WHAT JUNETEENTH MEANS (TO ME)

The White Iris Beautifies Me

Not the white of hard-won cotton,
or of pitiless snow—

I’ve found a whiteness
that gives me its glory;

it blooms
in Master Bellemare’s garden,

and though it is, by all counts,
untouchable,

quiet as it’s kept, I’ve carried it
into the shabbiest of cabins,

worn it as I witnessed
the slave-breaker,

the hanging tree;
in dream-snatches

it blesses me, and I become
more than a brand,

a pretty chess piece:
at the mistress’ bell,

always prudent and afraid,
wily and afraid—

And when the day comes,
my rescuing flower’s name

will become my daughter’s;
a freeborn woman,

I swear,
she will never be shoeless

in January snow.
bold Iris,

she will never fear sale
or the bottom of the sea.

Litany at the Tomb of Frederick Douglass

Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester, New York
November 7, 2008

This is the longitude and latitude of the impossible;
this is the epicenter of the unthinkable;
this is the crossroads of the unimaginable:
the tomb of Frederick Douglass, three days after the election.

This is a world spinning away from the gravity of centuries,
where the grave of a fugitive slave has become an altar.
This is the tomb of a man born as chattel, who taught himself to read in secret,
scraping the letters in his name with chalk on wood; now on the anvil-flat stone
a campaign button fills the O in Douglass. The button says: Obama.
This is the tomb of a man in chains, who left his fingerprints
on the slavebreaker’s throat so the whip would never carve his back again;
now a labor union T-shirt drapes itself across the stone, offered up
by a nurse, a janitor, a bus driver. A sticker on the sleeve says: I Voted Today.
This is the tomb of a man who rolled his call to arms off the press,
peering through spectacles at the abolitionist headline; now a newspaper
spreads above his dates of birth and death. The headline says: Obama Wins.

This is the stillness at the heart of the storm that began in the body
of the first slave, dragged aboard the first ship to America. Yellow leaves
descend in waves, and the newspaper flutters on the tomb, like the sails
Douglass saw in the bay, like the eyes of a slave closing to watch himself
escape with the tide. Believers in spirits would see the pages trembling
on the stone and say: look how the slave boy teaches himself to read.
I say a prayer, the first in years: that here we bury what we call
the impossible, the unthinkable, the unimaginable, now and forever. Amen.

this I know for sure

We are the breath the skin the muscles the heart the hands the unmeasurable bones whispering across the Atlantic Ocean.

We are the bellies of Middle Passage ships.

We are blue door of no return on Goree Island.

We are the mornings that broke with our living and our dead fastened together. We are the eyes bearing witness to sharks following our human cargo waiting for the feast of dead or sick bodies tossed overboard. We are the shadows in the back of the eyes of daughters throwing themselves and their babies overboard. Our blood is the red that stole the blue of the ocean.

We are scattered bones rising up from the bottom of the Atlantic revealing a pathway marking the route. We are the fruit of those bone trees planted deep in the fertile Atlantic.

We carry a DNA of survival, strength, extraordinary will.

From forced migration to slave market we are all the links of all the chains of the past and future. Binding spiritual links from the bones in the Atlantic to the bones of slaves in a place like Galveston Texas where ancestral whispers became the wind … caressing tired bones with a timeless spirit of rebirth and love.

The wind heard first. whispering from the trees, from the ground beneath their feet, whispering…

Freedom

Freedom

Freedom

the wind knew and rattled tiny bones beneath the feathers of birds. the wind knew. giving voice to the rain falling creating fertile freedom ground. the wind whispered to every butterfly, every insect pollinating from flower to flower.

Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.

eagles stopped in midair to listen to the wind’s song … Freedom came today. Freedom came today … and because our people are a chosen people we could understand the dance of the trees, the tremble of the water.

hoes stopped striking. hands stopped picking. feet stood still.

a mighty storm named freedom rained over them soaked them clean.

mothers kissed hope into the air above babies’ heads. grandmothers and grandfathers stretched prayers into a sky that would not bend. men asked where will this freedom live. children asked what does this freedom taste like. what does this freedom smell like. what does this freedom sound like. what does this freedom look like. mama, tell me what this freedom gonna feel like.

we screamed a jubilee into the clouds. we shed the skin of a slave. we shed the rags of a slave into the river. our freedom skin was a shining brand new nakedness that outshined the sun. we be clothed in freedoms of gold.

on juneteenth dead bones came alive and flew on the wings of sankofa birds all the way back to the river where blood is born … all the way back to the womb that never forgets.

we are the juneteenth resurrection … we are the ancient prayers answered. we are the cup overflowing inviting generations to this feast of freedom.

Juneteenth

With her shiny black-patent sandals
and her Japanese parasol,
and wearing a brand-new Juneteenth dress,
Johnnie’s a living doll.

Juneteenth: when the Negro telegraph
reached the last sad slave…
It’s Boley’s second Easter;
the whole town a picnic.

Children run from one church booth
to the next, buying sandwiches,
sweet-potato pie, peach cobbler
with warm, sweaty pennies.

The flame of celebration
ripples like glad news
from one mouth to the next.

These people slipped away
in the middle of the night;
arrived in Boley with nothing
but the rags on their backs.
These carpenters, contractors, cobblers.
These bankers and telephone operators.
These teachers, preachers, and clerks.
These merchants and restaurateurs.
These peanut-growing farmers,
these wives halting the advance of cotton
with flowers in front of their homes.

Johnnie’s father tugs one of her plaits,
head-shaking over politics
with the newspaper editor,
who lost his other ear
getting away from a lynch-mob.