“Niggar!”
“Whut?”
“Niggar you best get out this door and get your ass down on the street in front. In front of your house, motherfucker. Down in the motherfuckin’ front you’ll have two eyes in the back of your ass you don’t get your. Motherfucking. Ass. Out. On the motherfucking. Porch.”
Screaming from inside.
“Did you hear something?”
“Nah, man, you know I ain’t hear nothing.”
I pop the zip on a flash grenade and launch it over my shoulder. It goes through the roof, plops down on a kitchen table, and everyone in the room goes look, look at the pretty bombs about to explode for us. Then it stops fizzing and everyone looks around at each other like whut?? and then there happens the tiniest little click in all creation. Then the thing starts to whizz and the flashbang goes flash!, bang! All the tiniest stars in heaven come down to blind my man in there.
“Niggar! Did you hear me on that?”
“Fuck you, man! We were watching the Oscars!”
“The White Oscars?” I yell.
“What other kind of Oscars is there? Yeah man, the White Oscars. Everything else in this country is White. Might as well be a motherfucking White Oscars. Fucking White Jennifer Lawrence. Fucking White Laura Dern. Motherfuckin’ White writers everywhere. White police locker rooms. White cowboys—“
“Did you say ‘White police locker rooms?’ ‘Cause we got more than White police in our White police locker rooms.”
“Yeah but do you have anyone revolutionary in there? Like Martin Luther King!”
I motion to the other units. Double eyes. Everyone fall on me. Two here. Two there. Rush, rush. Go, go. Toss me another flash grenade in through the roof. Too bad we don’t have anything more dangerous than that. Too bad I can’t get to the trunk at the end of our bed. Too bad that Nikkas like tumbleweed in there can’t comprehend the power of the chest at the end of the bed. Too bad they don’t understand the heritage of the chest at the end of the bed. And why am I sitted here in West Dayton launching death pins at some scrub—a fucking nappy-headed scrub (who ain’t got no dough, who cain’t get my love) defending White culture to you, dear reader, who probably doesn’t have a penny to throw in a pot or a bank account to secreet it into.
“Go go go!” I say.
And the rat’s nest of cops, my partners for close to 20 years, unfurls itself (always in slow motion to me, always with its taps and clicks and locks and pops whose details—unknown to the masses—signals their doom). There’s Martin, my Black partner, been riding for six out of those 20. Last partner got a piece of electrified rebar punctured through his neck. He didn’t last long after that. Service medal. Wife pension. All of this posthumous of course. There’s Captain Bell, next car over. He’s on board. He’s got the right ticket punched and they punched it in the right place. 9mm in the sock. 45 in hand, he looks like a soldier—a stellar one. His eyes are on the door where my Niggar—Sheth Jones—should be coming out within the second. Three more cars behind us. We’re all ready to take the motherfucker out.
The sweat coming off my eyebrows—stop gap—it turns my vision blue, and in the pause I am in the kitchen with Sheth and his friends (“What? They’re your family?”). Anyway this Nig challenges me on my suit and I read across the table for a piece of whatever Black cereal he’s eating (probably Fruit Loops)—I would never let my children eat that—and I toss my Loop of Fruit into the air and I say, “Sheth Jones, 17 years old, priors none, straight-A student, what in the hell are we doing at your house today?”
To which Sheth would say, “I’m out of my element, sir.”
“You’re in your own home, so how you can say you’re out of your element escapes me! Do you understand what I mean when I say, Boo, Niggar! Do you read me when I say this?”
Then, in this imagination, Sheth pushes his chair back with a foot against the kitchen table (would not be allowed in my house) and behind his head on the television is Jennifer Lawrence tripping up the Oscar stairs and bugs were crawling in Sheth’s ears and around his mouth and through his nose and I saw him at the moment of his creation, slithering Satan writhed atop a similar kitchen table in a similar moment, similar house, similar kid, similar mother grandmother ancient ancestor squatting her legs blood seeping out and she plops Sheth right upon the tabletop right next to the Fruity Loops and loveless she crawls to the window scrapes the dirt away and breathes deep through her Satan’s lungs—she’s the devil she’s Sheth’s mom I don’t know if you got that but Sheth/Satan was given birth by her mother, Satan’s Mother, Satan’s Mother right inside that house, Satan’s Mother right behind that door. If you stare into Shethy’s eyes for a second all you’ll see is blackness, the blackness of the fornicator, the blackness of the Devil’s whore.
I swear to you, as the cold runs around my neck on this West Dayton Niggar’s residence, that I will never let my children see this pain. This West Dayton squat with refrigerators in the lawn, up against the house three tires—why would you even have three tires? Pink foam insulation falling out the exterior walls. Nappy head kiddos playing in a dumpster—probably needles—probably meth. None of these kids even go to school, and they wonder why their side of town is falling apart. Your whole culture has fallen to shit. Your entire culture is desecration. It should never have been brought here. It should have stayed in Africa. You Africans complain that back in Africa you had homes of gold and entire kingdoms—you should have stayed there. Although all I’ve ever seen of Africa is pictures of lions having just been killed by US Presidents. That’s all I’ve ever known. I’ve never seen its cities. Its people. Its resources. Its beauty. I’ve never seen that. All it is to me is Simba with his dead neck limped over some billionaire’s shoulder. Starving kids with flies all over their bodies. So if Africa is so great I’ve never seen it. And I wish we could ship all you shit heads and brown skins back there.
Do you hear me, oh Lord, oh my God, my President? Hear me when I want to run Niggars off the road in my F-150? Hear me when I want to ring their fucking necks? Do you head me when I wake with blood as cold as ice, with blood beneath my fingernails? Do you hear my rage? Do you hear that I am the last person to be racist, oh Lord, oh God, oh President of the United States? Oh President of these States. Oh chosen servant, unwilling, they dragged you into this. You never wanted to serve. You were happy being a billionaire. Your fellow Americans. Fellow people. Don’t do this to me. Do not make me speak. I am the Lord your God and your countenance shall shine upon me, in this rain, in the cold outside Sheth Jones’ house, the 17-year-old, the supposedly A student whose neighbor called in a domestic disturbance report of loud yelling, pots and pans being launched against the walls, suspicion of children inside the home. Hear my prayer oh Lord. Hear me shout it over the radio, call it on 911. And you answer me, on TV, in the phrases you use, in the white power call signs, the hand signals, the verbology, it’s all there to remind me that I’m ok—that you’re ok with me—that my secret beliefs are founded, backed up, by you, oh God. You are the alpha and the omega. Everything springs from you. You have been with me since the beginning, my God. Stay with me forever.
Pop! Crack!
The grenade goes in.
Flash. Bang.
Martin and Captain Bell stand tense. I stand with them. Sheth Jones comes coughing through the mist, hands up, and I’m up above the car (an entry team having opened the door) and smoke comes out and smoke comes out and we are waiting for mister Sheth Jones, juvenile delinquent, to emerge from his Nubian parlance with a coat of lion’s fur—you could have been—you could have been in Africa, motherfucker. You could have been tending your sheep. You could have stood under African skies and sang glorious tunes to your sleeping children, pumped them full of love in your click, click languages while the rest of us white people invented calculus and gravity and nuclear war.
My partner Martin isn’t so bad. He doesn’t live in Oakwood, but he lives as close as a Black person could live to Oakwood. He has kids and a wife and a car. We don’t have much to discuss (as he is Black) but when he plays me jazz I listen and pretend to enjoy it as much as one can pretend to enjoy the music of Niggars and drug addicts.
Sheth Jones, Blackie. Doubled over from the smoke.
I’m on him. Martin stands back. The Captain stands back. They know this is my kind of arrest. They know this is how I like ‘em. Young and Black and proud and used to be standing tall. Crack that kid in the back. Kick him to the floor. This kid is searching up into my face. I look at him through all the veins and the blood in his eyes.
“Sheth Jones. You are under arrest.”