Ethnic Memory

I feel your pain smell the swelter that rises on a Louisiana afternoon in a wooden slave shack hear chains in the metal sweat box, a human bake oven, plantation camps fueled by the intense heat of a day’s hatred children working shiny backs stinging with salt, blood and earth under a sun that seemed to stay fixed and not end the day as Miss Lillie fanned herself in evening shades. Your back was aching deformed by subservience shoulders sloped like some fourth-class non-human as you cut the cane that kept Miss Lillie. This was wretchedness. Nothing, not even Africa is as hot as the South in summer with locusts whistling merciless highs and the humidity of the Mississippi kissing your pores 153-years, not long slavery’s undefinable sadness still exists what would I have been? field hand breeder cook mistress wet nurse rebel house servant runaway who was hung or punished Suppose I was born with a handicap or blind, incapable of physical servitude unfit for sale Would they drown me as a child? That may have been a blessing.