Terrance Hayes - Woofer (When I Consider the African-American) lyrics

When I consider the much discussed dilemma of the African-American, I think not of the diasporic middle pa**ing, unchained, juke, jock, and jiving sons and daughters of what sleek dashikied poets and tether fisted Nationalists commonly call Mother Africa, but of an ex-girlfriend who was the child of a black-skinned Ghanaian beauty and Jewish- American, globetrotting ethnomusicologist. I forgot all my father's warnings about meeting women at bus stops (which is the way he met my mother) when I met her waiting for the rush hour bus in October because I have always been a s**er for deep blue denim and Afros and because she spoke so slowly when she asked the time. I wrote my phone number in the back of the book of poems I had and said something like "You can return it when I see you again" which has to be one of my top two or three best pickup lines ever. If you have ever gotten lucky on a first date you can guess what followed: her smile twizzling above a tight black v-neck sweater, chatter on my velvet couch and then the two of us wearing nothing but shoes. When I think of African-American rituals of love, I think not of young, made-up unwed mothers who seek warmth in the arms of any brother with arms because they never knew their fathers (though that could describe my mother), but of that girl and me in the basement of her father's four story Victorian making love among the fresh blood and axe and chicken feathers left after the Thanksgiving slaughter executed by a 3-D witchdoctor houseguest (his face was starred by tribal markings) and her ruddy American poppa while drums drummed upstairs from his hi-fi woofers because that's the closest I've ever come to anything remotely ritualistic or African, for that matter. We were quiet enough to hear their chatter between the drums and the scraping of their chairs at the table above us and the footsteps of anyone approaching the basement door and it made our business sweeter, though I'll admit I wondered if I'd be cursed for making love under her father's nose or if the witchdoctor would sense us and then cast a spell. I have been cursed, broken hearted, stunned, frightened and bewildered, but when I consider the African-American I think not of the tek nines of my generation deployed by madness or that we were a**igned some lousy fate when God prescribed job titles at the beginning of Time or that we were too dumb to run the other way when we saw the wide white sails of the ships since given the absurd history of the world, everyone is a descendant of slaves (which makes me wonder if outrunning your captors is not the real meaning of Race?). I think of the girl's bark colored, bi-continental nipples when I consider the African-American. I think of a string of people connected one to another and including the two of us there in the basement linked by a hyphen filled with blood; linked by a blood filled baton in one great historical relay.