Anyhow, leave the World Book Encyclopedias to the book peddler
who will never travel beyond the poor black college kids peddling
their history
books at semester's end. It might be the gra** growing
on the plots of dirt above our ancestors that makes me say this.
It might be the white woman or man our son or daughter will marry
and the white woman or man our grandson or granddaughter will
marry,
all of them wading into the future until one of our line claims to be
Sicilian.
Leave instructions: the granddaughter of our granddaughter shall be
named Cicily.
If all men are created equal, all men are prophets,
at least at the very start and end of their lives, I bet.
Cicly, as the curse I'm casting here prescribes, won't like blacks
any more than she likes looking into a mirror in a burning house.
Still, I can almost promise you time travel will never be invented.
At first Cicily will think someone rescued our photograph
from a puddle of ashes. It's like those stories
we wind up telling ourselves about ourselves after our friends are
gone.
It's as if we will always be somewhere smiling or singing.
Maybe you can imagine the end of the line, Baby, but history
is beyond me, I admit it. Either she will discover my apology
or she will never be forgiven, and that will be a function of the curse.
It's like one of those days that are wished for, but never guaranteed.
She will marry a man who says: "But blacks are different, they were
burned
black by God." "They dance in their sleep." "I love you" will slither
from its little sheath of hunger and that too will be a function of the
curse.
Which is why not too long ago you and I argued about race
and the question was: If I don't believe in evil, do I also not believe in
good?
I meant to say yes, because my mother loved me as if one of us was
two people.
Remember when our three year old asked why we weren't white?
To be black is to blacken a little every day, I should have said.
And how at the end of a life filled with music we all go without singing.