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You sign checks, she signs love
You signal for waiters & she signals warnings to dealers on the street
corner
You raise your hands to heaven & she raises hers to block blows every
night
You use yours to embrace & hers are to push away
Yours to turn the book pages, hers to count end of the day earnings
Gas up, grub down & hit the streets again
So she’s gonna take it
to ya!
Because there’s a war going on
And the streets and the jails and everywhere beyond her body yo,
is where the enemies live
Angry, lonely, hurt, unloved, despised, ostracized
Yeah!
So you better clear off the streets when the sun goes down
Because when darkness comes, its always been hers
It’s where she’s lived all her life
And she can see in the dark, cry in the dark, eat and love and hurt in the
dark!
And it’s hers!
And it’s all we ever gave her
So when she catches us there in it,
She doesn’t care who we are, what color we are
Whether we’re black or white or brown
She’s gonna bring it to us!
She’s gonna make us feel just a little bit of the darkness that she
has felt and lived in all her life!
You can be sentimental about rehabilitating her and flatter yourselves by
thinking we can change her
And send all them goodwill probation officers & counselors to try to
change her
But she ain’t changing nothing ‘cause it’s based on a
lie
A lie telling her that she’s supposed to be core!
That justice is for the rich and the privileged!
She knows that when you take away every single chance and opportunity before
she’s even born,
If we build a prison cell for her to live in before she’s even born,
Predicting that she’s gonna be a criminal because she’s black
or brown,
If we take away her essential need to communicate & even the tiniest
chance she has to scrape crumbs of dignity off the welfare table,
If we devise ways to make her feel inferior,
And make her feel different than others more acceptable,
If we call her names like nigger and spic & white trash,
All she is doing in the dark is screaming, “I need to communicate
to another human being!”
And so she gets older
And she’s cooked 1,000 pots of soup
And nothing’s changed
She’s made a million tortillas & served them to guests
And ain’t nothing changed
She’s poured a million cups of coffee & nothing’s happened
She’s changed and washed a million sheets and still no change in the
way society treats her kind!
She’s counted the beads on her rosary on her knees every night
Walking up and down them streets,
she’s seen people come and move out
Seen the trim repainted, the houses renovated, the mayors come and go
The gangs and the hip hop crews slang the soiled raps of love on the mean
streets of the night city
But nothing’s changed!
She’s seen the mist roll in from the bay with the commerce ships and
the tankers come in at sunrise
Everything promising to bring a brand new day; a brand new justice, a new
way of respecting each other, a new way of hope, and promises of just fucking peace!
But after the poets have gone home tonight, and the musicians put away the
saxophones and guitars and the leather cases & when the audience snugs collars against their necks and they head home,
She knows that nothing’s changed!
She smiles at the pigeons, flustering for scraps near the can
And beyond it she sees a homeless family and their blankets, shivering from
cold and hunger & she looks away and she sees others on a corner selling crack
Turns the other way and sees a policeman beating down a Latina
And she turns the other way and she sees a drunk stumbling in the alley
And she recalls when you used to look in the four directions for praying
to the spirit world & now no one looks anywhere unless it’s to protect yourself, to keep alive
And now people yell at her “Go home! You’re taking our jobs
away! You’re not American!”
And this city; its glass, its streets, its bricks, its rooms, consider Julia
an alien & she senses that each one of these things are a menace to her safety
That’s the Julia I’m talking about!
A brown woman, who waits at the bus station, praying that she ain’t
gonna get arrested for being brown!
A brown woman, who can fit everything she owns after 50 years of working,
in a suitcase!
A brown woman who’s gotta be careful of what she says, so she don’t
say nothing!
Because her reality is not like the other reality
Their sunshine days are her dark nights,
Their cool, breezy mornings are her blinding sandstorm,
Their justice is her imprisonment!
Their freedom is her shackle!
Their safety at home is her, in the middle of the night being tossed into
an INS truck in handcuffs and deported,
She knows the true reality
And all she ever wanted was peace!
