Market Block Books

Kevin Young’s Brown, published tomorrow, explores myriad manifestations and shades of brown in American life, including the poet’s own experiences from his black boyhood in Kansas. In our moment, when high school students are speaking out and attempting to make history, it’s worth remembering, as Young does here, how the subject of American History was served to him and his Midwestern classmates only a generation ago, and by whom.

History

Pillar of my high school, Mr. W     made class by seven a.m., filling his blackboards with white, using notes     decades old & denture yellow. I heard he could write any way     you wanted—backward, forward, left hand or right, even     mirrored. For him History was what each night     he erased. He never missed a day. Snow     days drove the man insane—   regular as mail, he said if a letter could reach     the school, so could we, trudging through bitterest cold to his overwarm room.     Never let kids eat, or talk in class, or take down just what he wrote on the board—     Listen to what I’m telling you, he’d say, synthesize, don’t record. Some days he’d launch     into an anecdote about the War or what’s wrong with kids today— you’re not moral or immoral, just     amoral. Even his jokes grown older than he was, the trap door he wished he owned       would send kids crashing into spikes simply for walking during class     without a pass. At breaks he began to bend to pick up stray trash. He despised the boom     boom boom of the radios black kids wore, he swore, or tugged his eyes at the corners     to imitate a Chinaman on the rail. Ah, so. Brilliant is what everyone     dubbed him, but by the time we got there Mr. W had started to slip,     missing most of the May before— rumors went round       our school had tried stopping his return—Take the year off,     you earned it—even he told us that—but here he was,     stonewalling, aged twenty years over the summer, back like MacArthur     or the Terminator to teach us all. Some seniors from last year’s class     brought him steel tension balls     that September—tinny things he clutched in his palm & clanked past     each other like cymbals tolling stress. We     stayed silent. Fifty pounds shed over the summer, his wrists jutted out     from the frayed cuffs of his Crayola cardigans.     He’d turn & tune those chiming spheres like the globe     his classroom never had— his walls held only Old Glory     & a fading photo of the flag raised at Iwo Jima. Mr. W let us know     he never got to fight in the War   more often as the year wore     away with his sweater’s elbows, till his yellow shirt shone     through like yolk. That year the Depression & World     War took all winter & knowing time was short, his own,     Mr. W spent nights transcribing to transparencies words     water could wipe away, numbering each palimpsest to match     his crumbling notes. Just in case,   he’d say, above the overhead     projector’s buzz—you could manage without me. He never     could forget a past only we would remember—     his teacher telling him at graduation You know you’re only seventeen     & who knows how long this Pacific Theater might last—They have this new     GI Bill. Get some college first, Wayne, his name all alliteration,     a tone poem. How   could he know     we’d drop the bomb & end it all? He tried serving     later, even went to enlist in Korea but was foiled     by a bad back & luck. I tried,   he’d plead the air. How to soothe     a man who woke his whole life at five & could silence kids     not his own? Who once drove 45 on the highway he told us     cause Nixon asked his fellow Americans to, counting     each unpatriotic car that passed him along the way? Like history he saved     & scored the immeasurable— with years-worth of sick days     hoarded & never spent, illness came to fetch him     from the only other home he knew. Wearing black now, pointing out where other kids once sat long before     we were born—future governors, a crook or two—       each chair a ghost. You’re my kids, he’d tell us, we built or broke     his heart. Next day he was gone. We never did make it     to Vietnam—rest of the year in silence we took down     the words he’d written projected on the wall     like any man’s promises to himself. The latter half of the twentieth century     felt a bit too cold, winter lingered too long—Mr. W’s words,       unchanged, awaited us coloreds & women libbers     half-hoping for him to return—for the world not to be     as cruel as we’d learned. We spent the Sixties     minus Malcolm X, or Watts, barely a March on Washington—     all April & much of May we waited for Woodstock     & answers & assassinations that would never come         among the steady hum & faint bright     of flickering fluorescent lights. More on this book and author: 

Learn more about Brown by Kevin Young.

Browse other books by Kevin Young.

See Kevin read from his work on April 17 in Brooklyn, April 19 in Wichita, April 20 at the Tulsa Lit Fest, April 24 in Philadelphia, April 25 in Baltimore, May 2 in New York, and May 16 in Brooklyn.

Peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

You will fall in love with Islandborn by Junot Diaz.