By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A short, volatile speech poem that exposes racial hierarchy and nationalist fantasy in a flat, disturbing burst.
A six-line poem that frames an act of reported, racially charged speech: 'he turned to me and he sid / Sweets, we are native sons, American.' The man's monologue runs through a nativist taxonomy of who belongs and who will inherit, claiming the 'browns,' the 'asians,' and the 'nego' each a place against the speakers' own 'native son' Americanness.
The poem is a transcription, not an endorsement - the oath 'I sware' and the phonetic 'sid' present this as something actually said by a particular man in a particular voice, and the work's force comes from setting that ugly speech down flatly for the reader to hear. The endearment 'Sweets' makes it intimate, a man confiding his racial worldview to a woman as pillow-talk or porch-talk, which is exactly what makes it chilling. The content is a crude hierarchy: the speakers are 'native sons,' the 'browns think it is / there country anyway,' the 'asians... find us the best,' and the 'nego will control the land they were brought to' - a tangle of grievance, flattery, and the loaded acknowledgment of slavery's history in that last clause. Presenting this without comment is the poem's method: the dialect ('sid,' 'there' for their) keeps it grounded in a real mouth, and the bluntness implicates the listener who is hearing it as 'Sweets.' The slurs and spellings are the source's and I have preserved them verbatim as the record of what is being depicted; the poem documents this speech rather than affirming it.