* The following is a true story.


It was your average morning
of stepping past white walls
connecting high school halls
and students hookin' up through hormones,
but I'm in my own zone,
bobbin' my head to the taps of my Stacy Adams
while making up some blank verse patterns.
The front office secretary
looked @ me with unspoken "God speed"
and told me that the cubicle
was outside the cafeteria to the left.
The sky has stayed gray,
so it may be one of those days,
and if worse comes to worse,
I'm in no mood for a cloudburst.

After going through the door,
I began to explore the lively area
for possible pet peeves
with smart bombs up their sleeves.
I learned every one of the seven students' names,
but following first period, I would find
that one of them didn't care to learn mine.
One young man with a Dunwitty complex
began to flex his gun of a tongue
and sprung aloud to the crowd
that word that every black person
(deep down) wished he or she never heard.
He pulled a Flip Wilson
because his headphones made him do it,
but I wasn't new to it.
I told him that, believe it or not,
some black people still don't appreciate
that endearing term of hate,
so I respectfully asked him to stop
planting the same poisonous crops in his own mind.
The black student sitting next to him
didn't seem disturbed
because, after all, isn't it just a word?
So Malibu's Most Wanted jumped the curb,
looked straight into my big browns
and got down and dirty.

"This ain't your class, so you can get out,"
he started to shout, and like a broken record
skipping across time in a beeline towards me,
he began to reply like a sniper
high off his own trigger,

"nigger,
nigger,
nigger,"

wanting me to just stare in shock
like the RCA dog he assumed me to be.

Even before he could pour out that first "ger,"
a Paul Watson rage began to crawl
out of a Gwendolyn Bennett page
and became scrawled across the walls of my veins.
Every Nat Turner vision,
every pre-Mecca Malcolm composition
and every dead prez rendition
swarmed into position through my balled fist
that I was just dying to lift and fire
so he would cease to exist and expire...

but it's not worth walking that way
to a jail cell where most brothers don't prevail,
so I made him set sail out the door
"and don't you come back no more."
Before catching his yellow belly cab,
he looked and took one last stab.

"I have family members in the Klan,"

he spurt then jerked like a smirking clown,
thinking another touchdown for the white man,
even though he's just a white boy suspended
who pretended it never happened.

And what's too sad that it makes me almost laugh
is that half of the black students sitting in a class
think brothers like me who take this stance
are getting too big for their own pants
because, after all, isn't it just a word
that shouldn't get on my nerves
like Murray's bell curve?
I don't endorse censorship,
but I do enforce respect,
especially when it's a need
that my people have yet to get
among white kids who think
that hanging with black friends,
bumpin' 50 Cent and watching Dave Chappelle
sells them the license to expel this epitome
with a history of hell in every nook and cranny,
going back to James Byrd, Jim Crow,
"swing low," minstrel shows with overweight mammies
and the countless rapes of great great grannies.

Now I love all of my peeps even if they choose
to use this term of deceit in their speech.
We just don't see eye to eye
when it comes to the revise:

Never
Ignorant
Getting
Goals
Accomplished

because I just keep seeing how

Nobody's
Inventing
Greater
Grammatical
Attempts,

and sometimes this seems to be
the only word that we know,
so I'm just ready to grow.

One day this student will see
that not every black person is laid-back like me,
and hopefully it won't mean his own R.I.P.
He Who is in me is greater
than the devil lowering levels in the world,
so may the Son of Man's nail-pierced hands
cause my fist to uncurl,
revealing how sand grains wiped from my eyes
have turned into priceless pearls.


Copyright 2005. Streetlight Publications.