I’m thinking about my cousin’s abundance that hires

A white comedy improv troop to entertain

The descendants of William Crawford Crymes,

And how the president is black, and my uncle isn’t here

To witness his reign, the absence of his older brother, who argued with all of us

About how many ears of corn one stalk would yield.

And my grandmother’s hands are smooth.

                                                                        She didn’t have to clean up after white folks

Like her mother.  She bathed, drew blood, and wiped shit off the bottoms

of the insane for nearly 30 years at the Milwaukee County Hospital.

  Granny’s white polyester skirt filled a wire hanger

dangling from the shower’s head-- a grayish stain adorned

its center like a watermark.

Her washed out white stockings draped over the shower’s railing

dripped overhead to my fresh pressed scalp.

I always liked it best when granny pulled my resistant hair

to the sharp wiry, yet flowy, cornsilk flatness

over my mother’s shaky wrist

And my father’s heavy handedness

that burned the tip of my right earlobe to an iridescent coal

(if coal could hold light in its cooled state).

  The onliest time, she once told me, that she was called nigger

was by a mad eyed pearl and olive patient in the psych ward

Whose banshee scream shuttered walls,

But only scraped at the back of the brain of the heavily

Medicated ones whose sad cow eyes

were vaguely aware of some other’s sad cow eyes

 looking back at them shuffling them between the community room

And their own closed cells.

  In this story,

Granny says the woman yelled,

‘I am Serbian! I am Serbian!’

and that locked identity in a sea of white walls, and white skirts,

and white stockings, and white gowns and white lights

and my granny somehow

soothes that hysteria with

her brown eyes, her brown hair, her brown lips

and her pink tongue

and says she knows.

And how quiet it all got so suddenly.

The sound of her own name hanging in the air between them

The woman would never call her nigger again.

And my grandmother isn’t humorless

when she tells me this story.

  And these three middle age white dudes are goading us

to yell out suggestions.

                                    There are 3 white people in my family now.

We yell the most ratchet things:

            Toenail clippings

                                    Weave hair

                        Farts

                                                Toe jam

And we watch my cousin’s daughter narrate the scene

Of three corn fed, beer bellied white men try to entertain

the descendants of William Crawford Crymes

150 years after his father’s emancipation.

My crackhead (ex) cousin yells out ‘bugatti’ and we cackle

At the improbable and blackness of it all.

  My dress is made of cotton

that I’m not sure is made in America

But my grandmother’s hands are smooth,

Because she only picked cotton when she was child,

And the cuts from the teeth of that plant

have long since healed.

And my cousin’s daughter has her father’s eyes

And she is the color of malted milk

in a cotton dress with colored polka dots

Her smile shines brightly

at her brown mother and her white father

And my grandmother’s hands are smooth

Soft as the fat of a baby’s underarm

My aunt is a white republican from Iowa.

she makes the most-wicked brownies,

Marbled with caramel and marshmellow.

  And I here think,

I’ve been running from the south

and the white heat of it

The dark humidity of it,

Shadows and canopies of magnolia trees

When I tell my grandmother

about comments I get from racists online,

She tells me of how a black man

Who was asked to work on his scheduled day off to pick cotton

On some white man’s land in 1952 had obliged them

ended up dead in some unknown wood.

His body recovered by people who notice

when you’ve gone missing

Found the bloated, sun blackened body

humidity holding him down like stones

in a river of white light.