Ethnic Memory

CATEGORY

life

1. I feel your pain
2. smell the swelter that rises on a
3. afternoon in a wooden slave shack
4. hear chains in the metal sweat box,
5. a human bake oven,
6. fueled by the intense heat of a day’s hatred
7. shiny backs stinging with salt, blood, and earth under a relentless southern sun
8. as Miss Lillie fans herself in a shaded knoll.
9. Your back ached,
10. deformed by subservience,
11. shoulders sloped like some fourth-class non-human,
12. as you cut the cane that kept Miss Lillie.
13. This was wretchedness   
14. locusts whistling in merciless highs
15. and the humidity of rivers kissing your pores
16. 200-years, not long
17. slavery’s undefinable sadness still exists
18. What would I have been?
19. field hand
20. breeder
21. cook
22. mistress
23. wet nurse
24. rebel
25. house servant
26. runaway who was hung or punished
27. Suppose I was born with a handicap or blind, incapable of physical servitude
28. unfit for sale
29. Would they drown me as a child?
30. That may have been a blessing.