LEMON & CREAM

Her Volkswagen beetle
was the color of lemon and cream.
She was white and twenty-two
with freckles on her cheeks
and spoke on her cell phone
while she was driving
with the articulate enunciation
that came from growing up on the west side of town.

And she said that she had black friends,
but they were all from her area of suburbs.
They were Oreos:
black on the outside
but white on the inside.
What she didn't realize,
was that racism wasn't just based on color,
it was also based on neighborhood.
The way that the police treated her black friends
in their upper-middle-class neighborhood
was not the same way that the police treated black people
in front of the poor apartments.

Where teenagers left school at 2 PM
when their mother told them their younger sibling was sick
and that they needed to come home to take care
of their younger sibling,
so that their mother could go to work.

Where their mother did not understand
that coming home at 2 PM
meant skipping class
in a way that was not considered acceptable
by their friends, their teachers, or their dreams.

No, the Volkswagen driver would never understand,
and could never understand
what it meant to be 'poor black',
because she was lemon and cream.