Poetry: ‘Yesterday’s Newsreel Was Chasing Me’

I was six years old when I watched a newsreel of Mussolini and his mistress murdered by partisans. For us kids, World War II was black-and-white. We were good, and the enemy was bad. Black writers who served in that war, however, told us about the hardships they encountered. They had to fight both the enemy and their white fellow soldiers. In the American South, German prisoners of war had more privileges than Black soldiers did.

Novelist William Demby and others fought in Italy, where Italian citizens saluted their valor before the Clinton administration got around to it. (I published Demby’s Love Story Black, a spoof on upper-middle-class Black militancy.) All of those Black soldiers whom southern white officers commanded went through hell.

I thought of that newsreel I saw when I was six after Mussolini’s party recently made a comeback. At the end of World War II, we thought that evil was done, but evil has a way of creeping back. History doesn’t rhyme. It giggles. 

This poem appears in Issue 24 of Alta Journal.
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I dreamt that yesterday’s
newsreel was chasing me.
It had the head of a Pathé screen
It was on roller skates and
Gaining on me
My feet hurt
I had shortness of breath
The white rooster they used as a logo was on the newsreel’s shoulder, crowing its head off and angrily flapping its wings.
And if that were not enough they
Were playing that hot, scratchy combative music
The newsreel’s theme.
Pathé was projecting images ahead
of me
I almost ran into one
Bob Hope was telling jokes
to the troops.
Mussolini and his mistress
Clara Petacci
hanging upside down.
FDR at Yalta.
De Gaulle and the GIs entering Paris.
Schoolchildren hiding
under their desks.
Rita Hayworth, her hands on her
Knees a pinup
Pasted on “Flying Tigers,”
her real name, Margarita Cansino.

Hirohito was on horseback.
Some uncouth baseball fan was handing Jackie
Robinson a black cat.
Robinson, who assaulted army officers
for using the N-word
petted the cat
“Buy Liberty Bonds”
Rosie the Riveter
her sleeves rolled up

But just as the Pathé
was breathing down
my neck
It passed me by.
It was after somebody else.
I wondered who
and I wondered why.•