Ida B. Wells Testifies in the Ghost Town

1995–201113 in the rubble of the Ida B. Wells Homes

 

this is not the white city,

though perhaps it is a city

for whites. these are the Southern

Horrors: abandoned streets, boarded

buildings, empty tumbleweed lots.

you can hear Lake Michigan

in a coke can. this barren land

where children once moved

from these blocks to prison

auctioned.

 

blocks never been safe.

 

this a Red Record of displacement.

what happens when culture amnesias.

I sat on a train seventy years before

Montgomery. what’ll this land be named:

scrapped plan for poor & Black, will it

be Lynchburg or Prisonton, New Laborville

the white city, again. these homes

had my name on them. now

 

I stand on rhodes near bridgeport,

astonished. prime land, my body, real

estate for the taking. dismembered

by hands the shade of ghost. my body

disfigured, again, this is what happens

when culture amnesias, when cities cancel

its promise, call it renewal. what happens

to those blue light monitored & standardized

test tracked, those forced into obsolete industrial

training, railroaded into new slave labor, orange

suited & disenfranchised, what do we do

with the forgotten, those left            out

to

hang

like ghosts.

I witness until the world does

until ghost stories are documented

& irrefutable, until America is haunted

by the spirits of those it says never happened.