Unit 6: Selection Vocabulary 4

My father is an imposing man. Small, with dark, sad eyes and gums that bleed when he brushes them in the morning. I ask my mother why he scares me so much.

“But figuratively, the Old World—” That evening, my mother scolds me over the phone. “There is no figuratively,” she says. “Why do you always have to blab about what you don’t know?”

I imagine my father sitting at his typewriter, whacking at the keys with agitated fingers.

She places a plastic tray wrapped in aluminum foil on my father’s lap, then disappears behind the curtain. I sit at the edge of my father’s bed and remove the foil. Together we study the four compartments: chicken, broccoli, pears, water.

how the orchards would swell with fruit,
how the trees would strain, then give way

under their ripe weight.

Someone
would intervene, would make of our absence

a profit.

But what we don't anticipate
is how the dust of the desert will clot our throats

And how our children will read this silence

as shame. However much we tried, we thought,
to demonstrate grace.

And how our children will read this silence

as shame. However much we tried, we thought,
to demonstrate grace.

This alone is what I wish for you: knowledge.
To understand each desire has an edge,
to know we are responsible for the lives
we change.

No faith comes without cost,
no one believes without dying.

There are no curses—only mirrors
held up to the souls of gods and mortals.

And so, although I grew up reading books about the baffling places where black people were treated badly for being black, race remained an exotic abstraction: It was Kunta Kinte.

I was angry that his behavior left Stephen bewildered, and for a long time I half-expected something similar to happen in other homes that displayed American flags.

“Ignorant” suggested that an affluent, educated American living in a Philadelphia suburb in 1999 did not realize that black people are human beings.

They believe that black people still encounter unpleasantness related to blackness but in benign forms and from unhappy people or crazy people or people with good intentions that are bungled in execution.

Although the way that blackness manifests itself in America has changed since 1965, the way that it is talked about has not.