I was honored to be asked to share this poem at the Racial
Healing and Action Service at Second Baptist Church here in Kalamazoo a couple
of weeks ago. The service represented the beginning of a collaboration of sorts
between ISAAC and ERACCE to work together in dismantling racism.
I believe poetry can play a part in social change and is at
its best when it does so.
I believe that for white folks to be able to do anti-racist work
effectively over the long haul, we need to be aware of how racism hands us all
kinds of privileges on the backs of people of color and we also need to be aware of how, at the same time, racism, that
place of racial superiority, robs us of
our humanity. This is my attempt to address that belief in a personal and
poetic way. (What follows is a version revised post that reading in June)
Used to Not Seeing (or Everyone's Mississippi Delta)
Only
low beams lit the road
as
my parents drove Highway 61
south
out of Memphis in route
to
Cleveland, Mississippi. We passed
the
Devils Crossroads in Clarksdale,
there
wasn't a marker, we were blind
to
more than the Blues. I barely saw
the
civil rights marches, only learned later
it's
not a delta at all, no mouth
until
further south. It's all alluvial
plain,
this place of my birth. Grandpa
disembarked
in Baltimore's harbor
in
1921, moved south when
cotton
was still king, but
he
never planted. Instead he owned
a
five and dime on Main Street
in
Cleveland. I was proud
to
help clerk. Sometimes he'd aim
squinted
eyes my way, talk the Italian
he
taught me, it translates: “follow that N____r."
"It's
the longest stretch of straight road
east
of the Great River," my Dad
always
said as he drove with low beams
to
avoid blinding the oncoming
drivers
like us. We got used to not seeing
anything
beyond the cotton
by
the side of the road.
Even
amid fields of outcries
at
the murders in the streets,
in
the parks, and the churches,
we
whites miss the lay of the land
with
our questions:
Was the officer following policy?
Was the shooter mentally ill?
Isn't the KKK really to blame?
The
fertile flatness freed
by
the floods of the Mississippi
and
Yazoo was stolen
and
exploited--Indian removal, slavery,
sharecropping,
Jim Crow de jure
and
now de facto. History's alive and
denied.
But with my heart set
on
high beams, I can see how
the
land of my birth really lies,
how
I could become Darren Wilson,
even
Dylann Roof, if I don't feel
my
conscription. If I don't feel
the
white of my finger placed
every
day on the trigger of the gun
I
was given in my cradle, then
there's
no chance of turning gun
into
ploughshare, there's only
this
senseless soldiering on.
Please let me know if you share this poem..
