Black Boy Poems Read online

  Amadou's murder happened when I was nineteen. News reports flashed his age, and I realized that I was only three years younger than he was. The scariest part was knowing that I could see myself in a similar situation. I've been stopped by police officers and asked to produce identification. Many black and brown folks have experienced that multiple times. Brother Amadou was at his doorstep when he was stopped by officers that were not in uniform. He reached for what officers asked for and was gunned down. That's what makes it so painful. The fact that no response is correct because your blackness makes you wrong all of the time.

  What is one to do when obeying the law/law enforcement agents can merit the same response as disobeying the law/law enforcement agents? This is part and parcel of the Black American experience. Correct or incorrect behavior can produce the same results, and far too often that result is fatal.

  The world and the treatment blacks experienced in post 13th Amendment America is similar in many ways to the world that Black people still live in. It is important to note some of the differences, but the state of black life is sadly pretty much the same. We don't fear death/violence from average white citizens like the ever-present fear of lynchings in the first iteration of Jim Crow. Violence perpetrated on black bodies by the local citizenry does still happen, but it's a little more rare for regular whites to conspire to bring death to black bodies. What has taken the place of civil lynchings are executions by police and security professionals, coupled with the insane amounts of men and women incarcerated in the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). Black incarceration is nothing new in America. During slavery days, before the Thirteenth Amendment, it was rare to see blacks incarcerated because it was more advantageous to use their labor on plantations. After the legal abolition of slavery, America began to see a rise in black incarceration because that was the only legal avenue to enforce slavery. Since then, America has seen large numbers of blacks incarcerated, but what we see today is staggeringly unprecedented. Once people enter the PIC, the system does a thorough job of disenfranchising its “clientele,” legally relegating them to the status of second-class citizens. Most lose their right to vote, opportunities for employment, housing, and participation in certain social services programs. Essentially branding these men and women with a mark akin to leprosy that mainstream America does not want to touch.

  This is completely unfair. Yet, it's the system we live under. This is an all-too-common piece that has become part of the fabric of American society. This treatment paralyzes the progress of black people and the black community in America. There has never been an equal playing field at anytime in America, and this guarantees that no equal playing field will be seen anytime soon, if at all. The American propaganda machine wants us to believe that the dream is for all, but the black sons and daughters of America have long known the dream doesn't include us. The dream that White America clings to so proudly is a nightmare to Blacks, funded and fueled by the withered carcasses once clad in black flesh. Like any good story, there is the hero and the villain; black people have been cast in the role of villain and as a result suffer to the upmost under this American social order. And as long as they keep producing this dream, we know that the villain will always lose in the end.

  The dream was on display when these four officers killed Diallo. If I was the author of the dream, our brother would be alive with his family, and those murderers never would've polluted the planet with their presence, but this is not my dream, it's theirs. Our brother's blood all on their hands, faces, hearts, and souls, and still all the officers involved were acquitted of any and all wrongdoing. They go on with their lives and go on with their careers. Meanwhile, we're left to bury and mourn for our dead. The dream hasn't stopped working for the cops involved in the shooting; in fact, just recently one of the officers received a promotion. I can't make this stuff up. For some, dreams come true, and for others dreams are deferred indefinitely.

  Around the time of Diallo's death, some were calling him my generation's Emmett Till. For those who don't know about Emmett, he was a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago who was lynched while visiting family in Mississippi in August 1955. The reason for his lynching was that he allegedly flirted with a married white woman. The husband of the woman and his half-brother abducted Emmett, beat him for hours, and eventually put a bullet through his skull. After all of this, they dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. His body ballooned up, making the savagery behind his lynching that much more pronounced. There was no justice for his murder as the murderers went unpunished, even though it was common knowledge who was responsible. Till's mother insisted on an open casket, so the world could see the evil that killed her son. The image of Emmett's mutilated, bloated body seared itself into the conscience of America and the collective souls of black folks. Every parent knew that any black child was an alleged flirt away from death.

  It's a sad commentary that every generation of Black America has its own equivalent of a hate or fear motivated murder of a black body. No generation of black people is safe from savage acts of terror and brutality at the hands of American citizenry or the state. A quick point to add here is for our black African brothers and sisters who are migrating to parts of the Western world due to various issues "back home" that have pushed their families into the diaspora. This awareness of your black skin in the Western world is essential to understand quickly because Western racism does not discern between black American or African black. Black skin is the base requirement to elicit a hate- or fear-motivated response. African brothers and sisters, your sons and daughters are at risk of the same brutality that has been raining down on the heads of your long-lost brethren and sistren via the triangle trade, and you cannot afford to think yourselves immune. You might view yourself as different ethnically or culturally; your family might have left west, central, south, or east Africa, but the blessed hue in your skin tone is viewed with hate and suspicion here in America and other parts of the Western world. Brother Amadou and his family came to these shores from Guinea in the Gold Coast searching for opportunity, I don't know if they knew the potential consequences that came with black skin in this new land. Black American and African black cannot hope to survive in this society ignorant of that fact and find a way to come together to support each other in the war being waged upon our people.

  One of the reasons why this poem is so important is the simple fact that it still continues to this day. Just recently a new Emmett Till has been crowned for this generation. That most unwanted distinction goes to 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was gunned down by Cleveland police for playing with a toy gun in a park. The ironic part of Tamir's story is that in the state of Ohio, it is legal for a person to carry a gun, so by decree of the state he wouldn't have been in violation of the law if he had a gun, and he certainly wasn't in violation of the law with a replica toy gun. Just like Emmett was killed for allegedly flirting, which isn't a violation of any legal code, and Diallo was killed for complying with directives of an officer, Tamir was killed for being a law-abiding black boy. Even in our committing no wrongdoing, the state will find excuse for execution.

  In the poem I repeat the phrase "41 shots 19 hits" multiple times. I do this intentionally because I want the listener to feel the brutality displayed in that moment. I want them to feel the malice, hatred, and complete disregard necessary to fire 41 shots and place 19 individual bullet holes in another human being. What drives a person or people to see so much of a threat and so little value in a life that they are capable of firing "41 standard state issued nigger killers with the intentions of killing just one?"

  Just recently, an officer named Michael Brelo was acquitted in Cleveland of all charges after firing forty-nine out of a total of 137 shots at an unarmed couple whose car backfired. Police mistakenly took the backfire for a gunshot. The couple, Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, had allegedly led the officers on a police chase. Brelo and his twelve colleagues fired 137 shots into the car. Brelo went so far as to hop on the hood of the car an
d fire an entire magazine of fifteen rounds into the couple at point-blank range. And of course, neither he nor his fellow officers were found guilty, and 137 shots in a residential area was not considered excessive force.

  It doesn't matter how outrageous the situation is, people will explain it away. America will find a way to exonerate the murders socially and legally. As if the taking of a black life while wearing a specific uniform doesn't violate the same code of 187 for murder the rest of us are subjected to. The reason for this is because our system has built itself upon a solid foundation of white supremacy, fueled by artificial black stereotypes that drive America to a manic state whenever it encounters a black body. White supremacy mixed with racial mania is the deadly cocktail America takes to the head multiple times a day. This narcotized state makes it easier to injure and or kill a black life. In an attempt to protect America in its perpetual drunken state, the system has evolved to include fail-safe protocols, which is an age-old American tradition. One of the most striking historical examples of these fail-safes is the slave codes enacted in many states during antebellum America. The purpose of specific codes was to shield slave masters and other whites from prosecution in the event that he or she took the life of a slave. The state of Virginia, which gave us slave-owning founding fathers such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, granted this protection to their slave owners and citizenry.

  Virginia, 1705: "If any slave resists his master … correcting such a slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction … the master shall be free of all punishment … as if such accident never happened."

  The execution of a slave by a slave master did not merit punishment in the homes of our Founding Fathers and the death of that black man, woman, or child was ignored by white society as if it didn't happen. This is eerily familiar because police officers firing forty-one shots at Diallo, two shots at Tamir, and 137 shots at Williams and Russell, are considered accidents or following procedure. The officers' actions do not merit punishment in a court of law, and the black man’s, woman’s, or child's death is largely ignored by mainstream society as if it never happened. These murders were no accident. These are blatant examples of murder, but when it comes to "justice" being meted out by a racist state apparatus with its patented fail-safes, murdering a black body is termed an accident and therefore swept aside with no regard either for the life lost or those connected to that person, who will never be the same as a result of their loss.

  We've all watched these scenes play out so much that we have the entire script memorized as to what will happen when white badge kills black body. We'll have a media firestorm; the community will be out in the streets demanding justice, and social media will be alive with various messages about injustice and accountability. The state will use multiple maneuvers to delay any court proceeding. Their new favorite tactic is exploiting the grand jury process to escape indictment, which throws out any attempt at reaching "justice." In the event we do find our way to a court trial, the most likely all-white jury will find it hard to prove guilt or ill-intent on the part of the murdering officer(s). The legal precedent is clear, and the story is already written. America has stated definitively that we are not all equal before the law, and for some of us, the law works to limit our life’s potential. We change out the faces, the names, and the hashtags, but the conclusion is always the same. The American system specializes in dehumanizing the black body, incarcerating the black body for the sake of labor for profit, and in killing the black body out of "fear" or sport. This is simply a reality that anyone who wears the black skin uniform in America must understand while the rest of America has the luxury and privilege to ignore it.

  Family Tree (2000)

  This is the story of my Grandfather

  You see,

  when my Mom was still a toddler

  her mother married a man named John Oliver

  And like many black men

  he worked in the armed service

  it's hard to determine

  what made him nourish

  his habit

  of alcohol which made him an addict

  the travesty

  of alcohol dependency

  which led to a tendency

  for a beast to surface

  he would eventually

  begin to

  beat,

  kick,

  choke,

  fight,

  cuss,

  whip,

  inflict

  pain

  A young black man

  intelligent and handsome

  but destined

  to reclaim the anthem

  of souls destroyed by those liquid phantoms

  he consumed demons and spirits

  with stickers and labels

  liquor,

  in tinted glass containers

  became a stranger to self

  it changed his mentality,

  became hellish

  a drunken zealot

  without any inhibition,

  his mission

  to satisfy his selfish desires

  he struggled with his sobriety

  even denying that he

  had a problem

  when off the liquor,

  sober,

  he was one of the nicest men you could ever meet

  he was kind,

  generous,

  considerate

  but you see those times were

  few and far

  in between

  he developed a routine

  on Fridays

  to be gone for a few days

  return home early Sundays

  the booze he paid for

  stayed on his breath

  and the bruises he made became sore

  and stayed on her flesh.

  As he led his family through the church doors

  and played the role of the righteous father,

  pious

  When he really had a dark side

  of a pirate a tyrant

  I call him a domestic terrorist

  all that violence and abuse

  sanctioned

  under the guidelines

  of legal marriages.

  My grandma sought counseling

  she went down to the local parish

  and the church father told her like this,

  to simply, "grin and bear it"

  as if

  God wanted her to be a punching bag for this man

  through

  sickness and health

  until death do you part.

  But she stayed strong

  knowing something was way wrong

  and kept praying to God for help

  because this man couldn't control himself,

  her mental health and life on the line

  and at times

  when intoxicated

  you could see the devil in his eyes

  my aunt, uncles, and mom would huddle and cry

  hearing muffled blows on my grandma's flesh

  not knowing if she'd be alive at the time of sunrise.

  His inequities then spread to his seeds

  you see,

  my aunt and two uncles began to emulate his deeds.

  They started with the drinking and smoking

  but two of them didn't let it control them

  they conquered the monster

  but the addiction was so much stronger in my Uncle Johnny

  named after his father

  he took after his father

  he sought something to curb his addiction.

  He started experimenting

  injected heroin into his system through his forearm

  one shot was all that it took,

  hook,

  line

  and sinker

  destined from the womb

  to be a casualty of this chemical warfare

  the family noticed he drastically changed

  his parents already gone their sep
arate way

  you see

  my grandma finally got the divorce

  John Oliver Sr.

  he out in Mississippi

  he tipsy of course.

  Little Johnny was fidgety

  he wasn't into as much physical activity

  as he used to be

  and what could it be the family would ask,

  Nothing!

  is what he'd snap back

  but it became all apparent when he forged his mom's signature to get cash

  that he had smack tracks

  on the other side of his elbow.

  He got into a rehab

  and started getting back to the Johnny we used to know

  but then them chemicals

  began to call him back

  by way of this one fast sister he used to holler at

  you see,

  she slipped him a bag of smack

  that wasn't cut clean

  set to wreck havoc in his recovering bloodstream

  still he cooked it

  he drew it up slow into the syringe

  tied his arm off tight

  pushed that needle through his skin

  my poor Uncle Johnny,

  he chasing the dragon again

  and that evening this is what happened to him

  he shot up

  he dropped

  to his knees

  his muscles seized up

  his heart gave up

  he never got up

  he a byproduct of his father's disease

  and by now

  under his skin,

  his blood starts to chill

  in sets the rigor mortis

  my uncle,

  he a picture,

  a ghetto still portrait

  titled:

  "Overdose in mom's kitchen"

  my grandma

  she comes home tired from work

  not knowing his condition

  not knowing that her worst nightmare has just

  come to fruition

  it's dark inside the home