The air in the high school is swollen. My heart balloons as I smooth my name tag down. The woman checking me in at Austin East Magnet High School has a warning, “They might not have much to say.” I have not come to measure their verbs or their vowels. My vested interest is their red blood cells. East Knoxville, where six students in one year, from one high school, are dead by gun violence. As I walk to Ms. Hall’s young writers class, 16-year-olds with the mud-red beauty of the Maasai fly past me in the hall late for class. There are no visible signs of bruising. A blood test could reveal the damage done these last 400 years. A blood test is a fine modern measurement of the homocysteine levels moving through precious growing creative bodies. There are no blood tests in my bag and I only have one hour to measure what I have traveled here to know. East Knoxville, fifty years before, every grocery store, bakery, doctor’s office, barbershop, pharmacy, juke joint, Miss Lucille Reader of Palms, closed down and laid to rest on the new Civic Center pyre. Blood sugar levels bought season tickets to the Moon. Families on the East side came to know American architecture intimately, how the right side of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard arced into the halls of the high school, and the left side dangled at the front door of Jarnigan & Son Mortuary, oldest Black business in town. A swelling is how the body begins to heal. A blood test can be historical marker for the inflammation of disparity. My ballooning heart enters the door of their A, B, and O world. I am met by 14 framed faces of curious encyclopedic sunlight. Their Wolof and Benin mouths follow me around the room like awakened cicadas. I ask them to read. They stop buzzing, mid-air, hold their patterns, wondering if I have come to take something else from them. The one in perfect white sneakers with BEATS dangling off his ears keeps his head under his hoodie. The two by the window use the glass as dream portal, watching, then aiming, their father’s eyes farther out into the rising Blue Ridge Mountain light settling the pitched roof of Jarnigan & Son. The room is a clover field of hide, luck, and chance, but the burning tenderness of their inflammation wants out. Inflammation is a fight response from the body when the immune system leaps into action even when there is no visible injury. Angelina extends her grey tablet out to me. Her dark Motown eyes begin their return to Earth. I read her poem as if it belongs in my mouth. Their words reach and ricochet. My immune system kicks in just as Jamartray decides I might be worthy, handing me his fragile worry-filled word rope, his mother’s Lindy Hop, in and out of the Double-Dutch rope of illness. Shiasia’s spunky Afro-Latin is read with Black girl attitude kept under my tongue for moments when the fear in their eyes is molten and strawberry. She cheers. Leonard begins with a piercing refusal to never be a statistic and ends with his mother’s double helix—HeLa—never-ending cells of extraordinary love alighting every face in the room. It is 9:00 am on a Friday morning in East Knoxville. I have lost my tally and count. The young poets have broken my fever. |
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