Crazy When You Smile

I’d never seen them up this close before

or ever known the awkward reckoning 

of our collapsing distance. Their hatred 

of what I am blooms wreckage on their skin,

their arms and faces blare in crimson while

they wave their placards with my breath

misspelled. I never thought that I would find

myself the object of foreboding thick 

enough to make a white man bare his teeth,

all Lucky Struck and rotting, just to hiss

a tightening noose in my direction, or spot 

a mother in a boxy robe of dimming flowers, 

hair all done up high and gelled, wrapped 

’round Velcro rollers. She sidearms rocks 

at the window by my head—I refuse to flinch. 

She calls me monkey. I smile at her beyond 

and through the spidered cracking of the glass.

It really drives them crazy when you smile 

my father said this morning, while I scrubbed

my pimpled cheeks and picked my badass ‘fro 

to sky. Don’t let on that you’re mad or scared.

I can’t say that I really understood the strategy 

of being less of myself—pretending deafness, 

unremembering my fists. I know he was thinking

of those long ago students in Greensboro, stiff 

in their counter seats at Woolworth’s while 

keening white boys leered and drenched their 

heads with flour, ketchup, sugar, mustard,

spit. Perhaps there was a lesson to be learned.

But this is Boston, ten whole years from then,

and maybe I don’t want to be a martyr because 

to me it looks like nothing much has changed. 

I’m stiff in my seat on this bus while seething 

white folks scan the ground for stones, for shards 

of glass, for ways to break the skin that vexes 

them. I know that this is not the South, and yet 

it is. I know God said they know not what 

they do—but yeah, they do. I know that I am 

not a fool, and yet I feel like one. Like the coon 

they expect to see—smiling and swallowing. 

And everyone still sitting on the bus is silent—

fascinated by the spew of phlegm and venom 

smearing the windows, the way no matter how 

they sing our names it sounds like nigger—

nigger screeched so wide, so thousand times 

and so on-key. When they let me go I just might 

wear that new name home to show my father.