Olaudah Equiano, c. 1745 – 31 March 1797
Fighting for Freedom: Black Abolitionists
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez
Most of us are familiar with the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself. We know what a towering figure he was in the battle against slavery and for suffrage. I remember reading this as a child and relating his story to those of my ancestors who had been similarly enslaved. I don't remember being taught much—if anything—in school about other leading figures in the battle for abolition of that noxious scourge— chattel slavery—from the heart of Great Britain. Douglass joined the battle for abolition in about 1841, when
... he first heard Garrison speak at a meeting of the Bristol Anti-Slavery Society. At one of these meetings, Douglass was unexpectedly invited to speak.
After he told his story, he was encouraged to become an anti-slavery lecturer. Douglass was inspired by Garrison and later stated that "no face and form ever impressed me with such sentiments [of the hatred of slavery] as did those of William Lloyd Garrison." Garrison was likewise impressed with Douglass and wrote of him in The Liberator. Several days later, Douglass delivered his first speech at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society's annual convention in Nantucket.
Before Frederick Douglass there were other black men and women who, alongside of whites had taken up the cause, from the heart of one of the European centers that was built on the back of those who died and toiled. That was in England.
One of the most powerful voices came from an African, portrayed above.
Olaudah Equiano (c.1745-1797): The Former Slave, Seaman & Writer
In his biography, he records he was born in what is now Nigeria, kidnapped and sold into slavery as a child. He then endured the middle passage on a slave ship bound for the New World. After a short period of time in Barbados, Equiano was shipped to Virginia and put to work weeding grass and gathering stones....
Equiano knew that one of the most powerful arguments against slavery was his own life story. He published his autobiography in 1789: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. It became a bestseller and was translated into many languages.
The book began with a petition addressed to Parliament and ended with his antislavery letter to the Queen. The tens of thousands of people who read Equiano's book, or heard him speak, started to see slavery through the eyes of a former enslaved African. It was a very important book that made a vital contribution to the abolitionists' cause.
To explore the early days and growth of the movement I suggest you take a tour of
The Abolition Project, where you will find a wealth of material, including teaching and learning tools. Their pages describe those beginnings.
What did a Quaker teacher, a Methodist preacher, a former slave, a former slaver, a ship's doctor, a businessman, an African composer, a Baron, a scholar, an outspoken widow, a lawyer and a wealthy politician have in common? They were just some of the people who campaigned to bring about the abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. For a long time, not many people in Britain knew and understood the evils of the Slave Trade. Those who did, and campaigned against it, faced abuse and occasionally even violence. They eventually formed a fellowship to abolish the trade.
The abolitionists also included many Africans who worked side by side with British abolitionists; they included Africans such as Olaudah Equiano, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and Ignatius Sancho. They formed their own group 'The Sons of Africa', to campaign for abolition. As Reddie says, the ‘work of these African freedom fighters was important because it dispelled many of the misconceptions that white people held about Africans at the time'.
It was not only freed slaves who fought against the trade. Enslaved people also fought for their freedom. You can read more about their struggle in the 'resistance section'. In Britain, the abolition movement gained in strength, despite setbacks and opposition from those who were making a great deal of money from the trade. The movement brought together a wide range of different people (black, white, male and female) and each had something unique to offer the cause.
Ignatius Sancho, c. 1729 – 14 December 1780
Ignatius Sancho was a composer, actor and writer. He was a neighbour and friend of Ottobah Cugoano. Sancho was born in 1729 on a slave ship and spent the first two years of his life enslaved in Grenada. His mother died when he was very young and his father killed himself, rather than become enslaved. When he was two, his owner brought him to England.
He worked as a servant in Greenwich and then for the Duke of Montagu. Sancho taught himself to read and spoke out against the slave trade. He went on to compose music and write poetry and plays. In 1773, Sancho and his wife set up a grocer's shop in Westminster. Sancho was very well known and his shop became a meeting place for some of the most famous writers, artists, actors and politicians of the day. As a financially-independent householder, he became the first black person of African origin to vote in parliamentary elections in Britain (1774 & 1780).
I teach a course on "Women in the Caribbean", for our women's studies program. One of the most important lives and voices we explore to examine the impact of slavery on women is the life and words of Mary Prince.
Mary Prince was born in 1788, to an enslaved family in Bermuda. She was sold to a number of brutal owners and suffered from terrible treatment. Prince ended up in Antigua belonging to the Wood family. in December 1826, she married Daniel James, a former slave who had bought his freedom and worked as a carpenter and cooper.
For this act, she was severely beaten by her master. In 1828, she travelled to England with her owners. She eventually ran away and found freedom, but only in England and she could not return to her husband. Mary campaigned against slavery, working alongside the Anti Slavery Society and taking employment with Thomas Pringle, an abolitionist writer and Secretary to the Anti-Slavery Society.
You can read the full text of her autobiography online. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Related by Herself. With a Supplement by the Editor.
She became the first woman to present a petition to Parliament, on 24 June 1829.
A Petition of Mary Prince or James, commonly called Molly Wood, was presented, and read; setting forth, That the Petitioner was born a Slave in the colony of Bermuda, and is now about forty years of age; That the Petitioner was sold some years go for the sum of 300 dollars to Mr John Wood, by whom the Petitioner was carried to Antigua, where she has since, until lately resided as a domestic slave on his establishment; that in December 1826, the Petitioner who is connected with the Moravian Congregation, was married in a Moravian Chapel at Spring Gardens, in the parish of Saint John's, by the Moravian minister, Mr Ellesen, to a free Black of the name of Daniel James, who is a carpenter at Saint John's, in Antigua, and also a member of the same congregation; that the Petitioner and the said Daniel James have lived together ever since as man and wife; that about ten months ago the Petitioner arrived in London, with her master and mistress, in the capacity of nurse to their child; that the Petitioner's master has offered to send her back in his brig to the West Indies, to work in the yard; that the Petitioner expressed her desire to return to the West Indies, but not as a slave, and has entreated her master to sell her, her freedom on account of her services as a nurse to his child, but he has refused, and still does refuse; further stating the particulars of her case; and praying the House to take the same into their consideration, and to grant such relief as to them may, under the circumstances, appear right. Ordered, That the said Petition do lie upon the Table.
Her narrative is key, for hers is the only surviving voices we have documenting the horrors of enslavement in the Caribbean through the eyes of a woman.
Her description of work in the salt ponds is chilling.
Mary Prince had a number of different owners. One was the owner of saltponds.
I was immediately sent to work in the salt water with the rest of the slaves. I was given a half barrel and a shovel, and had to stand up to my knees in the water, from four o'clock in the morning till nine, when we were given some Indian corn boiled in water.
We were then called again to our tasks, and worked through the heat of the day; the sun flaming upon our heads like fire, and raising salt blisters in those parts which were not completely covered. Our feet and legs, from standing in the salt water for so many hours, soon became full of dreadful boils, which eat down in some cases to the bone.
We came home at twelve; ate our corn soup as fast as we could, and went back to our employment till dark at night. We slept in a long shed, divided into narrow slips. Boards fixed upon stakes driven into the ground, without mat or covering, were our only beds."
Prince was key in inspiring women to become involved in anti-slavery activities. Though women did not have the vote, they could and did organize. Hearing Mary Prince speak wiped away any illusions about what happened to women on those far away plantations.
'Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave'
Capt. Stedman: "[the] first object which presented itself after my landing ... a young female slave, whose only covering was a rag tied round her loins, which, like her skin, was lacerated in several places by the stroke of the whip. The crime which had been committed by this miserable victim of tyranny, was the nonperformance of a task which she was apparently unequal, for which she was sentenced to receive two hundred lashes, and to drag during some months, a chain several yards in length, one end of which was locked around her ancle, and the other was affixed a weight of at least a hundred pounds..."
I find that even today, students have no clear picture of the lives and deaths of enslaved women. The stereotypes of mammies and maids in the home, have no grounding in the reality of how many women did hard field labor. This print is used on the cover of
Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838, by Barbara Bush, another one of the texts we use in the class.
Women's groups in Britain were key in organizing the boycott of slave grown sugar.
As the main food purchasers, women played an important role in organizing the sugar boycotts of the 1790s, after the bill for the abolition of the Slave Trade was defeated in Parliament in 1791. Over 300,000 people joined a boycott of sugar which had been grown on plantations that used the labour of enslaved people.
It is important to understand that the abolition movement had a powerful impact on other efforts for
social change.
The abolitionists set in motion Britain's first, mass social movement. Their rallying themes of liberty and equality influenced reforming campaigns for the right to vote, to form trades unions and the feminist movement. Their techniques of consumer boycotts and petitions are used to this day.
Lest you think the battle to portray this history has been won in England, activists were organizing to keep
Mary Seacole (pioneering nurse and heroine of the Crimean War) and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano in the school curriculum.
Over 40 leading British trade unionists and personalities want the man in charge of schools to rethink his proposals to axe Crimean war heroine Mary Seacole and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano as required study in UK schools. In the open letter to the Education Secretary, the signatories told Michael Gove that it would be 'historically and culturally incorrect to remove them'. Zita Holbourne, who has helped to organize the campaign, says their inclusion is for the benefit of everyone.
Campaigners say they are worried what the removal of these two black figures say about British history. Should it be, they argue, male, pale and stale? In other words, a history of old, white men told with a particular bias in mind. In summer where British multiculturalism was celebrated with Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah having their achievements applauded there should be more figures of history, not fewer.
That campaign was just won.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Johnson Publishing Co. (the publisher of Ebony Jet) Chairman Linda Johnson Rice explains why she supports marriage equality, though her home state of Illinois does not. Ebony: Why I Support Marriage Equality in Jet and Ebony.
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She always told me, "Linda, a person should be able to wear anything they want to wear. This is your plumage. This is how you feel about yourself." To my mother, even the worst kinds of unequal and unfair treatment shouldn't keep people from expressing their true colors.
Her words are still with me today. They were running through my mind when JET, one of Johnson Publishing Company's, flagship magazines, first featured a same-sex couple in August 2011, then again in March and December of 2012. When the December magazine hit newsstands, I received dozens of calls wondering whether our readers or advertisers protested. You know what? Not one did. They celebrated right along with us because they were celebrating fairness and equality.
Yet if the couples we featured walked into an Illinois courthouse and tried to get a marriage license, they'd be turned away. The same goes for couples in dozens of states. For millions of committed and loving same-sex couples, including African-American couples, fair and equal access to marriage is still a dream. For these couples, they can't show their true colors in the way my mother believed was absolutely essential.
Fuse/Thinkstock
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It used to be about Internet access. Now it's access to top jobs and capital to create diverse content. The Root: The Second Wave of the Digital Divide.
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Today, in early 2013, American media and entertainment face a curious condition. On the one hand, African Americans and other people of color are flocking to movies, Twitter, television and blogs in ever-greater numbers and percentages. We are huge consumers of media.
On the other hand, the Federal Communications Commission and the Hollywood trade and professional organizations report that the percentages of people of color (and in many categories, women) in senior positions are stagnant or actually declining. Minority ownership is also on the way down. With black ownership and executive ranks dropping, not surprisingly, black-themed shows are falling as well.
In other words: black consumption up, black control declining. The scissors effect. Viewership and media use cutting up, significant media participation cutting down. And equally curious, just as we return a black man to the highest political office in the land, we get fewer black men and women in the "C" suites of American media conglomerates. Right at the same moment that economists and other social scientists agree that media, entertainment and communication are becoming absolutely central to American life, shaping the news and information we get (or don't get) and defining the ways we define ourselves as a nation and a people, the capacities to tell new, diverse stories is becoming more peripheral. Communication has become more central, people of color more peripheral.
I came to this baleful conclusion as I prepared last November to deliver the annual W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard University. Experts from industry, professors from MIT and Harvard University and smart young students came together over three days and talked seriously about these issues. We asked the question, "If W.E.B. Du Bois were with us today, what would he say about the impact of the 'information revolution' on communities of color in the United States?"
Thinkstock Images
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The war on drugs has long been derided for its problems, and Patricia J. Williams writes in the Nation that children are its latest victims. The Nation: The War on Drugs Is a War on Kids.
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On a warm spring afternoon at American colleges, the intoxicating aroma of surely medicinal marijuana will be floating like a soft caress in the breeze, and hard-working students will be stocking up on amphetamine cocktails to sharpen their overstressed young minds for the coming exams.
On a warm spring afternoon at the nation’s poorer public schools, children (and I mean children) will endure a daily police presence, including drug-sniffing dogs, full-body pat-downs, searches of backpacks and lockers, stops in the hallways—all in the name of searching for contraband.
Drugs are ubiquitous in this country, and yet we know that some people have the privilege of doctor-prescribed intoxication, while others are thrown into dungeons for seeking the same relief. We know that the war on drugs is heavily inflected with Jim Crow–ism, economic inequality, gun culture myths and political opportunism. We know that Adam Lanza’s unfortunate mother was not the sole Newtown resident stocking up on military-style weapons; plenty of suburban gun owners keep similar weapons to protect their well-kept homes against darkly imagined, drug-addled marauders from places like Bridgeport. We divert resources from mental health or rehab, and allocate millions to militarize schools.
The result: the war on drugs has metastasized into a war on children.
Best publicized, perhaps, is the plight of young people in Meridian, Mississippi, where a federal investigation is probing into why children as young as 10 are routinely taken to jail for wearing the wrong color socks or flatulence in class. Bob Herbert wrote of a situation in Florida in 2007, where police found themselves faced with the great challenge of placing a 6-year-old girl in handcuffs too big for her wrists. The child was being arrested for throwing a tantrum in her kindergarten class; the solution was to cuff her biceps, after which she was dragged to the precinct house for mug shots and charged with a felony and two misdemeanors.
In New York City, kids who make trouble are routinely removed from school altogether and placed in suspension centers, holding cells or juvenile detention lockups. In the old days, you got a detention slip for scrawling your initials on a desk. Now a student can be given a summons by a school police officer. If the kid loses it or doesn’t want to tell his parents, it becomes a warrant—and a basis for arrest.
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How gyms for at-risk youths change lives through physical fitness. Black Voices: InnerCity Weightlifting.
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You'd never guess there's a gym on the second floor of the nondescript building Boston's historic Dorchester neighborhood -- and that's exactly how everyone involved plans to keep it. Driving to the address -- kept private for security reasons -- I'm not even sure I am in the right place, and, already 10 minutes late, rush up the stairs.
InnerCity Weightlifting's equipment is in decent shape. A few well-worn mats lie under squat machines, emblazoned with fading Northeastern University logos. The walls are nearly bare, except for workout steps written on a whiteboard, and a makeshift neon green holiday card given to the staff minutes before my arrival.
The young men who wrote and decorated the card are some of Boston's most likely to perpetrate acts of gang violence.
Just 1 percent of Bostonians aged 24 or younger are responsible for over half of the city's murders and more than 70 percent of the gun violence, according to Harvard University research. Among the young people arrested in the city, 44 percent are rearrested less than a year after their release.
"When they're in the gym, they'll have a conversation with you, smile," said Jon Feinman, executive director and founder of InnerCity Weightlifiting, or ICW. "But outside the gym, they have no positive outlets."
Josh Feinman, far left, Jon Feinman, far right and a group of Inner City Weightlifting students and trainers pose with HuffPost's Sarah Klein in December 2012.
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The Senegalese rapper has become one of the world's leading campaigners against female genital mutilation. The Guardian: Sister Fa: African rapper with a cause.
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A few years ago Sister Fa played a gig with Nile Rodgers at the UN general assembly. It must have been funny watching them try to rouse the delegates, skanking their way through the title track of her 2009 album Sarabah: Tales from the Flipside of Paradise. It's hard work being a rapper with a cause. You wonder if Sister Fa (real name Fatou Diatta) ever wakes up and thinks, you know, I don't really fancy talking about female genital mutilation today …
But music and politics go hand in hand if you're from Senegal. Baaba Maal is a UN youth emissary. Youssou N'Dour ran for president last year. Diatta, who moved to Berlin in 2006, is one of the world's leading campaigners against female genital mutilation. She's the subject of a new film, Sarabah, which documents her recent tour Education Sans Excision (Education without Cutting). And despite her subject matter, she's a lot of fun.
Diatta was born in Dakar in 1982. She made her first demo tape as a teenager and penetrated the city's male-dominated rap scene to work alongside politicised groups such as Positive Black Soul and Daara J. Her father, a teacher, "wanted a diplomat daughter" she says. "He was very sceptical about my choice until he listened to my tapes and decided they were formidable". (French is her second language, after her native Wolof.) "Even when I'd had some success I was expected to behave like other girls. You know, 'So what if you have a festival to play at – it's your turn to cook this weekend.' "
Fatou Diatta, aka Sister Fa, photographed in London for the Observer New Review by Sophia Evans.
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Is Ethiopia’s new leadership is practicing hero-worship? Economist: Long live the king.
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DURING his two decades running Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi almost single-handedly engineered its rise from lost cause to model pupil. Even his enemies admit he was both popular and competent. Often working around the clock, he could make complex policy choices and then explain them to ordinary people. He planned meticulously for everything—from road building to oppressing the opposition—except, that is, for his own demise.
It came six months ago on August 20th, following illness at the age of 57, and left the state reeling. Meles, as he is known, had grabbed so much power that many feared his death would spark political chaos and an economic downturn. He alone had the trust of the soldiers, the financiers, the Ethiopian people and the West.
But the transition to a new prime minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, has gone smoothly. The streets of Addis Ababa, the capital, have seen no unrest and the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) suffered no defections. A few audible grumbles were swiftly silenced. Rioting Muslims were beaten back. A minister was fired as were four regional officials in events that may or may not be related to the leadership change. Jockeying among the elite has been kept behind firmly closed doors. In public it espouses business as usual.
Instead of chaos, an eerie calm now hangs over the country. The old guard that once surrounded Meles, who hailed from the northern region of Tigray, remains in power. Winners of a 1980s civil war that toppled the dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Tigrayans have held on to top security jobs. Meles’s widow, Azeb Mesfin, who for a few months refused to move out of the prime ministerial palace, still controls a state-affiliated conglomerate, EFFORT. The number of Tigrayans in the cabinet has shrunk but key posts remain in the hands of ageing loyalists, many of whom fought alongside Meles. Talk of “generational change” over the past few years was seemingly a charade.
One of the few exceptions is the relatively young prime minister, Mr Desalegn. The 47-year-old is an articulate and experienced administrator as well as a former water engineer who studied in Finland. But he lacks his predecessor’s charisma and shrewd policy instincts. Though a former deputy prime minister (and former foreign minister) he is not an insider. He is a Protestant in a predominantly Orthodox Christian nation (his first name means “the power of Mary”). He is also an ethnic Wolaytan in a government dominated by Tigrayans. Meles, his mentor, may have chosen him for that reason, either to weaken ethnic divisions or perhaps to guarantee that ultimate power remains with his northern brothers-in-arms.
Economist
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In 2003, Andrew Rugasira had a vision of empowering farmers in his native Uganda by enabling them to produce and sell coffee direct to British supermarkets. So has his idea worked? The Guardian: Andrew Rugasira: can coffee transform lives in Africa?
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How can you tell when a story has ended? If it is an African story, such as the one Andrew Rugasira has to tell, closure is never likely to be satisfying or clear cut. Beginnings are more straightforward.
Rugasira's once-upon-a-time moment came nearly a decade ago, when he had a vision to start a coffee company in his native Uganda. He would, he determined, become the first African to collect and roast and market and sell quality coffee direct to British supermarkets. And, by that example, he would demonstrate his certain beliefs: that it was trade, not aid, that transformed communities and that change was never an imposed solution, but a positive choice made by those whose lives would be most affected by it.
The place Rugasira chose to base his coffee company, to start that story, the Rwenzori mountains – the Mountains of the Moon – looked a lot like a blank page. The lives of the 14,000 subsistence farmers who lived high above the town of Kasese, right on the war-torn border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, had never been the stuff of written record. Their narratives were of survival rather than progress. Ambition meant getting through the next day and the next week, in thrall as they were to the suddenly shifting front lines of brutal cross-border conflict and the vagaries of farming a little scrap of land without decent tools or any technology, without transport or access to market, barely growing enough to feed themselves and their children, waiting for agents or middlemen to pass through and buy some coffee beans, maybe soon, maybe not, and never for a price that seemed fair.
Rugasira believed he could help to give the lives of those 14,000 farmers and their families a different shape. One that could take in measurable progress; that could see skills learned and retained in the community; that could reward consistent effort, introduce saving and planning and time horizons that included the real prospect of better lives for children and for grandchildren. The first step in rewriting those life stories would be to communicate an idea, Rugasira believed. So, aged 34, and after a career that had taken in event planning and business consultancy in Kampala, he went up into the mountains and started telling the farmers what he had in mind.
Andrew Rugasira speaking to farmers in Kasese: 'Young African entrepreneurs are told Africa is open for business. But it is still business on somebody else’s terms.'
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Along the ancient beaches of San Francisco Bay, along tributaries flowing into its expanse, ancient peoples cremated and/ or buried the remains of their loved ones. For weeks and months afterwards, the ancient peoples would feast on shellfish and honor the dead by tossing the shells, along with personal trinkets and mementos, onto the grave sites; creating in some cases, mounds several hundreds of feet high.
These Shell Mounds have been known for over a century; yet their fact has mostly remained hidden. Developers, with the help of local academics and politicians, labelled the burial sites, "middens", or trash sites; leveled the mounds, used them for fill and ignored, in fact, forgot the peoples who for thousands of years resided along the ancient shores of the San Francisco Bay.
The descendants of those ancient peoples, the Ohlone, were illegally removed in 1927 from the "Register of Tribes" by L.A. Dorirngton, a corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs official.
This is how a people who flourished for an eon are "revised" out of history.
The "official" end of the Civil War was over a century ago; yet the fight continues. Historical revisionism is rampant in the academy, from edicts by local school boards to the Governor Manse. News personalities give succor to these revisions; and civic exaltations are bestowed on the traitors who fought to keep slavery intact.
We cannot allow these "developers of a revised history" to bulldoze over the mountains of truth, to level history and haul it away; to use as fill so as to obscure the deep void of their soulless greed.
The Fifth Fact
For Ben’s project he must research five facts
about his African-American hero and write them
on posterboard. He chooses Harriet Tubman,
whose five facts are: Her father’s name was Ben.
Her mother’s name was Old Rit. She was born
in 1820 and died in 1913. She was born in Maryland
and died in New York. Ben asks for advice
about his fifth fact and I suggest: She led more than
300 people to freedom. Ben sighs the way he does
now and says, Everyone knows that, Mom.
So I try to remember the book we read yesterday,
search for the perfect fact, the one that will match
his four facts and satisfy his almost-seven mind.
Remember, I ask, she was a spy for the North
during the Civil War? It’s a hit! He writes it:
Harriet Tubman was a spy for the north during
the civil war. It was a war between the north
which is where the slaves were trying to get
and the south which is where they were.
Before the war, Abraham Lincoln signed a form
that said All the slaves everywhere are free!
which is one of the reasons they were fighting.
On summer mornings, Lincoln rode his horse
to work down the Seventh Street Turnpike
close to my new home. Down Georgia Avenue
past The Hunger Stopper and Pay Day 2 Go and liquor
stores and liquor stores. Past Cluck-U-Chicken
and Fish in the ’Hood and Top Twins Faze II
Authentic African Cuisine and the newish Metro station
and all those possibilities gleaming in developers’ eyes.
There goes Lincoln’s horse down Georgia Avenue
from the Soldier’s Home to the White House –
much cooler up here in the country, in the neighborhood,
at the hospital. And there’s Walt Whitman, the sworn poet
of every dauntless rebel the world over, hanging around
his street corner every morning to bow to the president
at Thomas Circle by the homeless guys. It’s 100 years now
since any president summered at the Soldier’s Home.
But I was born only 50 years after Harriet Tubman died,
all these centuries we drag into the next century and the next.
And sometimes I see the ghosts of Harriet Tubman
and Lincoln and Uncle Walt and the true stories
and sometimes our own despair like Washington’s
summer malaria, her 40 war hospitals, Whitman moving
from bed to bed, stroking the hair of so many dying boys.
Head north up Georgia Avenue now to our own
soldiers’ home – Walter Reed – where the boys and now
girls too mourn the ghosts of their own legs and arms
and capacity for love. Where is their sworn poet?
I write here in my new neighborhood, the city old
and new around me, Harriet Tubman born so close,
all these heroes under our feet.
-- Sarah Browning
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