Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Charles Harper Webb’s "Peaches" is an unflinching exploration of childhood fear, social ostracization, and a belated reckoning with an unsettling memory. The poem vividly reconstructs an encounter from the speaker’s youth, blending grotesque imagery with a tone of uneasy nostalgia. Webb’s storytelling, which teeters between innocence and the loss thereof, exposes the prejudices and whispered condemnations of a small-town community, while also confronting the speaker’s own guilt and the weight of silence.

The poem’s title, "Peaches," is at first ambiguous—evoking sweetness, softness, perhaps a sense of indulgence. However, it quickly becomes clear that Peaches is not a reference to fruit but the nickname of a marginalized woman who lives down the street from the speaker. The poem’s opening establishes her vividly: "this fat lady who lived three houses down." Webb’s depiction of Peaches is harsh, even dehumanizing—"She wore big flowery nightgowns, and a polka-dot scarf around her head like that black lady on the pancake mix." The comparison to Aunt Jemima reinforces Peaches as a stereotype in the boy’s perception, positioning her as an outsider whose very existence invites ridicule or fear.

Her son, Elwin, is even more alien to the speaker’s childhood world. "Albino, deaf and dumb and blind, eyes sunk back in his head like marbles, rolling up." The child is presented as ghostly, otherworldly, more an eerie presence than a person. His movements—"He pranced when he ran, like a puppet on strings."—make him seem marionette-like, not fully human. The speaker recalls his terror upon finding Elwin in his closet, referring to him as "some drooling ghost." This mixture of horror and fascination is characteristic of childhood encounters with the unknown, especially when it involves people outside societal norms.

The speaker’s neighborhood, particularly the mothers, views Peaches and Elwin with disdain and suspicion. "He’ll get run over for sure," they whisper, while "White trash," "Welfare baby," and "It ain’t right" are phrases that leap "like sparks" into the young speaker’s ears. This is a world where judgment is swift and uncompromising, and Peaches exists outside its boundaries. The speaker himself has been instructed to stay away from her, and even "ask[ing] her for a trick-or-treat" is off-limits. But childhood curiosity, or perhaps economic opportunity, leads him to her door one day with Cub Scout candy to sell.

What he witnesses next is the heart of the poem, a moment both shocking and enigmatic. Through her window, he sees Peaches in bed, moaning, calling out to Jesus. The description is unfiltered, visceral—"She was naked on her back in bed, fat titties hanging down on either side, and Elwin’s head in the thick moss that curled and crackled between her hippo thighs." The explicitness of the imagery makes it difficult to interpret exactly what is happening, but the speaker himself is unsure as well: "I couldn’t tell what he was doing." It is a moment of deep transgression, not only because of what might be occurring between mother and son, but also because the speaker has stumbled into a scene that he was never meant to see.

Peaches’ reaction is fierce, defensive—yanking Elwin up and shielding herself with him as she confronts the intruder. Her words are laced with bitterness and accusation: "You think you’re somethin’, don’t you, boy?" The speaker denies it, but Peaches goes on, making him see his own privilege—the stable family, the "red two-wheeler with them trainin’ wheels." In contrast, "Alls I got is Elwin. All he’s got is me." Her final warning—"You get him took away, God’ll take somethin’ from you, wait and see."—is both a curse and a plea. She understands how precarious her situation is, how easily outsiders could intervene and tear her small world apart. Whether she is guilty of abuse or simply a desperate mother clinging to the only love she has, Peaches sees the boy at the window as a threat.

Terrified, the speaker flees—"I shagged for home like I’d been blasted by hellfire." The language retains its exaggerated, boyish fear, as if he has barely escaped from something monstrous. But as the night sets in, and the cicadas begin their buzzing chorus, a different feeling takes hold of him. He wrestles with what he has seen, what he should do, what it means. The poem shifts into an almost religious register, as "something rose out of my head, surrounding me with heat and light like angels in the Bible do." Fear and divine reckoning blur together, but the ultimate decision is not to tell.

That silence stretches on for years. Even after "Peaches got cancer, and she and Elwin moved away," the speaker "never told until now what I saw that day." The confession, coming at the poem’s end, carries weight—acknowledging not just what happened but the burden of witnessing, of withholding knowledge, of complicity. The poem resists a clear moral resolution. There is no indication that the speaker, now older, fully understands what he saw. The past remains murky, unresolved, both horrific and oddly tender. The closing image lingers: Peaches in bed, "her moon face smiling and glad," Elwin clinging to her like a child to his mother, like "a monkey baby at the zoo." Is this a portrait of love, of desperation, of something deeply wrong? The poem refuses to say.

"Peaches" is a masterful piece of storytelling, one that captures the uneasy, ambiguous terrain of childhood memory. Webb’s language is raw, unfiltered, driven by a voice that is both darkly humorous and painfully honest. The poem does not seek to resolve the contradictions within its narrative; rather, it allows them to coexist, unsettling and unresolved. It forces the reader to confront the limits of understanding, the weight of silence, and the way the past—once spoken—still refuses to settle into an easy, explainable truth.

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