Patricia Smith

"Skinhead" first appeared in The Paris Review. The fact that such a volatile little ditty popped up in such a highbrow litmag surprised me more than anyone. I certainly hadn't submitted it. I still had lots of questions about what kind of poet I was, and "good enough for The Paris Review" wasn't one of the choices. My book "Big Towns, Big Talk" was about to be published, and it was the editor's practice to choose and submit poems himself, believing that a history of literary journal publication would help sales.

The poem was written about I'd read an article about the painting of a swastika on Plymouth Rock. If you've ever lived in, visited, or heard about New England, you know the citizenry there is unusually touchy about their symbols of freedom, so this was a BIG deal. Although they never snagged the actual guy who did it, they traced the desecration to some Aryan organization called The White Youth League, and a reporter interviewed a random member. Here's this guy spewing all this hatred--blacks, gays, Jews, he hated everyone--and it would have been easy to just summarily dismiss him as a certifiable idiot. But I began to think about how his life and mine started at a common point, and for some reason he veered off in one direction and I veered off in another. The writing of "Skinhead" was my attempt to bring us back to that common point, to look at the huge defining role fate plays in our days.

SKINHEAD

They call me “skinhead”—and I got my own beauty.
It is knife-scrawled across my back in sore, jagged letters,
it’s in the way my eyes snap away from the obvious.
I sit in my dim matchbox,
on the edge of a bed tousled with my ragged smell,
slide razors across my hair,
count how many ways
I can bring blood closer to the surface of my skin
These are the duties of the righteous,
the ways of the anointed.

The face that moves in my mirror is huge and pockmarked,
scraped pink and brilliant, apple-cheeked,
I am filled with my own spit.
Two years ago, a machine that slices leather
sucked in my hand and held it,
whacking off three fingers at the root.
I didn’t feel nothing till I looked down
and saw them on the floor next to my boot heel.
And I ain’t worked since then.

I sit here
and watch niggers take over my TV set,
walking like kings up and down the sidewalks in my head,
walking like their fat black mamas named them freedom.
My shoulders tell me that ain’t right.

So I move out into the sun,
where my beauty makes them lower their heads,
or into the night
with a lead pipe up my sleeve, a razor in my book.
I was born to make things right.

It’s easy now to move my big body into shadows,
to move from a place where there was nothing
into the stark circle of a streetlight,
the pipe raised up high over my head.
It’s a kick to watch their eyes get big,
round and gleaming like cartoon jungle boys,
right in that second when they know the pipe’s
gonna come down, I got this thing
I like to say, listen to this, I like to say
“Hey, nigger! Abe Lincoln’s been dead a long time.”

I get hard listening to their skin burst.
I was born to make things right.

Then this newspaper guy comes around.
Seems I was a little sloppy kicking some fag’s ass
and he opens up and screams about it.
This reporter finds me at home in bed,
TV flashes licking my face clean.
Same old shit.
Ain’t got no job, the colors and spics got ‘em.
Why ain’t I workin’? Look at my hand, asshole.
No, I ain’t part of no organized grou, I’m just a white boy
who loves his race, fighting for a pure country.
Sometimes it’s just me.
Sometimes three.
Sometimes 30.
AIDS will take of the faggots,
then it’s gon’ be white on black in the streets.
then there’ll be three million.

I tell him that.

So he writes it up
and I come off looking like some kind of freak,
like I’m Hitler himself. I ain’t that lucky,
but I got my own beauty.
It’s in my steel-toed boots,
in the hard corners of my shaved head.

I look in the mirror, and I hold up my mangled hand,
only the baby finger left,
I know it’s the wrong finger, but fuck you all anyway.
I’m riding the top rung of the perfect race,
my face scraped pink and brilliant.
I’m your baby, America,
your boy. Drunk on my own spit,
I am goddamned fuckin’ beautiful.

And I was born

and raised

right here.