Hand Me Downs

Sarah Kay, a spoken word poet, shares her thoughts on the futility of inherited racial anger.

(Below is the transcription of the above video)

Hand Me Downs

I know

you’ve taken to wearing around your father’s hand me down anger,

but I wish that you wouldn’t.

It's a few sizes too big and everyone can see it doesn’t fit you,

makes you look silly,

hangs loose in all the wrong places

even if it does match your skin color.

I know

you think you’ll grow into it – that your arms will beef up after all the fighting

and it will sit on your shoulders if only you pin it in the right places with well-placed conviction.

The bathroom mirror tells you “you look good in it,”

that it makes your fists look a lot more justified

and when you dig your hands deep into the pockets you’ll find

stories he left there for you to hand out to the other boys

like car bombs.

And on the days when everything else is slipping through your fingers,

this you can wrap yourself inside of.

This will keep you warm at night, help you drift off to sleep with the certainty that

no matter what, it will still be there when you wake up.

And the longer you wear it, the better it starts to fit.

Until some of those stories are your own.

Maybe the holes in the sleeve are from the bullets you dodged yourself

so when it rips, snags on a barbed wire fence or someone else’s family,

don’t worry, because your mother and your sister will help mend it –

patch the holes, sew the tears, replace a button or two,

help you back into it and tell you

how proud they are of you – how good it looks on you – the same way it looked on your dad

and your granddad too

and on his dad before him

and on his father before him,

but back then – back then there was only sand.

Until someone drew a line.

Someone built a wall.

Someone threw a stone,

and the crack in the skull that it hit fractured perfectly outward like twigs on the branches of the limbs of a family tree.

So someone threw a stone back,

and each fracture, each tiny break,

wound itself together into thread.

The thread pulled itself around him, around your great, great, great, great somebody

and on the other side of that wall, they were knitting

just as fast and theirs fit them

just as well

but only in a slightly different shade.

So I’m asking, when the time comes, who’s gonna be the first one to put down the needle and thread?

Who’s gonna be the first one to remember that their grandpa suffered just as many

broken windows

broken hearts

broken bones,

and the first time you come down to dinner and your son is sitting at the dining room table with your hatred on his shoulders,

who’s gonna be the first one to tell him:

it’s finally time to take it off.