Most the time while playing,
I took notice of children
seemingly tanning quicker
and browner than me.
Never made me think them to be
smarter, dumber, richer or poorer.

Up north while in school
hallways and classrooms
had all kinds of skins sitting next to me.
Just another girl who’s hair I could pull.
Just another boy to play kick ball at recess.

But down here in Virginia
I found that certain people
mind you, that always looks the same,
are colored.

Now I am still a snot nose
knee high to a mule child
with mush for brains,
so’s my brothers tell me,
eight year old whose head is in the clouds
thinking of chasing blue jays around the yard.

Realizing that there is a color that is “colored”
well that made as much sense to me
as making my bed right before going to sleep.

There was this time
Grandma and me were in town.
Keysville was the name,
yawn while driving and you’d miss it.

Main Street had shops with big windows,
bold, black letters in half circles spelling out
“General Store” or “Dry Goods”
never did understand that
everything was better in milk making it wet,
didn’t want to go in there.
Some stores had
women’s dresses, blue and yellow
hanging on fake women dolls,
wearing broad straw hats,
some fancied up with lace.

There was a pair of sidewalks,
split by asphalt street,
traffic lights at each end of town
police office where we came in
post office on the way out.

To the best of my recollection
a man in overhauls
red on the bald spot of his head
to his neck around his open dirty collard shirt,
said hello to Grandma and me

Then two women, white as milk
passed us by only to stop
admiring them dresses and hats.

From a side street stumbled a hunched over
grayish awfully smelling man.
Grandma squeezed tightly
like my hands were oranges,
and she was making juice,
her pace quickened.

Her walk slowed down
two stores later,
back to usual double time for me.
Then a man turned up ahead
onto our sidewalk.
At first glance it looked like
Henry Gee, but no, just another man.

As we approached
he stopped dead in his tracks,
turned and stepped off the
sidewalk into the street,
allowing us to pass
as if Grandma was the Queen of England.

We stopped at the post office at the end of town
“Grandma why did that man
walk into the street to let us pass?”
“That’s what colored folk do child”

I spent the better part of the week
with Henry Gee out back in the fields.
All I could think was
I get blue when I’m cold
red when I get a fever,
brown when I stay in the sun
really white in the winter
and oh yeah my butt turns purple
when I get a woopin,
But Henry Gee is colored.
I guess Grandma wasn’t thinking proper.
I guess she meant to say,
“That’s what men do
when colored folk walk by.”