There Are Certain Particular People

                                        There Are Certain Particular People

There are certain particular people who will not accept help from individuals darker than the trunk of a living tree. There are people who will be hanging from the edge of a cliff, barely holding on by the tip of a protruding piece of metal, and deny the tan hand that gives assistance. These people will let go of their flimsy piece of safety and fall into the bottom of a pit containing multiple rocks all in the shape of hammers and daggers that will crush and cut the skin. One never knows if brown is contagious, better to die clear.

Still there are others who will take the hand of an auburn gentleman and climb to safety over the impending doom provided by the aforementioned cliff. Once they have been helped by the brown gentleman they will look him condescendingly in the eyes and focus only on the color of his dusty skin. They will thank the gods that they are safe, not only from being crushed and cut by hammer and dagger shaped stones, but also that they are light skinned. They will however feel a sense of subtle guilt for betraying the grander notions held by Euro-centric gentlemen in boxy suits and cry quietly to themselves.

There are certain particular people, who will give a dark skinned baby to the thirsty fangs of a flea ridden, biased full, and stocky wolf to be eaten at the wolf’s leisure. The people of a village, without fully knowing why, motivated by a subconscious desire to have their children succeed, will gather all the flour in a 20 mile radius, splatter it in the village square and dance, twist, shout, and squirm all over it. The people of this village will pray to unknown gods and wish for something they dare not say out loud and can only say to themselves while bathing in a far away river or while in a drunken state in front of only the house’s chairs. The people of this village will give a dark skinned baby to a wolf that is kept at the outskirts of this village but that is regardless invited occasionally to feast on the small limbs of dark offspring.

There are certain particular people who will take the population of a city with skin darker than the color of a mahogany tree silently swaying in the wind, and place signs of apology around their neck.  These signs will state in very eloquent and very grammatically correct words how the person wearing the sign of apology is sorry for something that is not explicitly stated in the sign. The people who make the population wear said signs will never mention them, just casually be aware of their presence and attempt to stay away from them while at the same time being tactful and respecting the fact that everyone is equal. That is their public theology.

The people made to wear the signs of apology become so accustomed to them that they breathe, jump, sing, and sometimes die without noticing them at all. However, there are times when a brown person wearing the large and heavy sign bumps into a small child or looks into a two way mirror while eating a deliciously cooked ethnic meal and realizes, in a perhaps dumbfounded way that leaves the person confused for two hours and thirty minutes, that he was wearing said sign for nineteen years of his life. It is then up to the person wearing the sign of apology to burn it or carry it; silently, fatherly, caringly around his auburn colored neck.