1.
Two years before I was born and less than five miles
from my grandfather’s farm,
somebody killed two women and two men,
filled them with so many rounds
the dead were hard to recognize—
young black men, one a veteran
just returned from the war,
and two young black women, shot to death
by a gathering of men
as white as the Georgia senate,
all persons unknown, or so testified
the single witness, also a white man.
Truman made a statement,
the FBI came down. After seventy years,
the case is still nowhere,
and surely the killers are dead.
But this is not about those who did it.
This is not about justice.
There will be no justice.
It’s about us, me and my friends,
the first generation raised white
in that town after the massacre,
allowed to cakewalk into adulthood,
self-assured, but as unaware
as cattle of what had happened. I didn’t know,
somehow, until I was forty-five years old,
and this is a poem
of dumb, sputtering astonishment
at the ignorance of our lives—we who went
to our churches and our homes
and our history classes, where no one said a word,
we who lived each day like blank pages,
mistake after mistake after mistake
in the history book.
2.
You think you so smooth, even blackface
is okay for you. Go on then, fool.
Look here: God is not mocked.
Ticket or not, you will be on that train, and soon.
And when you take that ride,
you better put on your face right,
wipe off the tarbaby
that came too easy. And how about the way
you talking right this minute?
You better let that go, but you won’t.
So keep it up, strut and hambone,
buck and wing, pick a bale of cotton.
You think you in the big house
for a reason, but son, sometimes
what looks like the sun coming up
is the sun going down,
the world has spun the other way.
There is nothing else to do then
but to turn your sorry ass around. You been going ahead
backwards.
3.
So now you have something to say?
You know who I mean.
Now, when there’s a street in every town,
often a back street that runs past
named Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard?
Now you have something to say? That is mighty white,
now that nothing is required,
nothing at all, to have coffee at the old place
on the corner with the woman from Cameroon
who runs your office. No refusal of service,
no greasy crew crowded at the window
to beat you both bloody when you leave, no
proprietor with a pick handle
telling you to get out, no sham law
to look the other way, no church to preach
the curse of Ham, no slurs in the air
to keep you, too, in your place.
You know who I mean. Back then, you might have been
a frightened little white boy like me,
or you might have been as cool
as a ducktail—slow-riding by the café
to spit out the window, rolling past
in your glass-packed Chevrolet,
playing that race music loud on the radio.
4.
On the notes showing the provenance, you’ll notice,
only first names. That was the etiquette,
and we hold to the old ways
at the underground auction. This is the nose
of a Carlton, this is the eyetooth of a Lucille,
now a charm
for a girl’s bracelet.
What we have here, in the original jars,
are the knuckles and the genitals
of a William. This is the big-toe watch fob of an Odell.
Here is the polished kneecap
of a Randolph, a family keepsake
engraved with the date. Let me be clear, though:
To consider what any of this, or all of it,
is evidence of a bad misunderstanding. When has anyone
paid a thing?
from Cave Wall