Saturday Poetry: What Did Thou Do to Thy Master?

Old Dead Tunneler:

Look at thee

A young man, strong and black

A musket tore your back.

Three hundred guilders lost

Did Master rue the cost

of his African

so strong and black?

Old Dead Tunnelers (chorus):

It is true

that thee are with us now

Thy Master’s guilders gone

No doubt he mourns the loss

but killed you nonetheless.

One of his best.

What did thou do, my son

to thy Master?

Old Dead Tunneler:

Look at thee

Rings burned around thy neck

Eyes plucked from thy face

The Pearls of Africa

are missing from thy case.

Thy master stole thou eyes?

No others tell thou that

they still are used

to find your way, to this our home?

Young slave made blind.

Old Dead Tunnelers (chorus):

Thy Master’s guilders gone.

No doubt he mourns the loss

but killed you nonetheless.

One of his best.

What did thou do, my son

to thy Master?

Look at thee

Africans strong and black.

(Look at me

African strong and black.)

Thy Master’s loss our gain

Thy mutilation is their shame.

Three hundred guilders thrown away

is not the measure of

Two warriors in our midst.

Returned to the Mother’s land

because of what thee did

to thy Master.

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part V

Lately I've been thinking a lot about American slavery.  Not quite sure why, perhaps it's where the mind goes when reading or listening to commentary about the 1963 March on Washington.  Perhaps it is, as I alluded to before, being in Myrtle Beach and Pawley's Island in the summer.  The other day a friend related a story about the lives of her forefathers.  She is a Yankee, a tribe that I hadn't encountered with any frequency until I moved here.  Her family has probably been here as long as Europeans settled these lands.  In her youth she read a history of her ancestors' town (located in the lobster's tail of Massachusetts).  It was published shortly after the Civil War (in part to make sense of the newly re-ordered Republic) and she found it remarkable for the book's candor about the North's complicity in chattel slavery.

The history's foreword tells a story about a slave named Pomp who one day walked to the water's edge with a parcel of food, laid the parcel down and then hanged himself facing the sea.  He had brought the food for the journey home and he faced the sea because home was across the vast Atlantic.

Back in the mid 1990's I created The Negros Burial Ground with composer Leroy Jenkins.  It was inspired by the discovery of the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan.  In order to write the piece I researched 17th through 19th century New York history.  Prior to manumission (in 1829) New York benefitted from not only the sale of slaves, but the owning of slaves in the city and country.  It wasn't like the antebellum South with its plantations.  A farmer may have had 2-3 slaves, an affluent urban householder a few more.   Armed with that knowledge I wrote a libretto that was fueled by my imagining the lives and deaths of enslaved Africans in New York City, and contemporary victims of police violence (Michael Stewart, Eddie Perry, and Eleanor Bumpurs).  They became wanderers in the Land of the Dead struggling to go home.

To make a long story short, a shitstorm ensued.  (I'm here to tell you that the best colon cleanser ever is sheer unmitigated terror.)  Were it not for the courage and vision of The Kitchen's Laureen Amazeen and John Maxwell Hobbs, of my collaborators Leroy Jenkins (now deceased) and the playwright and director Dominic Taylor, this work would never have been seen.  And in its totality it is a beautiful thing.  We were never able to mount a fully staged production.  What we presented at The Kitchen was an oratorio version.  I am grateful for that.

The poem that follows in my next post was the lyric for what became "What Did Thy Do to Thy Master?"  I read it today and can't help but think of Trayvon Martin.  Selah.