Sitting in my fourth period creative writing class, a little brown boy laughs at her. Chest swollen with mustard gas, his mouth pulls back from his own toxin, his skin folding at the potency of his cruelty. The promise of manhood harrowing in the pit of his stomach, he sings symphonies about the ugliness in the girl's ebony skin. He's loud, voice echoing against the crevices of his own identity. He's so loud, but I see no Huey Freeman in him, his skin something of a heavy linen suit minstrels like to play house in when the advent of strange fruit just wasn't enough anymore. His head bespeckled with puncture wounds the size of domesticity, his throat slit by privilege and forced agape by pride, a screeching aria, a Chris Brown defense counteraction. This symphony etched black men dragging rusted-chained bound black women through blood kissed concrete, their teeth tap-dancing on pavement, questions of loyalty veiled in morse code. That night, the girl used skin bleaching cream, setting her flesh alight with self-deprecating flames that danced like late night pit-fires behind the plantation. Fires twisting in the cracks in her skin like whip gashes gripping on black backs , like desperation, like theft of personhood, like BET caricatures set to the sound-track of Daddy coming home, alcohol slushing in his core, feasting on his mind to where he can't tell Momma's plea from a threat. With that, his knuckles brush her dark skin like when he kisses too hard, making her leak from her core, her blood pooling to the center of the floor. It's red like police sirens, like fidelity, like pride. Like loss. That summer I shaved my head, absolving myself of the sin of femininity, baptizing me in androgyny...invisibility. My breasts bound by gauze and tape, the audacity of my existence was now quieted into a dull whisper.
This black gender performance leaves my ankles broken and my toes bloodied. So for my own sake, I have to walk away from my own show, leaving my Jordan heel ballet slippers on the stage. For my own safety.