.
try again.

Even if
the best we’ve got
is
fairly
middling.

Khalisa Rae is a poet, essayist, and cultural worker based in the South, by way of the Midwest. She is the author of Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat (Red Hen Press) and a Pushcart Prize–nominated writer with work in Electric Lit, LitHub, Southern Humanities Review, RHINO, and more. A proud Black queer feminist, she writes about memory, mythology, and the intergenerational hauntings of girlhood. Khalisa is the co-founder of the Griot & Grey Owl Black Southern Writers Conference and serves as the Theater and Literature Director for the North Carolina Arts Council.