Colonizer

I'm awake
Family
Family
Family

Back in the day our boy Eddie was stylin'
Playin' the days of planes of cane man that was life on Caribbean Islands
He had
Sold a paper or two man he had something to prove
Brothers need food
Caught up in hacking the blues
How that boy kept on the move
He had to
Man built like a statue
Let me ask you
How would you feel when the Nazis came at you?

They came to his island
Put up a ransom put up demands for
Metal cane and sugar and some boys were sane for saying no to their anthem
But his mama she said
Man you best go ahead
Get out of this place
And you find you a space
And that got in his head
He took a lifeboat on their ship
And he hid inside of it
And when the Nazis went to ship
They didn't know it was him that they had took with
Family
Family

Who were they?
He came to America
Built a house built a home with a woman named Ada
You tellin' me that a black man and a white italian fallin' in love in American melanin wasn't in the question and that wasn't wack man?
Nobody who could back that
Is alive today
We gone astray
Who were they?
Family

Colonizer
Polarizer
Synchronizing my colors on both sides the line
Is white and white's alright is that right?
If my family was riding from outside the times
But Italians colonized thrice
And to knowing the past there's a price
Like wondering
How did an island of Sibony Indians
End up the home to a black man whose kids who had kids who had kids
Who grew up in Michigan
Wondering where their true family is?

I'm a white man
And I'm a guest in this musical light
Created by black hands creatives and back to school jams
And we are all guests on this land

Hamilton Road
I'mma be straight out so you can't say you had never been told
It's where I grew old
The dirt the bugs the trees the house the screams the love the pain the childhood full
The place I learned to never be scared of the cold
My family is normal normal enough
That sample I been usin showing yous rough
My father yelling and yelling for what
My sisters were late for school?

Colonizer
Polarizer
Synchronizing my colors on both sides the line
Is white and white's alright is that right?
If my family was riding from outside the times
But Italians colonized thrice
And to knowing the past there's a price
Like wondering
How did an island of Sibony Indians
End up the home to a black man whose kids who had kids who had kids
Who grew up in Michigan
Wondering where their true family is?

And where does that anger come from?
Does it come from the northern Italians who came from the Balkans who came from who knows where their families upturned and destroyed their villages burned or from the black man from the island who worked with and then fought the Nazis whose family before them came from who knows where chained together at the bottom of a ship and whose stories will never be known? And that anger manifests itself today in the voice of my father and the burning sensation within methat I know it is And where will it go? Family