The Boy in the Alley

I never saw his futurefall. But I have known this Boy. I have always heard him deal with death. I have always heard the shout, the volley. I have closed my heart-ears late and early.

And I have killed him ever. I joined the Wild and killed him with knowledgeable unknowing.

I saw where he was going. I saw him Crossed. And seeing, I did not take him down. He cried not only "Father! It went up to the wind.

It hung upon the heaven for a long stretch-strain of Moment. The red floor of my alley is a special speech to me.

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When pressed further by the policeman's questions, however, the speaker begins to recognize her own involvement in the youth's death, an involvement stemming from exactly the passive attitude Karenga associates with the blues tradition. But the act of realization is also an act of dissociation from the passivity of the tradition. At the poem's climax the speaker perceives the essential bond linking all Black people, while maintaining the lyrical blues attitude toward the immediate generative experience.

The final lines quietly endorse the blues' confrontation of the past painful experience, but at the same time hold the promise of the transformation hinted at in the immediately preceding lines. Implicitly they promise that the insight derived from the blues can be transformed into a direct form of resistance: Tradition Black and White.

In the poem, the literal cause of the violent death of a black boy whose blood, whose body "ornaments [the poet's] alley," remains unmentioned. Indeed, no possible cause is ever speculated about, encouraging the reader to consider the multiple ways in which young black men in this country mysteriously end up dead: The poet acknowledges a sorrowful and determined responsibility for the death of the boy, and in so doing teaches each of us the tragic consequences of "knowledgeable unknowing," of ever failing to act against oppression and violence:.

I never see the Dead. The Shot that killed him yes I heard as I heard the Thousand shots before; careening tinnily down the nights across my years and arteries. Policeman pounded on my door. A Boy is dead, and in your alley.

And have you known this Boy before? I have known this Boy before. I have known this boy before, who ornaments my alley. I never saw his face at all.

I never saw his futurefall. But I have known this Boy. I have always heard him deal with death.

I have always heard the shout, the volley.