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Cruelty of the years
by Elliott B.
America’s birthday is on July Fourth, 1776,
Two hundred and forty three years old.
Slavery in the Americas began in 1619,
Slavery is four hundred and one years old.
Slavery is one hundred and fifty eight years older than the home of the brave.
This means slavery in continental America is older than the oldest human being to ever live;
It’s older than the Taj Mahal;
Slavery is older than public news, electricity, the calculator, than the piano, and older than a compound microscope.
Lettuce Bailey was born in 1765,
Eleven years before America,
One hundred and forty six years after slavery in America.
Lettuce died in 1820, and died two hundred years ago.
However, she was only one of five hundred thousand slaves in North America.
Her ancestors though,
They were part of the twelve million slaves ripped away from their homes and families during that two hundred and forty six year period until slavery was abolished.
If we can represent that other eleven million, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, we will.
But it will take some time.
The Taken
It was cloudy the day they came for us,
It was the kind of day the looked like a the world
was about to spontaneously combust into a puddle of pain,
It felt like any second the sky would burst into a swarm of rain and thunder and lightning.
I was out hunting rabbits when they attacked.
The first I saw of them was a massive sail, breaking through vast wall of nothingness that looked like that ocean,
But the weather could not stop them, nothing could stop them from taking everything.
And I tried to warn my family, I shouted and ran towards the village yelling “Run, run! The white men with the guns are coming!”
But they couldn’t hear me,
No seemed to hear me.
By the time I got there they were gone.
Not just the intruders but my people too, my friends, and my family.
My old sickly and frail mother was taken, all that remained of her were ripped pieces of the scarf I had made her as a boy.
It had blood on it, and was stuffed in the corner of our home.
I felt the sound of my wife flailing in agony, sharp swords jabbing at her neck.
She wanted nothing more than to protect her home, but she wasn’t able to.
She had no choice but to follow them onto their ship that disappeared back into the vast gray nothing of the ocean.
I found my daughter sleeping in the cot where she stayed.
She looked so pretty and gently snuggled down in the sunlight.
She never woke up.
Shaded Hate
Rosa Parks, arrested in Alabama for not going to the back of the bus.
Black men, hunted in Mississippi, like animals by the KKK.
Little kids in Kentucky, yelled at and berated by their teachers
for using the “white kids’ bathroom.”
The South, a place where they view black people as less than,
Not human.
The South, the place where they devour slavery,
and are sometimes still mourning its departure.
It averages ninety-six degrees in Rhode Island Julys,
The little sweaty kids run on the beaches and get tired,
Everyone goes inside to get a drink from the fountain,
The only black kid in the town follows them in line.
When it’s his turn, he steps up to the fountain and looks behind him.
He’s bombarded with a band of stares, not discrete,
All of them looking directly at him.
A little blond girl wearing braided pigtails and a light blue sundress is next line,
she sees his not white mouth going to the water stream
and walks to the other fountain,
everyone else follows her.
That was the last time they saw the boy in that town.
How much better is it to be directly hated?
Than to forever be passive aggressively attacked,
Actions means more than words.
Elliott's artwork. This painting reflects the Sankofa symbol, the Asante Adinkra symbol used by the Witness Stones Project for its logo. Typically depicting a bird with its head turned backwards and feet facing forward as it carries a precious egg in its mouth, Sankofa is associated with an African proverb, “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi.” Roughly translated, these words mean: “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.”
Author's Statement
Because of the extreme lack of information we were given, I decided that I would direct my poetry more towards slavery itself, and that time period, rather than write a biography of Lettuce. I feel that addressing that time period and that the issues of the part of our history were important to write about. I think I achieved this by but talking about several different topics through several different poems. In my first poem, I address the sheer numbers of slavery. It truly shocked me that there were as many enslaved people as there were. In my second poem, I tried to talk about Europeans taking the Africans as slaves. I wanted to really represent the devestion that went down. And in my final poem, I wanted my readers to think about how there wasn’t really a safe place for black people at that time. This is because the North is almost as bad as the South in their biases and indirect racism. I hope people will remember the three things because they are important for the time we are living in. For me, coming up with things to write about was challenging because I originally wanted to talk solely about Lettuce.
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