194 Racism and discrimination poems

I think of the man who sat behind my grandmother’s sister in church and told her the percentage of Indian in her blood, calling it out over the white pews. I wonder what made him want to count it like coins or a grade. I wish I could hear him now when I think of her saying that all the Wampanoag blood in her body would fit in one finger, discounting the percentage it seemed, but why was she such a historian, tracing the genealogy of the last Wampanoag up to her own children, typing it all on see-through paper? Maybe like me she felt a little self-conscious caring about what we’re made of instead of simply being satisfied dressing our bodies and driving them around. Maybe she felt shy for loving someone she’d never met, I mean I do. I think of the knife cutting into flesh and the fork carrying it

Alas! and am I born for this, To wear this slavish chain? Deprived of all created bliss, Through hardship, toil and pain! How long have I in bondage lain, And languished to be free! Alas! and must I still complain— Deprived of liberty. Oh, Heaven! and is there no relief This side the silent grave— To soothe the pain—to quell the grief And anguish of a slave? Come Liberty, thou cheerful sound, Roll through my ravished ears! Come, let my grief in joys be drowned, And drive away my fears. Say unto foul oppression, Cease: Ye tyrants rage no more, And let the joyful trump of peace, Now bid the vassal soar. Soar on the pinions of that dove Which long has cooed for thee, And breathed her notes from Afric’s grove, The sound of Liberty. Oh, Liberty! thou golden prize, So often sought by blood— We crave thy sacred sun to rise, The gift of nature’s God! Bid Slavery hide her haggard face, And barbarism fly: I scorn to see the sad disgrace In which enslaved I lie. Dear Liberty! upon thy breast, I languish to respire; And like the Swan unto her nest, I’d like to thy smiles retire. Oh, blest asylum—heavenly balm! Unto thy boughs I flee— And in thy shades the storm shall calm, With songs of Liberty!

Seen my lady home las' night, Jump back, honey, jump back. Hel' huh han' an' sque'z it tight, Jump back, honey, jump back. Hyeahd huh sigh a little sigh, Seen a light gleam f'om huh eye, An' a smile go flittin' by — Jump back, honey, jump back. Hyeahd de win' blow thoo de pine, Jump back, honey, jump back. Mockin'-bird was singin' fine, Jump back, honey, jump back. An' my hea't was beatin' so, When I reached my lady's do', Dat I could n't ba' to go — Jump back, honey, jump back. Put my ahm aroun' huh wais', Jump back, honey, jump back. Raised huh lips an' took a tase, Jump back, honey, jump back. Love me, honey, love me true? Love me well ez I love you? An' she answe'd, "'Cose I do"— Jump back, honey, jump back.

On the radio this morning: The average woman knows 275 colors—and men know eight. Women say coffee, mocha, copper, cinnamon, taupe . Men say brown. Women know an Amazon of colors I might have said were green, an Antarctica of whites, oceans of colors I'd stupidly call blue, fields of color, with flowers in them I would have said were red. From women, I've learned to love the browns, the earths, the dusts, the clays, the soft colors, the colors brought out from the mines, hardened ones, hardened in fires I would call red; the colors of the furies; the reconciling colors of the cooling ash. By myself I know the evening colors when the sky goes from blue to another blue to black—although it's a lonely, whitish black sometimes, like the color of sleep— the way dreams are lit by the light that's thrown from nowhere on the things you find in them. Last night there was a turtle, I would say it was brown or green, or it was a snake, mottled, a kind of grey, disguised as a turtle, red spots as if painted on the shell, a palish greenish underside—vulnerable, alone swimming in water I would say was colorless. I woke to the pale colors of the morning—no one has a name for those: the white-rose white you see through the white of the curtains on the window, the milks, the creams, the cream a galactic swirl before it turns to brown when your wife stirs it in the coffee, the faint drying oval on the silver of the spoon.

in the shooter’s face, she recognizes her sibling’s coarse unforgiving hair, his yellow skin, & vacant stare, the year her brother broke down, she was still in high school, seventeen — w/ a taste for cutting not class but hands & arms any outlet to escape this “community” denies illness, a family reacts — against crying out loud let it be some other Asian in the shooter’s face, I recognize my sibling’s coarse unforgiving hair, his yellow skin, & vacant stare, the year my brother broke down, I was still in high school, seventeen — w/ a taste for cutting not class but hands & arms any outlet to escape this “community” denies illness, a family reacts — against crying out loud let it be some other Asian

i will die this month. how i do not know. still there is much work to be done. i am afraid not for myself but for betty and the girls. some nights i stay awake looking out the window, a gun in my hand. i know how cruel people can be. i have known hatred and blindness. there are brothers waiting to do me harm. i will die for them. i will love them as only i can. may allah be my witness.

Lift ev’ry voice and sing, Till earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; Let our rejoicing rise High as the list’ning skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us; Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won. Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chast’ning rod, Felt in the days when hope unborn had died; Yet with a steady beat, Have not our weary feet Come to the place for which our fathers sighed? We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, Out from the gloomy past, Till now we stand at last Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast. God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who has brought us thus far on the way; Thou who has by Thy might, Led us into the light, Keep us forever in the path, we pray. Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee, Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee; Shadowed beneath Thy hand, May we forever stand. True to our God, True to our native land.

my school teacher          asked me     if I wanted to go to Japan      do something good for the Emperor we were led to a harbor a cargo ship    a train to a factory in Doyamaki             where Food was so scarce    we pulled grass, roots anything we could eat girls died of hunger    some went crazy I ran away   was found   by a Japanese soldier Kobayashi took me to a hut            Every evening soldiers countless soldiers        on the wild mountainside Kobayashi An unusually quiet day I found Japan had lost the war I sailed to Korea jumped from the crates   hit my stomach with fists I failed            I named him Young-ju left him at an orphanage met him every Sunday one Sunday I saw another boy in his clothes Young-ju had died of pneumonia already buried I thought of Kobayashi bringing me rice in his drunken stupor                         I thought of the piece of steel I took    at the factory I found some of the steel            so attractive I still believe      he is alive somewhere                 I want to believe that all was just a terrible       fate But then, But then

Here, she said,put this on your head. She handed me a hat. You ’bout as white as your dad, and you gone stay like that.

I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, there’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and accept the Negro [pronounced Nigra] into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches. —Strom Thurmond, South Carolina Senator and Presidential Candidate for the States’ Rights Party, 1948 I said, “I’m gonna fight Thurmond from the mountain to the sea.” —Modjeska Monteith Simkins, Civil Rights Matriarch, South Carolina, 1948 The youngest has been married off. He is as tall as Abraham Lincoln. Here, on his wedding day, he flaunts the high spinning laugh of a newly freed slave. I stand above him, just off the second-floor landing, watching the celebration unfold. Uncle-cousins, bosom buddies, convertible cars of nosy paramours, strolling churlish penny- pinchers pour onto the mansion estate. Below, Strom Thurmond is dancing with my mother. The favorite son of South Carolina has already danced with the giddy bride and the giddy bride’s mother. More women await: Easter dressy, drenched in caramel, double exposed, triple cinched, lined up, leggy, ready. I refuse to leave the porch. If I walk down I imagine he will extend his hand, assume I am next in his happy darky line, #427 on his dance card. His history and mine, burnt cork and blackboard chalk, concentric, pancaked, one face, two histories, slow dragging, doing the nasty. My father knows all this. Daddy’s Black Chief Justice legs straddle the boilerplate carapace of the CSS H. L. Hunley, lost Confederate submarine, soon to be found just off the coast of Charleston. He keeps it fully submerged by applying the weight of every treatise he has ever written against the death penalty of South Carolina. Chanting “Briggs v. Elliott,” he keeps the ironside door of the submarine shut. No hands. His eyes are a Black father’s beacon, search- lights blazing for the married-off sons, and on the unmarried, whale-eyed nose-in-book daughter, born unmoored, quiet, yellow, strategically placed under hospital lights to fully bake. The one with the most to lose. There will be no trouble. Still, he chain- smokes. A burning stick of mint & Indian leaf seesaws between his lips. He wants me to remember that trouble is a fire that runs like a staircase up then down. Even on a beautiful day in June. I remember the new research just out: What the Negro gave America Chapter 9,206: Enslaved Africans gifted porches to North America. Once off the boats they were told, then made, to build themselves a place—to live. They build the house that will keep them alive. Rather than be the bloody human floret on yet another southern tree, they imagine higher ground. They build landings with floor enough to see the trouble coming. Their arced imaginations nail the necessary out into the floral air. On the backs and fronts of twentypenny houses, a watching place is made for the ones who will come tipping with torch & hog tie through the quiet woods, hoping to hang them as decoration in the porcupine hair of longleaf. The architecture of Black people is sui generis. This is architecture dreamed by the enslaved: Their design will be stolen. Their wits will outlast gold. My eyes seek historical rest from the kiss- kiss theater below; Strom Thurmond’s it’s-never-too-late-to-forgive-me chivaree. I search the tops of yellow pine while my fingers reach, catch, pinch my father’s determined-to-rise smoke. Long before AC African people did the math: how to cool down the hot air of South Carolina? If I could descend, without being trotted out by some roughrider driven by his submarine dreams, this is what I’d take my time and scribble into the three-tiered, white créme wedding cake: Filibuster. States’ Rights. The Grand Inquisition of the great Thurgood Marshall. This wedding reception would not have been possible without the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (opposed by you-know-who). The Dixiecrat senator has not worn his sandy seersucker fedora to the vows. The top of Strom Thurmond’s bald head reveals a birthmark tattooed in contrapposto pose:Segregation Forever. All my life he has been the face of hatred; the blue eyes of the Confederate flag, the pasty bald of white men pulling wooly heads up into the dark skirts of trees, the sharp, slobbering, amber teeth of German shepherds, still clenched inside the tissue-thin, (still marching), band-leader legs of Black schoolteachers, the single- minded pupae growing between the legs of white boys crossing the tracks, ready to force Black girls into fifth-grade positions, Palmetto state-sanctioned sex 101. I didn’t want to dance with him. My young cousin arrives at my elbow. Her beautiful lips the color of soft-skin mangoes. She pulls, teasing the stitches of my satin bridesmaid gown, “You better go on down there and dance with Strom— while he still has something left.” I don’t tell her it is unsouthern for her to call him by his first name, as if they are familiar. I don’t tell her: To bear witness to marriage is to believe that everything moving through the sweet wedding air can be confidently,left— to Love. I stand on the landing high above the beginnings of Love, holding a plastic champagne flute, drinking in the warm June air of South Carolina. I hear my youngest brother’s top hat joy. Looking down I find him, deep in the giddy crowd, modern, integrated, interpretive. For ten seconds I consider dancing with Strom. His Confederate hands touch every shoulder, finger, back that I love. I listen to the sound of Black laughter shimmying. All worry floats beyond the gurgling submarine bubbles, the white railing, every drop of champagne air. I close my eyes and Uncle Freddie appears out of a baby’s breath of fog. (The dead are never porch bound.) He moves with ease where I cannot. He walks out on the rice-thrown air, heaving a lightning bolt instead of a wave. Suddenly, there is a table set, complete with 1963 dining room stars, they twinkle twinkle up & behind him. Thelonious, Martin, Malcolm, Nina, Dakota, all mouths Negro wide & open have come to sing me down. His tattered almanac sleeps curled like a wintering slug in his back pocket. His dark Dogon eyes jet to the scene below, then zoom past me until they are lost in the waning sugilite sky. Turning in the shadows of the wheat fields, he whispers a truth plucked from the foreword tucked in his back pocket: Veritas: Black people will forgive you quicker than you can say Orangeburg Massacre. History does not keep books on the handiwork of slaves. But the enslaved who built this Big House, long before I arrived for this big wedding, knew the power of a porch. This native necessity of nailing down a place, for the cooling off of air, in order to lift the friendly, the kindly, the so politely, the in-love-ly, jubilant, into the arms of the grand peculiar, for the greater good of the public spectacular: us giving us away.