194 Racism and discrimination poems

A professor invites me to his “Black Lit” class; they’re reading Larson’s Passing. One of the black students says, “Sometimes light-skinned blacks think they can fool other blacks, but I can always tell,” looking right through me. After I tell them I am black, I ask the class, “Was I passing when I was just sitting here, before I told you?” A white woman shakes her head desperately, as if I had deliberately deceived her. She keeps examining my face, then turning away as if she hopes I’ll disappear. Why presume “passing” is based on what I leave out and not what she fills in? In one scene in the book, in a restaurant, she’s “passing,” though no one checked her at the door— “Hey, you black?” My father, who looked white, told me this story: every year when he’d go to get his driver’s license, the man at the window filling out the form would ask, “White or black?” pencil poised, without looking up. My father wouldn’t pass, but he might use silence to trap a devil. When he didn’t speak, the man would look up at my father’s face. “What did he write?” my father quizzed me.

Footpath passing a school, undiscovered by a nun black at her blackboard’s explanation of Vanishing Americans’ vanishing, I find myself flagged, by two not quite red rows, unfurled into grin, two white, and by one five-pointed, pale star. My lips let my teeth pledge allegiance, again, my fingers orbiting their own warmth, around this pen, as straight as Old Glory’s tall pole, but admittedly, ingloriously smaller, and, as the star descends, it draws, from Christian calendars’ precision constellations, a child—hand cramped from fisting fact onto dusty black clutching a wand, to draw him Everywhere. Though the teacher scowls us back to my dead, risen from The Trail of Tears as chalk, this day before Thanksgiving Day; a child will lead, as I finish taking my walk.

The cause is the consequence. — Frantz Fanon 1 He would get pulled over whenever he tried to download Blonde. He would be searched for f-bombs but not for h-e- double-hockey sticks. He would get choke-held for wearing a hat in the hallway. He would be Tasered for balling his Whopper wrapper and leaving it on the floor of the streetcar. He would get shot in the back every time he incorrectly used MLA format in the essay on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 2 He would take some E if he didn’t have to preach austerity. He would hire a tennis coach if the consultants he hired would actually fire the people to be fired. He would upgrade to the latest Galaxy if  millennials didn’t default on their student loans when he raised interest rates. He would get his shoes polished at the airport if the kiosk weren’t so far from the platinum members’ lounge. He would be placed on paid leave if  he raped the trainee from Dawson. Sexually assaulted. Allegedly.

She does not know her beauty, she thinks her brown body has no glory. If she could dance naked under palm trees and see her image in the river, she would know. But there are no palm trees on the street, and dish water gives back no images.

Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay, Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away, Gone from the earth to a better land I know, I hear their gentle voices calling “Old Black Joe.” I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low: I hear those gentle voices calling, “Old Black Joe.” Why do I weep when my heart should feel no pain Why do I sigh that my friends come not again, Grieving for forms Now departed long a go? I hear their gentle voices calling “Old Black Joe.” I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low: I hear those gentle voices calling, “Old Black Joe.” Where are the hearts once so happy and so free? The children so dear that I held upon my knee, Gone to the shore where my soul has longed to go. I hear their gentle voices calling “Old Black Joe.” I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low: I hear those gentle voices calling, “Old Black Joe.”

Blow back the breath of the bird, Scatter the song through the air, There was music you never heard, And cannot hear anywhere. It was not the sob of the vain In the old, old dark so sweet, (I shall never hear it again,) Nor the coming of fairy feet. It was music and music alone, Not a sigh from a lover’s mouth; Now it comes in a phantom moan From the dead and buried South. It was savage and fierce and glad, It played with the heart at will; Oh, what a wizard touch it had— Oh, if I could hear it still! Were they slaves? They were not then; The music had made them free. They were happy women and men— What more do we care to be? There is blood and blackness and dust, There are terrible things to see, There are stories of swords that rust, Between that music and me. Dark ghosts with your ghostly tunes Come back till I laugh through tears; Dance under the sunken moons, Dance over the grassy years! Hush, hush—I know it, I say; Your armies were bright and brave, But the music they took away Was worth—whatever they gave.

July 1965 As the sheriff remarked: I had no business being there. He was right, but for the wrong reasons. Among that odd crew of volunteers from the North, I was by far the most inept and least effective. I couldn’t have inspired or assisted a woodchuck to vote. In fact, when the sheriff’s buddies nabbed me on the highway east of Selma, I’d just been released from ten days of jail in Mississippi. I was fed up and terrified; I was actually fleeing north and glad to go. - In Jackson, they’d been ready for the demonstration. After the peaceful arrests, after the news cameras recorded us being quietly ushered onto trucks, the doors were closed and we headed for the county fairgrounds. Once we passed its gates, it was a different story: the truck doors opened on a crowd of state troopers waiting to greet us with their nightsticks out. Smiles beneath mirrored sunglasses and blue riot helmets; smiles above badges taped so numbers didn’t show. For the next twenty minutes, they clubbed us, and it kept up at intervals, more or less at random, all that afternoon and into the evening. Next morning we woke to new guards who did not need to conceal their names or faces. A little later, the fbi arrived to ask if anyone had specific complaints about how they’d been treated and by whom. But late that first night, as we sat bolt upright in rows on the concrete floor of the cattle barn waiting for mattresses to arrive, one last precise event: A guard stopped in front of the ten-year-old black kid next to me. He pulled a freedom now pin from the kid’s shirt, made him put it in his mouth, then ordered him to swallow. - That stakeout at dusk on Route 80 east of Selma was intended for someone else, some imaginary organizer rumored to be headed toward their dismal, godforsaken town. Why did they stop me? The New York plates, perhaps, and that little bit of stupidity: the straw hat I wore, a souvenir of Mississippi. Siren-wail from an unmarked car behind me—why should I think they were cops? I hesitated, then pulled to the shoulder. The two who jumped out waved pistols, but wore no uniforms or badges. By then, my doors were locked, my windows rolled. Absurd sound of a pistol barrel rapping the glass three inches from my face: “Get out, you son of a bitch, or we’ll blow your head off.” When they found pamphlets on the backseat they were sure they’d got the right guy. The fat one started poking my stomach with his gun, saying, “Boy, we’re gonna dump you in the swamp.” - It was a long ride through the dark, a ride full of believable threats, before they arrived at that hamlet with its cinderblock jail. He was very glad to see it, that adolescent I was twenty years ago. For eight days he cowered in his solitary cell, stinking of dirt and fear. He’s cowering there still, waiting for me to come back and release him by turning his terror into art. But consciously or not, he made his choice and he’s caught in history. And if I reach back now, it’s only to hug him and tell him to be brave, to remember that black kid who sat beside him in the Mississippi darkness. And to remember that silence shared by guards and prisoners alike as they watched in disbelief the darkness deepening around the small shape in his mouth, the taste of metal, the feel of the pin against his tongue. It’s too dark for it to matter what’s printed on the pin; it’s too dark for anything but the brute fact that someone wants him to choke to death on its hard shape. And still he refuses to swallow.

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. Some view our sable race with scornful eye, "Their colour is a diabolic die." Remember,Christians,Negros, black as Cain, May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

Upon reading PM newspaper’s account of Mr. Roosevelt’s statement on the recent race clashes:“I share your feeling that the recent outbreaks of violence in widely spread parts of the country endanger our national unity and comfort our enemies. I am sure that every true American regrets this.” What’d you get, black boy, When they knocked you down in the gutter, And they kicked your teeth out, And they broke your skull with clubs And they bashed your stomach in? What’d you get when the police shot you in the back, And they chained you to the beds While they wiped the blood off? What’d you get when you cried out to the Top Man? When you called on the man next to God, so you thought, And asked him to speak out to save you? What’d the Top Man say, black boy? “Mr. Roosevelt regrets. . . . . . .”

Grandma is washing me white. I am the color of hot sand in the bleached sea light. I am a stain on the porcelain, persistent as tea. Stay in the shade. Don’t say she was the only one. Cousins opposite say: you too white. I am a night-blooming flower being pried open in the morning. My skin a curtain for a cage of bones, a blackbird coop. My heart is crusty bread, hardening. Hardening. This way, I feed my own fluttering. Under shade, the day looks like evening and I cannot bear the darkness. Don’t say, I can’t stand to be touched. Say, I stare into the sun to burn off the soiled hands that print my body with bloody ink. Don’t say,Mulatto. Say, I am the horse in Oz turning different colors, each prance brightening flesh. A curiosity. Don’t say, Bathwater spiraled down into the pipes. Say, I never did fade. Say, Skin holds the perseverance of my days. Folding, folding, the water continuously gathers, making wrinkles in a map.