There Are Black - Analysis

A prison mapped by color, then warped by power

The poem begins like a blunt inventory: black guards on black men, brown guards greeting brown men, white guards laughing with white cons, and red guards, few, silent. That opening seems to promise a simple argument about race matching race. But Baca’s central claim is harsher: the prison doesn’t just reflect racial divisions; it turns them into a machine where people are trained to police, harm, and finally forget their own people. The repeated pairing of guard and inmate by color makes the betrayal feel intimate, not abstract—like kinship being rerouted into control.

The little antpile: everyone moving, nobody free

Baca’s image of the prison as the little antpile makes the place feel both busy and mindless: convicts marching in straight lines, guards flying / on badged wings with permits to sting. The tension here is that the guards gain authority by accepting a role that also shrinks them. They glut themselves on sanctioned power, but the cost is spiritual and social: they are secluding themselves from their people. The poem’s disgust is not only for cruelty; it’s for the way the institution trains the imagination to go numb—Turning off their minds like watertaps—as if empathy is just a valve you can close.

Watertaps and weak water: a chosen numbness

The extended metaphor of pipes carrying pale weak water to the guards’ hearts is one of the poem’s most damning moves. The heart is not simply hardened by trauma; it’s fed something diluted, made anemic. And the pipes are wrapped in gunnysacks, insulating them—suggesting a deliberate buffering against feeling. The poem’s tone shifts here from reportage to indictment: the guards’ failure isn’t ignorance in the innocent sense, but a walled-off condition that makes brutality easier to perform and easier to justify.

It gets bad: when the job requires cleaning up your own

The poem pivots sharply with It gets bad, and then repeats the phrase to deepen the descent. What makes it bad is not only violence but recognition: guards carry buckets of blood and puk at the smell of the people, specifically their own people who are slashing their wrists or hanging themselves. Even the dead are described with a chilling, procedural chill—the blue cold body taken out under sheets—followed by the guards returning to guard cages. The contradiction tightens: they are physically close to suffering, even tasked with its cleanup, yet they resume their posts as if the system’s rhythm matters more than the human cost. The poem makes that return feel like the real horror.

The mummy’s authority and the cobra’s hunger

Above this blood-rutted land, ordinary life continues—the sun shines, guards talk about horses and guns, buy new boots. That normalcy is not comforting; it’s nauseating. The longer the guards stay, the more they resemble some ancient mummy in the prison’s dungeons: preserved, powerful, and incapable of listening. Baca’s phrasing—so utterly disgusting in ignorance yet able to command—captures a key tension: power here is not linked to wisdom, only to deadened longevity. And at the mummy’s feet, some convicts become cobras, sucking life from their brothers, fighting for rings and money and drugs. The poem refuses a single story of innocence; it shows how a pit can manufacture predators, while never letting that fact excuse the pit.

Dust and sand: the innocent erased into the landscape

The closing section turns elegiac and eerily wide. Baca names another group: convicts guilty / of nothing but their born color, even guilty of being innocent. Instead of becoming cobras, they slowly turn to dust, and the poem makes their disappearance physical: from the gash in their hearts, sand flies up and drifts over houses and through trees. The final address—look at the sand blow… you are looking at them—forces the reader to see incarceration not as a sealed-off world, but as something that scatters into the ordinary places people live. The ending’s bleak power is that it doesn’t offer rescue; it offers recognition: the prison’s damage doesn’t stay behind walls. It becomes weather.