Calling a Spade a Spade

Angelique Zobitz

That is to say, not a fig or a trough—
which is what Plutarch originally said,
but you know—one white man decides another thing,
and all of a sudden, it’s enshrined.

A spade is a garden tool,
like a hoe but not, ya dig?
One rakes dirt, one digs a hole,
but both move the earth.

Oxford Dictionary says a spade is:
“a tool with a sharp-edged, typically rectangular, metal blade
and a long handle, used for digging or cutting earth, sand, turf, etc.”

In the beginning, men were nomadic. 
Without a spade, agrarian civilization wouldn’t be made. 

Spades is how I learned about community.
Elders listening to Johnny Lee Hooker,
Big Mama Thornton, Crown Royale, Seagram’s gin,
card-playing, shit-talking flying fast and loose.

The lowest spade trumps all other suits.

As the oldest in daycare,
my childcare worker played me spades.
So from an early age, I was a menace at the card table.

In our teens, my younger sister and I
fist-fought over her stealing my made books
when my back was turned during spades.
We didn’t talk for a year—
that’s how serious we took spades.

Robert Burton said call a spade a spade—
a lesson in freshman English composition.
Keep it simple stupid. 

Then Wilde took it, twisted it twice—
first in Dorian Gray, then in Earnest.
Both times, he made a thing plain.

But Black folks know the power of a spade.

Claude McKay, Home to Harlem,
was the first to call us spades.

Later some outgroup took it, flipped it—
“Black as a spade.” Made it pejorative
cutting like woke and now history is made. 

Not realizing—
a spade digs deeper than any blade.

Angelique Zobitz (she/her/hers) is the author of Seraphim from CavanKerry Press and the chapbooks Love Letters to The Revolution from American Poetry Journal and Burn Down Your House from Milk & Cake Press. Her work appears in The Journal, Sugar House Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts of the African Diaspora, and many others. She can be found at www.angeliquezobitz.com and on Instagram: @angeliquezobitz.