‘What the hell is going on?’ Darnell yelled. He turned to his son and wondered if that look of disgust had been permanently tattooed on his face. Little did Darnell know that it was a tattoo itself that had brought on an argument between his wife and their firstborn.
‘Show him your arm, Thomas!’ Jasmine cried. Thomas stood still, glaring at his mother and refusing to move. She stormed over to him and grabbed his arm, lifting up the sleeve on his black t-shirt. She held his arm up to into her husband’s eye-line. ‘Look what your son has done!’
Upon his arm was a tattoo. It was cheaply done by an amateur, similar to the markings Darnell had witnessed on inmates down at the County Jail. They used improvised equipment, utilising mechanical pencils, radio transistors and sometimes staples to imprint the images on the subject’s skin. Thomas’s arm was red raw with black ink running down. Darnell winced as he considered the pain his son must have been through to achieve this piece of art. His arms were exposed in a tartan shirt which was torn at the sleeves and his ripped blue jeans barely covered his knees. He’d tried to grow himself a beard but just a few wisps sprouted from his chin.
The amateurish nature of the tattoo proved Thomas had visited an underground artist or had one of his unsavoury friends create it; not surprising seeing he was underage. But it wasn’t his age which had upset his mother so much. It was the image itself. Thomas had upon his arm a swastika. Darnell glared at the Nazi symbol and felt his fist tremble.
‘How could you do this?’ Darnell lifted up his hand and smacked his son across the face. The impact threw Thomas back and he clung on to the red-tiled island in the middle of the kitchen to maintain his balance. ‘How can you do this to our family? Have you learned nothing in this house? Your ancestors died trying to give us the equal opportunities we have today. You would be a slave if they hadn’t bothered.’
‘You might be. But I wouldn’t be. Have you not noticed? I’m white.’
Darnell slapped his son for a second time. A red mark grew across his face in the shape of his father’s handprint, which Thomas grabbed with his palm.
‘Get out of my sight, right now! Go on, get out, and don’t come back until that thing has been removed!’
He pointed towards the door and his son obliged, slamming the door behind him. Darnell sat down on the chair and rested his head in his hands. He’d lost all faith in his son’s ability to finally become a decent human being. Thomas had problems, yes, but Darnell hung on to the hope that it was simply a phase. Now he wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up in prison with the rest of the reprobates he had arrested over the years.
‘Did we do something wrong?’ He turned to his wife and kissed her cheek, before wiping away the tear which had trickled down from her eye.
‘No, I don’t think so. We got things right with Aaron. And Thomas was a wonderful child before he met those hooligans.’
The hooligans Jasmine referred to were a gang which Thomas had begun to hang around with after his father had been shot. Darnell was in hospital for weeks and the tight ship he’d previously managed in the household loosened, allowing Thomas to go out after his curfew and meet up with an undesirable crowd. Darnell had met his friends on a chance encounter; they were a group of white hip-hop artists who riffed with each other on street corners, whilst parading the Confederate flag and signing a gun shooting with their hands whenever people of colour crossed their path.
Darnell found it quite ironic that they hated black people so much when it was they who had created the music they loved. Hip-hop had originated from the Bronx, made popular by African Americans, and brought into the main stream media during the eighties.
‘You can’t have the rhythm without the blues,’ Darnell whispered to himself, considering the wise words of the poet, Amanda Seales. Whilst he considered the group hypocritical, he found most bigotry to be so.
He couldn’t understand why his son would hang around with a group who would persecute someone like him. Yes, he was white on the outside, but on the inside he was as black as his father. It was clear from his chance encounter with the group that Thomas had kept his heritage away from his friends. Darnell targeted them after reports of vandalism of a war memorial in downtown Champaign. It was erected for those who died in the two world wars, as well as Korea and Vietnam. Darnell approached his son, who feigned confusion at the sight of his own father in front of his friends. When Darnell informed his friends that he was in fact Thomas’s father, he heard his son mumble “Stepfather” as he walked away.
‘We need to stop him seeing those people,’ Darnell grumbled.
‘How do you
