I’m 87 years old, if I live to see tomorrow morning’s sun,
I’ll be 88 and still counting Confederate gray pickup trucks,

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waving rebel flags, a sight that never did, much, bother me.

You see, I was born in the sun on the outskirts of Charleston

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on a little piece of land my father and his father before him sharecropped until “bad” back-taxes broke Daddy’s back.

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On the day I came into this world, a white doctor working

part-time at a Colored hospital tied 13 stars and 2 bars around

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my neck and sent me and Mama home. Heritage and hate,

since then, I have gracefully worn, natural as a lamb’s wool

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winter coat in winter or a light cotton, summer, church skirt

in August. August knows my dark skin is admired far more

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than it is hated, but secrets are kept silent for a reason. Treason seasons of moonshine love, the relationship between boundaries

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and beauty, the sweet texture of bitter chocolate. Ancestors that

built plantations here are “My people.” They planted and picked

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ten million bales of cotton. Then wide, white brims of plantation

white hats sold their nigger-harvest for billions in dollar bill signs.

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But, my ancestors were paid, each chocolate one of then given two or three thin slices of thin-love bacon per square acre and a dead-

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deal mule. The arithmetic of America wants not to know more,

the score. Secrets are kept secret for a reason, but the science of

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storytelling tells us the half-life of chocolate is short. Colored people in America live half in shadow, half on Sunshine street. Chocolate

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melts so quickly in fields of summer, coastal South Carolina heat.

I’m 87 years old. When I was young, I was a school teacher. I taught

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arithmetic, so I know how to count Confederate bumper stickers

on the bumpers of “Republican” colored cars and deer-hunting

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pickup trucks and I have seen my share of Klansmen, women,

and little cute children march to the beat and banner of heritage

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and hate. I even met the late James Strom Thurmond years before the people knew his real history was not his real history at all. Y’all

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think it’s a grand thing to take down the Confederate flag flying

over Columbia, the capitol of our great slave state and I suppose

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it is, but a flag pole has no feelings and wind that blows the unfurled does not care if it shares the Confederate gray sky with Confederate

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redbirds or not. The sky does not ask why. What y’all should do is leave the Confederate Battle flag up, unfurling its crossed out, X-ed

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out breeze and ease the Stars and Bars, the Confederate Battle flag down from around my neck. It’s hard to choke a flag pole to death.