Memento
How thoughtlessly
I took it, this cast
iron Aunt Jemima
doll hauled from the trunk
of my white
friend’s car. Another
of T’s, her Jamaican
husband’s, mementos
he collected
as a joke. Not unlike
those figurines
I recall a college friend once
exhibited, who’d bought
Aunt Jemima spoons,
shirts, piggy
banks, left his apartment strewn
with Uncle
Remus albums scavenged
from thrift shops: some
terrible gag
he’d invite friends over
to witness: we’d sit
and try not to look,
or to look and laugh
with the same
irony he’d cultivated,
though of course
it couldn’t be the same. He
was Black and we
were not and didn’t
each of us still have
some cupboard sticky
with the drippings from these
crystallized red caps, a box
of Uncle Ben’s
growing rancid
in the pantry?
My friend, I don’t think,
enjoyed his figurines so much
as our discomfort, the fact
he could see us for the first time
see the image the way he’d had to,
which is not the same as feelinghis own anger reflectedback in us. He liked instead to parse,
