Haki R. Mahdubati

 

Poet: Whatever Happened to Luther?

he was strange weather, this luther, he read books, mainly 
poetry and sometimes long books about people in foreign 
places. for a young man he was too serious, he never did smile, 
and the family still don’t know if he had good teeth. he liked 
music too, even tried to play the trumpet until he heard the 
young miles davis. he then said that he’d try writing. the family 
didn’t believe him because there ain’t never been no writers in 
this family, and everybody knows that whatever you end up 
doing, it’s gotta be in your blood. it’s like loving women, it’s in 
the blood, arteries and brains. this family don’t even write let-
ters, they call everybody. thats why the phone is off 6 months 
out of a year. then again, his brother willie t. use to write long, 
long letters from prison about the books he was reading by
malcolm x, frantz fanon, george jackson, richard wright and oth-
ers. luther, unlike his brother, didn’t smoke or drink and he’d
always be doing odd jobs to get money. even his closest friends 
clyde and t. bone didn’t fully understand him. while they be par-
tying all weekend, luther would be traveling. he would take his 
little money with a bag full of food, mainly fruit, and a change of
underwear and get on the greyhound bus and go. he said he be 
visiting cities. yet, the real funny thing about luther was his 
ideas. he was always talking about afrika and black people. he 
was into that black stuff and he was light skin as a piece 
of golden corn on the cob. he’d be calling himself black and 
afrikan and upsetting everybody, especially white people. they 
be calling him crazy but not to his face. anyway the family, 
mainly the educated side, just left him alone. they would just be 
polite to him, and every child of god knows that when family
members act polite, that means that they don’t want to be
around you. it didn’t matter much because after his mother died
he left the city and went into the army. the last time we heard 
from him was 1963. he got put out of the army for rioting. he 
disappeared somewhere between mississippi and chicago. a 
third cousin, who family was also polite to, appeared one day
and said that luther had grown a beard, changed his name and 
stopped eating meat. she said that he had been to afrika and 
now lived in chicago doing what he wanted to do, writing books, 
she also said that he smiles a lot and kinda got good teeth.