Blood

If thus thou speakest, thou wilt have hatred from me, and will justly be subject to the lasting hatred of the dead. But leave me, and the folly that is mine alone, to suffer this dread thing; for I shall not suffer aught so dreadful as an ignoble death.

Sophocles | Antigone

+++++

October

He was tired. He had been all week, but there was nothing new about being tired. Not these days, not in these times.

Being tired went with the job. The endless day-in and day-out of life on the streets. Minutes into hours, hours into days. Days then weeks, and on and on, endlessly, into months and years. Endless, pitiless time, time without end, streets without end. Jackals dancing around the fires of midnight, jackals with their faces aglow, red-eyed and glowing -- with blood of the innocent dripping from their snarling lips.

His name was Mathias Polk, though almost everyone called him Mattie, and he'd been with the department for -- what? -- almost twenty one years now? Long enough to have looked on helplessly as one marriage washed away in floods of doubt and recrimination, long enough to know his second marriage was weakening under new, ebbing tides of doubt.

No, he knew he was more than tired, that he was slowing down, and the knowledge wasn't always so easy to hide from these days.

Hiding in plain sight, wasn't that what he'd thought once? That's what it felt like, this being a black man -- in a white man's world. Enforcing the white man's law, playing by his rules -- even when they turned their backs to you. When you walked into the briefing room and you felt their eyes burning into the back of your black skull; when you walked through a store and could feel the hate growing all around you...surrounding you, until you felt choked off from their world?

But it hadn't always been that way.

No, he remembered a time not so long ago, perhaps not so far away, when things had been different. When differences had been papered over; before animosities, banked down and seething, had resurfaced -- boiling up like black tar from deep within the earth, waiting to spread out over the land and smother everything again -- with hate.

And he was beginning to fear the projects again, hate the way his own people turned away with sidelong glances when they saw his patrol car turn into their neighborhood. Hate the way his Brother Officers, his Brother -- White -- Officers grew quiet when he joined them on the street at a hot call. Hated being black, because in their eyes he couldn't be trusted.

But it hadn't always been that way, even just a few years ago. No, everything had changed -- to the way things had been a long time ago. Hate was back now, everywhere.

He felt that same kind of tired, the kind of tired he'd hoped to never feel again -- the kind of tired you feel when something evil you thought was long dead and gone suddenly, unexpectedly, returns in the night. The kind of tired you feel because you're black, because you were born with black skin, and you can't keep running from the kinds of differences people force on you, ram down your throat until you choke.

But he was tired of being a black cop most of all. Tired of the whispered, sidelong glances. Tired of being cast aside by his own people, tired of waiting for acceptance he knew would never come from his fellow -- white -- officers, and not just because his skin was a different color than their's. No, not just that.

Because it HAD been better, and then overnight, in a flash, it was all gone. Breitbart. Mark Levin. The ever-present Rush Limbaugh. What had been fringe paranoia was mainstream now, their lies spilling like raw sewage into the President's mind. They called it freedom; he called it hate. Freedom to hate again, and he heard it these days everywhere he went.

"Why'd they let a nigger put on that uniform?" He'd heard that one a few weeks after the election, but now, after hate was the new normal, he heard variations on that theme almost daily, and it was beginning to wear him down.

'It's like no matter where I go, no matter what I do, I'm always gonna be on the outside -- always on the outside, lookin' in...because that's where they're going to put me, because that's where, they say, I belong.'

And it would always be that way, he didn't have to add, because that's just the way things were. There'd been a brief flowering of acceptance, then all that hate had come welling back up from the deepest, darkest places of the soul.

Twenty-one years and still a patrolman, despite having aced the Sergeant's Exam -- twice. As in: two years running, beating out everyone else. As in, being passed over -- because in their eyes I'm just a nigger, a Second Class Citizen, and therefore not worthy of rank. And I'll never be more than that in 'their' eyes. 'I'm not an African-American, and I'm not even a black man. I'm a Nigger, plain and simple. Nothing's ever really changed, not really, and nothing ever will.'

Yet he'd graduated near the top of his class at Ole Miss -- the University of Mississippi -- with a major in Sociology and a minor in Political Science. He'd grown up in Oxford and wanted to be a politician, too, or at least that's what he'd told himself all those years ago, before he'd seen the light. "You're either a part of the problem -- or a part of the solution," the old saying went, but by then he'd begun to see politicians as just one part of a much bigger problem. Hate was hate, and he'd never be able to change that. He'd never be able to change human nature, so he'd decided to help where he thought he was needed most.

He turned on the radio, started singing with the music...The Who...Baba O'Reilly. "I don't need to fight," he sang, "to prove I'm right, I don't need to be forgiven." He'd wanted to make a difference, and the only place he could was out here -- out here in the fields, and then he was screaming "teenage wasteland, it's only teenage wasteland."

Because that's what it felt like now. A wasteland. Drugs everywhere, no personal responsibility. Politicians at every level had sold us out -- not just his people, but everyone, the entire country. Idealists when they campaigned, once they got in office they acted like whores, they spread their legs for anyone with money, and the more life 'educated' him, the more aware he became of this one self-evident truth: Money is Power. Democrat, Republican -- didn't matter: 'We, the People' was an abstract promise that held little relevance today, and the rising tide of mediocrity that had flocked to public service as a result was a joke, a new class of self-interested charlatans.

Clinton sold out black people just much as Reagan and Bush had, only when he sold welfare reform to -- 'We, the people' -- it turned out welfare reform meant prison privatization. Don't give a man on the 'down-and-out' a hand-out when it was much more profitable to stick his ass in prison! Why give a black man twenty large when you can give sixty to your cousin -- so long as 'cous' is in the prison biz? And who cares if the judges are invested in the system up to their eyeballs, the prosecutors, too. No sir, the rich get richer and the poor get -- children? Ain't that how the song went? Always been that way...always will be, too. Might as well get used to that, boy, so harness up and get ready to pull that plow. Maybe they get us to pickin' they cotton again, and real soon, too.

Yet he'd just bought a house out on the east side of town, and he had a daughter in middle school now, another kid on the way. "Isn't that funny?" he said as the music ended. "Or is that what you call irony? Because haven't I sold out, too?" he continued, talking to himself now as he drove down one bleak street after another. The white kids in this neighborhood were playing in the mud now, like the black folk did a hundred years ago.

"Now, ain't that something?" he sighed. Instead of lifting everyone up, they were pushing everyone down. "How 'bout that?"

Because he knew that, now, having blown past forty years old, being a cop was likely all he'd ever be. He'd never be mayor, never run for congress -- and he'd never teach at the university -- but he'd contribute as best he could, even if that meant being out here in the fields, driving these mean streets day in and day out. If that's what it was going to take to feed and clothe his kids, then so be it: that's what he'd do.

He turned on Locust Street, saw his mother's house ahead, the house his great-grandfather'd built almost a hundred years ago. Two spare little rooms, wood frame on cast concrete blocks, copperheads resting in the uncut shadows. A cinder block chimney to the wood stove for heat in the winter, a couple of ceiling fans for air conditioning in summer, and as he approached he saw his mother in her rocking chair on the front porch, sitting in the shade with a glass of lemonade by her side.

GiddyMay Polk's hair was white now, white as driven snow, and he saw she was reading the newspaper as she rocked her morning away. He checked out on the radio and parked out on the street, walked up to the porch, smiling at her quiet wisdom.

She looked up when she finally heard him come up on the porch, and the smile he saw on her face brightened more than just a little. "Ooh, look at you! So right and proud in that fancy uniform!"

"Hi, mom," he said, smiling, "anything good in the paper?"

"Oh, ain't much good in the paper these days, no sirree, but that President Carpenter coming to town sure has things riled up, that's for sure..."

He smiled, tried his best to ignore the very idea of Carpenter coming to the University. The man was considered by most -- even by many in his own party -- to be a bigot of the highest order, and though the Klan loved him, the Southern Poverty Law Center ranked him the most racist American president since, well, since whenever. But none of that mattered now, not in the least, not after the past several weeks of police crack-downs and renewed urban pacification, yet he'd somehow felt even more ostracized since Carpenter's re-election bid was announced. It was like he was living in a different country now, and he expected a renewed campaign of lynchings and church burnings to come to Oxford any day now.

"What was it like, Momma, back then?'

"Back when, Mattie?"

"Back, you know, when the Klan was around?"

"Boy, you must think I'm older than Methuselah!"

"And you were born when?"

"Ooh, you! You know you ain't s'posed to ask your momma things like that..."

"1936, wasn't it?"

She looked away, looked away from those memories, away from all the feelings in her gut she'd tried so hard to forget --

The hiding behind trees when boys in pickups cruised the neighborhood, looking for someone to rape...

The walking into stores, everyone's eyes following her every movement, because they just knew she was there to steal something...

Sitting in the back of the classroom, not bothering to raise her hand because her teachers ignored her...just like she didn't even exist -- because, she knew, she didn't -- not in their world, anyway.

And she turned to her son and looked at him. "What do you want me to say, Mattie? What can I tell you, hmm? -- that you don't already know?"

"But he's coming here, Momma..."

"He's the President, son. It's his country now, and I kinda think he's entitled to go wherever he wants..."

"I know, Momma, but..."

"But nothin'!" she said, her voice full of anger. "This is the way things are, the way things always have been. You best get used to it, Mattie, or you ain't gonna last out there. It's like that song, 'cause there ain't no place to run, no place to hide."

"Get used to it?" Mathias Polk sighed. "Get used to all that hate again, Momma, because my skin's black? You sayin' that's all there is, that's all there's ever gonna be...?"

She shrugged, looked him in the eye: "You got to lay low when times like this come 'round again, Mattie...like them poor Jews, back in Germany..."

"Lay low?! Momma, we been layin' low ever since creation! You tellin' me we always gonna be layin' low? When does our layin' low get to stop?"

"Mattie, hate's like that. It's not just born to some folks, waiting for release." She paused, took a deep breath. "No Mattie," she continued, sweeping her hand across the universe, "hate's out there, always. You too, Mattie. Hate's waiting to catch you unawares, so it can fill your heart. That's the way it's always been, so yes, Mathias, that's all there is, all there's ever gonna be. Nothin's gonna change what is. Besides, I don't think God wants it that way -- I think he wants us to struggle."

She started rocking again, picked up her paper and started reading again, and he turned away in despair and walked back to his patrol car.

She watched him out of the corner of her eye, then she shook her head and wiped away her fear. "But don't you forget about love, Mattie," she whispered. "Love's out there, too, He's watching over you, and waiting."

+++++

The man held the Colt M4's receiver up to the light, making sure he'd oiled the slide for the umpteenth time, and that he'd not smeared any residue near the ejection port. Oil got hot in there, got sticky and caused jams, so he ran his rag over the area again, just to made sure he was down to dry, bare metal.

His name was Cleetus Owen, but he went by Mohamed Ali these days, because he'd always respected the boxer -- until things had turned again, that is. Owen had seen action in Desert Storm, then pulled a long stretch in Croatia and Serbia, and he'd lost count of how many 'ragheads' he'd killed in Kuwait. After twenty years service he went home, home just in time for the bottom to fall out, but at least that way he didn't think about all the people he'd killed over the years.

"Until the bottom fell out," he said as he reassembled the receiver.

He'd known respect in the Army, and nobody had cared about the color of his skin in combat. He'd learned that when you bleed, you bleed the same stuff no matter what color your skin is. White man, black or brown, makes no difference, 'cause underneath all our differences we're all just the same.

"Blood is blood, ain't it?"

Then the crash on top of 9/11, and all of a sudden fear was the name of the game. The age old game he'd seen in Serbia and Croatia came home to roost; control the masses by injecting fear everywhere the public gathers. Distort all news to fit the new paradigm. All the old jobs are gone, so blame that fact of life on all "the others" -- the people different from "us" -- so when there's no money you know who to blame.

"Hates a good thing," he said. "Hate keeps you warm in winter, don't it?"

But a lot of the people getting out of the military were sick, many more had suffered life-altering injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet the VA turned out to be just another joke, another political piñata tossed around in the culture wars. Go there with a cold and you might get seen -- in a few months -- if you were one of the lucky, chosen few, that is. If you were white, maybe, just maybe your chances were better, but not much.

When the dreams started -- the vivid, nightmarish dreams about killing or getting killed started -- when he couldn't even sleep away the depression that had come for him, he'd gone to the VA and asked for help. And again. And been turned away again, and again. "Get in line," someone told him, half in jest, "take a number." But there weren't numbers for niggers, were there?

"Because we're all niggers now, no matter what color our skin is."

So much talk about inequality, then the courts legalized political bribery and what was left? Then one day he was walking out of a convenience store -- when the cops pulled up, guns drawn.

"Stop!" the first cop yelled as the man scrambled out of his patrol car. "Hands where I can see 'em!"

"What?"

"Down on your knees, mother fucker, and get your hands on top of your head!"

"What?"

Tackled, cuffed and transported -- not charged with robbery -- but with resisting arrest. Sent to Central Mississippi Correctional. Two years down that first time, but oh, the lessons he'd learned in there. He'd finally gotten the education he needed at Central, because all the bitter truths he'd never heard before were revealed inside that old, worn out cage, and the truth came easy to someone who'd only seen the lessons applied overseas before. How rights became privileges doled out by the men in charge, how you controlled a population first with fear, then with starvation. If it worked over there, didn't it. so why not here?

The brothers ran Central's school, lot's of ex-military in there too, and class was usually held out in the rec yard, sometimes in the weight room -- and always at night, just after lights out. Martin Luther King had been the white man's stooge, he learned, King's message of non-violence just the con the white man needed to help put the black man back in his place, boarded-up in their ghettos -- out of sight, out of mind one more time. All the gains blacks won under Kennedy and LBJ came at the point of a bayonet, from under the barrel of a gun, then through the black smoke of Molotov cocktails. Cities were burning in the sixties -- weren't they? -- and suddenly Whitey had grown very afraid. And when Whitey was afraid, he negotiated, didn't he?

But they weren't negotiating anymore -- no, not now? Not after 9/11. Lines had been drawn in the sand, and the dividing line between the Haves and the Have Nots had never been more razor sharp, but then people on the inside started seeing a new way forward. These people were taking up the challenge, men in uniform mostly, angry men who'd been betrayed by a crumbling system. They started recruiting in places like Central, ex-military for the most part, building a movement, stoking fires too long banked down.

Because these powerful men had finally figured out the civil rights movement had been a sham, a well planned ruse, a dodge to keep slaves bottled up in their new Sowetos. And that's what this prison was...a new ghetto. A place to warehouse the malcontents and dispossessed this culture grew...like bacteria.

He'd lay out there in the prison yard thinking about all he'd just learned in class, about the things he wanted to do when he got out, the impossible life he wanted to make for himself on the outside. He lay out there under the sun, looking up at fat white clouds passing by overhead, wondering what it was like to be as free as a cloud. Like a lily white cloud, free to go wherever the winds blew. And yet here he was -- locked up in the Man's mother-fuckin' cage -- because he'd asked -- 'what?'

When Clinton came in the nineties, he made a lot of noise promising real change. And yeah, there'd been change alright, and that change had landed on his people like another Plymouth Rock. Welfare gone, private prisons erected in it's place. Look at Whitey the wrong way and you went down, 'cause Whitey wasn't gonna take your lip no more. Then the stories started coming out in the news, how judges and prosecutors were invested in these new private prisons...and with all the politicians bought and paid for there was no way to change a thing. The people were trapped, only they hadn't figured it out yet. Maybe the news would come out during the halftime report, between beer commercials?

And so, like as it had with many of his brothers-in-arms, Owen's anger turned inward, inside to a much darker place -- where nightmares are born and like to hide. And as he listened to all those lessons in the prison yard -- with all that darkness now close to his heart, growing day by day -- he listened to his brothers as they plotted revenge, and his anger had an outlet now. His hate had a place to go. Sitting in his cell at night, hate kept him company, talked to him, filled him with all sorts of new ideas.