A Olympic gold-medalist entry to Essential Americans Anthology

Literati

There could not be a more fitting preamble to this entry than the words that accompanied it in an email to me:

Some days

I find myself looking

for the red in my hair.

Gifted from my mother, blue

eyes like the Texas sky.

Most days it’s just brown, brown, brown.

Sometimes like ditchwater

Sometimes like warm summer nights

And good rich earth.

Like hate and love muddied together.

It’s an inherited thing, this brown.

Passed on by my father, green

card in hand and hair Kurosawa dark

Red slinks and hides in sly places,

refusing to sit and be named.

I catch it out of the corner of my eye.

Black is the first thing a person sees, they think

Ah, there is no confusion here.

At first glance I fit the mold they shape for me.

But it’s a trick, a racial sleight of hand.

Their double take puts a question mark where a person stands.

Between mother red and father black

brown is the compromise.

Some days the brown swallows.

Too foreign.

Too dirty.

Too much and yet not enough.

Some days it is an impossible burden to bear.

But some days I braid and wear it like a crown,

wrapped in a halo of me and my

brown

brown

brown

hair.