Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, July 6, 2008; BW12

Now that Barack Obama is the nominee and has met his former opponent in Unity, N.H., it seems proper to introduce Terrance Hayes, a modest young genius whose poems evoke the kind of unity Obama is angling for. Hayes didn't grow up in any mythic "post-racial" America, but his high school was integrated, and his South lacked the colored water fountains I was yanked away from as a girl. Hayes's poems enact the new race struggle, more up-to-date than the pre-civil rights poems of his lit'rary ancestors (Langston Hughes, say), but equally instructive to this white reader.

Talk

like a nigger now, my white friend, M, said

after my M.L.K. and Ronald Reagan impersonations,

the two of us alone and shirtless in the locker room,

and if you're thinking my knuckles knocked

a few times against his jaw or my fingers knotted

at his throat, you're wrong because I pretended

I didn't hear him, and when he didn't ask it again,

we slipped into our middle school uniforms

since it was November, the beginning

of basketball season, and jogged out

onto the court to play together

in that vision Americans wish for

their children, and the point is we slipped

into our uniform harmony, and spit out GO TEAM!

our hands stacked on and beneath the hands

of our teammates and that was as close

as I may have come to passing for one

of the members of The Dream, my white friend

thinking I was so far from that word

that he could say it to me, which I guess

he could since I didn't let him taste the salt

and iron in the blood, I didn't teach him

what it's like to squint through a black eye,

and if I had to wonder if he would have grown

up to be the kind of white man who believes

all blacks are thugs or if he would have learned

to bite his tongue or let his belly be filled

by shame, but more importantly, would I be

the kind of black man who believes silence

is worth more than talk or that it can be

a kind of grace, though I'm not sure

that's the kind of black man I've become,

and in any case, M, wherever you are,

I'd just like to say I heard it, but let it go,

because I was afraid to lose our friendship

or afraid we'd lose the game -- which we did anyway.

Here Hayes addresses black power in its most spiritual form -- that of forgiveness for the ignorant white friend who stupidly thought he could lob the n-word with alacrity. It's also a poem about friendship and history and the games we stand to lose if we fail to understand each other.

("Talk" is from "Wind in a Box." Copyright Terrance Hayes, 2006. Reprinted with permission of Penguin Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.)