Black Scribes Matter: A Theme Song
*Inspired by Ava Duvernay’s “13th”, Common’s “Letter To The Free”, Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad”, and Lilah.*
I am describing a lynching. No, perhaps not. I am more so describing a linchpin, a powder keg ascribed to the moment at hand. Better yet, I am describing a protest. Or, if I am correct, directing a revolution. Maybe I am defining a burning. This would be convenient, the crackling of a riot. The embers whistling the tunes of a sit-in. Yes, we are coordinating a dance of boycott, of bullhorns and words with the trajectory of Bull Connor firehoses, Rick Perry Texas sentencing. What we are witnessing is the continuation of Black masses institutionalized, bartered, battered, chopped, screwed, and sold to the highest bidder. Pickaninnies plucked from the tallest of roots.
Yes, I am feeling extra Black tonight. Could be the moon, the month, the martyrdom. Excuse me, if I ramble too long, bang too hard on the table, yell too Black-ly, choke too loud at the poisons simmering in public offices and debate orifices. I am still — coaxing peace out of a Colt .45, hanging shotguns over dormitories, walking high wires on mandatory sentencing law structures, grinding my teeth and genitals on parole mandates and broken Reagan politics. Policies prevailing, all hail Giuliani, pistol-packing problematic police terrorism, the shit still surviving in every NYCHA building violating housing codes. This is democracy, now.
I am in the middle of death, Fred Hampton in a spiral, Huey in a tail spin, Stokely, Assata, crosses burning at the feet. Still here wiping the debris of hedge fund fallen from the bloody leaves, thickened with levee blood. Have you seen the news? They will murder you for being for free, for breathing this air, for beating this, beating them with hands and bare knuckles, chest out, soul tattered and stuffed in the solitary confinement of a book bag. I will pray for him and his mama, a mama who too prayed and died when he died because they will break you, they will brake you. Did you hear me? I said the heat, it will bake you alive, take you dead, down, for being Mulatto, or part Brown and ready to die, too much or half of anything not deemed constitutional.
Have you ever been told what you are not? Follow the systems, follow the stench of the Crow, the masses crowded under the guise of a mast, a docking port by the same river they dumped the teas in, the same waters they pooled bins of bodies pinned to wood hardened by slave lip and limb. You are too dark to eat, too light to birth here, too hot to be heathen, too cold to be saved, you need to be saved from something, darkie. Let me steal your back, your Black from you. Let me see those whips you speak of. Where are these chains you glamorize? Show me the hood of your casket, sow me your seedlings, your saps, your young and fertile. Give me your super-predators. Till the land until the traces of Till are trilled out, distilled out of the waters you drink, they still gotta drink the water in Flint. Where are the saviors in these books you prophecy over? Show me your zealots, bring me your stained glass still shattered, dripping with patriot and noose hanging portraits.
Peace comes in a brown bag nigga, and where are all the Niggers now? They are all voting or looting or fighting or progressing or dieting or loc’ing or jailing or dying or braving or praying or burying or recording death or being deadly or running or hands up or I didn’t do nothing wrong. The Niggers have died and went to another place with unending fried chicken and Soul Train lines and crack bushels and poverty shacks and shelters filled with fire and pregnant welfare card users dipping uterus in the shit you are so scared of us you have painted us, placated fears. The Niggers are buying guns, picking up pens, upending stories in media conclaves, contrived and continued by the disproportionate few who still believe a Trump is an accident. He was born, not of a contrition of the heart, but of the merits of the earth embued with the same cotton tweed brown fingers pricked and picked the gin for. Priced the plots of land, now held with gang signs and paper maché wire; we are the ancestors of the Klan, apparitions of the lost ankles and scarred wrists, wrinkled by time and overseer lash.
With that, the pen becomes mightier than sword, holier than verse; the ink the yoke for the oppressor. We here, burning trees looking for truths, flinging pilots out of clouds for answers, draining eyes pulling Philandos out of thin cars, Garners out of chokeholds. Not a man does a hoodie make, they may say in the face of a trigger, or a tazer. In favor of, in lieu of, in light of, in spite of…all of the things “of” can be used for when sacrificing flesh for flash, film for an Oscar Grant. The America here lies on its flag, herein lies the heinous, list the sorrows: Trail of Tears, the railroad, the jail system, War on Drugs, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Bay of Pigs, Rodney King, Dr. King, COINTELPRO. Shuffling the sufferers via Spotify satellite and a Sallie Mae loan, you can charge a man minimum wage in a cell to make a phone call home with the advancement for a colored people. So, with that, we stuff socks with Magnums, for sex or shells, with buckets of pens still open, standing on stilts, still palming the Blackness in our hands, to scribe the lives in their totality. The magic of a people enveloped in the historic shards of No. 2s. We write. We scribe. We survive. Still.
The end.
