The Author Explains good kid, m.A.A.d. City To His White Friend While Driving Through Southeast Ohio
“…and anyway, we ain’t all grow up the SAME kinda poor. I know them country boys out here wanna act like the blunt be some vice for the uncivilized but don’t we all feel better settin’ fire to some shit when we with the homies? ain’t that how so many white crosses made the fields dry and empty after the black families moved too close to town? God knows I be of a complexion responsible for so many empty harvests. so many hungry daughters, and we still don’t know what to do with all this violence but put one of them big gold frames around it and pray it might sell a million copies or somethin so our mothers can get up out them homes with the leaning bricks, that is if they still breathing. don’t nobody out here know what that is. fields out here might just need a good song, ‘least that’s what the end of a good whip used to whisper into the backs of my great-great-great ancestors. last week, heard your moms say the dairy queen off route 36 was “ghetto” and I figured that meant it been sandwiched between a juke that only played Sam Cooke and a grandmotherly sort who never stops swaying when the wind calls, just trynna stay alive since she don’t know what’s next cuz she stopped believing in heaven when all her children caught them bullets for wearing red or blue or the night on their skin, but it turns out the dairy queen was just out of vanilla soft serve. the men out in the fields here be letting the sun cook their skin bright pink, chewin’ on those big cigars like “why can’t they just get back to the good old days when a fistfight could solve it all?” but trayvon and jordan and ‘em still dead, and we still only know the way to fill something empty be with these songs or some other shit loud and covered in smoke”
