De Huse Niggah
We are all siblings, brothers and sisters, made by one Creator, Father God. How can we not sympathize with each other? Race is a manmade construction, for according to Acts 17:24-26,
“God, who made the world and everything in it, … has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on the face of the earth and has determined their pre-appointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings.”
She sang out with
all her might
It wasn’t mellow,
it was the wind
blowing through the cracks in the trees,
the sound centering
as it left the hole
in the bark.
A mighty up-roaring
awakening anyone who had ever done
skin-scrapping
callous-giving work
My mother bowed
and prayed for me
Maybe, she prayed for me
as she scrubbed
that white family’s floors.
Maybe she prayed for me
as she wiped the dust
from their photos.
Maybe she saw me in a picture
of their Sue Jane.
Maybe she prayed for me as
she bent over their dishes
and folded their clothes.
And as she woke me up
early in the dawning day,
dressing me in
their hand-me-downs
without having slept herself,
she thought of their full closets and pantries
Her cold hands-
pricked by the thorns of cotton
now by mending needles,
push me out the door to school
to sleep a few hours
work for the white man again
after she fixed supper.
When I think of my mother
I think of work, tired hands,
but a strong Negro voice
which cried three hundred years
in somebody else’s house.
No one knew because
they were in the fields.