Page 249

By Jack Joseph Smith

Telling It I as certain that God is mathamatics and matha mamatics is not God Yourcan not color race, cause the colors are all the same ; I am talking about looking I am white and I have been black enough,, brown, red and pale, I have been the color of a flower and I have been the color of a weed, and proud of what I was,, no matter what, . when I was doing it; there is not one, no American Negro, born betweem nineteerr fifty four, coming of age that is, and nineteen Severty four, even if where their from,, is a place they never once left, << hr does Not Kbow pw tye politicrl 4 Hi | ) MY te MostLivtely better Thar, | yor )

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Telling It sets mathematics beside God and refuses racial coloring, insisting that identity is made through lived looking, historical crossing, and pride in many forms.

The first claim is deliberately unstable: mathematics is close enough to God to invite confusion, yet too exact to be worship itself. The argument against coloring race depends on vision rather than abstraction, as if seeing truly dissolves the categories people cling to. When the poem turns toward Black American coming-of-age between the mid-fifties and mid-seventies, history enters as a pressure no personal metaphor can fully escape.

Claude

'Telling It': God is mathematics but math is not God; race color is not color because colors are the same. Catalogue of having been 'white, black, brown, red, pale,' flower and weed, with a coda about any American Negro born 1954-1974.