Kevin Young’s Brown, published tomorrow, explores myriad manifestations and shades of brown in American life, including the poet’s own experiences from his black boyhood in Kansas. In our moment, when high school students are speaking out and attempting to make history, it’s worth remembering, as Young does here, how the subject of American History was served to him and his Midwestern classmates only a generation ago, and by whom.
Pillar of my high school, Mr. W
made class by seven a.m., filling
his blackboards with white, using notes
decades old & denture yellow.
I heard he could write any way
you wanted—backward, forward,
left hand or right, even
mirrored. For him History
was what each night
he erased.
He never missed a day. Snow
days drove the man insane—
regular as mail, he said if a letter could reach
the school, so could we, trudging
through bitterest cold to his overwarm room.
Never let kids eat, or talk in class, or take
down just what he wrote on the board—
Listen to what I’m telling you, he’d say,
synthesize, don’t record. Some days he’d launch
into an anecdote about the War or
what’s wrong with kids today—
you’re not moral or immoral, just
amoral. Even his jokes grown older
than he was, the trap door he wished he owned
would send kids crashing into spikes
simply for walking during class
without a pass. At breaks he began to bend
to pick up stray trash. He despised the boom
boom boom of the radios black kids wore,
he swore, or tugged his eyes at the corners
to imitate a Chinaman on the rail.
Ah, so. Brilliant is what everyone
dubbed him, but by the time we got there
Mr. W had started to slip,
missing most of the May before—
rumors went round
our school had tried stopping
his return—Take the year off,
you earned it—even he
told us that—but here he was,
stonewalling, aged twenty years
over the summer, back like MacArthur
or the Terminator to teach us
all. Some seniors from last year’s class
brought him steel tension balls
that September—tinny things
he clutched in his palm & clanked past
each other like cymbals
tolling stress. We
stayed silent. Fifty pounds
shed over the summer, his wrists jutted out
from the frayed cuffs
of his Crayola cardigans.
He’d turn & tune
those chiming spheres like the globe
his classroom never had—
his walls held only Old Glory
& a fading photo of the flag
raised at Iwo Jima. Mr. W let us know
he never got to fight in the War
more often as the year wore
away with his sweater’s elbows,
till his yellow shirt shone
through like yolk. That year
the Depression & World
War took all winter
& knowing time was short, his own,
Mr. W spent nights transcribing
to transparencies words
water could wipe away,
numbering each palimpsest to match
his crumbling notes. Just in case,
he’d say, above the overhead
projector’s buzz—you could manage
without me. He never
could forget a past
only we would remember—
his teacher telling him at graduation
You know you’re only seventeen
& who knows how long this Pacific
Theater might last—They have this new
GI Bill. Get some college first,
Wayne, his name all alliteration,
a tone poem. How
could he know
we’d drop the bomb
& end it all? He tried serving
later, even went
to enlist in Korea but was foiled
by a bad back & luck. I tried,
he’d plead the air. How to soothe
a man who woke his whole life
at five & could silence kids
not his own? Who once
drove 45 on the highway he told us
cause Nixon asked
his fellow Americans to, counting
each unpatriotic car that passed him
along the way? Like history he saved
& scored the immeasurable—
with years-worth of sick days
hoarded & never spent, illness
came to fetch him
from the only other home he knew.
Wearing black now, pointing out
where other kids once sat long before
we were born—future
governors, a crook or two—
each chair a ghost. You’re my kids,
he’d tell us, we built or broke
his heart. Next day
he was gone. We never did make it
to Vietnam—rest
of the year in silence we took down
the words he’d written
projected on the wall
like any man’s promises to himself.
The latter half of the twentieth century
felt a bit too cold, winter
lingered too long—Mr. W’s words,
unchanged, awaited
us coloreds & women libbers
half-hoping for him
to return—for the world not to be
as cruel as we’d learned.
We spent the Sixties
minus Malcolm X, or Watts,
barely a March on Washington—
all April & much
of May we waited for Woodstock
& answers & assassinations
that would never come
among the steady hum
& faint bright
of flickering fluorescent lights.
More on this book and author:
See Kevin read from his work on April 17 in Brooklyn, April 19 in Wichita, April 20 at the Tulsa Lit Fest, April 24 in Philadelphia, April 25 in Baltimore, May 2 in New York, and May 16 in Brooklyn.
annaxmalina
germansingergirl
andulkaphoto
jbbartram-illu
dededos
