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Twenty-First Century Man
EDDIE BELL
I’m a 21st-century colored man strolling through recent times seeing the change coming that didn’t come, never meant to come…well maybe some, though cankerous unabated streets steam black with fools’ gold and sorry-ness.
I’m waking in the years’ mornings seeing that I’m still…well, black and losing, absurd, still irrelevant on mean streets that take my lives and make pictures. I bounce balls, carry balls, use my balls, sometimes to applause and high fives my bling swinging, my mouth flinging words that despise, words that sing my sorry state.
I bring laughter—everybody loves a clown.
I’m a 21st century black man desirable at the root but not in public, despised in private time when folk are comfortable in their own world comfortable being white—that nigger this that nigger that—smiles when I come around and pleasantries like false faces rebound into a make-believe world that wishes it wasn’t necessary. I pretend I don’t know, don’t care, but I do know, do care and I take my hurt and swallow it never forget it, go on, play the tune, recall that joy comes in the morning. Pops did his, Grandma did hers, Mama? She did hers too but after she first saw to mine. I swallow it and get stronger, turn my hurt into stories that I’ll tell later when it counts. Can’t play me. Can’t trick the trickster. This trip is mine regardless and I fun along the way.
I’m a 21st century dichotomized man split like the rent curtain my holy-of-holies exposed in naked detail—bars and boardrooms pipes and Grey Goose bling and Brooks Brothers 50 Cent and Wynton bound together by what I can’t escape, life on the outside clashing with life on the high-side. Come let us go into the house of the Lord together. I see a hip-hop jungle tired of itself but can’t see no other way don’t want no other way afraid of another way, sliding down the scale of invisibility into the morass of servitude and license plates and steel door economy and hos and bitches and daddy-less babies waiting their turn on the wheel. I see what ain’t supposed to be seen, muck and mire miry clay the light of day revealing footsteps that tug backwards. My other self steadfast against the slippage hoping this blot is only a temporary thing hoping that it’s slavery still trying to heal itself wondering if the physician is on the way.
I’m a 21st century black man determined to pierce the fog. Wake up, Brothers! Bill Cosby’s calling from the other side.
Memoir (and)