"What Year Was Heaven Desegregated?"
Jeffrey McDaniel

Watching the news about Diallo, my eight year-old cousin, Jake,
asks why don’t they build black people
with bulletproof skin? I tell Jake there’s another planet, where
humans change colors like mood rings.
You wake up Scottish, and fall asleep Chinese; enter a theatre
Persian, and exit Puerto Rican. And Earth
is a junkyard planet, where they send all the broken humans
who are stuck in one color. That pseudo-
angels in the world before this offer deals to black fetuses, to give up
their seats on the shuttle to earth, say: wait
for the next one, conditions will improve. Then Jake asks do they
have ghettos in the afterlife? Seven years ago
I sat in a car, an antenna filled with crack cocaine smoldering
between my lips, the smoke spreading
in my lungs, like the legs of Joseph Stalin’s mom in the delivery
room. An undercover piglet hoofed up
to the window. My buddy busted an illegal u-turn, screeched
the wrong way down a one-way street.
I chucked the antenna, shoved the crack rock up my asshole.
The cops swooped in from all sides,
yanked me out. I clutched my ass cheeks like a third fist gripping
a winning lotto ticket. The cop yelled,
White boys only come in this neighborhood for two reasons: to steal
cars and buy drugs. You already got wheels.
I ran into the burning building of my mind. I couldn’t see shit.
It was filled with crack smoke. I dug
through the ashes of my conscience, till I found my educated, white
male dialect, which I stuck in my voice box
and pushed play. Officer, I’m going to be honest with you: Blah,
blah, blah. See, the sad truth is my skin
said everything he needed to know. My skin whispered into his pink
ear, I’m white. You can’t pin shit on this
pale fabric. This pasty cloth is pin resistant. Now slap my wrist,
so I can go home, take this rock out
of my ass, and smoke it. If Diallo was white, the bullets would’ve
bounced off his chest like spitballs. But
his execution does prove that a black man with a wallet is as dangerous
to the cops as a black man with an Uzi.
Maybe he whipped that wallet out like a grenade, hollered, I buy,
therefore I am an American. Or maybe
he just said, hey man, my tax money paid for two of the bullets
in that gun. Last year on vacation in DC,
little Jake wondered how come there’s a Vietnam wall, Abe Lincoln’s
house, a Holocaust building, but nothing
about slavery?  No thousand-foot sculpture of a whip. No
giant dollar bill dipped in blood.
Is it ‘cause there’s no Hitler to blame it on, no donkey to stick it on?
Are they afraid the blacks will want a settlement?
I mean, if Japanese-Americans locked up in internment camps
for five years cashed out at thirty g’s, what’s
the price tag on a three-hundred-year session with a dominatrix
who’s not pretending? And the white people
say we gave ‘em February. Black History Month. But it’s so much
easier to have a month than an actual
conversation. Jake, life is one big song, and we are the chorus.
Riding the subway is a chorus. Driving
the freeway is a chorus. But you gotta stay ready, ‘cause you never
know when the other instruments will
drop out, and ta-dah—it’s your moment in the lit spot, the barometer
of your humanity, and you’ll hear the footsteps
of a hush, rushing through the theater, as you aim for the high notes
with the bow and arrow in your throat.