We All Earned Our Freedoms by Giving Concerts
For Dave Harris
We were encamped on a bank high, high enough to where
we saw the full thickness of the ground, sewn-up, cleared out
of its large canes. Our escape we planned to some
lampooning darkness. Our buffoonery, mysticism, happiness,
and luck: the pleasures of the grotesque, of abandonment.
A kind of romance exaggerated into Black life, a cheerful,
enslaved readiness, a dance pleasing to master-minstrels, a romance
carrying on between mothers and a son thought dead in Alabama.
We all earned our freedoms by giving concerts, by acting spontaneously,
naturally, all seized up by our willingness to be as darky as he be at home,
as darky as he be in life, in the cornfield and the canebrake’s rivers
and floodplains, its valleys lapping along the wet edges
of the waters that early settlers crossed over into indigenous
attack, on boats built like floating fires, with heavily-barred windows,
small sliding shutters, walls pierced through with gloryholes.
There were guns fired and performers stained in character
up off the stage, dressed up in slaveness, that perpetual smiling
of Jim Crows and Gumbo Chaffs, fighting, boasting
characteristically animal, bleeding like wolves,
having drunk ourselves full of ink to where we got sickened
and had to restore the color. We were inherently musical
for frolicking through night without no need for sleeping,
ignorant of pain, poorly spoken for, having been shot up
like balloons, waiting on the world below to turn.
The musics we hear jangle our nerves. Musics of those believed Black.
Propererous musics, respected, polished-up romantic tunes
with recognizable attitudes. Our vigorous teeth-slapping
footworks. I’m reeling from these songs.
First called plantation men, then Ethiopian serenaders.
Ineffable Blackness gives way to jealousy, as one who is himself
living religion, is the beauty of his own person, is darkly himself,
googly-eyed with pink red white teeths.
Goodness gracious,
the gentlemen: the brothers named Tambo and Bones, in each other’s joking arms
floating on a skiff in old Virginny, working from day-to-day,
raking oyster beds. To them, it’s just playfulness, but now
they grown old, can’t work no more. Carry them back to shore?
They’d choose another life this time.
They’d save their coin this time, buy a farm somewhere. But now
it hits them tight in their limbs, grown sore. Carry them back
after they jumps from their skiff,
down into the river, catching in their mouths
as many catfish as ever a nigger has seen. A circus of catfish.
Acrobatic fish, bareback lovers in dripping garb.
