Hole Straight To The Heart

I had such a visceral response to Nancy D. Tolson's Bullet Hole Man I knew I had to write about it. The subtitle labels it A Love Poem and while that is what the poem's about it also touches on so much at the same time. Tolson isn't just talking about a love story she's touching on social elitism, police harassment, racism, the pressure and truths about gang life that a lot of mainstream media likes to misrepresent. Right there in the beginning the emotion of it is set up in the third and fourth lines:

i caressed his body, and i wept from the soul

when my hand first touched my man's bullet holes

The starkness of those lines, the positioning of bullet holes as belonging to the man as opposed to something inflicted on him. They are part of him, he owns them. The weeping from the soul is understandable, we feel pain when those we love are hurt but there's more here. She, the voice in hasn't seen/felt these wounds before, she is just discovering them, this is their first time together and that makes the pain a different sort. She's not just mourning because a person she loves was hurt or even because he's trapped in this life but also because had those bullets in the chest found their target she would never have meet this love. Those bullet holes are signs of what was almost taken from her without her awareness. The love the narrator feels for this man is apparent in so much of the language in the poem and especially her recounts of the things she goes through for just being with this man.

i sneak now to see him, he lives underground
i love a street man though i'm college bound

Tolson touches on a lot of things in those two lines. The narrator has to sneak out to see him and underground has numerous meanings, it could be a metaphor for the "other side of the tracks" so to speak or it could mean he's in hiding from the authorities. The next line adds another reason though, a perceived social difference, a questioning of the validity of their relation ship because of their different paths. There's an idea in that line, that someone who is going to college would be too smart to be with someone involved in illegal activity. It's repeated when she talks about the harassment she gets from the authorities:

they think i will tell, 'cause i'm just too damn smart to love this Black man they believe has no heart

She's reiterating the expectations of intelligence that are part of the pressures on their relationship. It's something our media promotes all the time, that those involved in gangs are violent and stupid people and no one but someone equal in stupidity would date them which is a such a vast simplification of a problem that has ties with institutional racism, government funneling of drugs into ghettos and non-protection provided by authorities. This is not to say that every person involved in illegal activity is a saint pressured by circumstance but the situation is more complex than a simple - "Gang members are evil and violent" and the narrator knows this. She doesn't shy away from the things they have to live with, the things he does and the effects of those actions.

It's in this space of this complexity that the narrator opines her love. She knows that no one is all saint or all sinner and she tackles this two times in the text:

it boggles my mind this heaven and hell
that i'm living between, two worlds that collided

and the end of the poem which is plea and prayer as much as wish:

this man who is both my heaven and hell
may the bullets never make it to his heart

The narrator is aware of the position she's put in not just because of the things he does but because of the expectations that plague them both and the constraints their relationship. It is through exploring this complexity of identity where she's able to confront the racism of the police who harass her:

they've called me a ho and a stupid street maid

and the fear she exist in while she's with him:

some nights it's so easy, while some are so hard
to think that they could just bust through the door

This poem which at times feels like a explanation for or a defense of her love is a way for her to expose and explore her feeling for this man. In the end her statement that she would give up her degree and pick up a gun if it became necessary, for him, and she's able to really subject the reader to a shock because that's not something that's supposed to happen. Someone "smart" isn't supposed to be willing to give it all up and pick up a weapon. That's one of the reason's I love this poem so much Tolson gives us someone who breaks convention, who doesn't pick the "smart" move but is undeniably "smart" and in doing so she not only shows us love but truth.
No one is simple, no one is a stereotype.

-Naamen