flick and fairly recent favorite of mine, my mind
infatuated, I guess, by the familiarity of it all, its
portrayal of an African-American family, Chicago.
Lead actresses: Long, Nia. Williams, Vanessa. Fox,
Vivica A., her middle initial a strong component of
his query to me, not one full scene into the movie—
What is A hoochie mama? What does that mean?
He puzzles me with a pure white expression, edging
real hard on his pronunciation, and pronunciation,
suddenly, becomes a boulder on my young brain
as I try to translate English to English, as I tell him:
Uhhhh, it means she’s not a patient woman. It means
she drives above the speed limit, a bit “fast.” It means
she’s a flash of legs and thighs and breasts. It means
she’s a bird; she’s free, but maybe not cheap. Do you
get what I’m saying? It means there’s something to be
gotten, get it? It means get it. It means coochie. It means
cooing. Cookie. Nookie. It means it’s time for you to go
back home for dinner. It means it’s a mean thing to say.
It means you better not say it, but don’t know no better.
It means I do. It means I’m grown, grew up too fast.
As we dark ones tend to do.
As we have to. Do.
The Attitude Era
I’ve taken to telling every person that makes me mad to “suck it” in
my head. “It” refers to my private parts, but—at only eight, nine, ten
years of age—my pleasure is purely in pretending the insult’s impact,
their cheeks turning as red as the back of Stone Cold Steve Austin’s
neck, per Jim Ross’s rowdy ringside calls; the pleasure, for me, isn’t
in someone’s imitation of the act against my body—which is a crime
for you to even imagine.
I’m not supposed to imitate what I see:
a Tombstone Piledriver left to my stupid hands would kill as the name
suggests. Something like a DDT or Rock Bottom, delivered on a bed,
is easier to execute, safer only since they’d put more of me on the line.
This is what tips off that I’m not an inherently violent person. Sure,
there’s been an ass or two I wanted to kick. I mean, a butt or two—but
I can’t explain why with any ease.
I spend each Monday night, each
Thursday night, watching grown men with outrageous midsections fight
one another in their underwear. And, yes, I know the truth, but there are
so many things in life that feel far less real than what I witness happen
between those ropes, inside that squared circle.
Consider that I’ve seen
an eighty-year-old woman in a “relationship” with a burly, chocolate power-
liter give birth to a rubber hand; after that, there’s nothing you can do to
shock me: I could walk in on my playdate’s parents tag-teaming against
another couple in luchador masks and not bat a single brown eye, not raise
a scrutinizing eyebrow as my peoples do, because I’m no people’s champ.
Grand Theft Auto III (2001)
My guns are loaded with imaginary numbers:
the people I kill don’t count against the city’s reputation;
the people I rob have the money again tomorrow. And
I’ll take it then, too, because it feels good to can
for once or however many times I leave the hospital
with another life to live on the wrong side of the law.
Strategy guide: be a pacifist inside
the shell of a violent person.
I want good credit to my name to have the space
to sin. OBEY is the name of my personal brand, button-
mashing my way to academic excellence in geometry
while I bash in a black face with a baseball bat, a face
replicating at random in a restricted area of binary code.
Strategy guide: bad things aren’t bad
if you wear a white man to do them.
I bribe a miniskirt into the back seat of a stolen sports car
and watch it rump shake on its axles; with my silent, black
face I ask a classmate to leave me the “frick” alone.
Strategy guide: your default is “scary,”
so be smart about when you smile.
For my crimes, I take my punishment quietly, mean mug mug
shots Monday through Friday, as a singular form
in a room full of plurals. Then I come home, boot up, turn
up the volume high so I can hear the time bomb’s
explosion mark my mission complete, let my mouth
burst into pixels of pidgin, then peel out, peel off
my face, and the one under that, and the one under that,
until I get tired of playing a game I can never beat.
A Brief History of Violence
Boy, born covered in blood—
(Boy because phallus, bullet holes
for eyes; the color of target-practice silhouettes: boy. Between his
parents’ complexions: boy. Boy beneath Bible’s thumb. Boy baby-
sat by wooden ruler used for beatings of the backside. Screwdriver
lodged in the socket of his eye: boy. Crybaby by reflex: boy. Big-
brothering another the color of target practice silhouettes: boy. Big-
headed boy. Big-nosed boy. Boy: teeth misbehaving, acting outside
the bounds of braces. Boy tagged girl by birth name. Boy with drug-
dealing cousins with no names. Boy wearing bloody leather gloves.
Suburban boy. Kids’ fingers in his Brillo-brand hair: boy. Biting his
tongue red, so red it’s almost black: boy. Boy trapped between black-
board and blacktop. Boy burning through big books with next-time
fire. Boy: black eye on history. Boy: black-eyeing history in his own
mind. Boy with a broad beef opting for the baked chicken over fried.
Boy broadcasting blacked-out pro wrestling pay-per-views from the
basement. Boy bumped against locker bank by a bully and a bully.
Boy backing down like a bitch. Talking white: boy. Chalk-kneed boy.
Boy who forgets how to cry. Boy clutching black baseball bat. Boy
crowned criminal by cocked-back baseball caps. Without best friend:
boy. Boy blessed with baby fat still. Boy big-brothering sisters the
color of target practice silhouettes, each a parent’s complexion, not
between. Boy: short. Short-tempered boy. Hoop-shooting boy: alone.
Boy tuned into BET. Boy in velour. Boy in big Ts. Boy in deep blue
denim. Without belt looped in: boy. Boxer shorts showing: boy. Feet
too big: boy. Rocking Timberlands, untied laces in: boy. Boy in the
shower until shriveling begins. Boy with pornographic memory: big
booties abound, brain buck wild. Boy bucking the wrong trend, with-
out waves in his hair. Below-the-belt hairs in need of trim: boy. Both
hands breast-bound: boy. Too embarrassed to buy Trojans: boy. Boy
with bright future ahead. Banging rough rhythms inside his head: boy.
Battling blues: boy. Beaten blue: boy, brother. Baby sisters who love
him: boy. Boy trapped between his parents like a chicken bone to pick.
Boy balancing toothpick on his bottom lip. Boy splitting smooth-shaven
legs apart in secret. Boy, but briefly fly. Boy, but briefly live. Boy lost in
the blink of an eye. Boy shot down by boy)
with bullet holes for eyes.
Self-Portrait as a Chicken Dinner
Half-dark, extra mi
ld.
I pass these words to the cashier
standing behind the bulletproof glass.
She returns those words to me with
a tone change, eyeing my buttoned shirt
ironed as crisply as my speech free of twang.
Shot through the microphone it feels
forceful, like an indictment saying:
my brother, you are what you eat.
What a peculiar feeling to be looked at
suspiciously and not be considered a threat.
I have frequented these joints for years,
peppered all over the South Side
of Chicago like soup kitchens meant to
feed the poor: Harold’s Chicken Shacks.
Pieces of my parents that never
left the hood, so they handed them to me.
A tradition. A taste of the city
cooked in the grease of its politics.
A side of coleslaw paired with two
legs, two thighs, two slices of
white bread and french fries, coated
by mild sauce with a sweet accent.
Needless for that cashier to say,
I was a mild-mannered kid. Soft-spoken.
No knuckle on either hand. Most of my
friends, girls, according to recipe,
enjoying them for what they would become.
I was sensitive. Fragile. My classmates’
thesaurus. A transplant, a heart
in a home it was not born to.
Suburban in South Chicago, in
Hyde Park, in the Hundreds, humming,
praying, paying no tax on the tithe.
Blackness surrounding me in a small
circle but not the square of a block.
The brightest shade of black:
the ink used to endorse a check.
And after service, we would
go pick up chicken for dinner.
Humble our egos back in time to
the cotton fibers of our clothes.
I ate dark meat because I needed
to feel the way I looked.
I quoted Malcolm X whenever possible.
Hip-hop became gospel music. My body,
skinny for the threads I wore.
If a person can love and hate themselves
simultaneously, then surely I can
be two definitions of the same word.
But my tongue was never quite
comfortable in a sling. Never had
a fight I couldn’t walk away from.
Didn’t learn all my colors. Friends’
funerals few in the story behind me.
Behind me, fires of my own design,
choices of bridges to take or make ash,
like a choice between locations of the
franchise since my chicken came burnt.
My parents taught me not to take
wheels for granted, but I mistook skin
for verb, the reverb of punched bone.
Became who we all love to diss.
Still Life with the Dropout Bear Sitting in the Stands
Sometimes, I wonder if every black man remembers
the first time he calls his homeboy nigga and means it.
Means it respectfully. Tastefully, even, like their great-
great-great-grannies ate chitlins together or something
inside a shack buried deep in the roots of a cornrow.
My first time was an awkward dance with that history.
Fit on me like a pair of thirty-three-waist jeans: cause for
a belt back in those days, maybe even a good sermon,
but it somehow became as warm and wool as my hair is,
something to brush over, off like dirt on the shoulders.
I didn’t even rock with Jay-Z like that, not at the time.
Never called him Jesus’s name once. Sided with Nas. Didn’t
think he and the bullets that killed Biggie Smalls were all
that different: one bites and the other is bitten—semantics.
But the man did have immaculate production, had stadiums
full of black folk in the palms of his hands throwing up Giza—
and maybe only I saw it that way—even had me in Rocawear,
trying to dress the part of somebody’s nigga. All of that went
down before that album seemingly dropped out of the sky.
And after, it seemed as if my darker concerns dropped like
false charges: this cat who laid down entire blueprints for
Jigga to build on, this situational comedy of a black man with
a Chicago drawl came out rapping all that good-good we’d
talk without muscle or gun to our best friends: our niggas.
Playful smack. Odes to recreational drugs, or the idea of them.
Colorful anthems dedicated to thick girls, and all the girls I knew
blessed with booty loved that album, too: all of us soul-sampled,
our own bones made from our parents setting the mood into body.
We remembered, suddenly, the type of love that we all came from.
A record paved the way for many a mama’s boy to become men
of age, decked out in polo shirts, backpacks stuffed with college
textbooks about post-industrial economies, urban sociology, some
dead poets, maybe. In retrospect, that’s even greater irony than him
not marrying Mr. Rainey’s daughter, after all; ended up leaving her
several times over for a white girl: how he finally got his own degree.
Keep Your Mouth Shut
about the gun in his locker because you
knew nothing would happen and don’t
want to scare all the white kids. Keep on
a straight face inside the locker room, if
you know what you mean. Keep your fitted
to the front unless fronting especially hard
constructive activity. Keep on the good side
of all your teachers. Keep your grades up
like the fists they are. Keep your cellphone,
on vibrate, in your front pocket, like a soft
hand. Keep a girl in mind. Keep sober on
weekends. Keep your friends few, between
your fist and the wall. Keep your head up.
Keep shooting till you make one, and then
go inside the house. Keep the house, as best
you can, a very quiet place. Keep an eye out
for suspicious acts of love on the floor or in
the kitchen. Keep a journal that can never be
found, chiseled on the underside of your skull.
Keep all your metaphors in birdcages. Keep
yourself, meaning refrigerate, be cold, ice.
Still Life with Kendrick Lamar’s Mama’s Van
Before Chief Keef, the word around here was
Do or Die, was chopping it up in the back seat of
a Cadillac or, likely, a borrowed SUV or minivan
or cramped Japanese sedan, at least in this town.
My folks moved us out here when I was a shorty,
so I really didn’t have much choice but to be
a butter knife since certain hand-to-hand skills
I never needed sharpen. It’s just my place in life.
I’m told that it’s a good one. There’s a place for
everything, really. Take my profile: it’s either
a school or a jail, the building block or the block.
This ain’t the block, but we really be out here, though.
Not me, but we, because we talk like that. A force of
habit from us all looking the same to the force of law,
because we all drive through these expensive
neighborhoods, pumping bass like base through
the speakers after mandated curfew, chasing
daughters of the well
-off Wonder Breaded,
talking like the South Side, the West Side,
and that’s our story, not necessarily mine,
but ours, because we talk like that. That’s
hard to understand if you aren’t one of us.
Almost every car we use has four doors, four cracked
windows, four clouds with heads in them dreaming
of getting head, because that’s where the mind goes
in a high school full of white kids and liquid currency.
But if we roll through in caravans with sliding doors,
best believe model citizens will clear out. Fence a ghetto
around us. Move back to Chi-proper and push us past city
limits, driving up prices in the hoods of its greatest MCs.
And that’s a lyric we all know how to decipher: do or die.
Family and Consumer Sciences
I’m the... neighborhood pusha
Call me subwoofer, ’cause I pump base like that, Jack.
—Pusha T (Clipse), “Grindin’”
Stumbling through the kitchen, tired and headed for
the staircase, her hair is slightly out of character
as she asks me what residual I’ve left
coating the countertop, and I tell her: “it’s flour, Mom”—
stove’s eye burning behind me,
blue heat set beneath the metal pot.
If she had a dollar for every time I’ve
told her that, it would be flour
or baking soda. And if I had a dollar for
every time she asked me, it wouldn’t be flour;
it’d have to be baking soda then—no question.
In my mind, if I had a dollar for every time
she didn’t ask me, it’d be flour for sure.
When she stumbles into the kitchen, tired, headed for
the freezer, in those moments if she had a dollar
for every time she wanted to ask me, it’d be
baking soda. Needed to ask me? Baking soda.
Not there to ask me? Flour or baking soda.
If it was baking soda instead of flour, then, in
my mind, blue heat would toss me in the freezer.