What if He Doesn't See a Brother

What if he doesn't see a brother?

My father said something once

that changed the way

I understood the Bloods and the Crips.

We keep asking

how you get them

to stop killing each other.

We say,

How can you kill your own brother?

But my father was asking me

to consider something

I had never considered:

What if he doesn't see a brother?

I had to sit with that.

Because I thought

we were all looking

at the same thing.

Two Black boys.

Surely they know

there is something between them

older than red,

older than blue.

Surely somewhere inside them

is the memory:

You belong to each other.

I assumed they knew.

But what if

that is precisely

what was lost?

Break a family.

Then break

what remembers the family.

Scatter the names.

Separate children

from the stories

that tell them who they are

and who belongs to them.

Let fathers disappear.

Let mothers carry

what whole communities

were meant to carry.

Let grandparents die

with names and stories

still inside them.

Do it long enough,

and eventually

a child inherits the absence

without knowing

what is absent

But the need to belong

does not disappear

because the family does.

It goes looking.

And one day

a boy finds other boys

who say:

You with us.

They give him a name.

A place.

A way to greet his own.

Someone who will come

when he calls.

Someone who will fight beside him.

Someone who will mourn him

if he dies.

And we look at the color

and think the color

is what he loves.

Maybe we have it backwards.

Maybe the color

is simply where

the love had somewhere to go.

Red.

Blue.

Something so small

something so enormous.

Family.

So when we ask,

Why would you kill your brothers?

maybe the question itself

reveals what we have failed to understand.

Because he may look at the boy

across from him

and genuinely not know

who we are talking about.

Then turn toward the men beside him

and say,

These are my brothers.

And there it is.

Not an excuse.

Not an answer

I am certain I completely understand.

Just something

I cannot unsee anymore.

We have been looking at two Black faces

and assuming that somewhere inside them lived the memory:

We belong to each other.

But perhaps that memory

can be wounded too.

Perhaps it can be interrupted

for so many generations

that somebody eventually

has to manufacture

what should have been inherited.

A family.

A name.

A people.

A reason to say:

If you touch him,

you touch me

And maybe the saddest part

is not that a boy

could love a color enough

to die for it.

Maybe it is that

when he went looking for us

the color new his name before we did