194 Racism and discrimination poems

What’s yr race and she said what’s yr hurry how ’bout it cock asian man I’m just going for curry. You ever been to ethni-city? How ’bout multi-culti? You ever lay out skin for the white gaze? What are you, banana or egg? Coconut maybe? Something wrong Charlie Chim-chong-say-wong-leung-chung? You got a slant to yr marginal eyes? You want a little rice with that garlic? Is this too hot for you? Or slimy    or bitter    or smelly    or tangy    or raw    or sour — a little too dirty on the edge hiding underneath crawling up yr leg    stuck between the fingernails? Is that a black hair in yr soup? Well how you wanna handle this? You wanna maintain a bit of différ-ence? Keep or mother’s other? Use the father for the fodder? What side of John A. Macdonald’s tracks you on anyway? How fast you think this train is going to go?

Some lamp sputters its dusty light across some desk. Some hand, shaking, works the strained rope, twisting and knifing, weaving, tugging tight a bellowing circle. Randy Travis, steamy drawl and hiccup on the staticky AM, backs the ritual of drooping loop. Sweat drips an awful hallelujah. God glares askance, but the artist doesn’t waver—wrists click cadence, knots become a path to what makes saviors. The sagging hoop bemoans a need to squeeze, its craving for a breath within the ring.

Hard to picture, but these Goliath trees are taller still than Robeson. Outside vast plate windows in this lecture hall, I imagine him running down autumn fields, see his black thighs pumping that machinery across chalk-painted lines. He loved the woman in the lab, Eslanda, who saw order in swimming circles on inch-wide slides, who made photographs. I picture her standing in darkness, led by red light, bathing paper in broth, extracting images. Did this woman smile to watch white paper darken, to pull wet from the chemicals Paul Robeson’s totem face?

This is for the Pullman Porters who organized when people said they couldn’t. And carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the ChicagoDefender to the Black Americans in the South so they would know they were not alone. This is for the Pullman Porters who helped Thurgood Marshall go south and come back north to fight the fight that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education because even though Kansas is west and even though Topeka is the birth- place of Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote the powerful “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” it was the Pullman Porters who whispered to the traveling men both the Blues Men and the “Race” Men so that they both would know what was going on. This is for the Pullman Porters who smiled as if they were happy and laughed like they were tickled when some folks were around and who silently rejoiced in 1954 when the Supreme Court announced its 9—0 decision that “sepa- rate is inherently unequal.” This is for the Pullman Porters who smiled and welcomed a fourteen-year-old boy onto their train in 1955. They noticed his slight limp that he tried to disguise with a doo-wop walk; they noticed his stutter and probably understood why his mother wanted him out of Chicago during the summer when school was out. Fourteen-year-old Black boys with limps and stutters are apt to try to prove themselves in dangerous ways when mothers aren’t around to look after them. So this is for the Pullman Porters who looked over that fourteen-year-old while the train rolled the reverse of the Blues Highway from Chicago to St. Louis to Memphis to Mississippi. This is for the men who kept him safe; and if Emmett Till had been able to stay on a train all summer he would have maybe grown a bit of a paunch, certainly lost his hair, probably have worn bifocals and bounced his grand- children on his knee telling them about his summer riding the rails. But he had to get off the train. And ended up in Money, Mississippi. And was horribly, brutally, inexcusably, and unac- ceptably murdered. This is for the Pullman Porters who, when the sheriff was trying to get the body secretly buried, got Emmett’s body on the northbound train, got his body home to Chicago, where his mother said: I want the world to see what they did to my boy. And this is for all the mothers who cried. And this is for all the people who said Never Again. And this is about Rosa Parks whose feet were not so tired, it had been, after all, an ordi- nary day, until the bus driver gave her the opportunity to make history. This is about Mrs. Rosa Parks from Tuskegee, Alabama, who was also the field secretary of the NAACP. This is about the moment Rosa Parks shouldered her cross, put her worldly goods aside, was willing to sacrifice her life, so that that young man in Money, Mississippi, who had been so well protected by the Pullman Porters, would not have died in vain. When Mrs. Parks said “NO” a passionate movement was begun. No longer would there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs. Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system, the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No. Great voices would be raised singing the praises of God and exhorting us “to forgive those who trespass against us.” But it was the Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not being able to stand it. She sat back down.

A few years back and they told me Black means a hole where other folks got brain/it was like the cells in the heads of Black children was out to every hour on the hour naps Scientists called the phenomenon the Notorious Jensen Lapse, remember? Anyway I was thinking about how to devise a test for the wise like a Stanford-Binet for the C.I.A. you know? Take Einstein being the most the unquestionable the outstanding the maximal mind of the century right? And I’m struggling against this lapse leftover from my Black childhood to fathom why anybody should say so: E=mc squared? I try that on this old lady live on my block: She sweeping away Saturday night from the stoop and mad as can be because some absolute jackass have left a kingsize mattress where she have to sweep around it stains and all she don’t want to know nothing about in the first place “Mrs. Johnson!” I say, leaning on the gate between us: “What you think about somebody come up with an E equals M C 2?” “How you doin,” she answer me, sideways, like she don’t want to let on she know I ain’ combed my hair yet and here it is Sunday morning but still I have the nerve to be bothering serious work with these crazy questions about “E equals what you say again, dear?” Then I tell her, “Well also this same guy? I think he was undisputed Father of the Atom Bomb!” “That right.” She mumbles or grumbles, not too politely “And dint remember to wear socks when he put on his shoes!” I add on (getting desperate) at which point Mrs. Johnson take herself and her broom a very big step down the stoop away from me “And never did nothing for nobody in particular lessen it was a committee and used to say, ‘What time is it?’ and you’d say, ‘Six o’clock.’ and he’d say, ‘Day or night?’ and and he never made nobody a cup a tea in his whole brilliant life! and [my voice rises slightly] and he dint never boogie neither: never!” “Well,” say Mrs. Johnson, “Well, honey, I do guess that’s genius for you.”

At night Chinamen jump on Asia with a thump while in our willful way we, in secret, play affectionate games and bruise our knees like China’s shoes. The birds push apples through grass the moon turns blue, these apples roll beneath our buttocks like a heath full of Chinese thrushes flushed from China’s bushes. As we love at night birds sing out of sight, Chinese rhythms beat through us in our heat, the apples and the birds move us like soft words, we couple in the grace of that mysterious race.

0. the first line? “blackface is sometimes the truth.” the poet knows this will make fire. ponders performing in some dark room, squinting at the black type— red gel spots like laser sights from a rifle big as a bus. but here, the sniper stirs herbal tea, has a cell phone, the number of a woman the color of thrush wings. for now: the sniper with the cell phone will be he. he misses the next line beneath the spoon clanging in the mug like the clapper in a schooner’s alarm bell. the third line, perhaps: “. . . the smoldering cork testifies . . .” or “. . . the moldy corpse terrifies . . .” he considers each. and wonders about the second line —then about the girl he saw boarding the bus, what her name sounds like whispered in a dim room of red candles, a radio where the poet is. “—ncing and bucking. and the yes and suh . . .”—he misses something else, the new line of little to do with corks or corpses—courts, maybe— and what’s “. . . un a gold coin promise, layaway heaven with teeth and silence . . .”? he is lost between a poem, a cell and a thrush’s wing. so by this time the poet should probably place a refrain as this is going to be a long poem, long enough to make the poet famous. 1. blackface is sometimes the truth but with added emphasis. a boldface where the smoldering cork testifies. [the issue is intent, nahmean? like what is nahmean whenyousee knows its way around the alleys of the tongue? what is nahmean, nahmean? and the intent is the issue, you see?] [nahmean?] blackface is sometimes a lie but with added detail. a bold face where the smoldering cork testifies. 2. but to what? the sawdust packed pockets, the brogan’s salty shadow? to the straps? scraps off the hips of tin platters? the train’s constant is a-comin? the minister’s constant that Someday what is the cork, still smelling of cheap wine, some doe- eyed muscatel, a poor man’s dream-color of velvet, some sap fresh from a cicada tableau to a night club in a Sunday suit, cardboard under his left sock, the bootblack ache slithering out above his ass, the bootblack cash kissed in waxy fingerprints offered up, offered up to the waitress who won’t smile for a “what this get?” the bottle brought back, armpit warm? this cork, tossed to the floor and kicked, a careless jig swung by a white chick, and rolled below a table awaiting some jittering negro, whose gig it is to eyeball these corks, to swoop down, hands a pair of crows, to swoop up the cork, bear it backstage, to pull it from his pocket like a magician’s dove, transform it into smoke and ovation. what does this testify? what is this truth? why speak of the fire, the first kiss of flame to the cork? watch Bamboozled. that’s all I did. what does this testify? 3. what is truth? again reading some magazine, again waiting for the dressing room door to open: fire gleaming off the platter like a breakfast of stars, burning cork from Portugal, and cork doesn’t sink in rough waters, like fine schooners from Portugal, and fire splits the blackness of dark like the fingers of sailors from Portugal, whose tongues teach new tongues to the lips in the darkness of blacks from Africa, and burn the sea into their faces like smoke in a blue lit dressing room. and I close the magazine full of rappers swimming in denim, ism smoke and wait for the door to open. the embers to ignite 4. dancing and bucking spotlight’s prison-break eye and the sweat that lifts from the skull and the pancake sheen allowed for the cameras, the pancake that will not run, and the clothes that cling to the mouths of wetness and the red gels that turn the words into spastic ants holding tiny cue cards!!!!! but the stomach churn of memorization,no no no, the revisions on the other copy in the other notebook in the other room no no no the gimpy music stand tilt, the red eye, the spotlight’s stomach, the prison-break sheen, the ants cling, the pancake mouth, the spastic words, the cameras lift, the clothes’ wetness, the skull tilt, churn turn run no no NO DANCE                BUCK *   *   *   * the yes and sir the room. the books. hands telling what I know to a machine. alone. dreaming, yes, dreaming of pinning myself to journals like a prized butterfly. the ink of my beauty fading on the white pages. 5. a rusty bicycle is a copper skeleton against the mattress. through the chain link, children kneeling on the concrete look lined for butchering. chewed sedans bleed into the street, into sewer bellies. I’ve written these images too many times. DC is my ghetto— every black poet should have one, as every white poet should have a movie-house or a lake. white poets have attractions. black poets should also have grandmothers. I have grandmothers—one living, one not. neither mopped any floor but her own. if I stand on their memories, I am too tall to be jammed into a tenement. black birds peck at my journals. my fingers work grime into Elm Place in LeDroit Park, divine urine from Florida Ave and goad fiends from T Street’s throat. these are not my muses. an adjective. a noun. a simile. “ragged storefronts like beaten wives.” I must imagine what might go on behind bricks, past the railing climbing up the stoops like wrought iron centipedes. the windows are open sometimes at night. it was hot, one black grandmother had a pool. air conditioning. on days without smog, you could see the sea or someone riding a horse past the liquor store. no one needs horses in Altadena. here, horses are diamond necklaces. diamond necklaces that shit in crosswalks. in DC there is a different kind of horse, and I need it for poems as I need ink. it is not my muse, nahmean? one black grandmother didn’t sit in the back of buses. Raleigh lay before her, already mopped. the crows are waiting at the edge of the page. see, the madhouse that seeped out into NE before exploding into panhandlers stranded in phantom ants, drifting mothers birthing flying dutchmen, that man who walked all the way to 6 th Street swinging a golf club like a white woman dancing— these are not my muses. they aren’t even mirrors. they are cork awaiting flame. blackface IS sometimes.

Blackness is a title, is a preoccupation, is a commitment Blacks are to comprehend— and in which you are to perceive your Glory. The conscious shout of all that is white is “It’s Great to be white.” The conscious shout of the slack in Black is "It's Great to be white." Thus all that is white has white strength and yours. The word Black has geographic power, pulls everybody in: Blacks here— Blacks there— Blacks wherever they may be. And remember, you Blacks, what they told you— remember your Education: “one Drop—one Drop maketh a brand new Black.” Oh mighty Drop. ______And because they have given us kindly so many more of our people Blackness stretches over the land. Blackness— the Black of it, the rust-red of it, the milk and cream of it, the tan and yellow-tan of it, the deep-brown middle-brown high-brown of it, the “olive” and ochre of it— Blackness marches on. The huge, the pungent object of our prime out-ride is to Comprehend, to salute and to Love the fact that we are Black, which is our “ultimate Reality,” which is the lone ground from which our meaningful metamorphosis, from which our prosperous staccato, group or individual, can rise. Self-shriveled Blacks. Begin with gaunt and marvelous concession: YOU are our costume and our fundamental bone. All of you— you COLORED ones, you NEGRO ones, those of you who proudly cry “I’m half INDian”— those of you who proudly screech “I’VE got the blood of George WASHington in MY veins” ALL of you— you proper Blacks, you half-Blacks, you wish-I-weren’t Blacks, Niggeroes and Niggerenes. You.

It’s the shivering. When rage grows hot as an army of red ants and forces the mind to quiet the body, the quakes emerge, sometimes just the knees, but, at worst, through the hips, chest, neck until, like a virus, slipping inside the lungs and pulse, every ounce of strength tapped to squeeze words from my taut lips, his eyes scanning my car’s insides, my eyes, my license, and as I answer the questions 3, 4, 5 times, my jaw tight as a vice, his hand massaging the gun butt, I imagine things I don’t want to and inside beg this to end before the shiver catches my hands, and he sees, and something happens.

The porter in the Pullman car Was charming, as they sometimes are. He scanned my baggage tags: “Are you The man who wrote of Lady Lou?” When I said “yes” he made a fuss — Oh, he was most assiduous; And I was pleased to think that he Enjoyed my brand of poetry. He was forever at my call, So when we got to Montreal And he had brushed me off, I said: “I’m glad my poems you have read, I feel quite flattered, I confess, And if you give me your address I’ll send you (autographed, of course) One of my little books of verse.” He smiled — his teeth were white as milk; He spoke — his voice was soft as silk. I recognized, despite his skin, The perfect gentleman within. Then courteously he made reply: “I thank you kindly, Sir, but I With many other cherished tome Have all your books of verse at home. “When I was quite a little boy I used to savour them with joy; And now my daughter, aged three, Can tell the tale of Sam McGee; While Tom, my son, that’s only two, Has heard the yarn of Dan McGrew .... Don’t think your stuff I’m not applaudin’ — My taste is Eliot and Auden.” So as we gravely bade adieu I felt quite snubbed — and so would you. And yet I shook him by the hand, Impressed that he could understand The works of those two tops I mention, So far beyond my comprehension — A humble bard of boys and barmen, Disdained, alas! by Pullman carmen.