Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems Read Free

another. They all kick your ass.” There on his desk, the next page of “ass kicking” awaited.
    In 1963, James Baldwin visited San Francisco. The journey was amazingly caught on fuzzy black-and-white, educational TV in the KQED documentary
Take This Hammer
. One morning during his visit he found himself speaking with a group of frustrated young Black men standing there on the street. One of the young men reports, “There will never be a Negro president.” Baldwin asks him why he believes this. The young man responds, hardly catching his breath: “We can’t even get a job. How can we be president if we can’t even get a job?” You see Baldwin on camera move instantly closer to the storm raging from their ring of eyes to his. You see and feel the fire in their faces and in his. He knows this gathering storm well. He can hear the sounds of the thunder gathering deep in his ear. He has seen this same kind of lightning flash, hit, and burn down whole countries, whole neighborhoods, whole city corners, with their standing communities of young Black men. He himself has been soaked in this despair before. His inclination is to lead them away from the storm, but he’s in the storm too, and he won’t lie to them like everybody else has lied. He looks at them with great love. He can see the oil in the water on their cheeks. “There will be a Negro president,” Baldwin says calmly. “But it will not be the country that we are sitting in now.” It begins to rain. It doesn’t really, but that’s what the scene feels like to me through the camera’s grainy lens, fifty years away from Baldwin and that circle of beautiful and young Black men wanting what other young men wanted, there on that San Francisco street. It begins to rain, at first a light drizzle and next a pounding torrent, great sheets of great water, slanted and falling down from the open sky. Baldwin was never afraid to say it in his novels, in his essays, and in his poetry—because Baldwin saw us long before we saw ourselves.
    â€”Nikky Finney

JIMMY’S
BLUES

Staggerlee wonders
    1
    I always wonder
    what they think the niggers are doing
    while they, the pink and alabaster pragmatists,
    are containing
    Russia
    and defining and re-defining and re-aligning
    China,
    nobly restraining themselves, meanwhile,
    from blowing up that earth
    which they have already
    blasphemed into dung:
    the gentle, wide-eyed, cheerful
    ladies, and their men,
    nostalgic for the noble cause of Vietnam,
    nostalgic for noble causes,
    aching, nobly, to wade through the blood of savages—
    ah—!
    Uncas shall never leave the reservation,
    except to purchase whisky at the State Liquor Store.
    The Panama Canal shall remain forever locked:
    there is a way around every treaty.
    We will turn the tides of the restless
    Caribbean,
    the sun will rise, and set
    on our hotel balconies as we see fit.
    The natives will have nothing to complain about,
    indeed, they will begin to be grateful,
    will be better off than ever before.
    They will learn to defer gratification
    and save up for things, like we do.
    Oh, yes. They will
.
    We have only to make an offer
    they cannot refuse
.
    This flag has been planted on the moon:
    it will be interesting to see
    what steps the moon will take to be revenged
    for this quite breathtaking presumption.
    This people
    masturbate in winding sheets.
    They have hacked their children to pieces.
    They have never honoured a single treaty
    made with anyone, anywhere.
    The walls of their cities
    are as foul as their children.
    No wonder their children come at them with knives.
    Mad Charlie man’s son was one of their children,
    had got his shit together
    by the time he left kindergarten,
    and, as for Patty, heiress of all the ages,
    she had the greatest vacation
    of any heiress, anywhere:
    Golly-gee, whillikens, Mom, real guns!
    and they come with a real big, black funky stud, too:
    oh, Ma! he’s making