Outside the Mark Twain National Forest,
a cemetery, small and tidy, African-American owned,
and inside the park down a rough unmarked path,
the town that was before it wasn’t – a freeman’s space,
safe from the war racism constantly creates.
In the capitol, not thirty miles away, only recently
a sign now shows where the African-Americans were buried,
unaccounted for, hidden in a corner of a large graveyard,
unnoticed, undignified, unmarked, invisible –
African-Americans not allowed tombstones.
And let’s never forget the destruction of The Foot,
the home to many not able by law and culture
to live freely even in 1960, torn down to build – what?
A large field? An empty park? Huge vacant spaces?
Why is it white citizens cannot deal with a successful
and thriving African-American business community?
If we go another thirty miles over, we arrive in Columbia,
a lynching – there were more in Missouri, many more –
and this one was no different – James Scott was lynched
as more than a thousand white bystanders looked on –
and he was innocent – the real rapist discovered after the fact –
too late again – and no whites paid for the crime –
do we not owe Scott’s family reparations? A sincere apology?
We do – as we do the town destroyed decaying in the forest,
the members of The Foot dislocated for running a business
and not being white: the list goes on and on and on.
Reparations for an end to racism, Jim Crow laws,
the terrifying damage done because of the color of a skin.
| Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively. |
Whatever our civil society might do (or fail to do) by way of “making reparations” (Paris, France, now displays hundreds of stone and metal signs acknowledging French participation of Nazi internment of Jews during its occupation of France in the 1940s), each individual one of us can at least “repair our heart” (or fail to do so).
ReplyDeleteMichael, I myself find your call to do something irresistible.
Thank you.
ReplyDeleteOur state, too, had its history of lynchings. In old Eau Gallie where I grew up there was a "Lynching Tree Lane" and in my childhood the tree was still there. Of course, like all other signs of the realities of racism, it has been erased, removed, covered up. It is now "Shady Oak Lane" or some such white-bread drivel, and sports condos. No, the only relics allowed to remain are the dignified statues of vile racists and traitorous revolutionaries. THOSE we can let stand, just honoring our proud war dead, right? Lost are the stories of the thousands who stayed loyal to the Union, all that is left is the sugar-coated pseudo-history of the genteel South, poor victims trodden down by the brutal North. All false.
ReplyDelete