Riot

Gwendolyn Brooks
A riot is the language of the unheard.
Martin Luther King

John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe,
all whitebluerose below his golden hair,
wrapped richly in right linen and right wool,
almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff;
almost forgot Grandtully (which is The
Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost
forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray
and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxims,
the Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri.

Because the Negroes were coming down the street.

Because the Poor were sweaty and unpretty
(not like Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka)
and they were coming toward him in rough ranks.
In seas. In windsweep. They were black and loud.
And not detainable. And not discreet.

Gross. Gross. Que tu es grossier! John Cabot
itched instantly beneath the nourished white
that told his story of glory to the World.
Dont let It touch me! the blackness! Lord! he whispered
to any handy angel in the sky.
But, in a thrilling announcement, on It drove
and breathed on him: and touched him. In that breath
the fume of pig foot, chitterling and cheap chili,
malign, mocked John. And, in terrific touch, old
averted doubt jerked forward decently,
cried, Cabot! John! You are a desperate man,
and the desperate die expensively today.

John Cabot went down in the smoke and fire
and broken glass and blood, and he cried Lord!
Forgive these nigguhs that know not what they do.

Serena Williams, Whiteness and the Act of Writing
Rolando Wilson

The brown boy is afraid, because he cant tell, exactly, what his work is. He
identifies with Serena Williams, the gorgeous black tennis star who was booed at
Indian Wells. The rumor is that her father, Richard, fixed an earlier match in the
tournament where she was to play her sister, Venus, who pulled out with tendenitis
in her knees seconds before they were about to begin. The theory is that he rigged
this meeting, just as he did their first All-Williams Wimbledon Semi-final, where
Serena is rumored to have thrown the contest.

In his apartment in Brooklyn, the brown boy has dozens of photos of both sisters
which plaster the walls above his computer. In the one where they are standing
next to one another at Wimbledon, Serena is crying. Venus consoling arm is
around her sisters shoulder. This photo is next to cut up shots of two old men with
fat cocks, a collage he made and covered with a sheet of paper that reads:
travelogue. Behind this cover, one man is bald and his eyes are glazed shut, the
other is all crotch, grainy black and white hands, fat fingers and thigh.

When he thinks of the connection between his sad sisters and his turned on old
men strangers caught sucking and being sucked, and covered, he feels that his
mind is one confused object that pulses about unknowing, wound up, a note
towards itself with no answers but the need to cut, suspend, look. Paste, cover and
tape.

Next to one another, each piece locks up to the next, making sense only in his own
mind. Somehow he thinks if he could bring these shots together, things would start
to make sense, the whole of them becoming more like a finished puzzle.

What would it have been like? If when the brown boy was small playing tennis
with his mother at Cabrillo park, he could have imagined being Serena instead of
Tracy Austin?

He liked Tracy because of her size, the small pink perse of her mouth, her tough
little pony tails, Pony tennis shoes and short triangular one piece dresses. He loved
what the announcers called her moon balling, the way she hit the ball high and
over the net, back and forth looping it deep against an opponent like Andrea Jaeger
or Chris Everett Lloyd. Though the brown boys father taught him a one handed
backhand for better reach and cleaner volleys, the brown boy switched to two
because of the power he felt he could have stroking the ball, double fisted. It was
as though he had no choice but to hit with two hands, to forget what his father
taught him and to rear back and try to stroke the ball with the whole of Amelia
Island, Tracys home town, behind him.

What would have happened to his small dreaming brown frame of body, if it did
not pudge out into the impossible desire to be white, small and a girl like Tracy
Austin? What if he could have seen Serena then, imagined invading her body,
becoming her muscled frame, pounding the ball back into oblivion? What if he
could have seen her powerful torque, unleashing and winning against all that
booing at Indian Wells?

Still, he finds himself, while swimming, shaking his head forward and to the left,
his fingers brushing aside an imagined blonde slick of chlorine water-logged hair,
stuck then freed from in front of his eyes.

But he also remembers when he was six that his hair was straight; and even when
dry, it lay flat on his head. There is a photo of him, his face covered by the gaping
bottom of an RC paper cup stuck around his mouth. His hair, then, is straight and
light brown, bleached by the sun, flat and just lying there. The quiet of this picture
and the smoothed down curls that he palms down to his grown up head remind
him, again, of who he is, and who he is not.