© 18 July 2011, the Griot Poet
Did I miss the memo?
When we were brought to Plymouth Rock,
it wasn’t a voluntary vacation…down
in the bowels of overstocked ships,
sleeping in bile, human feces and piss,
separated through Goree Island gates
from our continent, languages and tribes
fulfilling Deuteronomy prophesies of
slavery in “a nation of fierce countenance,
which does not respect the elderly nor
show favor to the young.” 1
Did I miss the memo?
"Your sons and your daughters [shall be]
given to another people, and your eyes shall
look and fail [with longing] for them
all day long; and [there shall be] no strength
in your hand.” 2 Brought to a foreign land,
scarred by whips physically; eyes cast downward
mentally; “Willie Lynch” myth beaten us down spiritually…
Did I miss the memo?
When Harriet Tubman conducted the
Underground Railroad – at gunpoint – to those
that would decide to first blow their joint,
then change their minds and side with their
previous “Simon Legree” plantation masters,
the equivalent of going back across
seas of reeds to Egypt, bondage and slavery?
Did I miss the memo?
A Civil War was fought not for state’s
rights, but the right of
“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”
by original humanity deftly defined
constitutionally as three-fifths like
livestock to increase the stocks of landowners
and founding fathers fathering
Sally Hemming’s mulatto children.
Did I miss the memo?
“Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will.”
“Where justice is denied, where poverty
is enforced, where ignorance prevails,
and where any one class is made to feel
that society is an organized conspiracy
to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither
persons nor property will be safe,”
wise quotes by Frederick Douglass,
playing out over decades in mind-programming
entertainment minstrelsy shows.
Did I miss the memo?
Medgar Evers murdered by Byron de La Beckwith:
one lone nut theory I can get with,
but Malcolm X and Martin Luther King
were not too long after their 1st
and only face-to-face meeting
(after public animosity) assassinated by
actors that should not have had access to them.
Did I miss the memo?
When we were lampooned in minstrel shows,
burnt cork face, step-n-fetch blows to
our woman and manhood, birth of Jim Crow
by Thomas D. Rice to Edgar Rice Burroughs’
not-so-subtle statement that
English Lord Greystoke-Tarzan is needed
to tame the African jungle.
The modern context is
Bankrupt Entertainment Television, birthed
when Rick James couldn’t play his videos
on MTV, now VIACOM owns the whole shebang;
we’re mentally/spiritually being programmed
to desire those things we once fought
against as labels of our libel.
“My people perish for a lack of knowledge.” 3
Did I miss the memo?
1. Deuteronomy 28:50
2. Ibid, 28:32
3. Hosea 4:6
