From where I hail, Sunnyside, poor kids teased other poor kids for being poor.
Wars and progress lured black folk out of California, Louisiana, but, mostly, elsewhere Texas.
Quarter horses strode alongside Monte Carlos and El Dorados. Bobby Bland and Johnnie Taylor were prophets. On New Year’s Eve, chitlins strangled the air and didn’t relent till King Day.
Old steppers, like Daddy, cocked fedoras to the side. During storms, Mama told us to be still cause
“the Lord was working.”
Weekends recruited my sisters and I to 4th Ward at Grandma’s. In Freeman Town, everybody said hello to quiet the ghosts of ex-slaves. There, and Sunnyside too, the Disco Era was the last to let children be children before AIDS ate all the bodies it hungered; made others afraid to love. Soon Reaganomics dug trenches blocks of butter and cheese couldn’t fill. Crack suddenly shackled us in fear, mostly of one another; but packed booty and bullets to shatter and bury memories of our past as children of God who survived the treacherous voyage, chattel bondage, and codes of annihilation.
In Sunnyside, time is a trickster; it whispers, “If it’s meant to be, it’ll be.” Then escapes, like a jackal. We figured change was coming when doings of a black hamlet in Southeast Houston proved newsworthy after Rodney, Katrina and Obama frescoed psyches and souls.
We braced ourselves cause—
from where I hail, that’s what we do.