Editor’s Note: This article contains words that are racist and may be upsetting.
“…if I could somehow re-create the fatal whiteness of that light…then you would believe…” Tim O’Brien.
This is true. All of it.
I was invited to read my poetry at a Christian college in the US Midwest. Someone had encountered my work and thought it was something for their student body to experience. As my first book is entitled Teaching While Black, I’m often asked to broaden White horizons, to tell my story of being the only Black or Brown student or teacher in a 15-mile radius—a raisin in a bowl of milk. Standing before them sometimes feels like delivering a condolence or Dear John letter in person, but at this point in my career, I’m really good at dissociating.
On this particular evening, 30 minutes in, I read a poem entitled “when asked why ‘all lives’ don’t matter.” Despite the friction of arms quickly folding, sliding across chests—the sudden potential for smoke and fire after hearing only the title—I press on.
*****
You can tell a pure rage story if it embarrasses the listeners. Especially if they make a big show about being offended by obscenities. Even more, if they have a habit of ignoring how often obscenities hold hands with Truth—fingers tightly interlocked like co-dependents on a second date.
They hate to see things as they are. Like how when people are forced to live through racism, or sexism, homophobia, or other forms of war, they end up talking dirty. Become fluent in a language learned listening to the enemy, by hearing every shouted or whispered word.
Stories become a reclamation project of protection when pitched back at the oppressors. Or more simply: despite an abundance of vanity, people hate mirrors.
*****
The poem is about my maternal aunt’s battle with breast cancer. Actually, it is about telling a classroom of students about her death and the White woman who heckled we mourners from the back of the church hall. The self-righteous shouting about how our focus on this good woman was at the expense of others’ suffering. About how “all cancers matter” can reverberate through a congregation or classroom.
It’s a dramatic performance including gradual changes in pace, truncating lines mid-thought, and imitating the outburst with a stereotypical but unexpected karen-demanding-to-see-the-manager vocal fry. All this before I go silent—for three uncomfortable beats—and then get very sad and serious.
*****
In many cases, a pure rage story is not believed. Is, at best, met with a dash of skepticism. A shaker of salt. A pound of peppercorns. This is seldom a question of credibility. People willingly believe the crazy shit as truer than the quotidian all the time. But never when it is necessary to believe something distasteful about themselves: When they must believe the vomitous is completely normal behavior for people like them. When there is something in it for them to lose.
A Black boy thrown out of class for “wearing too much lotion.” Parents throwing blackface parties in suburban McMansions. White girls throwing “nigger” around at parties, laughing as they record the fete on social media for posterity. It’s impossible for some to believe that these moments aren’t monstrous. Just an average Tuesday.
*****
The poem ends in a conversation with my students about
appropriate time, place, and manner,
intent versus impact, the guilt and shame required
to derail communal grief and hijack a narrative
to make oneself more comfortable
I emphasize the tricolon and parallel structure with my hands. My shoulders bow under the weight of an invisible casket, as I mime the final lines, calling them to a choice to enter —
the room willing to bear bodies on our shoulders,
or, arms empty, leave and silently stand outside.
With the didacticism of the veteran high school teacher that I am, I tell them—my students, my audience—to replace the word “cancer” with “lives” throughout the metaphor, and wait, hoping they remember the title and other rhetorical breadcrumbs.
So what happens?
Two young women—possibly channeling the grandmothers and great-aunts who spat on Ruby Bridges—stand in a chair-shrieking-tile huff. They shout invectives I’m too far away to hear—but make those around them gasp—before storming out of the auditorium.
Later the administration, profuse with apologies, assures me these sorts of things never happen on campus. The Black and Brown students hear this and shoot assassin-level side-eye. I just want to know what was said. It might be poem-worthy.
*****
In a pure rage story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth: It can’t be fully teased out or separated from the narrative. Pure rage stories generalize through the specific. They engage in abstraction through analysis of the real. They ask difficult but obvious questions. Like How many crows until a murder? How many “bad apples” before the barrel is ruled rotten? How many dead bodies before an epidemic, or pandemic, is declared? They present propositions for those who have been told to bear last-straw burdens in silence and to accept silence for their burdens.
When heard, truly heard, pure rage stories cut at the gut—they make something in the stomach, the liver, the kidneys fill with bile and belief. Leave no room for doubt. A breathless “oh” is sometimes the only appropriate response. Or an “oh shit.”
*****
This is not a story I tell.
In fourth grade, a group of boys found a nest of baby crows beneath the giant oak near the slide. How it got there, I don’t know. It had probably fallen during the previous night’s windstorm. Miraculously, it landed fledgling-side up.
The boys gathered around the shallow bowl of grass and moss and twigs and soft bark. Inside, five or six tiny black maws opened and closed in silence. There was none of the characteristic cawing that punched through the windows, punctuated our studies. Perhaps they were still too young to scream.
As is the way of these things, pointing turned to long-stick poking as the distance closed. Inevitably, one boy got down on both knees, almost genuflecting before the nest. He gently scooped up one of the fledglings. He cupped it in his hands, stared into its enormous eyes, the pupils shiny and black and dumb. And then he squeezed.
For a moment there was no sound. The baby bird never peeped or chirped. Never called for its mother or siblings. There was no noise at all. Until the sudden crackling, the popping of tiny bones. The hapless grinding as his fingers flexed and massaged the baby bird to black putty. This was quietly more brutal than eating chicken wings. The incisor evisceration severing flat from tip. The molar gnawing of drumette. The breaking and slurping of marrow. The sucking of teeth.
Someone grabbed the second bird. Another the third. Another the fourth… Soon the nest was empty. Soon downy Black feathers were strewn about the acorns and cedar chips under and around the slide. They floated like ash on the wind. Detached beaks lay in mute agony.
Nobody said much. During or after. There was no cheering. Nor egging each other on. It just happened. All who stood in the ragged circle, those who watched, those who participated, felt all kinds of things. But not a great deal of pity for the baby birds.
As white hands wiped blood and viscera onto jeans and cargo shorts, they knew they had performed something essential, something brand-new and profound—they had found a piece of the world so startling there was not yet a name for it. It was Edenic: every sin, fresh and original. And yet, they felt it was their birthright. They walked away: there was still 20 minutes left in recess.
Before the bell, someone collected each, placed the ring of broken bodies back into their nest. It would be years before I pictured their mother’s inconsolable cries when she returned home to find her children were not. In my mind, I named her Rachel.
*****
Now and then, after a reading where I tell my stories, someone will come up to me, telling me they appreciate my work. That I gave them a lot to think about. That I challenged their assumptions. That they found my racial horrors, if not entertaining, interesting, intriguing. Usually, it’s an older woman of kindly temperament and humane politics. Sometimes it’s an older gentleman, who will ask to shake my hand or will colonize my shoulder with his. In either case, they will ask me questions—honest, if not somewhat intrusive—and then explain that, as a rule, they hate stories that make them uncomfortable. They can’t understand why I would want to wallow in all the pain and suffering of the past, write all these poems centered on “rage.” They tell me this can’t be healthy. That there are better things to think about, to write about. That so much “progress” has been made over the years, so many accomplishments that I and other Blacks—and of course they themselves—should be proud of. Hearing about the poor baby I once was, the man with similar woes I became, made them sad. Sometimes, even, the hint of tears bubble on an irised horizon. What I should do, they say, is put it all behind me. Find new stories to tell.
I picture the faces of loss and grief that have gone before, the history they would like erased, and I think, You stupid motherfucker. Because they weren’t listening. They aren’t rage poems. They’re love poems.
Often, I say this as kindly as I can, using different words. Other times, all I can do is read them another poem, another story, slowly, patiently, adding and subtracting whatever I must to get them to Truth.
No aunt with breast cancer. No shouting harridan at a funeral. No young and fragile racists. No White woman clutching her purse on an elevator, I tell them. No school board member “nigger”ing me through a hot mic. No cop bursting into my classroom door, hand to holster. The slave auction in AP US history, the CRT karens trying to cancel me, the vice-principal who wouldn’t shake my hand: it’s all made up, every detail. None of it happened. None of it.
And even if it did happen, it was a paternal uncle with prostate cancer. And the college was in the South, not the Midwest. And it didn’t happen on an elevator, but in a hotel lobby. And it was her smiling daughter she was clutching like pearls, away from me. Not the school board, but the racist principal at his final faculty meeting. And the cop’s gun was drawn before he cleared the door jam. And the baby crows were really… You get the idea. Or maybe you don’t.
*****
You can tell a pure rage story if you just keep on telling it.
But, of course, in the end, the story was never about rage. Like I said, it’s about love. And memory. It’s also about a future illuminated by the special slant of light that falls upon that one face in the crowd. The Vietnam veteran uncrossing his arms in a VFW lodge during a reading—his expression softening, becoming pensive hearing something, seeing something for the first time. How he listens, feels the words scratching at the back of his balding mind. He begins to see it coming out of the fog, around the bend. It’s the excuse his son makes for him, that he’s “from another time”—the same tired bullshit he resents. He knows his boy’s embarrassed, though he’s not sure why. It’s his granddaughter’s chiding and begging at Thanksgiving, her disgusted lip-curl at his opinions. It’s the look his sole Black friend fires like a warning shot, and the silence that follows. It’s there like a river he is suddenly seeing his way across, a march into mountains he is now less afraid to undertake.
You can tell a pure rage story when you remember the story is for those who don’t walk out, the people who are ready to listen.
After Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story”
MATTHEW E. HENRY (MEH) is the author of said the Frog to the scorpion (Harbor Editions, 2024) and five other poetry collections, including The Third Renunciation (New York Quarterly Books, 2023) and the Colored page (Sundress Publications, 2022). His work appears in Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and The Worcester Review among others. The 2023 winner of the Solstice Literary Magazine Stephen Dunn Prize, MEH is editor-in-chief of The Weight Journal and an associate poetry editor at Pidgeonholes and Rise Up Review. He is an educator who received an MFA in poetry yet continued to spend money he didn’t have completing an MA in theology and a PhD in education. Find him at www.MEHPoeting.com writing about education, race, religion, and burning oppressive systems to the ground.