194 Racism and discrimination poems

Because my father said Yes but not in our lifetimes Because my mother said I know my daughter would never want to marry.

To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew Is the curriculum. In mid-September The entering boys, identified by hats, Wander in a maze of mannered brick Where boxwood and magnolia brood And columns with imperious stance Like rows of ante-bellum girls Eye them, outlanders. In whited cells, on lawns equipped for peace, Under the arch, and lofty banister, Equals shake hands, unequals blankly pass; The exemplary weather whispers, “Quiet, quiet” And visitors on tiptoe leave For the raw North, the unfinished West, As the young, detecting an advantage, Practice a face. Where, on their separate hill, the colleges, Like manor houses of an older law, Gaze down embankments on a land in fee, The Deans, dry spinsters over family plate, Ring out the English name like coin, Humor the snob and lure the lout. Within the precincts of this world Poise is a club. But on the neighboring range, misty and high, The past is absolute: some luckless race Dull with inbreeding and conformity Wears out its heart, and comes barefoot and bad For charity or jail. The scholar Sanctions their obsolete disease; The gentleman revolts with shame At his ancestor. And the true nobleman, once a democrat, Sleeps on his private mountain. He was one Whose thought was shapely and whose dream was broad; This school he held his art and epitaph. But now it takes from him his name, Falls open like a dishonest look, And shows us, rotted and endowed, Its senile pleasure.

(1825) 1. CUVIER Science, science, science! Everything is beautiful blown up beneath my glass. Colors dazzle insect wings. A drop of water swirls like marble. Ordinary crumbs become stalactites set in perfect angles of geometry I’d thought impossible. Few will ever see what I see through this microscope. Cranial measurements crowd my notebook pages, and I am moving closer, close to how these numbers signify aspects of national character. Her genitalia will float inside a labeled pickling jar in the Musée de l’Homme on a shelf above Broca’s brain: “The Venus Hottentot.” Elegant facts await me. Small things in this world are mine. 2. There is unexpected sun today in London, and the clouds that most days sift into this cage where I am working have dispersed. I am a black cutout against a captive blue sky, pivoting nude so the paying audience can view my naked buttocks. I am called “Venus Hottentot.” I left Capetown with a promise of revenue: half the profits and my passage home: A boon! Master’s brother proposed the trip; the magistrate granted me leave. I would return to my family a duchess, with watered-silk dresses and money to grow food, rouge and powders in glass pots, silver scissors, a lorgnette, voile and tulle instead of flax, cerulean blue instead of indigo. My brother would devour sugar-studded non- pareils, pale taffy, damask plums. That was years ago. London’s circuses are florid and filthy, swarming with cabbage-smelling citizens who stare and query, “Is it muscle? bone? or fat?” My neighbor to the left is The Sapient Pig, “The Only Scholar of His Race.” He plays at cards, tells time and fortunes by scraping his hooves. Behind me is Prince Kar-mi, who arches like a rubber tree and stares back at the crowd from under the crook of his knee. A professional animal trainer shouts my cues. There are singing mice here. “The Ball of Duchess DuBarry”: In the engraving I lurch toward the belles dames, mad-eyed, and they swoon. Men in capes and pince-nez shield them. Tassels dance at my hips. In this newspaper lithograph my buttocks are shown swollen and luminous as a planet. Monsieur Cuvier investigates between my legs, poking, prodding, sure of his hypothesis. I half expect him to pull silk scarves from inside me, paper poppies, then a rabbit! He complains at my scent and does not think I comprehend, but I speak English. I speak Dutch. I speak a little French as well, and languages Monsieur Cuvier will never know have names. Now I am bitter and now I am sick. I eat brown bread, drink rancid broth. I miss good sun, miss Mother’s sadza. My stomach is frequently queasy from mutton chops, pale potatoes, blood sausage. I was certain that this would be better than farm life. I am the family entrepreneur! But there are hours in every day to conjur my imaginary daughters, in banana skirts and ostrich-feather fans. Since my own genitals are public I have made other parts private. In my silence I possess mouth, larynx, brain, in a single gesture. I rub my hair with lanolin, and pose in profile like a painted Nubian archer, imagining gold leaf woven through my hair, and diamonds. Observe the wordless Odalisque. I have not forgotten my Xhosa clicks. My flexible tongue and healthy mouth bewilder this man with his rotting teeth. If he were to let me rise up from this table, I’d spirit his knives and cut out his black heart, seal it with science fluid inside a bell jar, place it on a low shelf in a white man’s museum so the whole world could see it was shriveled and hard, geometric, deformed, unnatural.

The first Technicolor feature in Hollywood, a retelling of Madame Butterfly ,
 starring Anna May Wong green means go, so run — now — green the color of the siren sea, whose favors are a mortgage upon the soul

For Tamir Rice yellow plastic black sea eye-shaped shard on a darkened map no shores now to arrive — or depart no wind but this waiting which moves you as if  the seconds could be entered & never left toy boat — oarless each wave a green lamp outlasted toy boat toy leaf  dropped from a toy tree waiting waiting as if the sp- arrows thinning above you are not already pierced by their own names

Plant twelve date palms in a ring around the tarmac. Make them tall, slight towers, leaning into the wind as princes do. Fear that the sweetness of dates will churn your stomach. Plant them anyways. Plant the pudge of his fuzzless face in the arrested time of a school portrait. Plant his exotic name—found in a book that spelled dreams of eminence and hope for an uncertain coupling—in your ear. Know that whether it leaches into the soil or not, this ground was watered with his blood. This tarmac turned a rioting red. Strike that. There was a screech of brakes, and sirens howling like a cliché, then a volley of pops that might have been a game if only what came next was not such utter silence. The tarmac was red. There was no riot. Build a circle of palms and something to keep them safe. Build a greenhouse around the twelve palms. Yes, a green house. This land is not our land. Dig up the tarmac, the dark heavy loam of this side of town. Be sure to wear gloves as you dig through the brownfield’s mystification. Once the Cuyahoga River was a wall of fire. God knows how rain melts metal. Dig into that earth and build a foundation. Quarry it. Let the little boys and little girls of Shaker Heights and Orange bring a Game Boy or cellphone, or other toy made our of coltan that, chances are, a little boy or little girl dug up by hand in the DRC. Let the children lay their shiny toys in the foundation. Seal up ground with molten lead. Die-cast its melted weight. Yes, make a typecaster’s mold, and leave it a dull grey, like flint. Stamp out a broadside, only set it in the foundation’s floor. Let us read the letter that says this officer was unfit. Let us go over it step by step, every time we walk toward the green house of imaging what this boy’s boyhood should have been, the fulfilling of his name, his promise. Plant an oasis here. How is not my problem. * Let someone who remember how cook de rice. Let she cook de rice with palm oil ’til is yellow an sticky. Of course dem have palm oil in Cleveland. Dis no Third World we livin in. Let she cook she rice an peas. Let she say how she know to do it from a film she seen. In de film, dem people from de sea island gone to Sierra Leone and dema find dey people, dey people dat sing de same song with de same words. Come to find out dem words is not jes playplay words, dem words for weeping. So dema sit down together, an weep together, dey South Carolina an Sierra Leone family. Dey weep over de war, an de water, an de fresh and de forgotten, an dey cook dat rice ’til is yellow and sticky. Dey nyam it with dey hand, outta banana leaf and de old, old man, him say, you never forget the language you cry in. Let all dem little girls from Shaker Heights skip the gymnastics meet. Let dem come and eat rice and eat rice ’til they don’t want to eat rice no more an let dem still have rice to eat. Let them lose their innocence. Let horizons settle low. Let dates and raisin and apples and nuts seem a strange mockery of the new, the sweet, the hoped for. Let us share the matter. Let us sit here under these date palms, and haggle over whose fault it is. Let the rage that says tear this shit down tear this shit down. Let us start with the glass walls of the greenhouse, as a demonstration. Let the rage that says I cannot speak not speak. Let it suck speech into its terrible maw and leave us shuddering in silence. Let the rage that says, black lives matter matter. Let that other rage that says all lives matter be torn down. Let the matter with how we don’t all matter in the same way churn up a monumental penitence. Let the date palm offer us shade. Let us ask why we are still here. Let us lower eyes as we face his mother, his father, his sister.

you want to eat me out. right.what does it taste like

God washes clean the souls and hearts of you, His favored ones, whose backs bend o’er the soil, Which grudging gives to them requite for toil In sober graces and in vision true. God places in your hands the pow’r to do A service sweet. Your gift supreme to foil The bare-fanged wolves of hunger in the moil Of Life’s activities. Yet all too few Your glorious band, clean sprung from Nature’s heart; The hope of hungry thousands, in whose breast Dwells fear that you should fail. God placed no dart Of war within your hands, but pow’r to start Tears, praise, love, joy, enwoven in a crest To crown you glorious, brave ones of the soil.

And the way the jury chose to believe the ridiculous stories of the defense. . . . — Mamie Till, 1955 . . . with truth absent, hypocrisy and myth have flourished. . . . —Look, January 1956 The sheriff says it wasn't Till we pulled from the river, that man was as white as I am, white as cotton blowed by the cotton gin fan that weighed him down, looked like he'd lain there weeks, not a kid at all. He was a stranger just out of Money, recalled by a store clerk, a hobo, and a crossroad guitarist. The reporter finds them at the once abandoned crossing. They say it's like the sheriff says, came up one night, headed Clarksdale way, another one, hat pulled down, right behind. Three days later, the bluesman says, a plague of starlings gathered into little boys those who fished and found the dead man's foot. The reporter stares into his cataracted, cotton eyes. He cannot find them, no matter where he looks.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye, “Their color is a diabolic dye.” Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be refined, and join the angelic train. Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America” The mother bending over a baby named Shug chuckles, “Gimme some sugar,” just to preface a flurry of kisses sweet as sugar cane. Later, when she stirs a spoonful of Domino into her coffee, who’s to tell the story how a ten-foot-tall reed from the Old World, on being brought to the New, was raised and cropped so cooks could sweeten whatever tasted bitter? Or how grade-A granulated began as a thick black syrup boiled for hours in an iron vat until it was refined to pure, white crystal. When I was a child whose payoff for obeying orders was red-and-white-striped candy canes, I knew that sugar was love. The first time someone called me “sweetheart,” I knew sugar was love. And when I tasted my slice of the wedding cake, iced white and washed down with sweet champagne, don’t you know sugar was love. One day Evelina who worked for us showed up with her son Bubba and laughed, “Now y’all can play together.” He had a sweet nature, but even so we raised a little Cain, and Daddy told her not to bring him back. He thought I’d begun to sound like colored people. She smiled, dropped her eyes, kept working. And kept putting on weight. She later died of stroke. Daddy developed diabetes by age fifty-five, insulin burned what his blood couldn’t handle. Chronic depressions I have, a nutritionist gently termed “the sugar blues,” but damned if any lyrics come out of them, baby. Black-and-white negatives from a picture history of the sugar trade develop in my dreams, a dozen able-bodied slaves hacking forward through a field of cane. Sweat trickles down from forehead into eye as they sheave up stalks and cart them to the mill where grinding iron rollers will express a thin sucrose solution that, when not refined, goes from blackstrap molasses on into rum, a demon conveniently negotiable for slaves. The master under the impression he owned these useful properties naturally never thought of offering them a piece of the wedding cake, the big white house that bubbling brown sugar built and paid for, unnaturally processed by Domino. Phillis Wheatley said the sweet Christ was brought here from Asia Minor to redeem an African child and maybe her master’s soul as well. She wrote as she lived, a model of refinement, yes, but black as Abel racing through the canebrake, demon bloodhounds baying in pursuit, until at last his brother caught him, expressed his rage, and rode back home to dinner. Tell it to Fats Domino, to those who live on Sugar Hill, tell it to unsuspecting Shug as soon as she is old enough to hear it. One day Evelina’s son waved goodbye and climbed on board a northbound train, black angels guiding him invisibly. In class he quoted a sentence from Jean Toomer: “Time and space have no meaning in a canefield.” My father died last fall at eighty-one. Love’s bitter, child, as often as it’s sweet. Mm-mm, I sure do have the blues today: Baby, will you give me some sugar?