they wanted to know if Etheridge Knight really went to jail and i said 
that's something we have to look up because my history is built 
by textbooks and curiosity but you can't be curious about a name you've 
never heard, in spite of majoring in English, studying poetry, and writing 
it for the last ten years and i am embarrassed by my whiteness and my 
ignorance and it is not too painful to tell them, because they know anyway, 
and they are kind about it. 

and so, yes, children, he did. Just like Malcolm and just like Martin
and just like i don't in spite of all the opportunities, because right 
now it's more important to get to you by 7:30 and anyway, who 
would post bail? 

i try not to cry, as much, anymore, because i haven't earned the tears
of other people's lives. i have only earned my own and God, and anyone 
around me, knows i've shed enough of those in the last four years 
to take my breaths in a jagged way that shakes my whole body and 
alarms the students and they say miss, did you forget to breathe again?

and what a question when yes maybe i did or maybe i held my
breath too long in order to feel the air press against my lungs when i was biting 
my lip and trying not to cry but i walk around free in a world where 
it is easier for me to breathe than it is for others 

when i saw her face it was on the beach in the summer and i was wearing 
a striped bikini and feeling good in my skin and then i saw her, smiling, 
not her mugshot, and by the time i saw her, she was dead and i didn't know 
what to do but shake and shudder and burn with anger under the sun
until my skin turned the color of the inside of my eyelids that did not burn
with tears because this was beyond that

i am still trying to find a language to speak but what is better is to listen and
i would like to believe i am ready for the revolution but the only reason i'm 
closer to being ready is because i know i am not and that i need a thousand 
more years of sitting at the feet of others to learn how to live as an interruption
to the heavy forked tongue that tells our history.