HATE
A young Dominican-American, 11, spoke before a congregation
Of 35,000, about his spirituality and faith,
At 17, after a gang-crowd shooting,
The bars of prison clanked.
He heard clanks the next 5 years:
The clank of metal spoons on metal bowls slopping oatmeal;
The clank of ankle chains during moves;
The clank and click of bars and locks on cells
Night and Day and every hour in between; and sometimes
There was the clank of metal against skull.
In the bus, on the way, he had sat
With whites and blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans,
And everything was fine (relatively speaking).
But in the prison, there had been a race riot that day,
And the blacks and the whites and every type of Hispanic were separated —
Paprika, Cinnamon, Clove, Nutmeg, Ginger, Anise, Vanilla Bean —
Like spices,
They were piled into corners and divided
Like the segregated South of the 50s.
The first thing the guards did was take those on the bus and place them
Into their separate racial spaces behind fence chain.
The Dominican-American youth stood, partitioned, looking into men’s eyes,
They were male fighting fish separated and facing.
The black men spit at him and cursed him, called him many things,
Spoke of his mother in degrading slurs,
And threw things at him.
And twenty minutes later…he joined them,
A young man who never had harbored hatred based on race,
Whose family was a mix of color that ranged from the deepest ebony to palest ivory,
Began to retaliate: he spit and cursed and slurred; and in those first moments in prison,
He changed even more.
“What do animals do when caged?” he asked, then said, “I came to understand the reasons for hate.”