Question

A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city, and their contentions are like the bars of a castle.

Proverbs 18:19

"What up, brother?" the white teen with dreadlocks
    and a confederate flag tattoo on his arm asks,
and the black man to whom the question is addressed
    seems pensive: He may teach college or fix cars,

but right now he's a philosopher weighing an answer;
    he's survived his first year in the south, but he always
expected love and hate to speak clearer when standing
    on red soil. Dreadlocks and a confederate flag?

What message crossed in the mind of this young man?
    Did he start to listen to reggae after the tattoo?
The nanosecond freezes before they pass each other
    on this street corner in downtown Asheville, North

Carolina, which allows enough time for him to remember
    the last time he had seen a confederate flag
so out of place. He was driving a Uhaul truck
    down I-71 in Ohio when, to his surprise, as he approached

Cincinnati, he saw the largest confederate flag of his life painted
    on the roof of a barn. In Ohio, where slaves escaped to find
freedom, a confederate flag? A flag of secession, of blood and bone,
    of black against white, of homeland fighting homeland, of fear

of unity; the belief that blacks lacked spirit and heart; the grief
    of loss and longing; fear of shackle and whip; hatred so deep
that it pitted him against his own brother; hatred so deep it made
    him gnaw off his own white hand; turned lovers into soldiers,

into wielders of guns and bayonets and bottles and stones--
    this flag, this birthmark of an endless struggle to conquer
and enslave and betray--to betray himself--yet holds, for all its
    pain, something worth pride in his white mind? The black wonders

if dreadlocks can make a white boy a minority in his own country.
    "What up, brother?" Of that abrupt question--from salutation
to spitting in each other's face, to looking into each other's eyes,
    to not shaking each other's hand, to weeping at each other's

history, to killing and forgiving and loving and enduring and enduring,
    of that abrupt question, and these transitions, and the electric
current sent to the brain and the heart and the tongue and the spine
    and the bowels, raising up one more remnant of history--nothing

remains as clear as the laughing wind that brushes his face when
    he hears brother slip from between the teeth of a contemporary
confederate. "What up, brother?" The white asks the black, who
    decides to say nothing, verbally, but stands and stares into these blue

eyes, as if he were the one who asked the question--a sphinx
    tripping up another fool with the wrong answer to another tragic riddle.

A. Van Jordan lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where he teaches at Warren Wilson College. Rise, his first book of poems, will be published in 2001 by Tia Chucha Press of Chicago.

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