Red Rover

    Red Rover, Red Rover, Black women send their sons over. 

​

These tired mothers with sad eyes pour into church every Sunday. Church services are battlefields for prayer warriors fighting for more time with their babies. But Sheila, Edith, and Betty didn't pray hard enough, so their babies are staring down a barrel; While Janice, Beatrice, and Shirley’s sons make the decisions that earn them more time than their mother’s asked for. These flightless jail birds ask God’s return policy because this life doesn't fit. Can he return it for his freedom back? Maybe he can exchange it for the lives he's taken.

In the hood birthdays are celebrated weekly in order to cram a white man’s lifetime worth of celebration into 16-18 years. Birthday cakes only come with single digit candles and birthday parties feel like pre-mature graveyard gatherings.

​Strange fruit no longer hangs, but roadkill looks a lot like our uncles, brothers, cousins, and fathers. Dead dads make us want the beat back and prodigal sons usually return as posthumous  ones. 

            Red Rover, Red Rover, Black boys never make it over. 

Those who do are damaged out and returned to sender. Packaged carelessly in black bags on black boy diets, to black mothers with newly blackened hearts. The veteran mourners arrive to welcome the newest member to the society of lost ones. They wait while she fights for answers like those who came before her. In heaven, her son asks God why they won't help her. They can't. She has to earn her story, her right to grieve. His passing is her right of passage; so she puts her thoughts on repeat and dials her volume to the max, as she demands to know what happened to her son. She's the only one who doesn't know. 

The world has issued a cease and desist order on the manufacturing of black boys. But we know that this is white American slang. Cease and desist translates to deceased and dismissed. So I know what happened to her son. She raised him too well. She was a good mother who raised a good boy. Someone forgot to tell her that good mothers raise Heaven bound sons and great mothers make sure their sons live long enough to choose Heaven for themselves. But smart mothers choose not to become mothers at all. They are mentally infertile and they pity the pregnant ones. How do you tell a woman that there's death in her womb. That she's giving birth to a target. 

Smart mothers know that the good mother upstairs is raising a good son. The great mother downstairs is raising a savage, but both boys will die and the smart mother wonders why they can't see that. Orange isn't the new black because black blood bleeds red and the boys in orange jumpsuits are bleeding heavily.

​

Red Rover, Red Rover, either way their lives are over. 

Whether they break through the chain or fail and fall flat, they never had a chance because this game of red rover wasn’t meant for black.