Page 249

By Jack Joseph Smith

Telling It I as certain that God is mathamatics and matha mamatics is not God You can 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 between nineteen fifty four, coming of age that is, and nineteen Seventy four,, even if where their from,, is a place they never once left, That does Not Know THE Political Skill, Most Likely better, than, you know you All

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Telling It sets mathematics beside God and refuses racial coloring, then turns toward Black American coming-of-age and a handwritten claim that the addressed you already knows the Political Skill.

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. The bottom handwritten coda turns that argument into an address: political knowledge is not exotic or remote, but something the speaker says you All most likely already know.

Claude

'Telling It' opens on a careful asymmetry - 'God is mathamatics / and matha mamatics is not God' - and refuses racial categories: 'You can not color race, cause the / colors are all the same.' The speaker claims a chameleon witness, having 'been black / enough, brown, red and pale,' 'the color of a flower' and 'of a weed,' 'proud of what I was.' The handwritten coda turns to address: no 'American Negro, born between nineteen / fifty four... and / nineteen Seventy four' fails to know 'THE Political Skill, / Most Likely better, than, you know / you All.' This reading is held lightly because the band is 'mixed.'