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This was going around in emails a while back, and seems to be again.
I thought it would be a good thing to post today, I don't have a link, don't know who wrote it, maybe somebody does?
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America said my great grandfather was a savage. He could be legally hunted as wild game for twenty four more years after they said my great-grandmother (who they said was 2/3 human) was no longer at least technically the property of the man who raped her when she was 11. Great-Grandpa lived most of his life under an assumed name, as a fugitive from justice because on one occasion, he was foolish enough to hunt back.
America kept my grandfather from education, from voting, from owning property (unless he wanted to live on the reservation, where they would be conceded to "own" some scrap of the land of their fathers).
America said it was the same as bestiality for my grandfather and grandmother to get married. They were foolish enough to live together and have my mother anyway, on whom America looked down because she was illegitimate.
Another one of my great grandpas America brought over from China and let him build the railroad and when the railroad was finished and he was too old and damaged to be much more use, America tried to send him back but he had met my other great grandma, and being a foolish man, he refused to go so America tried to burn him alive.
America said that neither my mother, my father, nor for the first part of my life, I, could go eat in a restaurant, shop in the stores, worship in the church, live in the neighborhood, work at the job we wanted to.
We could not even go to the bathroom in the same place or drink the same water as the Americans, they said. We were, after all, just foolish "colored" people.
They did say my father could go die fighting for the Americans in the army though, and they let my uncle lose a leg, although when he came back, he could still not eat in a restaurant, live where he wanted to, and he didn't get a fancy artificial leg like the American soldiers did. My Auntie made him one out of some wood she was foolish enough to steal from an American's woodpile.
Auntie bled to death having my cousin Leila because America said she had to wait outside the emergency room until the doctor was through taking care of a little white girl who said her throat was sore. Once he had gotten through talking to her daddy about some land he was buying he came on out to the parking lot and pronounced her dead. My cousin Robbie was about out of his mind and yelled at the American doctor, who told him to quit that foolishness and get his mama's body out of the way of the Americans' cars.
Growing up, America said I could not go to the picture show, or the circus, or the swimming pool. America said the only schooling I could have would be in a falling down building with fifty year old books with half the pages missing.
When my mother complained about it, America told her she should be grateful, that it was a waste of money to give me even that, for all a colored boy like me would ever need it, and she was not helping me by putting foolishness like that in my head.
We always were the kind of coloreds that you have to watch and by the time we started hearing about Dr. King I was grown and went to march. America put me in jail, like they did Dr. King, they set their dogs on me, they almost tore my arm off with a fire hose on full blast.
America's local representative in town told me if I didn't cut that foolishness out something might happen to my mama and something would definitely happen to me.
God's local representative, my mama, told me if I even thought about cutting that foolishness out she would take a switch to me no matter how big I thought I was.
I did not cut that foolishness out.
In time, the foolishness made it possible for me to take my mama down to the courthouse to vote, and to the Red Lobster on Mother's Day. During the course of the foolishness, I met my wife, who had refused to cut the foolishness out despite the scars on her thighs from where America had beaten her for speaking her own language, and the crooked finger she got punching the lights out of an American who thought that some greaser pussy would be easy to get.
We raised our son to be foolish, and to talk back to America when it suggested that he go to vocational school instead of college, and when he got married we told him he had better raise his kids to be foolish too, or we would take a switch to him no matter how big he thought he was.
Today I sat out on the porch with my granddaughter. She wears a little gold ring in her nose and a Samoan tattoo on her arm and the blood of four continents in her veins and is the most beautiful woman the Lord ever made, except for my wife. She is trying to decide if she should go back to school or go back to Palestine, where she just spent the summer living with a family in the hope that her presence would keep the soldiers from blowing up their house. It didn't. Our son married a foolish woman and together they raised her to be a very foolish girl.
She is mad enough to spit, telling me all the things America is doing and paying people to do around the world as if I hadn't been living in it for never mind how many years. Sometimes I look at her and the foolishness just grabs my heart so hard I think "not yet, Lord."
When we come back from the airport, she is all I see in my mind, waving at us through the gate with that bag she says isn't heavy, but I've hefted it myself and I don't know how she carries it and still leaves us with that smile, half turning on those foolish little cream colored feet that she's about to go plant in front of a Merkava tank.
"Was my hair ever that black?" I ask my wife, who always knows everything I'm thinking whether I tell her or not.
She looks at me like she never saw me before in her life.
"It still is," she says, and I realize that to her, it probably is, because she is such a foolish woman.
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