When I examine the portraits of the enslaved the whole of freedom pauses for respiration hands sifting soil abject frustration. Every day can’t be rebellion but will be resistance, a man convinced that he is not a cow or horse the way someone wants him to mistake himself. The hands of enslaved women like mitts, or an old man’s work hands years past labor, still refusing balm until fingers bowls of palms crack, bleeding red lines like paper cuts in winter. And so many women praying unlike children with hands flat and fingers steepled beneath raised chins, but palms clasped fingers hugging, too swollen from work, chilblains, and arthritis to ever lay flat unless broken.
An Extant Slave Receipt Signed Peter Hairston
Negro wench and child declares the receipt, Black woman I mentally retaliate. In Europe, a royal wench was dubbed a lady, not a metonym for social promiscuity. Consider the barmaid— much like cook, except a few beers and coin most certainly could turn a hardworking one to lusty wench, only daylight morphing her to maid again. The price of Two-hundred and one pounds on American soil turned this Black woman to wench in no time at all, and what happened between her thighs, resulting in a child, made it a two for one; some planter’s coy prize. I want to divine her name and that of her babe, much more than this receipt entails. It is not enough to know the sweat of the planter seller is mixing with the DNA of my fingertips as his genetic code resides within me. Still, I wonder at the oft-turned phrase this family had a habit of not selling off their slaves A lie contrived once this receipt was neatly tucked away?
Rage from a white woman toward a Black screams This body just won’t do the words But I once owned you history articulating a time when Africans were a hostile mistress’s wealth a guaranteed come up from being property herself of a husband who had a choice of whose legs he split in stealth. There is nothing more despised than a sister at ease in her own skin the hard-won swagger before a predator’s desire to drape it over pale arms gaudy and feral. I know this to be true because I heard a Karen once exude You move so comfortable within your skin as if she wanted to peel me to see what lay within that comfort that movement, that othered self.
Of Bison and Bullets A Preservation Project Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA 2022
for Jayland Walker Behemoths cleave to the landscape like they have always been here amid the care the preservationists exhibit as they muck, monitor, and water. Shaggy brown cloaks appear more mange than majestic, unlike the embossed portraits on my father’s horde of buffalo nickels, tossed carelessly into a dresser dish alongside mismatched popped buttons and dulled copper pennies he called rare. Did he know then that the species itself was endangered, not so rare victims of overhunting by European settlers committed to wanton western migration. O the irony as I read of conservation to replenish the genus bison, common name buffalo on Indigenous reservations to restore glory to the family bovine; the descendants of majestic herds lured from the precipice of extinction. I always confuse preserve and reserve to keep safe, to hide away for now and tomorrow on purpose for posterity. Still, there is a parallel history as our very communities become preservation projects harboring assault rifles and teens programmed for defeat, steered by parents who haven’t learned to parent yet. I will not reserve judgement as doctors help viewers digest what a body looks like after taking rapid rounds: the severed heads and eviscerated torsos abound. Extinction. Has anyone had enough of being enslaved by a trigger aficionados can’t let rest ah, but I digress, they don’t want to preserve life just reserve the right to shatter lives and apologize in hindsight. Let’s try to preserve 48 bullets pumped into the back of a running Black man, use the same handcuffs that worked well to arrest a 21-year-old white man, so they both can stand trial, one for killing seven in Chicago on the 4th of July the other for killing absolutely no one. Bison and bodies coalesce in my mind, but this is muck work for which no one seems to have the time.
Artress Bethany White is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is the author of the essay collection Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity (New Rivers Press, 2020) and My Afmerica: Poems (Trio House Press, 2019).
Stills from Nineteen Eighty-Four, a 1984 film written and directed by Michael Radford, based upon George Orwell’s 1949 novel. The film stars John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton, and Cyril Cusack.
