Controlling the Silver

Controlling the Silver

65 Controlling the Silver For Thou, O God, hast proved us: thou hast tried us, as silver is tried. —Psalm 66 Her silver-money necklace and bracelets made agreement with the wind that went like this: if she rode upon her gray mule, seabreeze would kiss and coins protest, creole music. Silver coinage; England minted, soldered into flexible chains then freely draped about the neck and wrists of our Guinea great grandmother: controller of silver. Let us praise now market women: higglers, who maintain our solid, hidden economy in soft money banks between full breasts. Gold next; now these women control silver. In those Sunday markets across the island the sold Africans would gather, ostensibly to sell their ground provisions, cultivated at the end of long days in service to cane. In what-left hours, they transformed rock hillsides to bearing ground under the shine eye moon, which is why ground provisions gleam when tumpa knives cut them open. Let us praise now artisans and craftworkers, builders of Empire. Skilled ones who raised up temples of marble. Masons and carpenters constructing suffering into stone and fretwork. 66 Dovetailers of joints denied benefit of all union. Hail O basket weavers, potters, calabash carvers, seamstresses of garments stitched from rippedoff ends of regulation oznaburg; skilled recyclers of missus’ old clothes. Bush doctors, gatherers of curing herbs. Hawkers of vengeful potions, Myalists, Pocomania and Revival practitioners. New World Christians remaking massa’s religion. Praise to those gathered in common markets, redemption grounds where Africans swapped blood secrets, kept spirit, passed on information about insurrections, and bought and sold silver. So the silversmiths developed a brisk trade in bracelets and guard rings; the thrifty bury it to dig up one day and buy freedom. The silver likes market culture, stays there, does not leave. Deep shut-pans of silver lie buried at tree root. On moonless nights you may walk by coin-light, if your good foot happens to kick loose a lid a source of pent-up shining will be released. Crocus bags of silver still banked beneath banana trash mattress (we should look for it). Draw of silver passing from hand to hand in a susu/partner (you must pay the banker). One day the coinage runs so hot it runs out. The Governor has to be told that if he dies that night with his two eyes wide open, there might be no silver coins to keep them closed. 67 Not a threepence, a sixpence, not one florin. No metal-alloyed between the stirling notes. Not even a lion-pon-it shilling to connect one pound to guinea, absent all the silver, except for that revolving around the body of our women like Jupiter’s multiple moons, plunging between black mountains of bosom into drawstring vaults of calico threadbags. These women accustomed to Guinea gold, these people late of Benin, now control silver. Enough to buy land, even to lend to massa, every coin a cocoa, filling up their baskets. Full baskets of Redemption Ground Market. Bob Marley’s muse followed him home from there, when he went as country boy to buy raw cow’s milk, and two yard fowls. By day a market, by night hallowed ground. The workplace of productive angel bands and anointed spirit guides with real power in the blood to wheel you free from crosses. Wheel you till take-set spirits stagger back. “I was a smoker, I was a drinker, a backslider, God see and know I was a thief, till the Holy Spirit collar me, and spin me like Ezekiel’s wheel.” Praise to the power of our Guinea woman greatgrandmother , higgler with pencil in her tiehead to cancel old debts, seamstress with the scissors in her right hand who will cut for us fit pattern. 68 Nana who can balm you clean in five bush bath. Big woman, who can afford to pay Peter a shutpan of silver as indulgence for your soul. Mercy agent seated astride her gray mule, come to ride you home. ...