HUCK OR TOM

Feb. 4, 2008, like summer for a day. We made love too fast, out of practice but we get up from it like it’s all the time. My feet hit the wood floor, our underwear on my nightstand, the one window that opens and the fan worked a breeze around, 80 degrees. 5:35pm light persisting, our bathroom more beautiful when it thinks I’m not looking. The dog makes his rounds. When Katrina happened, when the levees broke, when Katrina happened, the voice I could make said Look at you, you’re not even tryin’ to get a Camry, you never even tried to get a Camry, so now you can’t get out. Of course I am angry I don’t have my Camry.

Let’s be plain about it. It’s a filthy winter here. We are one day back in Dallas from Manhattan where I got sick, a snot that hugs the germs of my brothers and sisters tight in my head. I took all of us, the entire possibility of a democratic republic, together in my sinuses to the Blockbuster to get a movie. A woman and her daughters checked out ahead of me. The second youngest corralled the baby away from the jawbreaker machine. The little cop pulled her sister by the hand to a framed poster of a white infant wearing headphones and looking surprised, jig-a-boo. The older sister pointed at the poster and forced a Ha ha, loud, didactic. The little one mimicked. My friend said Don’t say the year. I want to know if there’s a documentary on Nina Simone. In the information age do such easily answered questions stand only, or, principally as a sign of the interrogator’s buffoonery?

I had summer with my baby today. Cornell West talks about the niggerfication of Jim (Youtube it). West says there is a moment when Huck tears up the letter, when Tom tears up the letter, when Huck tears up the letter and refuses to believe or be party to the niggerfication of Jim. It’s a moral moment. I remember a white man on the TV, when Katrina happened, he said they got a lot of people out, the roads were full with early evacuees. So when I react to this with the indecorous line quoted above, should I tell you about it? Ha ha. We got summer today. I don’t know anything, my black friend has an Irish name. So what the signs don’t work. To find the loa, to pass through the earth. I can only tell you about sympathies. I wouldn’t let you at the jawbreaker either. It was sweet to make love, affirm life. There is dignity in hard work, there is dignity in a Camry.

               Windows smeared in our own dust

        if you want to come in here

                     light

           you’ll have to get through us

FARID MATUK