AUTHOR’S NOTE:
The text on yellow paper are the notes I took while sitting in the Thurston County Courthouse my first day in court. April 16, 2013. Yes, I know, they are riddled with spelling and punctuation errors. They are notes. Make note. I don’t like looking stupid, which I often am.
There is this scene, in the movie Django Unchained (written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, where a black man riding on a horse herds slaves as a free man. The movie was set before the civil war, if you are imaging the time, which you should be. I am telling a mother f*cking story, your mind should be open like a whore giving birth to a gang rape. Don’t read my sh*t, if you don’t want to think about the significance of details. Don’t watch his movie either, because all you will see is racism and gore. The slaves in that movie are happy. He depicts them on swings, or was that really a noose tethered by rope?
“I am sure it was both, she said with a smile, “Please do come in for some lemonade.” The blond of her curls reminded me of Nelly Olson, but her soul was team Laura. There was no better house than the one on the prairie. Her voice was like sugga, drawled long like the bosom of wet nurse. Was her mammies black?
“Is she good then?” the child wants to know, nestled up to them, and listening. We all remember Nelly as mean. Rich white girls tend to be that way, spoiled to curdle, and then rot.
The mother, wonders about the label she should tell her child, because the mother f*cking story is real one, and good mothers keep it real, so that monsters don’t eat their children. The only good witch is Glenda. It was in her image that the answer came.
“Sometimes you need to let the dogs eat your friends, my child. Sometimes you need to allow them to eat each other, or they will grow hungry and eat you. Something has to feed the fear that holds them to their slave. Do you think that black man was proud to have made it on that horse? Do you think it was ego that kept him there, above his people? I saw him on the prairie the whole time. Good men are humble, because they know hunger like three holes never filled by bone. This is the way life is always going to be, because it has always been. If you go thinking you are gonna change things, you just wind up dead. That is law.
When that first dog bites down on your friend, when you hear the howl of man in the fit of dying, I want you to swallow the sound until you are the one the dying, until it is your brain gurgling on death. Where will it bite next? Will your stump feel it? There will come a time that your body disconnects, before, or after, the jackals rip off your extremities, but not before then make a feast of your face. I want you smell it. Smell the sharp of that tooth stuck up in your nostril like the dank of a migraine.
That’s what will happen if you fall of that horse my son.”
