Douglass in London 1861, and: Interrogating Wordsworth, and: Douglass in Cedar Hill
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Douglass in London 1861
(after reading about the lecture by H. Box Brown)
There is no caked-on black face, no banjo, no dancingbut night after night he makes minstrel of his own rescue,for crowds already expecting circus beast,carnival side show, even before he climbs into that boxagain and again, curls up and waits to hear the finishof that brass band. What is the price of this?The laughter from the crowd relieved that he escapesnight after night. The copper boy who seethesinto a Georgia noon at the old trunk in tack shedwondering if this had been only whispered from ship caulkerto house slave to horse groom that leather would hold more than spacerobbed of possibility. How much does he really tell?No mention here about the stinging rash on the chest skinwhere his boy and girl sold south used to lay?Nothing here about how familiar the darkness feels settling around himwhen they close that box. His is a cold and clever freedom,not earned night after night when that felt hat goes from hand to hand,each crease filled with coins that never, neverwill fill the empty square in that crumpled, brown cardboard.
Interrogating Wordsworth
(and Keats, Shelley, and Byron)
When they molded mountains into metaphorwrote verses about bridges and nightingalesdid the rattle of chains, the low insistent wailbitter the tea, make that rum a harder pour?
Did imagining that urn cleanse the soresscarring all those backs at the edge of empire,or did those bodies just complicate desirechasing poems about beauty to glen and vale?
Do lines to Dorothy give step girls with broomsa place in those debates about distant lands?Were verses critiqued over hum of loomsthat turned flesh of men, women into handsblistered by poems with bridges and birdsongsthat even cube after cube leaves tea too strong?
Douglass in Cedar Hill
(Washington, DC, 1872)
She made her journeys to see me in the night, traveling the whole distance on foot, after the performance of her day's work
(Narrative of the Life, 1845)
Each time I write, there is less and less to say about those yearsespecially now, in this dim light echoing the time before freedombefore shackles of mission and duty chafed away at all the beautyin a world that opened itself slowly in grandeur and sin. [End Page 228] Anna is gone now. Her grand house surrenders each day to the shadowsof forty-four years, most of them lost to lectern, the blank page,strange sweat and flesh. I never understood how much I would miss her,never understood that after everything those slave songs would still sear the earsbouncing off fields and furrows for white folks to harvest what they wantfrom a rhythm that calls back through pulpit and grave to an uneasy peacealways settling in the kitchen, because without mistress, there were moments,voices would rise above a whisper and hums turn into songthat danced on the masters table, plowing a furrow into the darknessthat now creeps closer and closer bringing the cold I first rememberwhen they awakened me in the night, for those rough hands to holdmy small cheeks, as I stared hard into the blackness to see her face. [End Page 229]
Reginald Flood is a native of south central Los Angeles who now lives in a small town in southeastern Connecticut with his family. He has received a Walker Fellowship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Center and was the recipient of the Editor's Prize from Tidal Basin Review. His poems have appeared in The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, Cave Canem X Anniversary Collection, Massachusetts Review, Mythium, and Hampton-Sydney Review. He is a Cave Canem fellow and the coordinator of African American Studies at Eastern Connecticut State University, where he teaches composition, African American literature, and creative writing in the English department.
