Lyn collins think free#

Phillis, I would like to think that after you were released unto the world, when they jailed your husband for his debts and you lay in the maid’s quarters at night, a free and poor woman with your last living boy, that you thought of the Metamorphoses, making the sign of Arachne in the tangle of your fingers. Pretend that on your grave there is a date and it is so long before my heroes came along to call you a coon for the praises you sang of your captors who took you on discount because they assumed you would die that it never ever hurt your feelings. Pretend I was there with you, Phillis, when you asked in a letter to no one: How many iambs to be a real human girl? Which turn of phrase evidences a righteous heart? If I know of Ovid may I keep my children? Eighteen of them watched you and they signed to say: the Poems specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa and the abolitionists cheered at the blow to Kant the Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling and the enlightened ones bellowed at the strike against Hume no ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences And Samuel, dead at 78, final son, who was there on the day when they came looking for proof. There is a plaque in the grass for Increase, and Cotton. Pretend it drizzles and a man in an ugly plastic poncho circles the Mathers, all but sniffing the air warily. Children come with thin paper and charcoal to touch you. Pretend I see it in the stone, with a gruesome cherub. Foremother, your name is the boat that brought you. Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet whose books include “The Emperor of Water Clocks” and “Neon Vernacular,” for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. Who made soldiers fear for their lives, & at day’s end only two would pay with the branding of their thumbs. & an echo of the future rose over the courtroom as John Adams defended the Brits, calling the deadĪ “motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes & mulattoes, Irish teagues & outlandish jacktars,” They had laid a foundering stone for the Minutemen at Lexington & Concord, first to defy & die, Tore his chest, blood reddening snow on King Street, March 5, 1770, first to fall on captain’s command.įive colonists lay for calling hours in Faneuil Hall before sharing a grave at the Granary Burying Ground. Wind deviled cold air as he stood leaning on his hardwood stick, & then two lead bullets How often had he walked, gazing down at gray timbers of the wharf, as if to find a lost copper coin? Harpooner & rope maker, he never dreamt a pursuit of happiness or destiny, yet ralliedīeside patriots who hurled a fury of snowballs, craggy dirt-frozen chunks of ice, & oyster shellsĪt the stout flank of redcoats, as the 29th Regiment of Foot aimed muskets, waiting for fire! Diagram: Getty Images.Īfrican & Natick blood-born known along paths up & down Boston Harbor, escaped slave, A cavalcade of ghost ships wash their hands of all they carried.Ĭlint Smith is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University and the author of the poetry collection “Counting Descent,” as well as a forthcoming nonfiction book, “How the Word Is Passed.” Photo illustration by Jon Key. The soft hum of history spins on its tilted axis. I slide my ring finger from Senegal to South Carolina & feel the ocean separate a million families. I drag my thumb from Ghana to Jamaica & feel the weight of dysentery make an anvil of my touch. I pull my index finger from Angola to Brazil & feel the bodies jumping from the ship. My hand across the bristled hemispheres, but grow weary of chasing a history that swallowed me.įor every hundred people who were captured & enslaved, forty died before they ever reached the New World. I try to keep count how many times I drag My finger back & forth between the fragile continents. Over the course of 350 years, 36,000 slave ships crossed the Atlantic Ocean.