how long life is
how strong life is.
we know.
Lucille Clifton, "New Bones"
Perhaps you have been grabbed by white two men when your family sent you on an errand to fetch water. The bucket is either empty, as you were just approaching the well. They were waiting there for you. Or maybe it's full, and falling from your head, but you are busy trying to extricate yourself from men you have never laid eyes on before. Maybe one has a gun. Maybe both. You, on the other hand, strong, but young, caught off guard, only have your scream. But it's of no use. Your father, brothers, motherno one hears you.
You hear someone else scream. Then others scream too. You hear the scuffling, the attempt to escape. And still fighting harder to free yourself, to your hears comes the sound of something foreign from the mouths of those who have grabbed you and those you hear screaming. You hear the leaves rustle, bodies dragged along, those strange sounds and the screams coming closer. Mothers, girls, fathers.
The foreign voices are angry. But the foreign voices are in control. You can't see anymore as something has been tossed over your head. You are part of one group surrounded by the hands and the voices. No one from your village, or your family, is escaping the strange voices.
Feet and hands bound in chains, in the darkness, you recall that you have never seen an animal chained. You are kicked, beaten, and punched. Who has ever done that to you!
Who are these people who have you walking miles in such an undignified manner? Who has determined that you are less than the animals you have cared for? That you are to be their property? You are to be an object to be sold at market!
There's a big house surrounded by fields of tobacco or cotton. People like you are toiling away under the sun in those fields.
You will be here forever and ever. And year after year, you will remain "girl." As "girl," you will become the master's plaything, the mistresses punching bag, resented because you obeyed the master.
And you will think it's one big joke and try to laugh, only you'll cry as you remember your family, how you learned to cook jollof. Or prepare the kola-nuts. Ran for the water. You'll remember that day. You'll lay your head down to sleep and return to Mother Africa.
You won't know this, but generations later, when your descendants are finally freed from toiling on the plantations that a war, when many have died trying to escape enslavement and risking their lives, returned to free others, when the war took many more of their lives, your descendants will be killed outright because white Americans, angry and feeling betrayed by the abolitionists, by Lincoln and Grant, will refuse to accept Black people as neighbors, friends, co-workers, doctors, teachers. Humans!
White America will free itself from the violence of enslaving other human beings by telling itself that America is exceptional, America is great. There's a Manifest Destiny with "America" already stamped on bayonets used by Calvary to clear the Frontier, on the side of boxes of ammunition shipped off to the Philippines, on the wings of bombers and jets and drones to come.
But for now, the neighbors of your descendants will amass guns, rifles, gasoline, dynamite. More public opinion and consensus. More narratives about the free and the brave to represent what becomes for decades to follow " US History."
And soon the terrorism will begin in earnest. Determined and purposeful. Systematic terrorism!
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