Took the MTA North up to Poughkeepsie last week. Except for the overly-vivacious four-year-old who shrieked ecstatically for two freakin' straight hours at every dingy, sailboat and schooner we passed chugging up the Hudson River, and the guy across the aisle apparently in the final throes of some terminal sinus condition who hacked and snoggled incessantly until he finally stumbled off at Beacon, it was a pretty quiet trip. The Disturbed CD I'd brought along helped. A lot. I'd made this trip before.

It had been a full year since I had been up to Po'town and as I walked the stretch of Main Street between Vassar College and Eckerd's Pharmacy (where I buy all my pharmaceuticals locally), I was reminded what it might be like to be a minority. This part of Poughkeepsie is predominately African-American and while no one says anything, in the stores and on the street, they look at you differently. They look at you like, there's an outsider, there's someone who doesn't belong here.

Over the past few years I've gotten used to the street, to the area, even know some of the people who run businesses there. But I also remember that first time I was down on Main Street. June, 1998. Driving into a strange and menacing-seeming foreign land in my out-of-state pickup truck five days after James Byrd had been dragged to his death in Texas -- chained to a pickup truck -- and thinking, "oh, shit..."

*******

Race is the #1 Big Hot Button in America. Everyone's finger is constantly hovering over it. Everyone -- everyone white, anyway -- is afraid to push it. White folks think black folks obsess over race, can't see beyond it, can't get over it. Black folks think white folks just don't get it, because race is what it's about, and there is no seeing beyond it, no getting over it. As a pickup driving white boy, my own take is that, no, white folks don't get it because we can't but, yes, most of us would like to try.

Darian Dauchan's "Fallen Patriots" at the Independent, is a step in the direction towards understanding. Is it a worthy step? Without a doubt. Dauchan's writing -- and especially acting -- achieve moments of true brilliance on stage, and that's a word I don't toss around often or freely. Is it as big a step as it might be? Maybe not.

Dauchan's one-man show, which he scripted and which Malcolm I. Barrett directs, traces the experiences of three African-American soldiers through three white American wars: the Civil, the Second World, and the Vietnam. Dauchan inhabits each of his characters with a comfortable ease and inside-out familiarity, and his writing subtly gives each one period differences in speech and body language.

None of the stories end happily; each says convincingly that war is indeed a hell that no one who descends into ever completely climbs out of. Those of us old enough to remember past wars already know this to be true; a whole new generation of young Americans is right now discovering this for itself.

But where Dauchan has a unique opportunity is just where I think he may have missed one. For this white boy, he didn't go deep enough into what it is like to be black and fight a white man's war. What it is like to offer up your life to a society that treats you as a third-class citizen at best and strings you up from the nearest tree until dead at worst.

"Patriots" has moments where it touches upon this, most notably in the first act's closing monologue, from the escaped slave who has joined the Union ranks. The soldier returns to his former owner's ravaged plantation to encounter not only the rotting bodies of his slaughtered brethren, but the last gasps of racial hate from his dying, former master as well. In writing and performance, this passage especially is a particularly riveting piece of live theater.

There are other, mostly anecdotal, references -- a German POW who arrogantly refuses to "take orders from a nigger" and the returning black veteran who is castrated and lynched after parading his uniform and medals a little too proudly upon returning home to the USA.

Still, the core of "Patriots" is the sum of war horrors experienced by any soldier of any color, and not the inherently unjust and quite possibly obscene position of being asked to die to help perpetuate a society and a way of life designed to exclude you.

As Muhammad Ali said before he was jailed for refusing to serve in Vietnam, "I ain't got no quarrel with no Viet Cong." A lot of white guys said the same thing, but they didn't have billy clubs and firehoses waiting for them back home. What kind of mindfuck might it be if they had? Dauchan doesn't go as deeply into this as he might have.

That aside, "Fallen Patriots" is a visceral, wrenchingly powerful piece of theater that definitely should be seen. Darian Dauchan is definitely a name you should remember. We will be seeing this guy again.

*******

Leaving the theater after the show, descending the Independent's outdoor staircase that leads into a covered airway and then the sudden crush of 8th Street beyond, I thought of all the little everyday slights and injustices, snubs and suspicions people of color living in America face as a way of daily life, slights white folks mostly just don't notice. Such as being considered all the same, all lumped together, all categorized as one, without individuality or difference.

Standing next to the Barnes and Noble at the corner, waiting for the light, I thought back to a few days earlier, to the Eckerd's in Poughkeepsie where, trolling the aisles in search of a new notebook and pen, I had come to the end of the shelves and glanced to the directory sign above.

There, at the edge of the store, alongside the "Miscellaneous" and the "Seasonal" items, it said: "Ethnic Products".