I can never banish the image
of you, manacled, between two psychopaths
being marched to a defenseless
beating
that will leave your brain injured.
Try as I might, your lonely walk,
blind justice not even stumbling
behind
or anywhere in the neighborhood
will forever haunt me:
as you face two, three, four,
a dozen
soulless creatures
who enjoy beating you
to the ground; when your hands are not only tied,
but, demonstrating their true courage,
fastened behind your back.
Of what are we reminded:
the enslaved men worked to death
in seven years
their heads bashed in
when they could no longer work
their bodies, their bones, turning up
white with time; and directly underneath
where they fell: Where, but Wall Street.
Or the plantations
and hundreds of years of this.
Beatings. Beatings to death.
Beatings to incontinence. Beatings to brain damage.
A friend tells me she never uses the word
“picnic” for this very reason: it reminds her that the mothers
and fathers and brothers and children of the psychopaths
came to the beating, hanging, quartering
eviscerations or whatever else could be imagined
to entertain at a lynching
and brought baskets of food
to enjoy with the show. The torture of the Pickaninny
the word that to her sounds too much like “picnic”
and was often used for the victim
whatever his or her age
was the eagerly anticipated attraction.
If they were lucky, these picnicking families, they
got to take home trophies. Trophies sometimes seared from
the flames. Fingers, ears, toes.
A foot. Remember how DuBois saw those human feet in a
butcher’s window in downtown Atlanta?
Brother, Sister, Children,
you are not crazy to feel crazy
here.
Understanding this, may you realize
a greater exterior calm
and an unshakeable inner peace. We have lived within the soul
of brutality from the beginning of our connections here.
The harshness of knowing our journey
could easily steal our joy. To learn not to extend
our disaster!
That is what teachers
are for.