The Tradition
JERICHO BROWN
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In memory of
Bertha Lee Lenoir
(1932–2018)
I will bring you a whole person
and you will bring me a whole person
and we will have us twice as much
of love and everything.
Mari Evans
Contents
Note to the Reader
I
Ganymede
As a Human Being
Flower
The Microscopes
The Tradition
Hero
After Another Country
The Water Lilies
Foreday in the Morning
The Card Tables
Bullet Points
Duplex
The Trees
Second Language
After Avery R. Young
A Young Man
II
Duplex
Riddle
Good White People
Correspondence
Trojan
The Legend of Big and Fine
The Peaches
Night Shift
Shovel
The Long Way
Dear Whiteness
Of the Swan
Entertainment Industry
Stake
Layover
III
Duplex
Of My Fury
After Essex Hemphill
Stay
A.D.
Turn You Over
The Virus
The Rabbits
Monotheism
Token
The Hammers
I Know What I Love
Crossing
Deliverance
Meditations at the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park
Dark
Duplex
Thighs and Ass
Cakewalk
Stand
Duplex: Cento
Notes
About the Author
Also by Jericho Brown
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special thanks
THE TRADITION
I
Ganymede
A man trades his son for horses.
That’s the version I prefer. I like
The safety of it, no one at fault,
Everyone rewarded. God gets
The boy. The boy becomes
Immortal. His father rides until
Grief sounds as good as the gallop
Of an animal born to carry those
Who patrol our inherited
Kingdom. When we look at myth
This way, nobody bothers saying
Rape. I mean, don’t you want God
To want you? Don’t you dream
Of someone with wings taking you
Up? And when the master comes
For our children, he smells
Like the men who own stables
In Heaven, that far terrain
No one has to convince us.
The people of my country believe
We can’t be hurt if we can be bought.
As a Human Being
There is the happiness you have
And the happiness you deserve.
They sit apart from each other
The way you and your mother
Sat on opposite ends of the sofa
After an ambulance came to take
Your father away. Some good
Doctor will stitch him up, and
Soon an aunt will arrive to drive
Your mother to the hospital
Where she will settle next to him
Forever, as promised. She holds
The arm of her seat as if she could
Fall, as if it is the only sturdy thing,
And it is, since you’ve done what
You always wanted, you fought
Your father and won, marred him.
He’ll have a scar he can see all
Because of you. And your mother,
The only woman you ever cried for,
Must tend to it as a bride tends
To her vows, forsaking all others
No matter how sore the injury.
No matter how sore the injury
Has left you, you sit understanding
Yourself as a human being finally
Free now that nobody’s got to love you.
Flower
Yellow bird.
Yellow house.
Little yellow
Song
Light in my
Jaundiced mouth.
These yellow
Teeth need
Brushing, but
You admire
My yellow
Smile. This
Black boy
Keeps singing.
Tiny life.
Yellow bile.
The Microscopes
Heavy and expensive, hard and black
With bits of chrome, they looked
Like baby cannons, the real children of war, and I
Hated them for that, for what our teacher said
They could do, and then I hated them
For what they did when we gave up
Stealing looks at one another’s bodies
To press a left or right eye into the barrel and see
Our actual selves taken down to a cell
Then blown back up again, every atomic thing
About a piece of my coiled hair on one slide
Just as unimportant as anyone else’s
Growing in that science
Class where I learned what little difference
God saw if God saw me. It was the start of one fear,
A puny one not much worth mentioning,
Narrow as the pencil tucked behind my ear, lost
When I reached for it
To stab someone I secretly loved: a bigger boy
Who’d advance
Through those tight, locker-lined corridors shoving
Without saying
Excuse me, more an insult than a battle. No large loss.
Not at all. Nothing necessary to study
Or recall. No fighting in the hall
On the way to an American history exam
I almost passed. Redcoats.
Red blood cells. Red-bricked
Education I rode the bus to get. I can’t remember
The exact date or
Grade, but I know when I began ignoring slight alarms
That move others to charge or retreat. I’m a kind
Of camouflage. I never let on when scared
&n
bsp; Of conflicts so old they seem to amount
To nothing really—dust particles left behind—
Like the viral geography of an occupied territory,
A region I imagine you imagine when you see
A white woman walking with a speck like me.
The Tradition
Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. We thought
Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning
Names in heat, in elements classical
Philosophers said could change us. Stargazer.
Foxglove. Summer seemed to bloom against the will
Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter
On this planet than when our dead fathers
Wiped sweat from their necks. Cosmos. Baby’s Breath.
Men like me and my brothers filmed what we
Planted for proof we existed before
Too late, sped the video to see blossoms
Brought in seconds, colors you expect in poems
John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.
Hero
She never knew one of us from another, so my brothers and I grew up
fighting
Over our mother’s mind
Like sun-colored suitors in a Greek myth. We were willing
To do evil. We kept chocolate around our mouths. The last of her
mother’s lot,
She cried at funerals, cried when she whipped me. She whipped me
Daily. I am most interested in people who declare gratitude
For their childhood beatings. None of them took what my mother gave,
Waking us for school with sharp slaps to our bare thighs.
That side of the family is darker. I should be grateful. So I will be—
No one on Earth knows how many abortions happened
Before a woman risked her freedom by giving that risk a name,
By taking it to breast. I don’t know why I am alive now
That I still cannot impress the woman who whipped me
Into being. I turned my mother into a grandmother. She thanks me
By kissing my sons. Gratitude is black—
Black as a hero returning from war to a country that banked on his death.
Thank God. It can’t get much darker than that.
After Another Country
Some dark of us dark,
The ones like me, walk
Around looking for
A building or a bridge.
We mumble and pull
At our lips, convinced,
Until we see how far
Down the distance.
We arrive to leave,
Calling ourselves
Cowards, but not you,
Rufus. You make it
To the George Washington—
Bold as an officer of the law
With the right to direct traffic
When all the stoplights
Are out—and you leap
Dirty against the whiteness
Of the sky to your escape
Through the whiteness
Of the water.
The Water Lilies
They open in the day and close at night.
They are good at appearances. They are white.
I judge them, judge the study they make
Of themselves, aspirational beings, fake
If you ask me. If you ask me, I’ll say no,
Thank you, I don’t need to watch what goes
Only imagining itself seen, don’t need
To see them yawn their thin mouths and feed
On light, absolute and unmoved. They remind
Me of black people who see the movie
About slaves and exit saying how they would
Have fought to whip Legree with his own whip
And walked away from the plantation,
Their eyes raised to the sun, without going blind.
Foreday in the Morning
My mother grew morning glories that spilled onto the walkway
toward her porch
Because she was a woman with land who showed as much by giving it
color.
She told me I could have whatever I worked for. That means she was
an American.
But she’d say it was because she believed
In God. I am ashamed of America
And confounded by God. I thank God for my citizenship in spite
Of the timer set on my life to write
These words: I love my mother. I love black women
Who plant flowers as sheepish as their sons. By the time the blooms
Unfurl themselves for a few hours of light, the women who tend them
Are already at work. Blue. I’ll never know who started the lie that we
are lazy,
But I’d love to wake that bastard up
At foreday in the morning, toss him in a truck, and drive him under
God
Past every bus stop in America to see all those black folk
Waiting to go work for whatever they want. A house? A boy
To keep the lawn cut? Some color in the yard? My God, we leave
things green.
The Card Tables
Stop playing. You do remember the card tables,
Slick stick figures like men with low-cut fades,
Short but standing straight
Because we bent them into weak display.
What didn’t we want? What wouldn’t we claim?
How perfectly each surface was made
For throwing or dropping or slamming a necessary
Portion of our pay.
And how could any of us get by
With one in the way?
Didn’t that bare square ask to be played
On, beaten on the head, then folded, then put away,
All so we could call ourselves safe
Now that there was more room, a little more space?
Bullet Points
I will not shoot myself
In the head, and I will not shoot myself
In the back, and I will not hang myself
With a trashbag, and if I do,
I promise you, I will not do it
In a police car while handcuffed
Or in the jail cell of a town
I only know the name of
Because I have to drive through it
To get home. Yes, I may be at risk,
But I promise you, I trust the maggots
Who live beneath the floorboards
Of my house to do what they must
To any carcass more than I trust
An officer of the law of the land
To shut my eyes like a man
Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet
So clean my mother could have used it
To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will
Do it the same way most Americans do,
I promise you: cigarette smoke
Or a piece of meat on which I choke
Or so broke I freeze
In one of these winters we keep
Calling worst. I promise if you hear
Of me dead anywhere near
A cop, then that cop killed me. He took
Me from us and left my body, which is,
No matter what we’ve been taught,
Greater than the settlement
A city can pay a mother to stop crying,
And more beautiful than the new bullet
Fished from the folds of my brain.
Duplex
A poem is a gesture toward home.
It makes dark demands I call my own.
Memory makes demands darker than my own:
My last love drove a burgundy car.
My first love drove a burgundy car.
He was fast and awful, tall as my father.
Steadfast and awful, my tall father
Hit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks.
Light rain hits easy but leaves its own mark
Like the sound of a mother weeping again.
Like the sound of my mother weeping again,
No sound beating ends where it began.
None of the beaten end up how we began.
A poem is a gesture toward home.
The Trees
In my front yard live three crape myrtles, crying trees
We once called them, not the shadiest but soothing
During a break from work in the heat, their cool sweat
Falling into us. I don’t want to make more of it.
I’d like to let these spindly things be
Since my gift for transformation here proves
Useless now that I know everyone moves the same
Whether moving in tears or moving
To punch my face. A crape myrtle is
A crape myrtle. Three is a family. It is winter. They are bare.
It’s not that I love them
Every day. It’s that I love them anyway.
Second Language
You come with a little
Black string tied
Around your tongue,
Knotted to remind
Where you came from
And why you left
Behind photographs
Of people whose
Names now buck
Pronouncing. How
Do you say God
Now that the night
Rises sooner? Why
Must we wake to work
Before any alarm?
I am the man asking,
The great-grandson
Made so by the dead
Tenant farmers promised
A plot of woods to hew.
They thought they could
Own the dirt they were
Bound to. In that part
Of the country, a knot
Is something you get
After getting knocked
Down, and story means
Lie. In your plot
Of the country, class
Means school, this room
Where we practice
Words that undo your
Tongue when you tell
A lie or start a promise
Or unravel like a story.
After Avery R. Young
Blk is not a country, but I live there
Where even the youngest call you baby.
Sometimes you ain’t we. Sometimes you is
Everybody. Washboard rains come. We